"When We Bring in Our Positionalities, We Make the Space Inclusive”: Organizations, Identities, and Belonging in Racially Diverse Contexts

Castrechini, Sebastian

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-8634-8d06

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"When We Bring in Our Positionalities, We Make the Space Inclusive”: Organizations, Identities, and Belonging in Racially Diverse Contexts

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The literature on racial/ethnic diversity in schools largely shows evidence of positive academic outcomes for students in diverse schools relative to segregated schools. At the same time, there is ample research demonstrating the discrimination and marginalization that students of color experience in desegregated schools. In this dissertation, I seek to understand this incongruence in the literature by examining the organizational conditions that shape youth’s experiences and development in racial/ethnically diverse schools. Across three studies, I examine the ways that schools as organizations create the conditions that influence students’ sense of belonging, intergroup interactions, and their feelings of salience and regard for their identities. In the first study, I examine school belonging and its relationships with school organizational features. I find that belonging is associated with demographic composition in combination with the ways schools organize their staffing, values, and discipline, with these combinations differing for each racial/ethnic group. For the second and third studies, I draw on a year-long ethnography of an afterschool debate program. In the second study, I find that the organizational cultures of debate teams both enabled and constrained how and if youth had positive interactions with peers of different racial/ethnic groups. In the third study, I examine youth’s experiences of their ethnic-racial identities and find that the context—including the racial/ethnic composition as well as the specific content with which youth were engaging—factored into how youth saw race/ethnicity as salient in their interactions. I also find that youth drew messages about other’s regard for their identities from peers’ reactions and particularly from the reactions of adults with power in the organization. These findings together demonstrate the importance of organizations and the way that they are racialized in understanding the linkages between school racial/ethnic diversity and youth development.

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