Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
The problem of in/attention among school children has been the focus of many educational interventions over the past several years, including mindfulness education. Growing in popularity in schools, a central aim of these interventions has been to cultivate attention in children and young people in order to make room for learning. Informed by a year-long inquiry in a primary school classroom, this dissertation attends to the multiple, shifting, unexpected and divergent ways in which “mindfulness” is enacted by children in school spaces in ways that often overspill the spacetime boundaries of the classroom. This dissertation troubles how discourses embedded in curriculum and everyday classroom practices position children as coherent, knowable, and agentic subjects who are responsible for their own mis/behaviour, and offers alternative, more speculative responses to the “problem” of in/attention among children. The chapters bring together various forms of fieldwork data, multiple (and often divergent) strands of theories and approaches, and speculative writings. They move away from a focus on formal lesson plans and classroom interventions, and instead work to “intervene” in the assumptions and practices regarding what is deemed important to pay attention to within the contours of school life. The chapters also introduce more than human agencies that trouble notions of child-centrism, rationality and self-regulation. Mindfulness becomes reconfigured in a way that includes attention to not only the autonomous, agentic child, but also the flows of affect, the vibrancy of materials and spaces, as well as atmospheres that make different enactments of in/attention possible and visible in school spaces.
View record
This dissertation explores how elementary educators in Alberta, Canada make sense of and engage with queer, trans, and gender non-conforming diversity in elementary education, and how those understandings inform their pedagogy and practices. Contextualized within Alberta’s political conservatism, this research consists of a policy analysis of Alberta Education’s Guidelines for Best Practices and 12 school district policies, 14 interviews with elementary educators and two group discussions. This dissertation makes a critical contribution to the field by exploring how elementary education is shaped by necropolitical regimes of normativity that bestow privilege and support to some queer and trans kids, while increasing vulnerability and precarity for others. By focusing on discursive practices, this research explores why current government and school district policies, professional development, administrative interventions, and classroom strategies for queer and trans “inclusion” are insufficient. Findings underscore the limitations of an individualized, reactive, “accommodation approach” to change in schools that does little to confront larger, systemic issues in Canada’s public education system. Highlighting the workings of white settler colonialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism, this research discusses how even supportive and knowledgeable educators often perpetuate harmful discourses despite their best intentions. Educators’ stories reveal the pressures, risks, and responsibilities they face as they navigate institutional constraints that are not conducive to implementing queer, trans, and gender diversity into the classroom and school in meaningful ways. By critically examining the limitations of existing approaches to building “safe, inclusive, and welcoming schools,” this research aims to contribute to a better schooling future for queer and trans students in Alberta, thereby improving conditions for all students.
View record
Violence against racialized women that is known as “honour”-killing or “honour”-related violence and oppression (HRVO) is typically depicted in dominant media discourses as being the result of the cultures of the victims and perpetrators. Culture is framed as causing HRVO because dominant media discourses in the Western world tend to depict racialized communities through an Orientalist lens. Orientalist discourses are problematic because they contribute to the oppression of racialized communities by framing them as homogeneously dangerous, uncivilized, and barbaric. Most literature on HRVO takes a discursive approach, analyzing and critiquing how Orientalist narratives are advanced in government reports and policies as well as the mainstream media. While this research has important implications in identifying Orientalism and suggesting alternative perspectives, this dissertation investigates the perspectives service providers use to understand and deal with HRVO and what role these perspectives play in challenging Orientalism. The conceptual framework for this study is the theory of Orientalism combined with the heterogeneity of culture, the migration context, and intersectionality perspectives. In addition, critical realism is used to guide the methodology, particularly data analysis. In this dissertation, 13 service providers in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario—from settings such as ethnocultural organizations, shelters, law enforcement, education, and mental health—were interviewed, while an additional 10 service providers participated in group interviews. The study found that the most effective perspectives for service providers to use to challenge Orientalism were two-fold: (a) the heterogeneity of cultural approach, which recognizes internal differentiations within cultures; and (b) the migration context approach, which focuses on social forces that may shape and influence attitudes that support HRVO. Further, critical realism reveals several non-discursive factors—namely, embodiment (experiences of the body), materiality (physical nature of the world), and power (institutions and how through policy and force they control access to resources)—that service providers encounter and must manage to effectively counsel and support victims of HRVO. Recommendations are identified regarding education and risk assessment tools that can assist service providers to advance the heterogeneity of culture and migration context approaches as well as manage non-discursive factors.
