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In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic mandated closures of thousands of schools across the United States. Students dependent upon the support, guidance, and community of their schools became disconnected from these resources while encountering the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study represents a time capsule of the school community of one Los Angeles County public middle school from March 16 to May 28, 2020. Semi-structured interviews of school staff and parents grounded the study’s analysis. Public documents and participant researcher protocol responses collaborated the participants’ narratives. Results provide a snapshot of the school community before emergency mandated COVID-19 closure, participants’ recollections of the school community during the closure, and their reflections and reactions to the closures. Data analysis utilized a conceptual framework developed to capture e-school community access and engagement. Outcomes from this study illustrate the need for additional supports for student mental health, investment in universal access to reliable internet service, and the importance of physical school outreach during times of crisis.

In recent decades, there has been a considerable expansion of citizen participation in protests and voluntary advocacy groups. To analyze this development, the social movement literature and the interest group literature have emerged. Yet these two bodies of literature have not communicated with each other and have rarely incorporated knowledge from other fields in political science. As a result, critical questions remain unanswered regarding the political influence of advocacy groups. How do they affect politicians? To what degree do informal groups use lobbying tactics? Are socioeconomically advantaged groups more influential? This thesis endeavors to address the above shortcomings by bridging the literature on social movements, interest groups and political parties. The purpose of the thesis is to explain if and how advocacy groups affect public policy and to analyze which resources that are required to influence political decisions. The focus is on informal and loosely organized social movement organizations (informal SMOs): parental networks, staff networks, and village networks. To test my arguments, I use a unique database on protests and lobbying against school closures in Sweden. Closures of public schools have been one of the most important drivers of political activism in Sweden. The results are presented in three essays. Essay I tests new electoral mechanisms that could condition the political influence of advocacy groups. The results suggest that the political influence of informal SMOs on school closure decisions varies according to the type of voter they mobilize: swing voters or core voters. Essay II demonstrates how informal SMOs use lobbying tactics, such as presenting policy-relevant information, to influence politicians. Social movement scholars often focus on protests and ignore lobbying tactics. However, the results show that SMOs that present policy-relevant information are more likely to stop school closures than SMOs that mobilize large protests. Essay III analyzes which informal SMOs exchange policy-relevant information with politicians. Previous studies on the use of lobbying tactics have ignored activist resources. My results suggest that SMOs mobilizing high-income activists and activists with analytical and civic skills are more likely to present policy-relevant information. This is problematic given normative ideals of equal access to decision-making by all members of society.

abstract: This study enters on the heels of a trend of public school closures across the United States. Using qualitative methods, the study concerns the curriculum experiences of six African American students attending a majority-white high school in a white, middle-class community in the Midwest, one year after the closure of their predominantly Black high school in their hometown. The study draws from Michel Foucault’s philosophy on care of the self as an analytical tool to look at students’ care of the ‘racialized’ self, or more specifically, how African American students are forming a ‘self’ in a majority-white school in relation to the ways they are being racialized. Background of the schools and a description of the conditions under which the school change occurred are provided for context. Data collection involved conducting life history interviews with students, observing students in their classes, and shadowing students throughout their school day. Findings show that African American student-participants are contending with what they describe as a “them”/“us” racial, cultural, and class divide that is operationalized through the curriculum. Students are in a struggle to negotiate how they are perceived and categorized as ‘racialized’ bodies through the curriculum, and, their own perceptions of these racializations. In this struggle, students enact self-practices to make maneuvers within curriculum spaces. A student can accept how the curriculum attempts to constitute her/him as a subject, resist this subjectification, or perform any combination of both accepting and resisting. In this way, a curriculum, with its distinctive and potentially polarizing boundaries, becomes a negotiated and contested space. And, because this curricular space is internally contradictory, a student, in relation to it, may practice versions of a ‘self’ (multiple ‘selves’) that are contradictory. Findings illuminate that in this complex process of self-making, African American students are producing a curriculum of self-formation that teaches others how they want to be perceived. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2016

