Apprenticing urban youth as critical researchers: implications for increasing equity and access in diverse urban schools

It is no secret that race, class, and ethnicity play a major role in determining access to college (McDonough, 1997; Wilds, 2000). Each year, countless intervention programs are created to equalize access to college with minimal results (Gandara and Bial, 2001; Perna and Swail, 1998; Swail, 1999). Often these programs begin with deficit assumptions about marginalized students, their families and communities, and seek to either transmit information or transform the habits of these students to increase access. Dissatisfied with deficit and subtractive (Valenzuela, 1999) approaches to college access, a team of university researchers and high school teachers looked toward critical sociology (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) to design a project that simultaneously increased college access for its participants and disrupted the system that perpetually provided unequal access to low-income students of color.