ABSTRACT
Ain’t No Making It (1995), Learning To Labor (1977) and other such texts on the working poor and ethnic minority youth (e.g., Hollingshead, 1975; Solomon, 1992) present compelling arguments for the significance of students’ subjective understanding of mobility in explaining their social outcomes. These subjective interpretations of mobility, which I refer to as perceptions of opportunity, define students’ assessment of the availability of chance, definitions of the ‘making it’ process, and overall belief in the achievement ideology (e.g., MatuteBianchi, 1991; Ogbu, 1978, 1987; Solomon, 1992; Suárez-Orozco, 1991). Within this area of research, students’ perceptions of opportunity inform how they engage in school. That is, students’ reasoning of how opportunity operates for people like them shapes the ways in which they participate and, in part, perform in school. Although research in this area differs as to the relative impact of and whether or not social factors, like race and/or class, have a more or less predictive role in social outcomes, they do lay an analytical approach for exploring the various perceptions of opportunity that working poor, low-income and ethnic minority youth maintain. This approach involves exploring students’ understanding of how opportunity is made available, what opportunity provides, what kind of opportunity are available to them, what it means to make it, and so forth. Of course, what underlies this analytical approach to understanding students’ social and educational outcomes is that such outcomes are informed by students’ rendering of opportunity and the making it process. Thus, for the purposes of this investigation, exploring perceptions of opportunity is a useful analytical approach in understanding the students’ outlook on how they perceive their social world as well as how society operates and what it may indicate about their academic orientation.
