Supporting liberatory literate praxis across disciplines and institutions

This dissertation examines what undergraduate students in liberation-focused programs find meaningful to their holistic literate development across two social justice education programs: the University of Colorado Boulder’s INVST Community Leadership Studies Program and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s Social Justice Educators Paraprofessionals Program. As each of these programs aims to empower students to cocreate a more just world, they are ideal for studying students’ experiences of literate learning that lead not only to their academic advancement, but to their personal development and their growth as social actors – aspects of students’ becoming often missed by education research too narrowly focused on classroom learning. In this ethnographic project, I employ discourse-based interviews with students, teachers, and administrators across these sites. Each case study details the history and aims of one focal program, how those aims are embodied in teachers’ and administrators’ praxis, and how students experience and practice them through their meaningful learning and literate activity. Ultimately my comparative case study approach enables the creation of a working heuristic for designing and sustaining robust liberatory learning environments, one that disavows blanket “best practices” and instead invites educators to match their curricular design and praxis to their own values in situ.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Turnipseed, Nicole Marie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Prior, Paul
• Mortensen, Peter
• Haas Dyson, Anne
• Winn, Maisha

• writing
• education
• social justice
• learning
• development
• literate practice
• praxis
• program administration
• liberation
• becoming

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2021 Nicole Turnipseed

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113199

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/113199