View record
The growing influence of neoliberalism in post-secondary education has changed the definitions of both education and educational leadership, moving each further away from values of participatory democracy toward educational practices that are antithetical to such principles. Under neoliberal conditions, education becomes a commodified resource in a global marketplace, impacting identities and relationships: students become customers, faculty are contractors, and administrators are corporate managers. This study is autoethnography: the story of a dean working in a post-secondary institution in British Columbia, Canada. Engaging multiple exercises in reflexivity, including biographical self-analysis and creative non-fiction, the author attempts to surface his own leadership values and dispositions, illustrating how these conflict with those of the neoliberal institution he serves. Specifically, he asks himself: Who are you and what do you stand for? The study draws on a Sociological Imagination to confront the dissonance characteristic of his leadership experience, reconstructing it from failure of personal agency to predictable and conflicted consequences of the social impact of neoliberalism on higher education. The story documents how neoliberal changes have affected his institution, shifting it from its roots grounded in philosophies of access and social justice to its current focus on competitive global market economies. A key claim of the study is that educational leadership must be reconstructed as a plural identity that entails the exercise of judgment in multiple “worlds” that, in turn, are grounded in conflicting values and practices. Such a stance may make it possible for educational leaders to survive under neoliberal conditions while also creating and supporting opportunities for democratic eruptions and contestations. Educational leaders must learn to travel betwixt and between conflicting worlds to contribute to education as the pursuit of a good and worthwhile life for all.
View record
In the current educational marketplace, the range of school options has made parents key players in their children's school education. Unlike previous decades, where students typically attended their neighbourhood schools, today's parents are more likely to transport their children greater distances to their school of choice. This case study tells the story of one British Columbia public elementary school that transitioned into an arts-integrated school--usually referred as a fine arts school. The arts-integrated curriculum attracted a growing number of families who resided outside of the school's catchment area. As a teacher at the school before and after its transition, I began to notice trends in students enrolling from outside of the school catchment area. Those trends included issues pertaining to behaviour, social interactions and academic challenges. Thus, my research investigates parental perceptions of arts-integrated (fine arts) focus schools. Data collected through interviews with both parents and educators detail: (a) parents' expectations and understandings of such schools, and the complex reasons why they enrol their children; and (b) the difficulties in implementing an arts-integrated curriculum. Interview data also became the impetus for the self-study which runs in tandem throughout the research chapters. The self-study speaks to my own childhood and teaching experiences: to an extent corresponding with the way in which students in dance classes are taught to negotiate self within defined and discrete spatial areas. Because the study is situated temporally in what is commonly termed a neo-liberal era, I include discussion of the wider political environment, particularly with respect to parental choice. My case study demonstrates that arts-integrated (focus) schools are accessed chiefly by middle-class families seeking advantage for their children. The study reveals that the main value of fine arts schools may be as enablers of student success in behaviour, socialization and academic terms. Finally, I argue that arts-integrated schools can also be spaces of fulfillment for parents who, through choice of school and active participation there, feel that they have played a more profound role in their child's education.
View record
My dissertation explores how journalists who self-identify as “transnational” shape their journalism to make human rights claims that trouble, open up and go beyond the nation-state. The project is a multi-sited, ethnographic, comparative case study of journalism education among two different transnational peoples: Romani/Gypsy and Saami (the Indigenous peoples in the current states of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Drawing upon 45 interviews with journalists and journalism educators, my research suggests there are two distinct strategies in how transnational peoples’ journalism is conceived, taught and assessed. These strategies influence and are influenced by larger socio-political contexts: the Saami media work within an Indigenous rights framework; their goal is to engage with journalism as a form of self-determination. This differs from Romani media programs, which are funded by non-state donors who aim to use Romani media as a form of claiming citizenship. These citizenship claims are both within a specific state as well as within Europe. In short, the political, economic and cultural contexts shape the journalism, and the journalism in turn shapes the politics.Although the differences are significant, both transnational groups recognized the power of journalism in agenda setting within, between and across borders. Through the framing of information in particular ways, journalists, editors and the media outlets, as well as the funding sources for this journalism, were all engaged in a form of agenda setting (Carpenter, 2007; 2009) and productive power (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). My findings indicate that a unique feature of transnational peoples’ journalism is recognizing and operationalizing power beyond that of the state; another contribution is a more robust understanding of objectivity in journalism – one that demonstrates how journalists can be credible, without pretending to be neutral. These are all important contributions to reimagining human rights advocacy beyond current discussions of transnational advocacy which still often privilege the state and tends to pay scant attention to journalists themselves. Learning from transnational peoples who are creating, teaching, and participating in journalism education in its many places, forms, and media allows us to make more sound connections between human rights and journalism.
