CHAPTER 14: Resistance at City Middle School: Critical Race Theorizing in Educational Research

In this paper, I will discuss both the literature addressing the role of critical race theory (CRT) in education research and the study’s methodology, which utilized CRT as the conceptual framework. I will also describe the school community and the findings as they relate to resistance in the school climate. I will conclude with the study implications for both practice and further research.

The term “resistance” in education research is often used in relation to resistance theory, whereby some students are driven to actively resist the roles and identities schools provide for them (Collins, 1995). Students engage in oppositional behavior in the form of sustained challenges to authority. This is active opposition, rather than deviance, because the term generally indicates a positive and justified opposition (Collins, 1995). Generally, this term is used to describe behaviors in children and youth that explain their school failure, as Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) notion of Black students resisting school because school engagement constituted “acting White.” While these definitions have typically been utilized to explain opposition in youth, in this paper, these definitions describe only the behavior of the administrators and faculty.