Michela Musto: The Worst Years of Your Life? Unpacking Educators’ Gendered and Racialized Assumptions About Middle Schoolers’ Behaviour


DATE
Tuesday March 30, 2021
TIME
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The Sociology Research Forum hosts Dr. Michela Musto for a presentation titled, “The Worst Years of Your Life? Unpacking Educators’ Gendered and Racialized Assumptions About Middle Schoolers’ Behaviour.”

Abstract:

In this presentation, I draw on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 interviews conducted at a racially diverse, public middle school in Los Angeles to reveal how dominant narratives of age contribute to the persistence of gender and racial inequalities in education. In a suburban school like the one I studied, where the majority of students were affluent, white, and Asian American, educators viewed students’ behaviour through a developmental framework. In other words, educators deployed ideas loosely affiliated with developmental psychology to characterize students’ intellectual, social, and emotional capabilities as gradually expanding as students grew older. Despite describing students’ behaviour in seemingly gender- and race-neutral ways, the developmental framework helped normalize affluent, white boys’ behaviour as the default standard against which other students’ capabilities were measured. Ultimately, educators’ beliefs in biological development helped obfuscate the routine ways in which taken-for-granted school processes can advantage race- and class-privileged boys in early adolescence.