View record
In recent years academic attention, educational resources and popular media have turned to the issue of homophobia in schools and the violence facing LGBT youth and those perceived to be LGBT. Consequently there has been an increase in the development of curricula and other pedagogical tools meant to address the problem of homophobia. Yet there has been very little qualitative data exploring the success of these pedagogies, or the implications and efficacy of these programs for LGBT students.This qualitative extended case study addresses this analytical gap through an examination of the media and educational discourses employed by one urban community organization in Vancouver, Canada and the youth filmmakers with whom they work. The organization, Out in Schools, takes film, much of it youth produced, into educational settings throughout British Columbia in the hopes of breaking the silence surrounding gender and sexual diversity. In addition, they run a one-week filmmaking camp for aspiring youth filmmakers. This project utilises a number of ethnographic methods including participant observation, face-to-face interviewing, and researcher fieldnote reflections. Participants include adult facilitators, teachers, and youth filmmakers. Interviews took place over a three-year period. The theoretical framework for this research is largely poststructural drawing extensively from queer and feminist theories. As part of this project’s theoretical investigation, I juxtapose the voice of queer youth and queer youth media production alongside the larger narratives of queer and neoliberal politics.Analysis revealed that the messaging of antihomophobia education has influenced and limited the ways in which Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer youth are able to articulate queer identities. This study concludes that antihomophobia education is largely a normative project, that it is wholly implicated in discourses that arise from heteronormativity, informed by liberal understandings of individualism that invariably identifies the queer victim as a way of negating responsibility. Lastly, through a synthesis of data and analysis, I investigate the future of queerness within educational discourse, and drawing upon the work of Muñoz (2009), Duggan (2002, 2009), Bruhm & Hurley (2004), Bryson and MacIntosh (2010), I advance a notion of queer futurity in educational spaces.
View record
This research focuses on storytelling as bottom-up educational leadership and policy making. The researcher examines language policy in practice at a Canadian post-secondary institute, following an institutional ethnographic approach and using discourse analysis tools. Stories about everyday experiences with English language placement testing, communication course marks reassessments, plagiarism, and prior learning assessment and review (PLAR) of communication skills are collected from 9 students, 6 instructors, 5 program heads, and the researcher herself as an associate dean. The researcher’s own identity negotiation as an insider at the institute is explored through discussion of tensions around the handling of people’s stories and the role of reflexivity in shaping the research. The research links the personal to the institutional while exploring connections between everyday experiences and processes of administration and governance. Exploration of policy moments in participants’ stories uncovers a discourse of control and homogeneity where difference is constructed negatively, several language myths operate as forms of domination, and storylines suppress conflict. Exercises highlighting dilemmas that people face at the institute are presented to enable dialogic politics. It is argued that storytelling proved to be a powerful method for surfacing everyday struggles, and the sharing of stories led to a new awareness for participants. Storytelling proved to be a generative form of talking back to policy and policy making as it repositioned policy review as a bottom-up exercise and captured moments of policy as struggle and change. Dialogic exercises are presented as tools for reconstruction of language practices that are more equitable and humane.
View record
This research focuses on educational leadership and social justice in British Columbiapublic schools. Specifically, the study looks at how principals and vice-principalsunderstand and respond to homophobia in one school district. The researcher examinessix administrators’ understandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited,intersex, queer, and questioning (LGBTTIQQ) issues following a critical approach andusing ethnodrama to present and analyze the data. The researcher is an insider as she is aprincipal in the district being examined. The resulting tensions, confusion, and reflectivepractices all assist in the exploration of the research. The study makes connections fromthe general to the particular, from the personal to the institutional, and from the page tothe stage all the while examining and spotlighting thoughts, values, beliefs, and opinionsaround LGBTTIQQ issues in our public schools. The research uncovers a lack ofcatalytic leadership in support of social justice. Ethnodrama proves to be an imaginativeand powerful tool not only in highlighting the “truth” in the data collected but inrevealing people’s inner understandings and, sadly, lack of responses, to the needs of theLGBTTIQQ community. Not only is socially just leadership faltering, but principals arenot supported at the district and provincial levels by explicit policies, adequate postsecondaryeducation, or professional development around LGBTTIQQ issues. This research aims to make visible the invisible and help lead the way toward more socially just schools.
