Lives on the edge: Tales of six resilient young men who achieved success in learning and literacy

In academic performance and especially in literacy, males have been clearly underachieving in comparison to girls, and working-class males underachieve even more than boys from middle- and upper-income homes. The purpose of this multi-case study is to examine the literary and academic lives of 6 resilient young men, the personal challenges they encountered in their schooling, and how they acquired the resilience they needed to achieve a level of academic success not common among others in their peer group.;The selective sampling includes a group of 19--20 year-old young males who attend a public state university and who (1) have come from a working class family, (2) experienced difficulties in school, (3) are able to participate reflectively in the study, (4) have demonstrated an ongoing interest in literature, and (5) achieved a high levl average level of literacy competency in high school and college. To record the academic lives of these young men, this researcher used these data gathering instruments: a series of in-depth interviews, a culminating group interview, a survey of reading and writing habits and preferences, interviews with secondary informants, literary scrapbooks that the participants created to chronicle their literary lives, and reading logs.;This study validates the concept that various internal and external support factors, when in place in young men's lives, enable them to cope with adversity while helping them achieve their educational aspirations. This study also posits the idea that literacy competency played a critical role in helping these young men develop resilient dispositions and furnished them with the reflectiveness, resolve, and confidence they needed to mitigate risk and achieve academic success. As a protective factor, literacy competency enhanced the likelihood of learning success, evoked new understandings about how others, including themselves, deal with struggle, and protected them from adopting the anti-school attitudes common among many males. Because literacy competency and reflectiveness have been so important in promoting educational resilience, at least among the participants in this research, this study suggests further examination of how these factors promote resilience in students struggling to achieve academic success.