TITLE It's a Fine Line...Deconstructing Youth At-Risk: Critical Ethnography as Pedagogy.

This paper uses case studies to introduce a method by which educators in a graduate course transformed the ways in which they saw the students with whom they worked as they situated themselves within the context of "at-riskness. " Four white women, all of whom worked with at-risk youth, took a graduate course on the educational challenges of youth at-risk. They were required to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in which their views of being at-risk were informed by a range of respondents, including students, staff, teachers, and administrators. In many ways, these students had internalized the acceptable responses when asked to define being at risk, but they soon began to respond to teacher questions by separating their preconceptions from their actual belief structures. Another outcome of the process was that they began to learn from their students, undergoing a pedagogical transformation to increased respect for their students and a personal transformation through self-reflection. The case studies illustrate how critical ethnography a