“AM I NORTH AMERICAN OR SOUTH AMERICAN?” THEORIZING AND STUDYING LIVING CURRICULA OF THE GLOBAL

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“AM I NORTH AMERICAN OR SOUTH AMERICAN?” THEORIZING AND STUDYING LIVING CURRICULA OF THE GLOBAL

ABSTRACT

Education about the world in K-12 schools frequently emphasizes the interconnectedness of nation-states. The curricular aim is often to prepare citizens for a world community with shared values, ethics and goals in order to maintain world peace. However, this notion of global education exists almost entirely outside the lived experiences of teachers and students; the notion lacks consideration of the specificity of people’s relations to world systems of power and to the historicities of the place(s) they inhabit. Moreover, questions about community and belonging are often prioritized solely in relation to the nation-state, eliding alternative forms of identification and citizenship that are articulated via other associations of political belonging and systems of power. Thus, definitions of citizenship in global and international education lack a framework of power that engages with how the everyday lives of citizens in different places and communities are related to global systems of power.

This dissertation is a curricular study of global citizenship education that is attuned to those missing lived experiences. The study is based on narratives of citizenship and belonging in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Specifically, it maps an inquiry into the lived experiences of citizenship for transnational immigrant Latina/o youth in Hazleton, and also incorporates my own experiences. I story personal narratives by implementing a narrative research approach: I interweave collective history, theory, vignettes and drawings to offer a form of curriculum for global education that is situated in lived experiences and that questions predominant assumptions of citizenship framed by the nation-state.

Ultimately, I theorize and argue for a living curriculum of the global: a course of learning that attends closely to the lived experiences of students and teachers in the specificity of their place(s) and historicities. In doing this work, I aim to respond to oversimplified and restrictive forms of identity sanctioned by a Euro and US-centric curricula of the global. Such curricula of the global is better defined as a curriculum of dislocation because it assimilates “others” into systems of power that seclude citizens from the place(s) and historicities that configure their lives. A living curriculum of the global is an important antidote to this curriculum of dislocation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………………………. vii

LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………………………. viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………….. ix

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. x

 

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………….   School-In-A Box ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

Chapter 1  The Problems of an Abstract Curriculum of the Global …………………………………. 6

In A World In Motion, Where …………………………………………………………………………….. 7

Do You Belong? ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7

Complicating “the Global” as One Place of Sameness……………………………………………. 9

Complicating Essentialist Narratives of Culture ……………………………………………………. 14

A Curriculum of the Global Outside the Lives of Students and Teachers………………….. 16

Key Concepts ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 19

Layout of the Dissertation…………………………………………………………………………………… 21

Chapter 2  Theorizing Living Curriculum of the Global ………………………………………………… 24

Curriculum and Lived Experience ……………………………………………………………………….. 24

Curriculum as Living Experience …………………………………………………………………. 24

Currere: Curriculum as Autobiographical Study ……………………………………………. 28

A Living Curriculum From the Borderlands ………………………………………………….. 29

Curriculum and Difference …………………………………………………………………………………. 31

Decolonizing a Eurocentric & US-Centric Curriculum of the Global……………………….. 32

A Living Curriculum of the Global ……………………………………………………………………… 36

Chapter 3  A Methodology for a Lived Curriculum of the Global …………………………………… 37

The Role of Stories ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 37

Stories as Sites of Transformation ……………………………………………………………………….. 39

Narratives of Erasure: Replacement Narratives ……………………………………………… 41

Healing Narratives: Curandera History…………………………………………………………. 42

Stories and the Study of Curriculum…………………………………………………………………….. 46

Currere as Method ……………………………………………………………………………………… 47

Autoethnography………………………………………………………………………………………… 50

Autohistoria and Autohistoria-Teoría ……………………………………………………………. 56

My Living Curriculum of the Global ……………………………………………………………………. 58

The Study …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 64

Site Selection …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 64

Research Questions …………………………………………………………………………………….. 70 Participants ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 71

