What’s Identity Got to Do With It? Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom

Abstract

Research done over several decades in a variety of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities has shown that students and teachers alike bring their identities and experiences with them into the classroom. Identities are highly salient for students’ experiences in school; they make the classroom a different place for different students. This is because students with different identities in the same classroom will face different sets of what Claude Steele calls “identity contingencies.” Steele uses the term to refer to the specific set of responses that a person with a given identity has to cope with in specific settings. Indeed, who a student is perceived to be will affect such variables as his placement in an educational tracking system, the friends he will have to choose among, and the academic and social expectations that his teachers will have of him.1 While these identity contingencies might seem relatively insignificant, they can have major consequences for the opportunities a person will have over the course of his or her life.