This qualitative study of Police-Civilian Encounters (PCE) takes a grounded approach towards observing PCE videos. The research begins with an overview of coercive force and known outcomes related to the practice. A subsequent review of policing data and police literature establishes the framework for the selection of PCE videos used in this study. Following an inductive line of reasoning the research examines PCE on a basic level through observation of PCE video. An organized undertaking that starts at a tertiary level and drills down to milliseconds within PCE to allow for transcription of conduct and dialogue that come to pass where police use coercive force to compel an arrest. As a result of this analysis, distinctive patterns emerge from the PCE video data that underscore anti-black policing: First, police delay a peaceful conclusion to the civilian’s interaction with law enforcement. Second, police use the conversational space to generate interactional conflict with civilians. Third, police escalate coercive force practices to make compelled arrests of civilians. Fourth, police construct a law enforcement narrative to recast coercive force in terms of civilian resistance. The implications associated with magnified observation of PCE may help to advance parallel studies concerned with sequential social activity and authority-based relationships. Research in this area may lead to more sophisticated ways of measuring coercive force practices demonstrated by police during encounters with civilians; especially where PCE are intimately connected with social control of disenfranchised populations.

Black nationalists of the Black Power era often viewed Black criminality as an essential component to Black political consciousness. "There have been those black Americans who have resisted white America," activist Julius Lester argued. "These were the field niggers during slavery, Nat Turner, the Black abolitionists, Garvey, and in our own time, Malcolm, the hustler on the corner and the high-school dropout." Scholars have amply demonstrated the ideological logic of Julius Lester's thinking about the guy on the corner, but how the guy on the corner makes sense of the Nationalist argument is undertheorized in the current literature. In an era when gangsta rap has come to be seen to epitomize urban Black manhood, this question remains crucial today. What then is the relationship between oppositional, self-destructive notions of Black identity and Black political consciousness as lived and experienced by urban Black youth? Building on the work of Franz Fanon and more recent theories of coloniality, the study explores the relationship between the two as they have evolved in the lives of young Black men.

The historical relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Crips and Bloods serves as a lens through which I examine the interplay of criminality and radicalism in Black consciousness in the United States. Thus, this dissertation is not primarily a study of gang activity or the Black Panther Party. Rather, it is a sociological study of how evolving political activism, state actions and economic conditions have shaped Black consciousness. The relationship between self-destructive notions of Blackness and resistance is complex. That organizations like the Black Panther Party have attracted significant numbers of gang members is well documented. Still, it is a fact that most Black youth have not been in gangs or in radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Nevertheless, I argue, the historical relationship between the two social collectivities illuminates a fundamental aspect of Black consciousness. This tension between criminality and radicalism has long been recognized in Black life. Whether in celebrations of the folk figure Stagger Lee, Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, or Hip Hop artist Tupac Shakur, the intersection of oppression, resistance and criminality occupies a crucial place in the Black experience. However, the particular, shifting balance of these tendencies at any given moment is a matter of critical importance in how Black Americans navigate their American dilemma.

Asian American students attend increasingly diverse schools, yet scholarship on their experiences typically considers them in isolation, leading to a group-level emphasis rather than a focus on the relational processes that give ‘Asian’ meaning as a social and educational construction and social location. Building on theories of racialization, I study an urban context where multi-group ethnic and racial relations are negotiated. My dissertation examines how Asian American and Black students, as well as staff, engaged in discourses and practices that reproduced patterns of inequality among groups of students of color in a high-poverty school that was 99% non-White, but where Asian Americans comprised almost half the student body. This research clarifies how positive but conditional notions of Asian-ness were created through and against negative ideas of Blackness, in particular. Staff generally contrasted engaged Asian American students with oppositional Black youth, despite the diversity of students’ aspirations and performance. While some contested these constructions, many students acted in ways that reinforced them. These biased perceptions ultimately led to greater support for Asians American students, who expressed a stronger sense of belonging to and ownership of the school than non- Asians. My work examines formal and informal stratification among racial minority youth and elucidates the ideologies and mechanisms that normalized it. Despite their academic heterogeneity, urban Asian American students were privileged through a re-inscription of the model minority myth that imputes a cultural basis for Asian American educational success, while Black students were interpreted through negative stereotypes and expectations. This dissertation highlights the costs of Asian American students’ privilege in this context and draws attention to the continued marginalization of racial minority students. It argues that the model minority trope and the trope of the oppositional and deficient Black subject were bound together in the schooling of Asian American and Black students. It reveals the power of the myth to shape how all students are positioned in a racial hierarchy, thus giving insight into racialization itself.