View record
No abstract available.
This study is an attempt to understand how it is that high school students come toparticipate as democratic citizens in the public sphere. A great deal of time and effortgoes into providing students with the opportunity to participate in making decisions thataffect their education and their lives in schools. Student Voice is the term often used todescribe those attempts. In most cases, a small minority of students participate and mostof the decisions that students are involved in relate to planning events, fund raisingactivities or serving on Student Councils. The provincial government has attempted toprovide an opportunity for student voices to be heard through School Planning Councils.Each high school in the province is required to have a student representative on theSchool Planning Council whose mandate is to set goals for improvement in studentachievement. Students participate, usually at the request of the principal, but theirinfluence is limited. How is it then that students come to be involved in influencingdecisions that directly affect their education? This study is an attempt to find out.This is a qualitative case study of a group of high school students who becameinvolved in campaign to prevent their high school from being reconfigured into a middleschool. Their campaign spanned a period often months and included presentations to theBoard of Education, letters to the editor, protests, and appearances on radio andtelevision. As a participant observer, I kept notes of all the activities that students wereinvolved in. Through focus groups and interviews, I tried to gain a better understandingof why students decided to get involved and how they made decisions about what actionsthey wanted to take. What I learned was that the students valued their school and wanted to engage in a dialogue with trustees about what was important to them. When the trustees used the power of their position to attempt to silence the students, the students decided to take their concerns to the broader community, to participate in the public sphere. They engaged in dialogue and planned activities in private. When they were ready, they ventured into the public sphere. They were unable to influence the trustees' final decision, but they garnered a great deal of community support. They learned that communicative action generated a power of its own that made an impact on what came to be discussed in the public sphere. The findings of this research study will be useful to educators willing to support students in their attempts to be involved in the democratic process either in their classrooms, schools or the wider community. Creating private spaces for this kind of dialogue is a challenge for all of us in public education.
View record
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Sexual health education (SHE) is a provincially mandated element of the school health curriculum in British Columbia. Though intended to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of sexual health, I argue that the current top-down approach to designing and implementing SHE curriculum works to uphold colonial ideologies that limit, rather than enhance, youths’ knowledge regarding sexual health. Employing an interview- and observation-based study and utilizing reflexive thematic analysis, this study explores how bottom-up approaches to SHE, centering the experiences and stories of secondary-school-aged youth, have the potential to shift dominant narratives, not only for youth individually, but also within and beyond their wider communities. Grounded in an ethics of hospitality, participation, and critical hope, the following questions guide my study: (1) How can storytelling and collaborative dialogue provide insight into the messaging that youth have received about sexual health? (2) What do these stories tell us about the kinds of issues that youth are experiencing in the context of sexual health? (3) What do these stories tell us about the kind of SHE that youth want? My research challenges current colonial approaches to SHE by engaging youth, as experts in their own lives, in a collaborative process of reimagining what SHE might look like in BC secondary schools. Findings illuminate the transformative potential of bottom-up approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. In comparison to top-down approaches, which perpetuate or impose cultural norms on the knowledge being disseminated, bottom-up approaches have the power to change cultural and societal norms by (re)establishing what “the norm” looks like, directly from the perspective of those being affected; that is, youth. Buy-in, when it comes to SHE, is pivotal; if young people are not engaged in their learning, it runs the risk of perpetuating dominant sexual health discourses and overlooks opportunities to challenge accepted norms. The findings from this study contribute to a deeper understanding of youth voice in curriculum development, and how it can spur long-term systemic change, starting with sexual health.
