Promoting Academic Resilience in Multicultural America : Factors Affecting Student Success

As schools struggle to redefine and restructure themselves, they need to be aware of the new realities of adolescents. Thus, this series of monographs and texts is committed to depicting the variety of adolescent cultures that exist in today’s troubled world. It is primarily a qualitative research, practice, and policy series devoted to contextual interpretation and analysis that encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary critique.

Promoting Academic Resilience in Multicultural America combines biographical sketches of resilient students, examples of effective programs designed to encourage resilience, recent research in the field, and their own experiences of resilient academics of color. The book illustrates exactly how academic success occurs within traditionally challenged learning environments. The authors focus most closely on the crucial transition between high school and college. The individuals spotlighted and programs outlined cross racial, gender, socioeconomic, and ethnic lines, and include African American, Hispanic, and white students. In part, the authors conclude that there are specific multidimensional protective factors that work collaboratively to enable the success of these exceptional students. It is the detailed exploration of these phenomena that lie at the heart of this work and that has the potential to help all children excel.
Among other uses, this book could be a valuable addition to a college freshmen seminar series, a foundations of education course, a course on multiculturalism in America and/or any course focused on basic educational psychology.