Despite increased literature on the disciplining of black and brown youth in schools, there has been little attention to implications for content area instruction. This study examines the disciplining of knowledge in world history classrooms, and the impacts of this on students who often get labeled as troublemakers. Although many world history classrooms make claims of a shared humanity, such spaces often reproduce value systems that deem some as historically significant, while negating and excluding others. I employ qualitative methods to examine how such disciplinary practices impact students. I conducted individual student interviews and think-aloud tasks with twelve tenth grade students, to document how students understand themselves in relation to world history. To identify students and gain context of their learning, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in two out of three sections of tenth grade world history classrooms in their small urban Title 1 school, with predominantly African American and Latino students, over the course of six months. I read the world history classroom and how students think in light of queer theory, critical theory and cultural studies, and subaltern studies.

This study shifts the focus on so-called troublemaker students from a behavioral focus that aims to integrate them into the status quo, to consider their ways of thinking in broader socio-political contexts. This work builds on the ways these students productively trouble the logics of traditional world history pedagogy, and complicates historical thinking by engaging challenges within the discipline of history itself. I turn to history as a disciplinary space to consider how scholars from marginalized populations have challenged the work of history, including the archive, document production and preservation, narrative production, and the relations of knowledge production within the history discipline. This study ultimately aims to alter how teachers think about and teach world history, in light of these marginalized students.

At present, there are two priorities within social justice education that have taken center stage. The first is the task of ending oppression, and the second is the task of affirming the individuality and freedom of the child. Social justice educators advocate a non-hierarchical approach to learning that centers students’ self-directed construction of knowledge from their experiences, while at the same time expecting students to develop an explicit critique of the social order (Freire, 1998; Shor, 1992). These pedagogical practices can considered progressive or constructivist. Though both “progressive education” and “constructivist education” have been used to refer to a range of philosophical assumptions and practices (Labaree, 2005; Phillips, 1995), they generally refer to “a set of theories that hold that knowledge is not a body of facts, skills, and interpretations to be transmitted to students, but rather is actively constructed by learners as they interact with their environment” (Perlstein, 2002, p. 270). However, the use of progressive or constructivist pedagogical approaches for the pursuit of explicit ideological goals leaves critical educators with a dilemma: what happens when students’ reflections don’t lead them to conclusions that challenge oppression? In other words, how should educators respond when “critical” thinking does not lead to the “critical” conclusions that social justice teachers advocate (ie, ones that challenge systems of oppression)?

This study draws from ethnography (LeCompte & Schensul, 2010), autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), action research (Herr & Anderson, 2005), and social design experimentation (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) to examine the tensions involved in using constructivist pedagogical approaches to cultivate students’ critique of oppression and commitment to social justice values. Data included video recordings of classroom dialogues, field notes, student written assignments, and teacher and student interviews collected from three sections of an undergraduate teacher education class at an elite public university during the Spring of 2017. Drawing from critical and feminist pedagogies, the course (ED280) used a constructivist approach that privileged students’ self-directed learning, the construction of knowledge from experience, and the creation of a democratic classroom within a formal school setting. At the same time, ED280 also aimed to cultivate students’ critique of oppression and commitment to social justice through social action. Taught by three instructors of differing racial backgrounds (myself, an Asian American woman; Sarah, a white woman; and Tiana, a Black woman), the course also attracted students from multiple, contradicting, positionalities.

There are three major findings from this study. The first stems from the fact that social justice educators in formal school settings are contradictorily positioned as agents of institutional power, even while they seek to critique such power (and thus undermine their own authority). This paradox led social justice educators like Sarah to send mixed messages to her students regarding both the nature of her authority and the seriousness of the social justice objectives of the course. At times, Sarah leveraged her authority to advance social justice ideals, and at other times, she undermined her own authority at the expense of those ideals. However, in prioritizing the development of students’ social justice critique over the creation of a “democratic” classroom space, Tiana was still able to use constructivist pedagogical practices and create a largely democratic classroom. These findings illustrate the importance of first grounding constructivist pedagogical practices in an explicit critique of oppression, particularly in formal school settings where hierarchical relationships of power and authority are inherent to the educational space.

This study also finds that because students construct knowledge from an environment already imbued with oppression, the experiences from which they construct knowledge are often complex and contradictory, leading them to take up and critique dominant ideologies in complex and contradictory ways. While a constructivist pedagogical approach supported some students in making sense of their own experiences of oppression, at times, it also served to justify students’ pre-existing ideologies, rather than to support them in constructing new knowledges. This occurred in part because students occupied multiple, contradicting positionalities – thus, their experiences (and interpretations of those experiences) at times reflected the critique of oppression that ED280 aimed to cultivate, and at other times, contradicted it.

