Re-imagining School Reform and Movement Making through a Feminist Politic of Resistance and Digital Storytelling

This dissertation grapples with dominant ideas of school reform and socialmovement making. I argue that school reform efforts that remain within thediscursive and institutional domains of schooling often reproduce socialinequities. This qualitative case study focuses on Adelante, a collaborative effortamong researchers, teachers, community leaders, and first generation Latinoparents, who collectively worked to resist deficit discourses, imagine communityand student success, and mobilize community members and district personnel tomake the schools and community more responsive to the needs of the mostdisadvantaged students. This study extends beyond a tracing of modernistconceptualizations of resistance that define social change as occurring throughorganizing oppositional forces against institutional bodies and people in power, toexplore the ways in which Adelante collectively produced a feminist politic ofresistance. This politic rested in the inevitability of failure based on a masculinistdefinition of success and turned toward non-modern knowledges and practices asthe ethos from which to organize. This analytic frame attends to the perceived failures, productive tensions and disquieted affect of the organizations’ history offormation, the process of digital storytelling, the anthology produced, and thequieter movements of social change

Re-imagining School Reform and Movement Making through a Feminist Politic of Resistance and Digital Storytelling

This dissertation grapples with dominant ideas of school reform and socialmovement making. I argue that school reform efforts that remain within thediscursive and institutional domains of schooling often reproduce socialinequities. This qualitative case study focuses on Adelante, a collaborative effortamong researchers, teachers, community leaders, and first generation Latinoparents, who collectively worked to resist deficit discourses, imagine communityand student success, and mobilize community members and district personnel tomake the schools and community more responsive to the needs of the mostdisadvantaged students. This study extends beyond a tracing of modernistconceptualizations of resistance that define social change as occurring throughorganizing oppositional forces against institutional bodies and people in power, toexplore the ways in which Adelante collectively produced a feminist politic ofresistance. This politic rested in the inevitability of failure based on a masculinistdefinition of success and turned toward non-modern knowledges and practices asthe ethos from which to organize. This analytic frame attends to the perceived failures, productive tensions and disquieted affect of the organizations’ history offormation, the process of digital storytelling, the anthology produced, and thequieter movements of social change

Achieving Program Goals? An Evaluation of Two Decades of the Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture (AEH) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been teaching people organic and ecological horticulture for 43 years. This paper examines the extent to which the program has met the goals of growing farmers and gardeners, and contributing to change in the food system. It also explores specific programmatic ways the AEH contributed to these outcomes. We surveyed program alumni from 1989 through 2008. Findings suggest that the program has successfully met its goals. According to alumni suggestions, the primary way the program contributed to these outcomes was by developing apprentice knowledge and skills through hands-on activities. In addition, other educational components, not always explicitly addressed in similar programs, were also key. We use different learning theories to help understand the AEH’s success and make recommendations for similar programs

Beyond Inclusion: Cultivating a Critical Sense of Belonging through Community-Engaged Research

A broad body of literature outlines the interventions to support underrepresented and minoritized students’ inclusion and sense of belonging into university contexts. In this paper, we explore how two first-generation students of color articulate a critical sense of belonging through their reflections as student researchers in the Apprenticeship in Community-Engaged Research or (H)ACER program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). (H)ACER integrates community engagement, ethnographic sensibilities, critical race and decolonial theory, as well as women of color feminisms into a curriculum designed to train critical scholar-researchers. Through themes of feeling isolated on campus and returning ‘home’ in the garden, building comfort with academic theory, and navigating insider/outsider identities in campus/community contexts, we trace how the students developed an awareness of their positionality and made sense of their experiences of ‘belonging’, both within the campus and community contexts. Their narratives spark our deeper exploration into how critical approaches to community-engaged research may offer a pedagogy for supporting student sense of belonging that extends beyond inclusion, a promising vein of further research