The purpose of this study is to understand why some children of teachers, who, having been brought up in an environment where education is highly valued, nevertheless, choose not to pursue a college education right out of high school. The study focuses on young adults who have at least one parent who is a teacher and who, when they graduated from high school, either chose not to attend college right away or enrolled in college then left within the first few semesters. Through open-ended interview questions, constant comparative qualitative analysis, and narrative analysis, the study examines what impact having a teacher as a parent has had on young adults’ construction of formal education and their decision to forego higher education immediately after high school. The interviewer also asks the teacher-parents what response they had to that decision. The research questions of this study are as follows: (1) What experiences of education do these young adults, who are teachers’ kids, have? (2) How has their family shaped their understanding of education and their attitudes toward it? (3) How did they choose not to pursue a college degree right out of high school and what meaning do they give to this decision? and (4) What is/was the teacher-parent’s response to this decision? This study illuminates the college decision-making process that young adults go through when they are in an environment in which education is a prominent feature. Two major findings emerge. For the young adults, all valued education but they had no sense of urgency about pursuing formal education immediately. Their decisions were shaped by particular life circumstances and, for many, a belief that a college education was irrelevant at that point in their lives. The second finding concerns the teacher-parents. These educators assumed that their children would go on to college, but they did not pressure them to do so; their primary concern was that their children be happy.

The purpose of this study is to understand why some children of teachers, who, having been brought up in an environment where education is highly valued, nevertheless, choose not to pursue a college education right out of high school. The study focuses on young adults who have at least one parent who is a teacher and who, when they graduated from high school, either chose not to attend college right away or enrolled in college then left within the first few semesters. Through open-ended interview questions, constant comparative qualitative analysis, and narrative analysis, the study examines what impact having a teacher as a parent has had on young adults’ construction of formal education and their decision to forego higher education immediately after high school. The interviewer also asks the teacher-parents what response they had to that decision. The research questions of this study are as follows: (1) What experiences of education do these young adults, who are teachers’ kids, have? (2) How has their family shaped their understanding of education and their attitudes toward it? (3) How did they choose not to pursue a college degree right out of high school and what meaning do they give to this decision? and (4) What is/was the teacher-parent’s response to this decision? This study illuminates the college decision-making process that young adults go through when they are in an environment in which education is a prominent feature. Two major findings emerge. For the young adults, all valued education but they had no sense of urgency about pursuing formal education immediately. Their decisions were shaped by particular life circumstances and, for many, a belief that a college education was irrelevant at that point in their lives. The second finding concerns the teacher-parents. These educators assumed that their children would go on to college, but they did not pressure them to do so; their primary concern was that their children be happy.

This dissertation offers a unique examination of new cultures and forms of social movement organizing that include horizontal networking, non-hierarchical decision-making and governance combined with the importance of public visual art. Based on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how processes of neoliberalism and globalization have influenced youth organizing and shaped experiences of historical marginalization. What makes youth activism in Southern Mexico unique from that occurring elsewhere (i.e. Occupy Movements in U.S. and Europe) is the incorporation of indigenous organizing practices and identities with urban subcultures. At the same time, the movements I study share important characteristics with other social movements, including their reliance on direct-action tactics such as occupations of public space and sit-ins, as well as their creative use of digital media technologies (i.e. Arab Spring). This research contributes to the study of social movements and popular politics, globalization, culture and resistance, and the politics of space by examining how youth activists combine everyday practices and traditional social movement actions to sustain autonomous political projects that subvert institutional and spatial hierarchies. They do so through decentralized activist networks that resist cooptation by the state and traditional opposition parties, while at the same time contesting the spatial exclusion of marginalized communities from the city center. This research contributes a critical analysis of the limits of traditional models of social change through electoral politics and traditional opposition groups, such as labor unions, by challenging us to take seriously the innovative models of politics, culture and governance that Mexican youth are offering us. At a larger level, my work suggests the importance of genuinely engaging with alternative epistemologies that come from places we may not expect- in this case urban, indigenous, and marginalized youth. / 2015-10-03

