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Browsing by Subject "Critical Ethnography"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Black Worldliness: Poetic Knowledge in Education
    (2022-12) Sims, Noah NuhuBabuKubwa" Isaiah"
    Black Worldliness is an amalgamation of stories and experiences from a Black male charged with teaching white people how to be more racially and culturally conscious. It is a critical and auto-ethnographic project that is deeply informed by the Black Radical Tradition. The manuscript centers around a 2-year research study of equity work in education that is filtered through the lens of Black Radicals and Afro-Surrealism. I spend significant energy trying to demonstrate what an Afro-surrealist would say about the system of public education in the U.S. How would they critique it? How would imagine something different? This work is about spending time and building an intimate knowledge of a system so that, like W.E.B. Dubois informs us, any critique comes from a space of knowing the system inside and out.
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    Contradictions and Opportunities: Learning from the Cultural Knowledges of Youth with Histories of Domestic Violence
    (2016-03) Pyscher, Tracey
    As a society, we do not openly discuss domestic violence and yet its reality is front and center for children and youth whose lives are deeply shaped by it. At best, the school landscape is bleak for many, if not all, HDV youth (i.e. youth with histories of domestic violence and youth currently living with domestic violence). We know little to nothing about how HDV youth navigate school from their perspectives—how they engage with and resist educational discourses and practices and thus take up subject positions. What we do know from popular, psychological literature is that HDV youth are often objectified as troubled and deficient and this shapes their identities and experiences in school. In this study, I discuss the challenges HDV youth face when they navigate normative and hegemonic interactions in school. I also analyze the resistive identities and performances HDV youth take up in response to interactions perceived as violating. The study is situated in a public, urban middle school and outlines how HDV youth make sense of their daily interactions with school peers and staff. The study is told through the subjective voices of three female middle school HDV youth—Jen, Mac, and Shanna. Their stories along with the voices of their caregivers offer a counter-narrative to the dominant discourses often shaping the representations of HDV youth. Data analysis is grounded in the theoretical conceptions of critical sociocultural theory (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), resistive ambivalence (Pyscher, 2015; Pyscher & Lozenski, 2014), and Scott’s (1990) conceptualization of hidden and public transcripts. I seek to better understand and theorize the intersections of actions, identities, practices, and discourses that HDV youth use in educational interactions. The methodological foundation of this study is fourfold: critical discourse studies (Gee, 2014), critical ethnography (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995), geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), and mediated discourse analysis (Jones & Norris, 2005). Implications include the possibility of creating more liberating educational practices for youth with histories of domestic violence and marginalized youth in general. I conclude by suggesting that we consider creating more transgressive and humane school cultures that embody carnival-like practices.
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    Entanglements of Teenage Motherhood Identities: A Critical Ethnography within a Community-Based Organization
    (2017-05) LoBello, Jana
    The social construction of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage is based on a hierarchy of age, race, social class, and gender that affords some individuals with the privileges of full participation in the United States yet positions others as subordinate within the progress of the nation (Lesko, 2012). The organization of school as an institution relies on the assumption that development occurs in linear stages where grade levels and labels such as elementary, middle, and high school predict certain characteristics found within each context. Oftentimes, teenage mothers are positioned as those subordinate or deficit within these formal systems of education as they do not “fit” into these traditional labeling practices. Negative labels such as “stupid slut”, “teen rebel, teen mom”, “the girl nobody loved” and “dropouts” show evidence of this deficit mindset (Kelly, 2000). The impact of such labels manifests themselves in perceptions of disengagement within formal school settings (Kalil, 2002; Kalil & Ziol-Guest, 2008) and the policing of aged, racial, social classed, and gendered bodies (Jones, 2007). The purpose of this critical, ethnographic study is to deeply explore the experiences of teenage mothers participating in a community-based organization (CBO) as potential opportunities to take up issues of age, race, gender, sexuality, motherhood, and social class within their ongoing identity construction and schooling experiences. This study takes a critical perspective on the social construction of adolescence in order to contribute to scholarly work that attends to how teenage mothers are socially, politically, and educationally positioned within Western schooling and society. By focusing on hybridity and the intersectionality of identities this research pays attention to the ways in which educational practices have been both disrupted and maintained discriminatory when conceptualizing what it means to educate and involve teenage mothers and their children within existing systems. Findings show that the chronological passing of time as well as the physical representation of the pregnant female figure is reflected within women’s stories as one form of oppression and/or agentic negotiation. Additionally, mixed perceptions around if and how local and alternative high schools provide space for the hybridity and intersectionality of teenage mothering identities was engaged by participants within embodied “fitting in” or “pushed out” discourses. These perceptions seek to complicate traditional practices and identities of student, athlete, and parent within formalized educational spaces. Also, Real Moms both provides opportunity for authentic senses of caring (Noddings, 2005) as well as has limitations in “protecting” participants from the risks of being vulnerable within relationship and storytelling. This study will extend the literature by looking at the ways in which teenage mothers are both disrupting and reinscribing discourses of chronological developmental stage theories (Lesko, 2002; Lesko, 2012) by attending to the multitude of social factors that influence the cultural construction of adolescence and adolescents (Vagle, 2012). Additionally, this work looks at how schools are sites for the perpetuation of social contracts that implicitly exclude or push out specific student identities, such as race, social class, and teenage motherhood that do not adhere or assimilate to existing normalized practices (Milner, 2015; Noguera, 2003). For example, the quarantining of teenage mothers into all-female alternative schools or limited participation within local schools attempts to de-sexualize female students against discourses of desire (Fine, 1993). In thinking about authentic, caring relationships (Noddings, 2005), this study also complicates the notion of creative, narrative expression as an automatic form of empowerment as opportunities for vulnerable storytelling stir up both damaging stereotypes (Edell, 2013) and self-interpretations of empowerment (Kelly, 1997). By contextualizing the lived experiences of the female teenage mothers and mentors within this community-based organization, this study thoughtfully and reflexively attends to the existing discourses of teenage motherhood.
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    A Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical inquiry into whiteness
    (2014-05) Tanner, Samuel Jaye
    The project was a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical investigation into whiteness. During the 2012-2013 school year, nearly 40 mostly white 9th-12th Grade students in a first-ring, suburban high school outside of St. Paul investigated whiteness. They researched whiteness in the fall, wrote a play in the winter, and produced it as the school's spring play.Using YPAR (Appadurai, 2006; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Guishard, 2009; Morrell 2008) in concert with playbuilding pedagogies (Boal, 1979; Mandell & Wolf, 2003; Norris, 2009; Sawyer, 2003; Zipes, 2004), the students used data they generated in their research to inform their play.This project was designed from a critical whiteness perspective. Instead of using traditional white privilege pedagogy, white high school students participated in a teaching project that both acknowledged privilege and inquired into organizing logics of white supremacy. Students worked towards anti-racist action through the collaborative construction of a theatrical text.This dissertation presents the possibility and limitations of centering whiteness as a category of analysis in a high school context, the nature of sharing power between a high school teacher and a YPAR collective, and the implications of white people using a critical whiteness perspective to make sense of whiteness. It will argue that Thadeka's (1999) theorization of white shame should caution educators to approach whiteness work with nuance and care.