This study examines the multiple and complicated ways that Native American students engage, accept, and/or reject the teachings of a Native American literature course, as they navigate complex cultural landscapes in a state that has banned the teaching of ethnic studies. This is the only classroom of its kind in this major metropolitan area, despite a large Native American population. Like many other marginalized youth, these students move through "borderlands" on a daily basis from reservation to city and back again; from classrooms that validate their knowledges to those that deny, invalidate and silence their knowledges, histories and identities. I am examining how their knowledges are shared or denied in these spaces. Using ethnographic, participatory action and grounded research methods, and drawing from Safety Zone Theory (Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006) and Bakhtin's (1981) dialogism, I focus on students' counter-storytelling to discover how they are generating meanings from a curriculum that focuses on the comprehension of their complicated and often times contradicting realities. This study discusses the need for schools to draw upon students' cultural knowledges and offers implications for developing and implementing a socio-culturally sustaining curriculum.

This project draws on sociocognitive rhetoric to ask, How, in complex situations not of our making, do we determine what needs to be done and how to leverage available means for the health of our communities and institutions? The project pulls together rhetorical concepts of the stochastic arts (those that demand the most precise, careful planning in the least predictable places) and techne (problem-solving tools that transform limits and barriers into possibilities) to forward a stochastic techne that grounds contemplative social action at the intersection of invention and intervention and mastery and failure in real time, under constraints we can't control and outcomes we can't predict. Based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Sudanese refugee diaspora in Phoenix, I offer a method for engaging in postmodern phronesis with community partners in four ways: 1) Explanations and examples of public listening and situational mapping 2) Narratives that elucidate the stochastic techne, a heuristic for determining and testing wise rhetorical action 3) Principles for constructing mutually collaborative, mutually beneficial community-university/ community-school partnerships for jointly addressing real-world issues that matter in the places where we live 4) Descriptions and explanations that ground the hard rhetorical work of inventing new paths and destinations as some of the Sudanese women construct hybridized identities and models of social entrepreneurship that resist aid-to-Africa discourse based on American paternalism and humanitarianism and re-cast themselves as micro-financers of innovative work here and in Southern Sudan. Finally, the project pulls back from the Sudanese to consider implications for re-figuring secondary English education around phronesis. Here, I offer a framework for teachers to engage in the real work of problem-posing that aims - as Django Paris calls us - to get something done by confronting the issues that confront our communities. Grounded in classroom instruction, the chapter provides tools for scaffolding public listening, multi-voiced inquiries, and phronesis with and for local publics. I conclude by calling for English education to abandon all pretense of being a predictive science and to instead embrace productive knowledge-making and the rhetorical work of phronesis as the heart of secondary English studies.

ABSTRACT Controversies surrounding multilingual language programs, disparities on educational achievement measures, and tracking represent some of the conflicts concerning race that continue to take place in school districts around the country. These debates are especially significant today as schools experience shifts in demographics. Racial and ethnic minorities now account for at least one-third of the nation's population (United States Census Bureau, 2010), and schools are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). The continued importance of race in education serves as the impetus behind this dissertation's inquiries into race and language in the high school English classroom. This study explores how one group of students, attending a predominately White high school with growing racial and ethnic diversity, write and talk about race in the English classroom. I examine how explicitly or implicitly students engaged in everyday language, school talk, and school writing about racial and ethnic identity, as well as how students responded to an English language arts curriculum devoted to issues of race and equity. On a broader scale, this study seeks to understand the school, community, and larger social context of racial and ethnic division and unity, particularly the role language and literacy pedagogies can play in addressing these issues. Blending two qualitative methodologies, including ethnography and the design and implementation of a race-conscious English curriculum, I spent eight months in one high school classroom, resulting in an analysis of a series of field notes, student writing, and in-depth participant interview transcripts. Findings from this study may help complicate researchers' and teachers' notions of how racial and ethnic identity operates in classrooms with shifting demographics. This study also highlights the importance of bringing race-conscious literacy activities to the forefront of English classrooms where structured discussions and carefully crafted writing prompts can facilitate discourse on race that might otherwise be muted in the context of traditional English language arts curriculum. Finally, this dissertation calls for a greater focus on collaborative research and teaching teams comprised of classroom teachers and university researchers.

In this study, I examined how African American students in a church youth group constructed ethnic and spiritual identities as they engaged with community literacy practices. Arizona's small, scattered population of African Americans is reflected within participants' multi-ethnic schools where they describe feelings of being almost invisible to school agents and peers. Listening to students, I came to deeply understand how they struggled with cultural isolation and racial discrimination. The growing tensions with state immigration reform only magnified those feelings as participants perceived the ban on ethnic studies to be another attempt to exclude them from school curriculums. By using utilizing four identity types, I gained greater insights into participants' negotiation of ethnicity and spirituality. Drawing from critical race theory, I utilized counter-storytelling to not only recapture participants' experiences with social injustice, but also to illustrate how the youth group empowers the students to become activists. Resisting the paralyzing effects of racial stereotypes, participants emerged as essayists, artists, orators, and spoken word poets.