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This project has developed a resource guide that will help kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers implement an integrated history-social science curriculum that encourages children to become critical thinkers.

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Fifteen professionals in a variety of environmental occupations in the United States were interviewed in a structured, open-ended format. Job profiles were developed from the interviews. The philosophy of these environmental professionals is expressed in their own words and offers insights into influences upon career choice, professional training and personal fulfillment. In addition, environmental related career activity guides were developed to help students and their parents and teachers gain an awareness of the occupations available in this field.

In 2016, the Colombian National Congress endorsed the Peace Agreement with the largest guerrilla group in the country, FARC. Prior to this political benchmark episode, the National Government, under different executive agendas, sought to overcome the Colombian armed conflict through different approaches. Formal education has been historically conceived as a central area for advancing peace and democracy. Today, under a holistic model of Transitional Justice and the slow implementation of the 2016 Peace Accords, schools hold a key role in forming young citizens for peacebuilding, respect for human rights, and democratization. In this research project, I examine how high school students take up civic subjectivity in relation to the ongoing political transition in Colombia. I also explore the interplay between civic subjectivity and historical memory, emphasizing how students’ understandings of the past inform their civic positionings and actions in the present regarding the armed conflict and the prospects for conflict transformation. This study engages with the Foucauldian conceptualization of subjectivity as the two-fold process of “being-made” and “self-making”. Drawing on 22 weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at Colegio San Antonio public school (Eastern Antioquia), I analyze students’ encounters with the difficult past —often in the form of textured silences— and how these give shape to their construction of previous and contemporary armed violence and civic action/responsibilities on this matter. By paying attention to participants’ everyday lives and social navigation inside and outside of school, this dissertation discusses the tensions and negotiations youth face in the process of giving historical and political meanings to the armed conflict and current transition. It also sheds light on the intertwined dimensions of temporality, spatiality, and experience in how youth conceive and position themselves as civic actors. This study demonstrates how, through civic disjunctures, students partake in their becoming as citizens who challenge fixed and already-established notions on what peace is, should be, and what the school is expected to do to form peaceful citizens. This dissertation concludes with some reflections about the possible intersections between civic education and Transitional Justice’s efforts.

This study is concerned with the availability and the use of certain learning aids in the teaching of social studies in Yuba County elementary schools. FIeld trips and speakers are the learning aids which have been included in this study.

Over the past years, particularly during 2018, Chilean society has experienced a robust feminist movement led by high school students. At the same time, mainstream society and researchers claim that Chile is experiencing a youth civic and citizenship education crisis, particularly among young women. I address this apparent contradiction by challenging the futuristic approach in citizenship education taken in the country and exploring how young women are currently politically engaged and challenge gender oppression within their high schools and their activist spaces. I have used a post-human and post-colonial feminist theoretical framework to answer the following research question, How do female public high school students in Chile who identify as feminist or politically active produce their gender/political subjectivities in the 2018 context of contentious feminist politics? And, sub questions; How do they do this while engaging with feminist discourses and practices in and outside of school? How do they do this while engaging with historical narratives? Finally, how do they do this while engaging with formal political education in school? A context of contentious feminist politics will be understood as a context where feminism is prevalent in public discourse, which forces people -in this case students- to take a stance concerning this subject. To answer the research questions, I conducted a critical ethnography, observing classes and other activities at Edelbina González High School, a Chilean all-female public high school with an active group of high school feminists. During my fieldwork, I invited six 12th-grade participants to be my focal group of observation and to take part in individual testimonios interviews and collective art-based testimonios workshops. Through these methods, I produced fieldnotes of observations, transcriptions and audio-recordings of the interviews and workshops, and photographs of the school space and students’ art pieces. I analyzed the data through a three-layer process using thematic coding analysis, narrative structural and content analysis, visual analysis, and “plugging in with theory” analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). This study engages with lengthy discussion regarding education and reproduction of gender regimes; it explores how oppressive systems transform but remain, particularly in regards to citizenship and formal political education through neoliberal discourses of girl empowerment. It also shows how feminist female high school students communally and creatively respond, theorize, and re-imagine political engagement within these frames, providing insights into what is, and what can be education for democratic citizenship and gender justice. The Feminist students in this study produced themselves as nomadic mestiza bodies engaging with pre-existing political frameworks but at the same time built something more. The students assembled themselves within an antagonistic us/them framework within the Chilean Student Movement, which considers the state and school as adversaries attempting to oppress them. Their high school attempted to reproduce them as feminine, successful, conflict-free neoliberal girls. Regardless, the feminist students displaced both the antagonistic and neoliberal model producing their gender/political subjectivities as nomadic, ever-shifting, vulnerable and strong, and connecting themselves with collective memories and historical narratives. The production of the feminist students’ gender/political subjectivities through “affectivism,” resistance, and political caring rendered the participants as nomadic mestiza bodies, always becoming, collectively connected and empowered by one another to produce political change.

Informed by positionalities theories and narrative inquiry, this dissertation study explored how positionalities of immigrant social studies teachers in New York City influenced their interpretations of citizenship and their instructions of citizenship education. To do so, I used interviews, participants’ photographs and activity-works, and a self-reflexive researcher journal as aspects of my data-generating and data-gathering methods. My interpretations suggested that immigrant teachers experienced subjugation and discrimination as well as a sense of vulnerability due to their lack of legal citizenship, along with their minoritized racial/ethnic/linguistic/religious status in current racist, U.S.-centric, and nationalist regimes. However, instead of being passive recipients of such sociopolitical forces, these teachers took agency and created their own ways to actively influence, change, and subvert their minoritized subject positions through their transnational form of activities and attachment to their home country as well as the affinity, commitments, and sense of belonging they forged in local school communities in the United States. The complicated positionalities of these immigrant teachers further allowed them to imagine and practice multiple and alternative concepts of citizenship education that are more relevant to their students from minoritized backgrounds. By complicating essential, static, and fixed notions of immigrant teachers’ experiences and challenging dominant and normative modes of juridical notions of and national belonging in citizenship discourses through these immigrant teachers’ narrativized experiences, this study offers implications for social studies educators, citizenship scholarship, and teacher education policies and practices.