Performing the new public school: embodied narratives in a Chicago charter school
This feminist performative ethnography locates the emergence of the new public school in Chicago, the charter school, within a cultural imperative for global competence by local government, private-public interventions to stage school reform, and marginalized communities’ participations to achieve educational equality. These new educative spaces, found mostly in underprivileged neighborhoods, engender complex social and cultural performances among students, parents, educators, local, and national figures who transact across racial, gender, ethnic, linguistic, and class discourses to both engage and/or contest the transformation of public education, its curriculum and practice, and the democratic participation of communities. Through a Latina Feminist theoretical lens that approaches issues of power, knowledge, and everyday communal relationships, and a Performative Pedagogy that presents the acts of doing by individuals to express the complexities of their communities, this dissertation situates a special focus on the oral testimonies and histories that speak of the political, historical, cultural, and social awareness students and teachers have of their location, their embodied subjectivity, and their participatory performance as charter school students/participants in the city of Chicago. Joining the personal voices of these participants is my own lifelong educational testimony performed as an autoethnography that will interrupt, translate, and reflect. Evoking the mythical metaphor of La Malinche as a verb of the present, using her gaze, her tongue, and her body as I/she journey through neoliberal times, the different voices collected in this dissertation will seek to provide democratic possibilities to engage in a participatory pedagogy that acknowledges the sociopolitical intersections underrepresented students and their families find themselves in their quest for educational equity within urban public schools.
Urban public schools and neoliberal policies, Charter schools and neoliberal school reform, Identity and youth in Chicago, Critical performative pedagogy, Feminist performative ethnography, Autoethnography, narratives, and Testimonio, Race, class, and gender issues in education, Latina feminism and La Malinche, Chicago public schools and community engagement, Qualitative research in public schools
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign