ABSTRACT
Education fulfills many roles for the individual, communities, and the nation and takes place in many spaces: in homes, neighborhood institutions, churches, schools, and informal activities that are often peer directed. Social science research has tended to focus on learning within particular spaces rather than looking comprehensively at learning across spaces. Educational outcomes for youth have typically focused on formal schooling with regard to school completion and scores on high-stakes accountability measures (Perle, Moran, Lutkas, & Tirre, 2005). Since the 1960s, such outcome data on African American, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian/Asian Pacific Islanders and youth from low-income communities has documented persistent disparities in both educational achievement and opportunity to learn (Ramani, Gilbertson, & Fox, 2007). The dominant orientation to these disparities has addressed presumed deficits; risks rather than resilience, assumptions about dysfunctional families and neighborhoods, unmotivated students, or the structure of and resource allocation to formal schooling (Lee, 2009; Spencer et al., 2006).
