This dissertation is an investigation into Knowledge Producing Schools (KPS). KPS is a socio-cultural change effort that reforms that traditional structures of schooling and the connections between schools and the communities in which schools are embedded. KPS schools attempts, through New Literacies, to bring out-of-school practices into schools, in an effort to make students' schooling experiences overall and those incorporating technology more relevant. The position of this dissertation supports KPS goals while rejecting the pedagogy of New Literacies. Instead this dissertations builds upon two elements implicit in KPS/New Literacies work, social inquiry and the facilitation of publics. By making these implict KPS elements explicit this dissertation offers a KPS-Dewey hybrid that locates socio-cultral change efforts in public social inquiry contexts that supports and helps create the communal conditions that can facilitates able, active, publics. These able publics work toward community self-management and alternative representation while dealing with daily problems and current matters of concern. Able publics have been a recent concern in the educational literature that calls for the need of educational reform to be resituated as social movements for education equity. / Ph. D.