This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the shape and content that social conflict takes as a central mediator of children's socialization processes. The study's focus is on the effects that conflict between children and adults might have on the child's academic performance and life prospects. In this sense, the study explores the ways in which conflict was displaced from having been predominantly child to child during the early 1990s, to becoming primarily between children and adults by the late 1990s. The research examines how punishment and a punitive culture are enacted, the contesting strategies children use to resist such culture, and the debates and tensions adults engage in their search for explanations, understandings, and solutions.;A central theoretical construct guiding this study is the notion of teachers as protective agents who, in such capacity, face the dualism of disabling or helping children of color build social and cultural capital. The assumption of this construct is that such social and cultural capital will in turn, increase children's life chances, particularly that of children of color. Thus, the research attempts to answer the guiding question: "In what ways does conflict mediate socialization processes?";The study investigates socializing dynamics within the larger context of school change. By chronicling the impact whole school change has had on the school's organizational structures, this inquiry looks closely into the creation of strategic spaces that allow, expands, or inhibits the engagement of complex and difficult epistemological issues of race, culture, social class, and gender. This microscopic examination provides an intimate portrait of the tensions, struggles, and entrenched beliefs and values that make it, both promising and difficult, the task of bringing systemic school reform to the level of classroom practices.
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