ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 focuses on how young Black males in education deploy agency, resilience and the ‘turnaround narrative’ in order to challenge the stigmatisation of, or label as ‘educational failures’ and help them achieve ‘against the odds’. The ‘turnaround narrative’ describes a narrative embodied by recognising previous ‘errors’ that caused setbacks or failures and instead pursuing ‘recovery and redemption’. Despite finding themselves in a ‘failing’ situation e.g. permanent/temporary school exclusion and poor examination results and so forth, young Black males are not deterred from pursuing educational attainment, rather they demonstrate the determination to succeed which is cultivated through the family and organisational/community agents. Essentially, despite low educational attainment, particularly within the compulsory school context, young Black males make a renewed attempt to progress through education, through demonstrating their agency and resilience. A key aspect of the chapter is to establish whether the turnaround narrative articulated by young Black men is the same across the two cohorts or differs according to educational contexts, the men’s intersectional identities and educational desires.