My dissertation, “‘It’s like I can be myself here’: Adolescent identity and agency in an arts-based out-of-school program” is a three-year post-critical ethnographic study (Noblit, Flores, and Murillo, 2004) of YouthArts, a free, out-of-school arts program for adolescents who self-identify as having a low socio-economic status. YouthArts, under the auspices of a non-profit art space, offers participants both a range of activities, such as field trips, artist-led workshops, and critique sessions, and materials, such as supplies and an electronic portfolio, to help foster artistic identity development. The program design demonstrates the complexity of artistic endeavors beyond technical prowess and highlights the role of collaboration, communication, inquiry, and curiosity in the process of art creation and consideration. I employ participant-observation methods, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection, as well as narrative analysis and content analysis, to create a dynamic representation of how adolescents engage in this program. My theoretical approach to this project brings together social production theories, such as figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998), social and cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006), situated learning (Lave, 1990; Lave and Wenger, 1991) and the field of youth studies (James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998; Best, 2007) to explore learning, identity, and agency. I provide a thick description of the program’s professionalizing activities and offer detailed case studies of four focal participants in order to demonstrate the ways that the program helps participants transition from high school to post-secondary paths and from being students in high-school art classes to becoming practicing artists. I privilege youth voices to highlight the ways they see their identities as being informed by multiple communities, including their out-of-school activities, their schools, their families, and their friends and through intersecting classed, raced, gendered, and sexualized discourses, as well as to consider the ways that they enact agency in these multiple contexts. I highlight the need for more studies that research out-of-school learning from a place of positive youth development and explore the role of relationship building in learning environments. / text

Discourses of adolescence/ts that reduce teenagers to impulsive, hormonal, incomplete adults are pervasive, and affect the way that adolescence/ts is regarded in institutional spaces like schools. However, scholars in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) reject these determinations in favor of a vision of adolescence as a social construct; a construct that has changed throughout time and does not accurately reflect the lived experiences of diverse youth. This study considers the way in which these discourses are mobilized and circulating in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and, specifically, through the study of literature. Grounded in empirical scholarship that approaches classroom literature pedagogy and response through a sociocultural lens, and in theoretical scholarship in Critical Youth Studies (CYS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the purpose of this qualitative inquiry is to observe student response to young adult literature (YAL) in one ELA classroom in order to locate discourses of adolescence that are mobilized and circulating as students comprehend, analyze and interpret texts.

The objective of the following essay is to investigate in what way trans- and nonbinary people are portrayed in children’s literature. It aims to answer questions such as in what way the trans characters in the books examined are portrayed, and which stories and narratives are being told and reproduced, as well as which stories are missing or get neglected. The method used here is content analysis, in which twelve books make out the material for analysis. Out of these twelve, four books are analysed further and are presented in a more detailed manner. The content analysis is carried out by examining the literature based on how the stories are affected by their trans characters and how, if at all, the word trans is used by the author. In the result, the literature is categorized depending on where the focus of the story lies – and how the story is connected to the trans character in question. We learn that most of the books at hand can be classified as books without a focus on trans themes, and the remaining books either have a symbolic focus on trans themes, or a story mainly focused on a character being trans. This essay then discusses if literature with less outspoken trans themes are more attractive to conservative publishers, and why some of the literature with more uncommon themes are, as such, uncommon. The discussion also shines a light on the portrayal of nonbinary people, and raises questions regarding how we view gender based on looks and stereotypically gendered items. In conclusion, the essay finds that the books analysed here fails to show the diversity found in the trans community and in the way trans- and nonbinary people exist.

This qualitative multiple case study explores the intersection of young adult literature and adolescent memory narratives in an undergraduate course entitled Learning about Adolescence through Literature within an action research framework. This dissertation is motivated by two research questions: (1) What influence might young adult literature and memory narratives of adolescence have on undergraduate students' understandings of the cultural construction of adolescence? (2) How does the text we read affect how we perceive our lived experiences, and, in turn, how does this interchange of story affect the way in which we perceive adolescence in general? Building upon reader response theories and critical narrative pedagogy, findings indicate that YA literature and lifestory narratives can facilitate reconceptualizing previously held notions of adolescence, replacing pejorative and generalized assumptions regarding adolescence with an openness and acknowledgement of diversity. Implications for teachers and other youth workers are discussed, as well as implications for adolescents.

Dissertation zum Thema "Alltagswelten der Jugendlichen" Verlagsausgabe: Campus-Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1986

abstract: At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large. In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication Studies 2018

Dissertation zum Thema "Alltagswelten der Jugendlichen" Verlagsausgabe: Campus-Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1986