Social Success Skills: Black Male High School Students' Perspectives
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SOCIAL SUCCESS SKILLS: BLACK MALE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIETY AND THEIR MEDIA EXPERIENCES by Darnel Degand Dissertation Committee: Professor Lalitha Vasudevan, Sponsor Professor Susan Lowes Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education Date___________22 May 2013______________ Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in Teachers College, Columbia University 2013 UMI Number: 3568449 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 3568449 Published by ProQuest LLC (2013). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 ABSTRACT SOCIAL SUCCESS SKILLS: BLACK MALE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' PERSPECTIVES ON THEIR MEDIA EXPERIENCES AND SUCCESS Darnel Degand This dissertation’s purpose was to better understand how messages received through different cultural mediums influences the development of social success skills. Black male students were chosen as the focal participants for this year-long study because they are included among the groups whose social success skills development are thought to be disproportionately negatively affected by media and stereotypes that are present in our society. On average, non-Whites and individuals from low income families seldom realize the same levels of economic, professional and academic success Whites and individuals from higher income neighborhoods are likely to achieve. The stereotypes present in our society and reinforced by media include beliefs about varying skills, traits and levels of success students from different cultural groups are expected to display. As a result, an increasing number of individuals are acknowledging and researching multiple ways that various forms of media influence the societies and cultures in which children live. I am particularly interested in collecting information that will be beneficial to socially conscious media producers with prosocial product development goals. When considered from a sociocultural perspective, the mediated lives of youth can be better understood by learning about the social processes present in the environments in which they partake in their media experiences. I used a phenomenological research approach to develop an understanding of the social processes that occur during each experience. Semi-structured interviews, focus group sessions, and observations were the data collection methods used to better understand the personal experiences of each participant. This study’s results generated two theories and a set of guidelines. Social Success Mediation Theory states that the ideas formed about social success are mediated by the social role models, social success narratives and the social communities associated with an individual’s media experiences and social experiences. Mediated Production Activity Theory hypothesizes that the social context surrounding the development and experiencing of media products requires the use of various tools for intrapersonal processing, interpersonal communication and broadcast communication. Lastly, this study introduces Culturally Relevant Media Production, a set of criteria socially conscious media producers can use to produce effective instructional entertainment content. © Copyright Darnel Degand 2013 All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION This is dedicated to my immediate family: Yves Oge Degand, Paulette Rouzeau Degand, Alex Yves Degand, Daphney Paulette Degand, Viviana Rodriguez Degand, Isaiah Amaru Degand, Nasir Darnel Degand, and Elijah Mikael Degand. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you Dr. Lalitha M. Vasudevan. I still remember when you first called to let me know that I had been accepted into the program. Thank you very much for being such an important part of my journey at Teachers College. Your expertise, patience, and guidance in class and during discussions have helped me in so many ways. I am fortunate to have had you on this path with me from the beginning to the end of my doctoral program and I look forward to working with you in the future. Thank you Dr. Susan Lowes. You immediately understood that it was going to be difficult for me to pursue this degree while working fulltime. Yet instead of talking me out of it, you sat me down, helped me select courses, and provided guidance on how to manage my time. Your methodology class first introduced me to qualitative approaches and you always responded when I needed help. Thank you for always being supportive throughout my time at TC. Thank you Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz. Your positive energy is infectious and appreciated by everyone who has gotten to know you. Thank you for your many words of encouragement and for agreeing to join the committee. Thank you Dr. John Broughton. I feel fortunate to have had you selected as a member of my committee because of our shared interests in culture, education, technology, youth, and media. Thank you for joining the committee. Thank you to Dr. Charles Kinzer, Dr. Joey Lee, and my colleagues working hard to complete their doctoral degrees in the Communication, Computing & Technology in Education program at Teachers College. Thank you to my writing group members: iv Bianca J. Baldridge, Sosanya Jones, Keisha McInotsh-Allen, Blanca Vega, Terrenda White, James Alford, and Richard Lofton. Thank you to the participants of this study and the pilot study that inspired it. I hope that you all have success with your future goals and I also hope that you were positively influenced by your roles in my study. Thank you Brian F. Peterson, Solomon Steplight, Kenrick Waithe, and Karl Joseph Ufert. You have each given me guidance and looked out for me at different times of my life. I hope to do the same for others who are coming after me. Thank you to the DEC (and honorary members) family: Isaiah Belle, Daniel Blake, Don P Hooper, Richard Hooper, April Stewart, Leonne Tanis, Uduak Victor, Shadeed Willis, and Larry Wiltshire for their support during our time at the University of Pennsylvania and for their continued friendship after our undergraduate years. Thank you to my junior high school friends Teddy Damour and Gregory Nelson, my high school friends Gordon Miller and Spencer Bell, and my college roommates Richard Adzei and Jonathan Jungblut. Various circumstances have made it so that we were able to keep in touch throughout all these years and even though I already have enough relatives, I am happy to also consider you all my brothers/cousins. Additionally I want to thank my high school friend Shawneequa Callier and my college friends Christyna Faulkner, Regine Jean-Charles, Jasmine Sykes-Kunk, and Korzu Taplin for their continued friendship and support. Once again, even though I have more than enough relatives, I consider you all my sisters/cousins. Thank you to the University of Pennsylvania and New York University’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications for the academic knowledge they provided me and the v environments they offered that helped to encourage my growth. Thank you to my former colleagues at the City University of New York’s Queensborough Community College, especially the Academic Computing Center’s Bruce Naples, Charles Prancl, Dave Moretti, Nestor Arboleda, Rajesh Vaswani, Mary Kasworm, Jason Ano, and Phillip Roncoroni for your support and understanding during the early years of my doctoral program. Thank you to my Sesame Workshop family, especially Ronah Harris, Carla Engelbrecht Fisher, H. Melvin Ming and Bianca Williams. In addition, I want to thank all of the socially conscious educational entertainment media producers who came before me and inspire me to continue pursuing my goals. Thank you to my parents Mommy Paulette (Paulette Rouzeau Degand) and Pappy Yves (Yves Oge Degand). The appreciation I have for your sacrifices and support could never be fully explained and appreciated with words. I have many memories of you two pushing me to excel and they usually revolved around you expecting more from me than the world did. I will always remember those moments at the blackboard at home with Mommy Paulette. I hope to be just as great a parent as you two if I am ever blessed to have children. I want to say thank you to Maman (Irma Degand), Pappy Dupont (Dupont Rouzeau), Iphanie Auguste, and Oge Degand for giving my parents the blueprint. Thank you to my godmother and aunt, Tati (Wilhel Jean-Louis). The added support you have always given me will always be remembered and appreciated. I still treasure the gifts you gave me when I was younger because they were a part of my early introductions to the idea that books could be fun and entertaining. I wish I still had some of those books today. vi Thank you to the rest of my immediate family: Alex Yves Degand, Daphney Paulette Degand, Viviana Rodriguez Degand, Isaiah Amaru Degand, Nasir Darnel Degand, and Elijah Mikael Degand. And thank you to the rest of my extended family members. We are blessed to be members of such a large family but that also means that the list is just too long to write. Thank you to (the soon to be) Dr. Orly Clerge. Having you on this journey with me has been great. Your support has always been appreciated and I am happy we were able to pursue our degrees around the same time. It’s been fun having you as a partner who could understand the process involved in pursuing this goal. And thank you God. I will always strive to be humble so that I never forget that there is a higher power that none of us fully understands, that none of us can fully visualize, and that none of us can fully explain.