We have not had democratic classrooms since the 1960s. Even then they were a rarity, a few teachers working in isolation. There was a great deal of imaginative exploration, which veered off in different directions. There was legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Head Start, Upward Bound, and New Careers. All instigated and encouraged experimentation, yet these never coalesced into a broader, institutional democratic vision for education. Progressive as well as radical educators were interested in access and equity for marginalized populations but did not produce a critical democratic praxis. This dissertation project will specifically document what happens when elementary students have an opportunity to engage with democratic principles through critical understanding of the Bill of Rights. It will demonstrate how a teacher committed to social justice pedagogy interprets the demands of corporate driven reforms to enact rigorously democratic praxis that embraces students from nondominant populations as well as dominant students in the Cultural Linguistics Civics Project. The ultimate goal of the research study is to document students’ knowledge and attitudes about their rights as guaranteed in the United States Constitution.

This dissertation documents an arts-based peace education doctoral study that employed narrative métissage as both a pedagogical and a research tool. The research question asks: Does practicing narrative métissage in an intra-conflict society foster empathy and understanding of self/other? This question is explored with a total of seven Arabic and Kurdish students representing both male and female genders and Muslim and Christian faiths. All the participants were in their second year of study in a two-year English preparatory program at the University of Kurdistan-Hawler, (UKH) in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq. The students wrote autobiographical narratives around the theme of “Boundaries,” then participated in workshop forums sharing and weaving their individual narratives together into a longer text—the métissage—and afterwards performed their métissage. The researcher has also woven her own personal narrative of living, teaching, and carrying out research at UKH in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq into the fabric of the dissertation. The participants’ and the researcher’s experiences and insights are documented through autobiographical and story-telling genres in the data representation. The key contributions of this research are practical, theoretical, and methodological. Practically, this research contributes to peace education initiatives in intractable conflict societies, which is an under- researched and under-reported area within peace education studies. Narrative métissage has obvious application as a peace education initiative and as a curricular vehicle for teaching, discussing, and healing around social justice issues in the classroom, however it has not been explored as such. This research contributes to the dialogue of social justice pedagogy. Theoretically, this research contributes to the area of arts-based learning and the power that writing and sharing autobiographical stories has in awakening to self/other, stimulating collective knowledge construction and empowering individual and collective change. The research employs narrative métissage both as a pedagogical tool and a research tool and by doing so lays new ground in terms of methodology. / Graduate

Hyperpedagogy seeks to actualize social justice pedagogies and poststructuralist theorizing in digitally enhanced and online learning environments. Hyperpedagogy offers ways to incorporate transactional pedagogies into digital curricula so that learners throughout the United States' pluralistic culture can participate in e-learning. Much of the hyperbole promoting e-learning is founded on social-efficiency pedagogies (i.e. preparing tomorrow's workers for the information-based, new global economy) that tend to homogenize culturally pluralistic learners. The premium placed on a strict adherence to rigid learning systems inculcated within standards-based reform movements typically, moreover, discriminate against historically marginalized learners. Hyperpedagogy seeks to elucidate the closeting of privilege in e-learning so that learners of color, female learners, and homosexual learners can be better represented in the literature than is currently practiced. / Ph. D.