Braiding Education, Workforce, and Community: Designing Cohesive Learning Systems for Democracy and Mobility

This dissertation examines how education-to-employment systems shape economic mobility and civic participation, and how communities can redesign those systems to better align opportunity, contribution, and institutional trust. Grounded in youth voice and lived experience, particularly youth furthest from opportunity, this integrated research–practice dissertation examines how fragmented learning and labor-market pathways are experienced and how intermediary infrastructure converts fragmentation into coherent systems that support shared prosperity and democratic capacity. Drawing on IRB-approved qualitative research and embedded practitioner inquiry, the dissertation addresses three gaps in existing scholarship. Workforce development research rarely engages civic theory or democratic outcomes; civic education scholarship seldom examines labor markets or intermediary infrastructure; and systems-design literature rarely treats young people as analytic partners in diagnosing institutional failure. By linking these domains, this dissertation advances scholarship on political economy, labor markets, civic formation, and institutional design within an undertheorized civic–economic space. Based on interviews, focus groups, surveys, and practice-based artifacts across traditional, alternative, and civic education contexts, findings show youth articulate a consistent “both–and” theory of thriving. They seek economic mobility and meaningful contribution, autonomy and institutional reliability, and self-sufficiency alongside community connection. Youth interpret misaligned systems not as benign complexity but as institutional incoherence undermining dignity, predictability, and civic confidence. When learning and work systems fail to align, youth lose not only access to opportunity, but trust in public institutions. In response, the dissertation advances the High-Quality Intermediary Framework (HQIF) as a central theoretical and applied contribution. HQIF conceptualizes intermediaries as civic–economic infrastructure defined by governance, relational, operational, and sensemaking capacities that align education, workforce, and civic systems at regional scale. Youth contributions function as system intelligence, positioning youth as co-theorists whose insights strengthen coherence, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Grounded in Indiana as an active site of policy and intermediary experimentation, the research examines how HQIF-aligned intermediary infrastructure can be adapted across regions and states, and argues that economic mobility and democratic renewal are mutually reinforcing aims. When educationto- employment systems are coherently designed, they can expand opportunity, stabilize institutional trust, and renew the civic foundations on which shared prosperity and well-being depend.

Author dc:creator

• Hall, Lauren Marie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hensel, Devon

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/57286

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.indianapolis.iu.edu:1805/57286