Content area
Abstract
Solutions to combat the problem of poor educational and professional achievement among minorities are often compounded by the methods used to study it. While many recent studies consider community influences—such as discriminatory institutional practices, peer group pressures, access to opportunity, and cultural capital—they often ignore developmental processes, individual choices, and long-term outcomes. This study seeks solutions to the problem of poor achievement by examining the personal influences and individual choices expressed in autobiographies of successful minorities.
This interpretive study employs techniques of narrative and linguistic analysis in the autobiographies of Chinese American writer Elaine Mar ( Paper Daughter), Mexican American writer Richard Rodriquez ( Hunger of Memory), and African American writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Colored People) to discover cognitive-affective patterns of minorities who overcome adversity as they cross racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic borders. Analysis of the images, imagoes, ideological settings, and metaphors controlling the narrative structure reveals that a strong, positive relationship exists between success and skills in all three of the following areas: emotional intelligence (Mayers & Salovey, 1997), transformational learning (Mezirow, 1991), and the ability to construct a positive personal life myth (McAdams, 1993).
The autobiographies reveal that skills of emotional intelligence and transformational learning appear in developmental years through the writers' abilities to use descriptive emotional terms to identify and appraise feelings, facilitate thinking, distinguish between complex emotions, and reflect in ways that motivate personal growth. By expressing their feelings through journals, diaries, and conversations with mentors, the autobiographers articulate their understanding of the challenges related to their bicultural identities and, ultimately, the way language facilitates the perspective transformation necessary to overcoming adversity. Central to their success, however, is their adoption of an ascendant life myth that reflects their identification with role models from fiction, history, and popular culture.
The study, therefore, encourages those in curriculum development, as well as educators and counselors of adults, minorities, and pre-service teachers, to use reading and writing autobiographies to overcome adversities related to crossing borders of identity construction.
