Love and Meritocracy
Culturally Affirming Care and Cheating at an Urban High School
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11366284 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Suneal Kolluri (0000-0001-9628-0032, University of California, Riverside, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 131 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 271-297 |
| Publication date | 2025-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0195-6744 • E-ISSN: 1549-6511 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/733581 |
| OpenAlex | W4405365986 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 30 |
Purpose: Teachers who demonstrate authentic care make culturally affirming connections with students and critically consider injustice in student communities. Authentic care is distinct from aesthetic care that only emphasizes academic achievement. A full version of care—its academic, cultural, and critical components—expands opportunities for marginalized youth. Few studies have looked at authentic care partially applied. Research Methods: This ethnography of Sunrise High School, an urban school serving nearly all Black and Latinx students, analyzes the incomplete implementation of care. With more than 200 hours of participant observation and more than 50 interviews of students, teachers, and administrators, this study interrogates how care is understood and applied at Sunrise High School, and how students responded to the care they received from their teachers. Findings: Teachers at Sunrise were adept at building deep, culturally responsive connections with their students. These relationships manifested alongside powerful meritocratic messaging. The teachers’ care for their students lacked a critical component and largely ignored the oppressions associated with their urban setting. In response to this partial application of authentic care, students felt at home in the care of their loving teachers and most regularly completed their assignments. However, students elevated work completion over learning with a larger social purpose, and cheating was rampant. Implications: The findings emphasize the necessity of the critical component of authentic care. In addition to caring for students, teachers should be encouraged to care about the ways oppressions associated with race and class affect students’ lives and communities
Cheating · Meritocracy · Political science · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Higher Education Research Studies · Law · Psychology · School Choice and Performance · Social Psychology
Educational foundations
Their Highest Potential
Learning to Labour
Operationalizing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Teaching in Tensions
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Black Male Students, Schools, and Learning in Enhancing the Knowledge Base to Disrupt Deficit Frameworks
Not the Color Purple
Meritocracy 2.0
Public Goods, Private Goods
The Art of Critical Pedagogy
Toward a theory of critical care in urban small school reform
The irony of rigor
Cultural negotiation and schooling
A Womanist Experience of Caring
Caring in a Small Urban High School
Safe, Affirming, and Productive Spaces
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Critical Care
Will You Stand for Me? Authentic Cariño and Transformative Rites of Passage in an Urban High School
What Does It Mean to Be African American? Constructions of Race and Academic Identity in an Urban Public High School
But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy
Boring but important
Criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries
Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing
On Fieldwork
Relational ethnography
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |