ABSTRACT
We’ve arrived at the end of this book, where readers of educational studies anticipate authors will declare answers to the research questions and offer solutions to classroom problems, not uncommonly under a heading titled, “teaching implications.” So beware that we have no intention of projecting ourselves as holding “answers” to the “problems” described in the first eight chapters. Indeed, if we intend anything by way of a “conclusion” it is to highlight Lil Boy Blue, Smurf, Juice, Lil Garfield, and Debbie’s story as one that confronts and complicates, rather than explains, failure (McDermott, 1997). In this chapter, we consider the constructs of community, school failure, literacy, and identity. We ask more questions. What are the boys’ positions in each of their communities? How is the boys’ School Community (I) a culture of failure? How does literacy contribute to the divisions that exist between the boys’ communities and to their failures in school? How, in fact, is literacy a tool society uses to construct borders between communities of practice in order to fabricate failure? And finally, what might advocacy, as a form of critical ethnography, offer for shifting constructions of failure for marginalized kids?