Finally, this study examines how critical and feminist pedagogies can become conflated because they draw on similar constructivist roots. In particular, I examine the tensions involved in using a Freirean framework to teach students about their positionalities. In analyzing two pedagogical events that aimed to teach students about their positionalities – the Privilege Walk and the Identity Wheel – I find that students developed essentialized notions of identity within an “oppressed/oppressor” framework, even when their own experiences contradicted such binary understandings of experience. As a result, students came to conflate positionality with identity, understanding it as static and fixed, rather than socially constructed and malleable. This led students, particularly students from positionalities of relative privilege, to reject the instructor’s call for students to participate in social action, as they understood themselves to be defined by their identities, rather than by their actions.

Within education, progressive and constructivist pedagogical practices have become dominant in the field (Phillips, 1995) as a means for addressing an array of social, educational, and economic problems. This study illustrates some of the contradictions that arise in relying on progressive pedagogical practices to address such structural inequalities, as well as how teachers and students navigated these challenges in practice. In so doing, this research encourages scholars, educators, and activists to prioritize the development of students’ critique of oppression over progressive pedagogical practices, and thus contributes to scholarship in social justice education, teacher education, and curriculum theory.

Abstract

Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the `Benevolence' of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898-1916

By

Funie Hsu

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Daniel Perlstein, Chair

Even though historians are increasingly pointing to the importance of colonialism in U.S. history, an investigation of the role of colonialism in the shaping of American public schooling has been largely unexamined in education. This dissertation focuses on the colonial legacy as it pertains to English instruction, highlighting the case of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. This project provides a close examination of Philippine Public Law 74, the colonial education policy that mandated English as the language of instruction, and investigates the social and political conditions that motivated the policy. Employing a historical methods approach, this study examines how the U.S. education policy of English instruction organized both the school system and the broader project of American colonialism. Moreover, this dissertation examines the process by which the history of U.S. overseas conquest in the Philippines has been forgotten.

This dissertation demonstrates that a gendered and racialized discourse of education was central to efforts in reconciling the contradiction that U.S. colonialism posed to American democracy. It illuminates the manner in which gendered constructions of the American English teachers as feminine and nurturing-- as juxtaposed with the image of the aggressive male soldier--enabled the institution of American colonial education in to create a domesticating illusion of peace. Through the mechanism of English instruction, American officials were able to articulate their presence as "benevolent tutelage" rather than imperial expansion, thereby erasing the violence of colonialism and instructing the forgetting of U.S. overseas conquest. In other words, English instruction provided an ideological justification and institutional method to literally rewrite the history of U.S. empire. This study highlights the political role of English instruction in U.S. colonial expansion; and it examines the manner in which notions of gender, domesticity, and race were embedded in the ideology and implementation of U.S. colonial English instruction.

In the midst of intensifying income inequality, police violence, and school segregation, Obama’s Administration launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in 2010 to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement and eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline. Since then, the Supportive School Discipline Initiative has been touted as a success story of grassroots advocacy, philanthropic involvement in education reform, bi-partisan collaboration, and cross sector coordination between education, school psychology, law enforcement, and criminal justice. Education reformers invoke common narratives of liberal reform in this process, including bottom-up change, collaboration between strange bedfellows, and innovative policymaking through networks. Yet, this study finds that even under ideal implementation conditions, characterized by successful destabilization and educators committed to change – the social control, punishment, and policing practices in the school district didn’t change much. Instead, the district mandated the adoption of more behavioral management programs and the creation of a district-wide discipline data system, both experienced as bureaucratic and insufficient to address the school climate and culture needs in schools.

While, dominant explanations for liberal reform failure place the blame on resistant or incompetent educators, this study asks what larger political and economic interests were at stake in the creation, implementation, and outcomes of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative. Through social network visualization and qualitative coding of policy and advocacy reports published on school discipline between 2000 and 2014, I found that the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice worked together to support and shape a national policy network through which education reform non-profits and for-profits co-opted the school-to-prison pipeline frame to drum up demand for behavioral management programs and other education reform products and services. Through an in-depth qualitative case study of the first two-and-a-half years of the implementation of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in an urban school district, I find that the policy mandates, the civil rights ideals it invoked, and the current grant-dependency of urban school districts incentivized district central office administrators to compete with one another to secure funding for education reform industry products and services and to coordinate a shared managerial interest in data auditing and accountability. Thus, I conclude that the Supportive School Discipline Initiative worked largely as it was intended to, serving the interests of the education reform industry and not the interests of those concerned with the school-to-prison pipeline or creating more just schools.

