| This study chronicles the "ordinary success" of minority adolescent girls in an urban Catholic school. These highly motivated adolescents have attracted little attention in cultural discourses on minority success, which too often focus on extraordinary achievement or predictable failure.; The girls' stories challenge deeply held assumptions about the nature of high achievement in general, and among minority adolescent girls in particular. In achievement motivation research, success is almost always understood as individual performance relative to a single standard of excellence. These girls, however, speak of success as an ongoing process, constantly in motion, rather than as an outcome that can be attained in the present moment. In this shifted metaphor, the girls have not arrived at their destination, but are facing in its direction and moving along its path, with success always deferred, evolving, and beyond their line of vision. Their faith in the promise of success, contrasting starkly with the realities of their everyday lives, sustains their motivation, but it also leads them to postpone the future, protecting the hopefulness of unlimited potential by keeping it at a distance. The very source of their vitality actually jeopardizes their prospects for success.; Listening to these girls speak about the complexities of success calls into question any assumption about academic achievement as an unproblematic, universally desired endpoint of development. The promise of success sustains these girls and injects hope where it is needed, but it is also gives rise to anxiety, frustrations, and vulnerability that are centrally implicated in struggles around psychological health. Forces acting from within can be at odds as the girls manage the simultaneity of longing for success, recognizing the material conditions that will facilitate or hamper their efforts, and feeling gratified or deflated in response to actual achievement. Yet this experience of being at odds, of desire forever being incompletely satisfied, is a source of energy that beckons them onward. With accomplishments in the present moment never yielding any total pleasure, the girls continue to be restless, finding within their unsettling experiences the surge of a desire for success that gives them the courage to go on. |
