Books in the Child Development in Cultural Context series

Schools, as one form of complex organizational settings, are regulated by often invisible expectations, understandings, and values that comprise the culture of the institutions. This volume will extend the already substantial understanding of academic motivation by moving beyond important and well studied relational and personal variables to an examination of school culture and motivation. Prevailing normative expectations for students are constructed and guided bycultural values and shape student motivation and achievement in powerful ways. This value system, however, is often left invisible in motivational analyses. Chapters in this volume challenge the prevailing discourse that equates ethnic minority with culture and places the cultural assumptionsguiding schools outside the sphere of cultural inquiry.

Considering research, practice, and policies on opening pathways to overcome educational disparities, this book provides new quantitative and qualitative evidence to introduce a multi-level theory on how youth navigate across the cultural worlds of their families, schools, peers, and community programs to access academic opportunities.