Crossfire on the Streets and into the Classroom: Meso/Micro Understandings of Weak Cultural Boundaries, Strategies of Action and a Sense of the Game in an Inner-City Chemistry Classroom

As this nation shifts towards an educational focus of “teaching for social justice,” this critical ethnography illuminates the importance of considering overlapping fields to help understand what is occurring within inner-city neighborhood classrooms. While prior attention has focused on the apparent deficiencies of urban schools, such discussions do not take into account the complex sociocultural issues associated with a classroom field. In this paper, I provide descriptive narratives of the unfolding day by day events occurring within urban neighborhoods, as well as common practices, shared strategies of action and a “sense of the game” embodied within urban youth as they enter the workplace and a chemistry classroom of a comprehensive neighborhood high school in Philadelphia. Moreover, by identifying and interpreting the patterns of coherence as well as the contradictions of what is occurring on both the meso and micro levels across these various fields, I offer alternative understandings of practices typically labeled as disrespectful, acting out, and violent. More importantly, the implications of being able to understand porous boundaries in the classroom are addressed in terms of the accessibility of science to urban youth and their development of scientific literacy.