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T16:28:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Micheli Schimitz.pdf: 7235795 bytes, checksum: ba1de92e1c6c6731401564e77db16fd9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-16 / Fundação Araucária / This study investigated the process of closing schools located in rural areas of the municipalities that make up the Regional Center of Education of DoisVizinhos in the Southwest region of Paraná. From the data presented in the opinion 1011/10, DUDE / SEED / PR, which indicated that between the years 1990-1999 there was the closure of 3,948 schools in the field in Parana, the need for an investigation felt to understand the factors who contributed in reaching that amount. To this end it was held data collection by the Regional Center of Dois Vizinhos Education, Education Departments of Municipalities and Schools, about the number of schools and students, differentiating them from urban and rural, starting from the year 1980 until 2014. It was taken as a case study the closure of schools in Canoas community in the city of Cruzeiro do Iguaçu, the State School Field Canoas - Elementary School and the Municipal Rural School Santa Terezinha - Kindergarten and Elementary School. To understand the closure of these schools held interviews with members of Canoas community, staff, students and officials who held public office in the school closure period, it sought to documents, protocols and photos that could illustrate the historical construction and the process closings of these schools. The historic building naturalized the idea of the countryside as a delay of place where not made / make school education is required. The laws legitimized a dual education, where the children of the elite have comprehensive training and the children of the working class were formed to work. The modernization of agriculture allied with agribusiness has meant that small producers were expropriated the match, and their land stay with great owners. Thus it happened the emptying of the countryside and consequently the schools it decreased the number of students and have been and are being closed, without taking into account the socio-cultural context that these schools represent the impacts on communities and families. There are currently laws that ensure that schools be closed only after consultation with the community, or that schools be organized in alternative ways that meet students with quality, but these laws are not always implemented and many schools located in field find themselves threatened with fear of closing, or end up being closed. / O presente estudo investigou o processo de fechamento de escolas localizadas na zona rural dos municípios que compõem o Núcleo Regional de Educação de Dois Vizinhos, na região Sudoeste do Paraná. A partir dos dados apresentados no parecer 1011/10, DUDE/SEED/PR, que indicou que entre os anos de 1990 a 1999 houve o fechamento de 3.948 escolas do campo no Paraná, sentiu-se a necessidade de uma investigação para compreender os fatores que contribuíram para que se chegasse a esse montante. Para tanto, foi realizado levantamento de dados junto ao Núcleo Regional de Educação de Dois Vizinhos, Secretarias de Educação dos Municípios e Escolas, sobre quantidade de escolas e alunos, diferenciando-os de urbanos e rurais, partindo do ano de 1980 até 2014. Foi tomado como estudo de caso o fechamento das escolas da comunidade Canoas, no município de Cruzeiro do Iguaçu: a Escola Estadual do Campo Canoas Ensino Fundamental e a Escola Rural Municipal Santa Terezinha Educação Infantil e Ensino Fundamental. Para compreender o fechamento dessas escolas realizou-se entrevistas com membros da comunidade Canoas, funcionários, alunos e autoridades que ocupavam cargos públicos no período do fechamento da escola, buscou-se documentos, atas e fotos, que pudessem ilustrar a construção histórica e o processo de fechamentos dessas escolas. A construção histórica naturalizou a ideia de zona rural como um local de atraso, onde não se fazia/faz necessária a instrução escolar. As legislações legitimaram um ensino dual, onde os filhos da elite teriam formação integral e os filhos da classe trabalhadora eram formados para o trabalho. A modernização da agricultura, aliada ao agronegócio, fez com que os pequenos produtores fossem expropriados do campo e suas terras ficassem com grandes proprietários. Desse modo aconteceu o esvaziamento do campo e, em consequência a isso, escolas diminuíram a quantidade de alunos e foram e estão sendo fechadas, sem se levar em conta o contexto sociocultural que estas escolas representam, os impactos nas comunidades e nas famílias. Atualmente há leis que garantem que escolas só sejam fechadas mediante consulta à comunidade, ou que as escolas sejam organizadas de modos alternativos, que atendam aos alunos com qualidade, porém essas leis nem sempre são implementadas e muitas escolas localizadas no campo se veem ameaçadas, com medo do fechamento, ou acabam sendo fechadas.

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