Modes of Inquiry………………………………………………………………………………………… 73

Interpretive Method: Storying………………………………………………………………………. 75

Limitations of the Study………………………………………………………………………………. 81

Chapter 4  Narratives About Citizenship and Belonging in Hazleton ………………………………. 82

A “Multicultural Future” in Hazleton …………………………………………………………………… 82

Hazleton: An “All-American Small-town” With “Legal, Hardworking Citizens”………. 87

Belonging in K-12 Settings…………………………………………………………………………………. 89

“A Small School With Small School Planning,” ……………………………………………………. 90

“Non-Speakers” ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 94

Expectations for Latina/o Youth and Their Families………………………………………………. 97

Discussion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 100

Chapter 5  Experiences of Citizenship of Latina/o Youth in Hazleton …………………………….. 104

Flags ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 105

La Vega ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 109

“So, I Am—” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 112 President’s Day …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 118

Discussion ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 121

Chapter 6  Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 123

Dissertation Summary………………………………………………………………………………………… 123

Narratives of Citizenship and Belonging in Hazleton …………………………………………….. 126

Transnational Latina/o Immigrant Youth’s Experiences of Citizenship ……………………. 130

Significance of the Study and Contributions to the Field of Curriculum Theory………… 134

Limitations of the Study …………………………………………………………………………………….. 136

Teaching and Curricular Implications ………………………………………………………………….. 137

Appendix A  Methods and Texts Generated…………………………………………………………………. 139

Appendix B  Afterschool Club Session Programing ……………………………………………………… 140

References……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 141

Introduction

 

School-In-A-Box

In 2016, the African country of Liberia outsourced its pre-primary and primary public education system to a private, for-profit American firm called Bridge International

Academies, popularly known as “Bridge.” Created in 2008 by American anthropologist Shannon May and engineer Jay Kimmelman, Bridge used the model of “school-in-abox,” or a highly standardized model of education, to offer low-cost schools in the socalled developing world. This for-profit company has built more than 500 private schools in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Liberia, and India. According to May and Kimmelman, standardization has taken an important role in expanding rapidly in different countries, in maintaining low costs, and upholding “a minimum level of quality” in each school. Bridge cuts costs through four primary ways: having large numbers of paying consumers; hiring teachers who do not have college degrees but can read scripted lessons; having large classes that average in between 40 to 70 students; and by using tablets as electronic supervisors. Students’ success is measured according to their performance in national standardized tests (Kwauk & Robinson, 2016). The company has been financially supported by agencies, such as the United Kingdom Department for International

Development and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and by individuals including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (Buchanan, 2015; Kristof, 2017; Kwauk & Robinson, 2016). Bridge has received a number of awards, as well as the attention of research institutions and the press (e.g. The New York Times, CNBC, and

Brookings Institute’s Center for Universal Education, among others).

Bridge’s “academy in a box,” or “school-in-a-box,” “reengineered the entire lifecycle of education delivery (..) it controls the entire supply chain from school construction to curriculum design to teacher training to lesson delivery” (Kwauk &

Robinson, 2016). May affirms that in the “school-in-a-box,” the role of the teacher is not to produce knowledge but to deliver it (May in Beaubien, 2013). Every aspect of the process is mediated by technology to reinforce a highly standardized practice; this includes following up on procedures, tracking students and teachers’ attendance and

lesson content, as well as general data collection.

