The Policy Maker in Me: Civic Identity and Bottom-Up Policy Making as a Practice of Power

• In Event: 77.022 - Bottom-Up Policy Making in an Age of Misinformation: Critical Youth Participation as a Practice of Power

Abstract

Bottom-up policy making as an exercise of power may sound like a foreign concept in relationship with our daily work in and around schools. Often, policy is hidden behind a veil of legitimacy and in-accessibility that lies far away from the identities and perceived scope of agency of students, families, and teachers. Schools themselves, as “taken-for-granted” institutions of the modern world have the possibility to become both “normalizing agencies that bring legitimacy to existing social relations and practices, rendering them normal and natural” (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008, p.23) and/or sites of possibility to interrupt the reproduction of the dominant culture and ideologies (Giroux, 1995). Simultaneously, schools exist and operate as sites for broader processes of policy making, contestation, appropriation, and resistance. According frameworks that distribute symbolic power (Hall, 1988), schools often leave those most impacted by policy out of the conversation. Enacting policy built upon assumptions of how others will operate and further disenfranchising those who should be at the center of policy and leading to “solutions” that often exacerbate the problems (Noguera, 2003). This paper, through the analysis of two different projects in California, examines the potential and lessons of two different projects in transforming the civic identities of students and enabling authentic, empowering avenues for bottom-up policy formation.

Re-conceptualizing policy as a complex social practice and ongoing sociocultural process, a practice of power (Levinson and Sutton, 2001), and moving towards an examination of policy as “productive, performative, and continually contested” (Shore & Wright, 2011, p.1). This study will draw upon critical theory to bring a theoretical and empirical lens to frame and interpret the structural and historic roots of inequities, and sociocultural theory to ground the situated and contextualized nature of identity. Additionally, it draws on the concept of “critical bifocality” (Fine, 2016) to examine how expanding notions of policy, participating in critical forms of inquiry and policy formation, and shifting civic identities, enable young people to; interrogate structures of oppression and the ways these structures are embodied and resisted in the daily work of schools, and document landscapes of counter narratives and possibilities.

Analyzing the experiences of young people in both; a critical community of inquiry of pushed-out and marginalized students in Los Angeles, and a youth organization engaged in policy formation through the Local Control Funding Formula in California, this qualitative study explores how engagement with policy shapes civic identities, notions of “who gets to construct policy”, and youth’s individual and collective sensemaking of policy. Qualitative analysis of interviews, observations, focus groups, along with the previous findings of both studies focuses on possibilities, challenges, and emerging tensions at the intersection of civic identities, activism, policy formation, and education.

This study, centering the findings on the voices of those impacted by educational policy, interrogates potentially oppressive assumptions of educational policy and shows how claiming power through different forms of bottom-up policy formation can reshape notions of civic identity and contribute to more socially just and critical ways of knowing, learning, researching, and constructing policy.

Authors

• Miguel Casar, University of California - Los Angeles

• Joseph Peter Bishop, University of California - Los Angeles