View record
My research focuses on skateboarding as a youthful and often gendered means of negotiating public and cultural space. Much of the academic literature sees the act of skateboarding as having transgressive potential in relation to public space. I use this body of work as a starting point from which to explore how class, race, sexuality and especially gender complicate the seemingly progressive relationship between skateboarding and public space. How do those publics who have struggled and continue to struggle for power, safety, and mobility in the public sphere (with a focus on women and non-binary people) engage with this struggle through their participation in skateboarding? And through what means are women and non-binary skaters creating space for themselves within the homogenous and sometimes exclusionary culture of skateboarding itself? Framed through theories of public space (Lefebvre, 1991; Borden, 2001; Mitchell, 1995; Wilson, 1992; Day, 2007) and youth, gender, and resistance (Beal, 1995), my paper explores the contradictory ways that skateboarding both reproduces and provides a means to resist hegemonic discourses. Via an analysis of 10 interviews with skateboarders in Vancouver, BC, a number of media interviews of professional woman skateboarders accessed online, and field observations, I analyze how non-dominant identities find belonging in skateboarding and how skateboarding affects their interactions in and with public space. The women and non-binary skateboarders I spoke with and researched had all at some point overcome external and internalized narratives about women’s limitations when it comes to physical ability and risk, as well as about women’s legitimacy as skateboarders. In conclusion I find that women and non-binary skateboarders negotiate belonging in public space through the use of a variety of gender presentations, the creation of female-only and female-run spaces, the seeking out of female role models, and through the creation and consumption of skateboarding media for and by women.
View record
Today, vital aspects of private life and public discourse are happening online, and media and digital literacy skills (MDL) are necessary to engage in this sphere. This qualitative study examines how adults can learn the MDL skills necessary to advocate for social change on Twitter using activist hashtags, like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and engage as democratic digital citizens. To do this, nine Twitter users with varying levels of activity provided their Twitter archives and took part in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. These data were evaluated using content analysis to explore how participants learned to use activist hashtags on Twitter. Using the lens of critical pedagogy and a theory of learning through experience (Dewey, 2004) as the foundation, participants’ learning journeys were coded, analyzed, and compared to concepts from the literature. These concepts include public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000), which applies to sites of learning beyond formal education, and communities of practice, which addresses how communities teach their members (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In addition, the concepts of publics and counterpublics are employed to make sense of how hashtags function (Bruns & Burgess, 2015; Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002). Finally, the concept of digital citizenship is applied to the practices under examination to demonstrate how MDL alone fails to capture the critical, political aspects of activist hashtags. Study participants learned to use hashtags to advocate for social change on Twitter by combining multiple strategies, based on individual goals, opportunities, and obstacles. In total, participants described 18 strategies, which could be grouped into the four main approaches of applying prior knowledge, exploration, modeling and examples, and directly accessing expertise. The three most common strategies were learning through exposure over time (i.e., experience), observation and copying, and trial and error. Activist hashtags are able to function not just as sites of public pedagogy or communities of practice, but as “publics of practice” where participants used the public discursive space to learn and practice relevant digital citizenship skills. Although this study is focused on a narrow set of behaviours and participants, it provides insight into how people might be learning to use new digital tools.
View record
This thesis explores the discursive treatment of care and caring relationships in educational policy in the Canadian province of Alberta. The object of this exploration is Inspiring Education, an ensemble of K-12 schooling policies. Feminist ethics of care literature and the work of theorists Joan C. Tronto, Virgina Held, and Hannah Arendt inform a critical interpretation of the policy texts. Closer analysis is achieved through techniques of discourse analysis, drawing primarily from the work of Norman Fairclough. This thesis is guided by the question “How are ‘care’ and ‘caregiving’ discursively represented—or not represented—in the policy texts of Inspiring Education?” The purpose of this project is two-fold: (1) to illuminate particular discourses within educational policy texts and to consider the impact of those discourses on care practices across our society; and (2) to consider how the discursive treatment of teachers within these texts influences the possibility of a caring teacher-student relationship. The four discourses identified each constrain the possibility of caring relationships in particular ways. The first two discourses are related to the construction of the “educated Albertan of 2030” (Alberta Education, 2010, p. 5): Personally Responsible and subject to Private-Sector Norms. The second set of discourses is related to the construction of the teacher: Neoliberal Professionalism and Teacher-as-Facilitator. The implication of these discourses is that the maintenance of caring relationships will require greater sacrifice, that it will continue to be the hardest work, done by the very people excluded from the political process of assigning care responsibility. By not acknowledging the role of care in our society and in our school system, we risk permitting the de facto methods of assigning responsibility to remain undisrupted and unfair.
