One of the ideals underpinning public education in the United has been that of educating young people to become engaged democratic citizens. Civics courses have been the main, and sometimes only, sign of public schools attending to their civic mission. An opportunity to offer citizenship education through the experience of democratic governance manifests itself through the implementation of school participatory budgeting. Though promising, the use of school participatory budgeting in the United States is relatively new. The literature is sparse and issues of process design as well as research methodology remain unexplored.

School participatory budgeting has the potential, at least, to offer students an opportunity to experience deliberative democratic decision-making and thus enhance those capabilities critical for effective citizenship. More ambitiously, school participatory budgeting presents an opportunity to delicately and steadily transform school governance to give real decision-making power to students.

The four stand-alone articles that make up this dissertation are four facets of a single case study on the first large-scale instance of school participatory budgeting in the United States. They began with the question: What were the accomplishments and challenges of school participatory budgeting in a large secondary school district in the Southwestern United States in its initial implementation?

This question was interpreted and answered differently in each article. The first article examines aspects of process design and how participatory budgeting might contribute not only to citizenship learning but also the expansion of student voice. The experiences of students, in the second article, and those of teachers and administrators, in the third article, are explored through analysis of interview data. The final article addresses this question by drawing on my own experience of implementing school participatory budgeting using analytic autoethnography. This dissertation presents school participatory budgeting from multiple perspectives and recommends more empirical research on the structure of the process before, during, and after implementation.

This dissertation examines this approach to citizenship learning dynamically by using various methodologies and bringing together the literature on student voice, citizenship learning, participatory budgeting, and curriculum studies in order to enrich the discussions and provide actionable knowledge for advocates and practitioners.

This is a genealogical study of the taken-for-granted ‘free’ or ‘self-governed’ play practice at the free schools. The study places play practice within a historical trajectory. The study compares and analyzes the current (1960s to present) discursive formations of play practice as they emerge in various archival texts such as on free schools, and juvenile delinquency and youth crime, to the discursive formations of the 1890s to 1929s as they emerge in various archival texts such as on physical education, public bath, city problems, playground, outdoor recreation legislation, and recreation areas and juvenile delinquency. The study demonstrates how various “subjugated knowledges” appeared during these time periods around play practice. Foucauldian genealogy is crafted for the study through Foucault’s lectures, interviews, essays, and how other scholars wrote about Foucauldian genealogy and conducted genealogical work themselves. The study is to challenge what it seems to be the grand narrative of this play practice in free schools. Instead of being the form of learning that allows students to seek their truest capacity and interest, learning, and eventually growth and happiness, this practice does so at a great cost, and therefore it is a dangerous practice, opens up various power/knowledge such as play is used as a systematic and accurate technology to shape, mold, and organize the schooled children body, a means to interrupt and intervene with the children growth, as the technology of school hygiene, and as a governing tool to help the state, nation, family, and school, produce ‘good’ citizens, who will not commit to idleness, delinquency, gang-spirit, and similar others.

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.

The present study is a narrative representation of two individuals - one, a prison abolitionist living in the Phoenix area and, the other, myself as a writer and scholar - and their development of, negotiations with, desires for, and problematic performances of critical dispositions within the contemporary social order. In initiating this research, I framed my process as an exploration of the ways in which people who commit themselves to organized counter-hegemonic movements have developed critical dispositions despite their immersion in the normative discourse of American public schools and the relentless public pedagogies of neoliberal subjectivity and psyche. In essence, I wondered how people had gained both the capacity to perceive - however fleetingly - an outside to doxic structuration and, more difficult yet, to sacrifice the psychic comfort these structures promise for the risky work of creating a more just social order. Via psychoanalytic understandings of identity and desire, these stories explore and represent the primordial learning, experiences, and traumas that guided my informants to resist or reject dominant ontological narratives and normative cultural scripts in order to explore and maintain space - albeit exilic - for their own axiological and ethical development and, ultimately, to take up positions of active, educative resistance.