"Challenging Spaces": Sites for the Reproduction, Construction, and Transformation of Identities and Knowledge

This paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference April 2007.This qualitative study of cross-cultural interaction during groupwork in a culturally diverse, desegregated middle school social studies class explores those "challenging spaces" within the groupwork process where students' sociocultural identities meet, ways of knowing collide, and knowledge, identities, and relationships are transformed, re/constructed, or reaffirmed. The researcher identifies ways in which learning about controversial issues related to student experiences and cross-cultural interaction intertwine themselves in ways that locally impact student identities. She concludes that greater attention is needed to helping students to understand how different world views, different ways of knowing, and different perspectives are socially and locally constructed and how their construction is intertwined with changes in peoples' values, beliefs, and identities