View record
Drawing from a poststructuralist feminist paradigm, this thesis considers the questions “How do the observed popular fantasy narratives in a child care setting intersect with three- and four-year-olds’ gendered subjectivities?” and “How and why do these narratives contribute to marginalised subjectivities in this setting?” I spent two-and-a-half months in an early childhood classroom using ethnographic-type methods, with a perspective of “methodological immaturity” (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008) in departing from the Mosaic approach of multiple methods (Clark, 2005). The study included six children – two girls and four boys from three- to four-and-a-half-years-old – with whom I engaged in “conversations with a special purpose” (Eide & Winger, 2005), participant-observation, and the occasional activity-based methods. In considering Butler’s (2008) conceptualisation of gender as masquerade, the children’s gender performances intermingled meaningfully with the fantasy play narratives of superheroes and princesses. The children seemingly masqueraded these commodified identities in body and discourse towards better satisfying the implicit expectations of a well-performed gender discursively put upon young children’s bodies. Further, through these embodied discourses, other child bodies were relegated to the margins. Much of this was demonstrated through the restricting discourses called upon by me in the research conversations themselves, such as calling on a boy/girl binary in asking about the “rules for boys.” Thus, limitations of the research methods used are thoroughly discussed. This research suggests departing from an all-or-nothing mentality on “allowing” this play, and encouraging new ways to engage with and depart from these narratives.
View record
This thesis explored how participatory artistic quiltmaking contributed to peacebuilding asdefined by Bickmore (2004) among grade 4, 5, 6, and 7 students in one classroom at aninner-city elementary school in Vancouver, BC. Using Bickmore’s (2004) frame, thefollowing questions were explored:1. What makes participatory artistic quiltmaking an effective vehicle for grade 4, 5, 6,and 7 students to engage in peacebuilding?2. How are peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding evident in the experiences,processes, and interactions among the participants involved in the project?3. How does Bickmore’s frame provide an adequate theorization for understanding theexperiences and processes among the participants involved in the project?4. How does the data gathered in this project challenge and extend Bickmore’s frame?This study was composed of three parts: (1) ethnographic observations to understand issuesin the school from a social justice perspective; (2) participatory artistic quiltmaking on thetheme of inclusion and exclusion with one class of participants including students, theclassroom teacher, educational assistant, volunteer quiltmaker, and me; (3) interviews withparticipants and parents.Analysis of the data revealed several themes. The artistic component of the quiltmakingprocess contributed to three outcomes: (1) the fostering of individuality and collectivityamong participants; (2) the fostering of self expression; and (3) the fostering of creativity.The participatory component contributed to three outcomes: (1) the fostering of groupdevelopment; (2) the fostering of a sense of inclusion; and (3) the connecting of personalexperiences and stories to the theme of inclusion and exclusion. The quiltmaking processcontributed to three outcomes: (1) it promoted a shift in perspective about others, whichfostered new and deeper relationships; (2) it fostered confidence and pride; and (3) it fostereda sense of hope and hope for peace while sending a larger message or statement. Theseoutcomes demonstrate peacemaking and peacebuilding, as defined by Bickmore.The findings from this study have implications for administrators involved in curriculumdevelopment, particularly in peace education; teachers involved in supporting social justice; policy makers involved in developing school policies; and individuals who conductcommunity-based participatory research in school-based settings with youth.
View record
Through an institutional ethnography in two secondary public schools in northwest Washington State, this research explores the web of social relations coordinating the lived experiences of students without legal immigration status and the educators who taught them. The U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, guarantees students’ access to a public K-12 education, regardless of immigration status. However, without a pathway to legalize their residency, unauthorized status inevitably denies these students full social membership in a polity, which excludes them from assuming paid professional careers, presents significant obstacles in pursuing higher education, and precludes their full social and political participation. Those without authorized status are unable to fully actualize the dreams, knowledge and skills developed throughout their education. Situated in this tension, I examined educators’ everyday schooling activities that prepared students for life after graduation. Educators’ daily practices groomed students to become college-bound and career-driven. To pursue these goals, my research suggests that ruling relations positioned educators to enact depoliticized discourses of meritocracy and a decontextaulized student-centered practice, as well as practices that silenced the social, political and economic contexts of students’ lives. Situated in a contradictory intersection of education and immigration policy, I argue that redressing the root cause of the injustice that students without legal status experience requires political action. This research suggests that educators dedicated to a socially just education grounded in human rights would commit to political action, express passionate and informed encouragement to their students, and acknowledge and engage status as a lived experience in their students’ lives.
View record
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.
