Writing Collectivities: Remixing the Ideal Student Construct

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding and Contesting Neoliberalism

Abstract

"Writing Collectivities: Remixing the Ideal Student Construct" is an ethnographic study exploring the collective experiences of students attending a continuation high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. The study engages with creative and autobiographical writing as a heuristic and involved leading students through a critical creative-writing curriculum reflecting on their experiences in the education system. In this study, I am interested in how students challenge, acknowledge and/or reify dominant damage and deficit-based discourses about urban youth of color within the education system. I am further interested in how constructs of “ideal students” reflect colonial and neoliberal logics of schooling and how the students move towards a lens of resistance and nuance, “playfulness” (Lugones, 2003) and “desire” (Tuck, 2009).

Author

• Chrissy Anderson-Zavala, University of California - Santa Cruz