An Ethnographic Depiction of Navigating School Based Partnerships in a Neoliberal Context

• In Event: 15.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: 15.061-11 - Civic and Political Learning in a Politically Polarized Era: Exploring Civically Oriented Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Purpose
The author uses an ethnographic methodology to reflect how a community organization navigates school partnerships. The sociopolitical climate is within a midwestern state that is known as a purple state and a local control state. Given the local control sociopolitical context at the state level, school districts and furthermore schools still operate with a local control lens which lends toward differing experiences from youth who engage in the organization at the high school level. One school partnership is a comprehensive traditional high school and the other is a 6-12 school. One school had a civic course offered and the other school had a youth council model. The organization works primarily with students of color. Both groups of students navigated action civics and engaged in community events with policy makers.

Theoretical Framing

Neoliberalism is a lens that permeates the state and thus is brought into school contexts as well. “The hegemonic disposition of neoliberalism has resulted in an understanding of social justice, which focuses on helping individuals to alleviate their difficulties, rather than actually addressing the structural causes of these difficulties” (Welsh & Parsons, 2006, p. 52). Students are navigating an individualistic narrative within their school climates concerning the ways in which social justice is defined for them rather than by them. In order to disrupt this narrative, the community organization takes a critical race theoretical disposition toward the curriculum, pedagogies, and theory of change. Critical race pedagogy “…offers insights, perspectives, methods, and pedagogies that guide our efforts to identify, analyze, and transform the structural and cultural aspects of education that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom” (Solórzano, Ceja & Yosso, 2001, p. 63). Critical race theory allows for interrogation of neoliberalism as an individualistic and neutral norm that invalidates their schooling and civic experiences.

Methods and Significance

An ethnographic method will be used to better understand the ecology of the organization’s context in navigating school partnerships within an innovation zone and a neoliberal context. In order to better understand the experiences of the school culture and unveil multiple levels of reality, students will be interviewed and artifacts will be used to understand the culture of the community organization, school partners, and the innovation zone. The behaviors and multiple levels of reality will be revealed through a critical lens in that there will be an “orientation toward examining closely subculture resistance and the reflexivity of the author” (Creswell, 2013, p. 236). The researcher will engage in the research as a participant observer in order “to explain behavior from the ‘native’s point of view’” (Creswell, 2013, p. 262). The time in which the researcher and the participants experienced the culture is critical. The participants will have been in the setting for a minimum of one year in order to have the ability and cultural knowledge to reflect on the setting and environment before and after engaging with action civics with the community organization.

Author

• Janiece Zalina Mackey, Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Activism (YAASPA)