Young Black men are often boxed into severely limited scripts that define what it means to be Black, male and scholarly. This dissertation is concerned with learning how young Black men succeed academically in secondary settings and documenting the substance of Black life. Furthermore, it illuminates the voices of students whose perspectives are often void in research, yet are invaluable in preparing teachers to work more effectively with this population. The four Black male students represented in this study come from a variety of family backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and school contexts. Disrupting the Single Story: Cultivating More Complete Stories About Academically High Performing Young Black Men is a longitudinal, cross-context, ethnographic case study. In order to investigate the academic performance of the young Black men in study, I employed two primary phases. In Phase I, I developed a curricular innovation; it began in a pre-college, residential university-sponsored summer enrichment program, where I was the writing instructor for the student participants. I developed and implemented the writing course curriculum for rising seniors in high school, with the following aims in mind: expose students to college level texts about critical theories in education, cultivate college level academic writing, develop scholarly research skills, increase college readiness, and nurture careers in education. In Phase II, I followed the young men for one year in their respective high schools, which spanned across three different school districts in the Midwest. Because of my access with the young men in and across different academic settings, I was able to contextualize ethnographically how the young men constructed, negotiated, and embodied scholarly literacy identities in different spaces. Two crucial findings are (1) artifactual metaphors functioned as a powerful catalyst for unpacking the racialized and gendered literacy identities of the young men and (2) intersectional identities were leveraged to assert agency in their academic and non-academic communities. These findings deepen our understandings about how young Black men are achieving while Black and male and they also shed light on ways teachers can recognize, cultivate, and sustain scholarly literacy identities among their Black male students.
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