Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar
May 25, 2010 Center for Urban Education USC
Institutional Agents
1997, A Social Capital Framework for Understanding The Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths." Harvard Educational Review, 67, 1.
Purpose of Manuscript/Essay
1) To elaborate the concept of institutional agentsthose individuals, well positioned in schools, universities, and in other institutions and organizations, who have the capacity and commitment to provide youth/students with:
valued resources and opportunities (linked to school success and social mobility) & with connections to other key and resourceful agents and networks
2) personal resources individuals with high degree of human, cultural, & social capital Resources & institutional support can either be positional or personal
Positional Resources
Coordinator
(an amplification of institutional broker)
Cultural Guide
Coordinator
(an amplification of institutional broker)
Cultural Guide
Institutional Broker
Cultural Guide
Advocate
Knowledge Agent
Institutional Agents:
Along the Class Hierarchy
Social Reproduction: .upper strata: IAsidentified as those societal actors who act to maintain the advantages of other actors and groups who share similar attributes, high-status positions and social backgrounds
Gate-keeping agents
Agents are oriented toward rendering services and providing institutional support to those privileged by class or race, to those who exhibit cultural capital, and to those who demonstrate institutionalized symbols of merit and ability
Urban educators, fulfill their potential as an institutional agent when they 1) provide institutional support to low-status students, 2) enact the many roles subsumed under the concept of IA
Empowerment Agent
Advisor Bridging Agent
Institutional Broker
Cultural Guide
Empowerment Agent
Advocate
Agent serves on agent acts When the institutional a campus with a critical consciousness, they committee looking at become ansuccess. They student empowerment agent; they question the system, envision identify resources that an alternate system, and enable would improve Latina and students to do the same. Latino student success.
Knowledge Agent
Empowerment defined: as the active participatory process of gaining resources, competencies, and key forms of power necessary for gaining control over ones life and accomplishing important life goals
(Maton & Salem, 1995).
P-o-w-e-r
Power: includes ability to critically interrogate [societal, organizational] social structures:
bureaucratic/institutional policies, rules, procedures and normative practices, codes, regulations, and laws,-and --operate in ways that exclude, discriminate, or disempower members of a group or class;
empowerment agents
empowerment
awareness of resources necessary to navigate the system transforming social network into social support system political and networking skill-set entering into different kinds of relationships developing effective coping strategies Ability to interrogate the sociopolitical contextenvisioning social change