Abstract

This study asks how neoliberal reform became the hegemonic framework for racial justice and educational equity. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I examine three reform projects that operate on different terrains – or scales – of ‘governmentality’: that of broad public sense-making, that of district policymaking, and that of individual and community-based subjectivities.

The first project (Chapter Two) was a national publicity campaign funded by the Broad and Gates foundations. In this chapter, I use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to understand how reformers used language to shape public consciousness, pointing to the continuity of an educational “crisis discourse” first manufactured in the Reagan era. Chapter Three examines the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of an urban school district. Using the theoretical framework of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2007), I trace how the neoliberal reform network penetrated the district, fundamentally reshaping its structures and processes. In the fourth chapter, I use ethnographic methods to study the effects of ‘punitive privatization’ on a school site steeped in historical traditions of anti-racist and anti-capitalist critique. I argue that neoliberal accountability is “devitalizing” (McDermott & Hall, 2007) to the political vision and practices of the school, and that it works to co-opt dissent and redirect parent participation.

Taken together, these projects demonstrate both coercive and consensual processes: the corporate reform network penetrates public institutions and democratic processes, redirecting them to do the work of marketization and capital accumulation. At the same time, it employs sophisticated and well-funded marketing to articulate these projects across a breadth of terrains and at different scales. Each project demonstrates how market advocates, driven by venture-philanthropic funding, position their work as the only possible means for racial justice and educational equity. The findings point to two powerful aspects of neoliberalism: its role in creating and manipulating educational crises and its ability to absorb and reframe challenges to capitalism.

This dissertation examines the relationship between caring teaching practices and greater health outcomes for black children. Public health theory suggests that Black youth generally experienced greater levels of adversity compared to non-black youth (Schilling et al., 2007; Marie, 2016). Exposure to these frequent and/or sustained stressors without the buffering care of a supportive adult can change children’s brains and bodies, including disrupting learning, behavior, immune systems, and even the way DNA is read and transcribed. My research examines the efficacy of critical classroom pedagogy (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008) and social design-based research (Gutierrez, 2016) as a framework to address and attenuate the impacts of toxic stressors that black youth embody.

This study honors research principles grounded in care (Angelou, 1979; Noddings, 1988; Duncan-Andrade, 2006), to generate grounded theory for social transformation. This dissertation anchors data (field notes, classroom video, in-depth interviews) in order to integrate the fields of education and public health to produce ecologically valid findings that: 1) highlight and reproduce that types of teaching practices and conditions that mediate healthier children and 2) reframe our understandings of the possibilities of education.

The constraining role of racial, social, and economic stratification on the lives and education of African American males has been argued both theoretically and empirically (Massey, 2007; MacLeod, 1987; Noguera, 2001). Some have argued that one important mechanism is the perception of limited opportunity structures (Noguera, 2004; Ogbu, 1987). This dissertation explored how real and perceived opportunity structures were shaped by political, social, and economic forces in an urban neighborhood. Specifically, this study focused on a core group of Black males in a bounded historical time and geographic locale and explored how life pathways were identified, conveyed, and chosen. This study was historically situated in the period starting with the inception of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, until the time of the death of its co-founder, Huey P. Newton in 1989. This study argued that the complex interplay of competing ideologies that arose during that time period was at the crux of redefining Black life pathways to achieving the American Dream, also conveying the outcomes from that pursuit. This study took place in Oakland, California as this was the birthplace of the Black Panthers and it focused on the Oak Knoll neighborhood. I explored the ways in which the Black Power movement, the burgeoning drug epidemic, and State suppression in post-industrial Oakland informed how a cohort of over 40 Black males made sense of their societal positionality and how that 'sense making' influenced their choice of pathways and life outcomes. I will draw on Critical Race Theory in order to examine the ways in which race and power were central in the choices youth perceived, communicated, and enacted (Crenshaw, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Methodologically, I will utilize interviews with members of the cohort, biographical narratives, primary and secondary sources, with the dissertation taking the form of an autoethnography of the block cohort. Primary and secondary sources will be employed to give a historical context to the time period and to contextualize the differing pathways. Interviews with cohort members and the development of autoethnographical narratives will focus on what I am calling 'block pedagogy', which I define as the organic community discourse that reflects the constant negotiation of identity, power and privileged knowledge, informed by the historical context. A focus on 'block pedagogy' (as remembered by informants) will be used to illuminate alternative/oppositional life pathways that were available to this cohort and how those options were developed and conveyed across the cohort through the use of privileged knowledge. Ultimately, this study will contribute to our understanding of the ways in which the multiple spheres of societal contact--with the power structure, Black radicalism, and criminality--resulted in identity-shaping knowledge. In doing so, it will document the ever-changing nature of oppression and community response to it: both in ways that subvert and reproduce existing oppressive social structures.