Browsing by Subject "Critical"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?: a journey toward a localized pedagogy for shared survival
    (2013-05) Hokanson, Aaron Rudolf Miller
    Like the children in the opening sequences of the original episodes of Sesame Street running into an empty lot and turning curbside trash into a trampoline, this is a document of a journey to discover a Sesame Street in localized contexts--the here and now, the everyday and mundane. Through the use of autoethnographic methods, I document a journey between the reality of my lived experiences, and the theorization of a pedagogical approach exemplified in those early episodes of Sesame Street. It is reflective work toward unsettling the spaces where and ways in which I have lived my life; work inspired by what Eve Tuck (2009b), a scholar and Native Alaskan, says is a necessary move from "damage-centered research" to "desire" centered research. This work is informed by decolonizing and indigenous literature (eg. Smith, 1999). In it I recognize I am complicit with, and a product of, historically racist colonial systems, that oppression is a result of the work of educators and researchers, as well as individuals and families--it is recognizable in the everyday experiences of non-marginalized communities as much as it can be seen in the damage done to marginalized communities. This is written with a deep faith in the possibilities people embody in all their difference, as well as sadness about the continuing action by individuals (myself and people I love included) that limit these possibilities. I believe that the strongest inclinations toward learning are present in everyday lives and relationships, that authentic learning emerges from a desire for people to be with other people. In this dissertation, I examine my complicity with oppressive action as I search for possibilities and narrate my attempts towards strategies of shared survival: reflection, relationships, shared experience, listening and love.
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    Definitional Tension: The Construction of Race In and Through Evaluation
    (2019-12) Shanker, Vidhya
    Despite the centrality of racialized difference to evaluation, the field has yet to develop a body of literature or guidelines for practice that advance understanding of difference and inequality, including its own role therein. The purpose of this study was to broaden understanding of observed differences and inequality in evaluation beyond individuals and individual lifetimes. Drawing from critical theories of systemic oppression and system dynamics, it used a discourse-historical approach to answer three questions: How has the U.S. scholarly evaluation literature constructed racialized difference? How has that construction changed since the field began formalizing? How is that trajectory related to surrounding systems? Results showed four discursive patterns: (1) minoritization and ambivalence toward whiteness; (2) the invocation of diversity and inclusion; (3) the replacement of race with culture; and (4) the rise of and decoupled relationship between indigeneity and colonization. All four patterns were tied to meso-level dynamics. In the second two, existing recruitment and training efforts initiated and led by and for evaluators representing racially otherized groups at lower levels of the American Evaluation Association were elevated to the association’s board-level, where leadership and language were broadened to represent dimensions of difference beyond race. Analysis of archival documents and interviews tied this meso-level pivot away from race to macro-level discourse and policies associated with racialized neoliberalization, which attributes inequality to individual as opposed to structural deficits. Unlike “Equal Opportunity” or “Affirmative Action,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “culture” depoliticize difference and privatize the responsibility for—and benefits of—desegregation. In fourth pattern, literature that authors who identified as indigenous published, which explicitly complicated the relationship between indigeneity and colonization, increased sharply and remained higher following the organizing efforts led by evaluation scholars and practitioners who identify as indigenous. Their efforts remained in their hands rather than being elevated or broadened. Variation among the patterns suggests that the American Evaluation Association’s relations with its racially otherized members and with educational institutions, large firms, philanthropy, and government are linked to the field’s construction of racialized difference through existing institutional mechanisms. Whether the mechanisms counteract or amplify racialized neoliberalization depends on whether they circulate capital in ways that enable otherized groups to exercise collective agency and produce knowledge for structural change.
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    Negotiation & Translation in First Year Composition WPA Work: Transformative Professional Knowledge to Composition Practice
    (2022-05) Champoux-Crowley, Alexander
    This dissertation considers the roles that Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) play (and the strategies that they use) in First Year Composition (FYC) programs to promote transformative professional knowledge. This study demonstrates how WPAs not only do the work of translating professional knowledge in Composition’s largest and most visible theater (FYC), but also how they are on the front lines of promoting transformative knowledge (challenging dominant conceptions of writing and education) and negotiating how that knowledge is taken up in program practices. Looking broadly at transformative knowledge—including feminist, critical, anti-racist, de-colonial, translingual, and other “emancipatory politics and pedagog[ies]” (Greenbaum, 2002, p.xii)—the analysis in this study seeks to articulate how strategies and ideals, theories and practices come together in the work of WPAs as they negotiate their positions and institutional realities. Nine FYC WPAs who identified as doing activist work of negotiation and translation were interviewed about the strategies they employed to port transformative knowledge from the profession into practices in their FYC program and/or the university at large; of these nine WPAs, some additionally shared key program documents whose production and/or use (by the WPA or by others associated with the program) supported transformative work. These findings—of strategies and textual practices—were then analyzed to gain a better sense of the diverse tactics employed by WPAs in different contexts and from different positionalities to reach “emancipatory objectives” (Greenbaum, 2002, p. xiii).