Learning On and Off the Court: African-American high school basketball players constructing identities as "doers" and "learners."

Na'ilah Nasir

This project explores the relation between learning and identity through an examination of how learning and identity construction occur for African-American high school basketball players across two settings: school math class and basketball. The work I propose to do as a part of this fellowship has two components—one empirical and one theoretical. Empirically, I will build on my current program of research, employing qualitative methods and video analysis of social interaction to understand the kinds of identities high and low-achieving high school basketball players develop in relation to both school math and basketball. The study focuses on eight players (4 high achieving, 4 low achieving) from each of two schools. Players will be observed as they participate as doers and learners (or not) across settings, and analyses will focus on how the construction of identities occur through social interactional processes in these settings. Additionally, players will be interviewed about both their past and future participation in these activities, allowing for the study of both how identities remain stable over time and place, as well as how they change and are created in cultural activities. Theoretically, I will review literature on identity and its development from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural psychology, psychology, socio-linguistics, and educational anthropology. This review will be the first step in synthesizing this body of work and developing a hybrid theoretical conceptualization of identity and its development as both coherent and stable over time, and in flux (and indeed in production) in moment-to-moment cultural participation and interaction.

About Na'ilah Nasir

Dr. Na’ilah Suad Nasir is an assistant professor at Stanford University’s School of Education. She received her BA in psychology and social welfare from UC Berkeley and her PhD in education from UCLA. In her research, Dr. Nasir draws on socio-cultural theory to explore the relation between learning, development, and culture. One line of research examines the relation between the in-school and out-of-school learning of African-American children in inner-city schools, and describes the complex cognitive strategies that children employ in out-of-school practices like basketball and dominoes, as well as how identities as “doers” and learners get formed in these practices. This line of research has implications for thinking about the relation between culture and learning and understanding historical patterns of school failure among many minority students. In a second line of research, Dr. Nasir is focusing on moral development in the context of urban, faith-based communities and schools. Of particular interest is the role of moral identity as a culturally-constructed mediator of development.