Creating Risk and Promise: Children's and Teachers' Co-Constructions in the Cultural World of Kindergarten

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted with 21 former Head Start children as they made the transition to public school, we examined how notions of their "risk" or "promise" as students were constructed through specific discourses and practices in 14 kindergarten classrooms. Informed by cultural production and practice theory, we view students not only as shaped by classroom structures and larger social processes but also as agents who actively coproduce with teachers notions of themselves and ways of acting in school that can lead to risk or promise. The 2 main questions we address in this article are (1) what discourses and practices in the cultural world of kindergarten work to construct students in particular ways, and (2) what are teachers' and children's novel productions in this world that have implications for a child's school trajectory. Although we found many examples of positive interactions between students and teachers, we saw some practices that could contribute to early school failure. Teacher practices that worked best for nonprototypical students included high expectations, an emphasis on what children could do, praise, gentle redirection of inappropriate behavior, and a caring attitude. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for reconceptualizing risk and promise.