One illustration of this mediated process is how Bridge teachers are trained to read from a wirelessly-connected tablet the scripted lessons written in the US to students in countries in the so-called “developing world”:

By centrally developing all the teaching and learning materials, this model provides new teachers with step-by-step instructions for teaching content that they themselves may not be experts in, and enables teachers to focus more time on their students’ progress rather than on creating content and lesson plans themselves. (Kwauk & Robinson, 2016, p. 6)

The underlying idea of the scripted curriculum and instruction is to reduce “variation in quality by providing ‘scaffolding’ for weaker teachers” (Kwauk & Robinson, 2016) in contexts with low numbers of teachers. Every Bridge 3rd grade classroom in the same country is learning the same lesson, at the same time. The same tablet used to read the lesson is used to gather the data of every interaction, process, or exchange made between administrators, parents, teachers, and students. These “wireless teacher guides” are also used to keep data related to student’s scores, lesson pacing, measures of student comprehension. All of this functionality is thought to free up the teacher’s time that would otherwise be consumed by lesson planning and other “administrative tasks” (Bridge International Academy, 2018). Despite this standardization, Bridge does adapt their “school-in-a-box” according to the context and national curriculum of the country where the school is built in order to help students “understand the language, problem types, and test taking strategies needed to pass important national exams” (Bridge International Academies, 2013).

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) Paulo Freire explained the differences between what he called a banking education model and education as practice of freedom. The first model functions like a bank account: The role of students is no other than to receive the contents, which they are to memorize and repeat; the role of the teacher is to deposit content into students’ brains. Due to this relationship, students are assumed to be ignorant and the teacher is assumed to have all knowledge. There is no communication or dialogue between student and teacher. The purpose of this kind of education is not to change the mentality of students or transform the structures that oppress them; rather, the purpose of this education is to assimilate marginalized students into a system that codes them as marginal in the first place. In other words, a “banking education” reproduces its own marginalizing structures.

The “School-in-a-box” curriculum illustrates the banking education model where knowledge is deposited regardless of students’ and teachers’ experiences within oppressive structures created through global, historical, and colonial relations. It is a curriculum that does not take place into consideration: place as the locus of enunciation of the contents, language, and representations that are embedded in the curriculum; place as the historical roots and relations of power embedded in the epistemologies that produce the curriculum plan; place as the specificity of a historical time and cultural locale (Pinar, 2004); place as the bodies of students, teachers, families, administrators, curriculum planners, and the lived experiences they embody. The “school-in-a-box” curriculum appears to be a “placeless” curriculum plan. However, if we pay attention to the multiple transactions produced by the movement of materials, technology, data, teachers, symbolic and financial capital, and the way the curriculum impacts people’s everyday lives in different places, “school-in-a-box” is not placeless. The curriculum planners from the US have preconceptions, biases, interests, and worldviews that frame that now-displaced curriculum. The lived experiences of teachers and students are not valued or made sense of. The classroom becomes a space that distances from freedom when its dynamic is generated by a teacher that reads from a tablet without thinking, “just delivering” (May in Beaubien, 2013) as May says, with a group of students that simply repeat content from the board as a means of learning to pass a national standardized-test.

These “school-in-a-box” transactions actualize historic and global relations of power in creating private, for-profit schools in “developing countries” with pre-packaged knowledge produced by “developed countries.”

The “school-in-a-box” model of curriculum stages the failure of global curricula to engage in a practice of freedom by attending to lived experience. There is nothing dialogical about the “school-in-a-box” planned curriculum. There are no structures for the co-construction of knowledge between students and teachers. There are no structures for a relationship between knowledge production and the community. There is no consideration for identity and community building, no space to value the knowledges in the community or affirm their identities. There are no considerations of education for social change, nor questions about students, teachers, or families’ places in the world. The banking model of education reproduces oppressive systems, which leaves the oppressed with no alternative but to express and make meaning of the world in a language that is already charged with relations of power (Freire, 1970). Literacy, according to Freire, is the act of naming, the act of creating and the act of transforming the world. Becoming literate, beyond the practical act of learning to read and write, is being able to say one’s word, to create one’s representation of the world as part of a community, to represent it based on one’s experience in the world; it is central to feeling free and exercising freedom (Fiori, 1978).

“AM I NORTH AMERICAN OR SOUTH AMERICAN?” THEORIZING AND STUDYING LIVING CURRICULA OF THE GLOBAL

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