Opportunity to belong: Exploring equity, access, encouragement, and constraint in the education of foster youth

This study set out to uncover the ways in which foster youth inscribe the life-worlds of school and foster care, the ways in which this inscription makes visible the supports or constraints on their access to learning, and to explore the consequences of these inscriptions on their opportunities as adults. Using ethnographic data from 20 interviews with youth in or recently emancipated from foster care, an in-depth discourse analysis at three levels of scale was conducted using Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) approach to metaphors as clues to the how people structure their experiences, an adaptation of Michael Agar's (1996, 2006) notion of "rich points", and Bloome and Egan-Robertson's (1993) and Fairclough's (1992, 1993) notion of intertextuality. The analysis yielded five dominant metaphors which youth in foster care use to inscribe these life worlds: (1) Foster care is suffering. (2) Foster youth are powerless. (3) Foster care is a container unit. (4) CYFD is a person. (5) School is a container unit. All of these metaphors were complex and highly structured by many other sub-categorical metaphors. Three major rich points emerged in this analysis all of which revealed alternative perspective to the rich points established above. These notions are presented under Mitchell's (1984) notion of a "telling case". The three alternate metaphors revealed through these telling cases are as follows: (1) Foster care is life. (2) Foster youth are powerful. (3) School is a destroyer. The final level of analysis concentrates on the "traces" left in the discourses of foster youth by what is defined in this study as "institutional discourse". Rhetoric, and specifically, metaphors given by the institution of foster care leaves marked traces in the discourse of foster youth in ways that structure or limit the number of ways in which they can experience can foster care. An analysis of the public rhetoric issued by three different universities about education and the traces that rhetoric leaves in the participants' discourse is also studied here, and though not enough participant discourse surrounding education was available to be conclusive in this study, promising possibilities for future research were discovered.