This research examines the ingenious activity, relationships, and power dynamics that mediate learning in the video game play of youth from non-dominant communities. Through extensive analyses of a multi-sited digital ethnography, the dissertation draws on data collected from a study on the everyday media practices of working-class families, as well as analyses of youth activity on a live-streaming platform called Twitch to analyze learning in playful contexts. The three-article dissertation highlights the importance of studying youth digital activities and phenomenon across media ecologies to understand how youth develop repertoires and dispositions. By drawing on a Cultural Historical Activity Theoretical (CHAT) framework, the three articles call attention to the generative possibilities of focusing on youth agency, ingenuity, and digital resistance to counter deficit approaches around the everyday media practices of youth. The first article of the dissertation examines how a Latino boy, Richard, draws on the relational expertise of a community of gamers to learn how to exploit glitches in the games he played. Specifically, the study shows how the focal child, learns to subvert video game system designs, and argues that by deviating from the norms of play, children from non-dominant communities, like Richard, can expand and transform the learning ecologies they participate in. The second article of the dissertation examines youth activity on a live-streaming platform, called Twitch, to analyze how race discourse mediates learning in gaming spaces. This article documents how youth engage, reproduce, and/or challenge race discourse that emerges in their digital play ecologies. Finally, the third article draws on “Learning by Observing and Pitching In” (LOPI) as an analytical frame to examine how children and adults in gaming communities work as a fluid ensemble to accomplish endeavors in their online activity. The article argues that online gaming spaces are organized in ways that support collaboration amongst adults and children and, as a result, can be leveraged to develop relational equity between adult educators and their students. Overall, the three-article dissertation study has implications for how we can design robust digital and hybrid learning ecologies that center play and youths' media interest-driven practices.

This dissertation’s overarching and guiding research question was: “How are education policies and schools both reproducing structural inequality and promoting educational equity and social justice?” This dissertation explores this broad question through an exemplary case: The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and its implementation in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Three papers, representing two “planes of analysis” (Rogoff, 1995) – the federal policy formulation and local implementation levels – and structured to focus on the interplay between “policy, people, and place” (Honig, 2006), were used to explore this question. Each paper also interrogates 1) how federal policy-makers use education policy (NLSP) to position public schools as sites of intervention for mitigating broader social inequities (food insecurity), and 2) the efficacy of delivery of social provision (nutritious food) at the local level.

Paper one focuses on the historicity of policy through an examination of the historical and contemporary (1930-2010) landscape of the NSLP. The paper demonstrated how the NSLP has served as a quintessential example of the “educationalized welfare state” – that is, the American preference for using education policy to redress broader social problems and schools as sites of intervention and for the delivery of social provision. Furthermore, this paper includes an analysis of the tensions between and the affordances and limitations of federal versus local level policy-making. Finally, paper one considers how the privatization of the NSLP in the 1970s-1990s reflects the dangers of education privatization, which undermines the educationalized welfare state and thus, social welfare more broadly.

Paper two focuses on policy, people, and place at the federal policy-making level. Using the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and Qualitative Text Analysis, this paper analyzed the discourse utilized by legislators and Congressional hearing witnesses throughout the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) that led to the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) of 2010 – the most recent reauthorization of the NSLP. This research finds that legislators and witnesses defined and framed the problems of childhood hunger and obesity as both a consequence of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and children and parents’ bad dietary choices. Furthermore, these problems were considered a moral responsibility of the U.S. government to resolve for the benefit of children’s physical and cognitive development, a critical part of health care reform and long-term public health, and as a matter of national security as well as American competitiveness in the world. Finally, legislator’s discourses led to the construction of the HHFKA as a means for expanding and increasing students’ access to healthier school meals through, for example, mandated, science-based nutrition standards and the provision of universal free lunch in high-poverty schools. However, partisan politics and the tradition of placing social provision in the realm of schools also led to legislators taking away funding from the Food Stamp program (a broad food assistance program) to pay for the HHFKA (food assistance in schools).

Finally, paper three focuses on policy, people, and place at the local policy implementation level. Drawing on data from a three-year ethnographic case study of the implementation of the HHFKA in OUSD, paper three examines the constraining and enabling conditions that allowed California Thursdays – an innovative farm to school initiative – to go to scale across 84 districts in California. This study finds that local level actors developed a “bite-sized implementation strategy” that broke down the process of changing school food systems into small, scaffolding manageable tasks that, through a “progress-based journey,” accumulated into larger systems change. This research also finds that the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) in Berkeley, CA, played a critical role as an “intermediary organization” in its use of a “collective impact model” to organize school districts implementing California Thursdays into a network. The California Thursdays network shared resources and best practices through an email listserv, which advanced the initiative’s “co-construction” and ability to scale across a variety of implementation contexts. Furthermore, CEL also positively shaped the discourse of school lunch through the trademarking and branding of California Thursdays, and its use and facilitation of empowering language through the listserv. Finally, this research finds that California Thursdays is reshaping the school food landscape in California and creating broader, cross-sectoral impacts.

A significant challenge confronts the design of teacher education: how to leverage an expansive theory of teacher learning of which equity is central in the context of historically entrenched institutional norms and practice. Following Engeström (1991), these norms and practices have contributed to an encapsulation of schooling that makes it difficult for teachers to understand the importance of everyday practice in expansive forms of learning. To understand teachers’ co-learning and co-design, this study examined how teachers develop new pedagogical conceptualizations as they attempt to leverage youths’ everyday cultural practices.

In this social design-based study (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), teachers’ sense-making was documented across a range of teacher practices: collaborative inquiry in several activity settings, and in cognitive ethnographies, to capture shifts in how teachers came to see students as competent meaning-makers. Through the participation framework (Goodwin, 2007), I saw the various stances that teachers deploy in their co-operative action (Goodwin, 2017) as they made sense of new pedagogical conceptualizations that seek to build with youth. In this study, teacher learning was conceptualized as collective activity, which provided a window into the various commitments that were still evolving in the collective space of the teacher education classroom.

Findings show that teachers in this study shifted in their pedagogical approaches, subsequently generating theoretically informed conjectures about the social organization of learning in their classrooms. One teacher initially conceived of his role in the classroom as a peripheral participant, as he was expected, as a student teacher, to help youth stay on task. However, as he appropriated course theories, specifically those on third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) and socio-spatial repertoires (Cortez & Gutiérrez, 2019), this teacher began to attend to specific features of the broader classroom environment; in effect, he began to turn away from solely focusing on individual students’ who he believed were disengaged. In addition, by using critical discourse analysis as an analytical lens, the participant was able to see classroom discourse patterns as opportunities for leveraging the everyday cultural practices of youth and connecting them to a larger structural analysis of power.

This study further highlights the co-operative action (Goodwin, 2017) of two teachers as they experimented with course theories in their reflections on their pedagogical practices. Through this experimentation, the participants began to center their meaning making on the everyday practices of youth, as well as imagine new possibilities for their practices. Through their collective actions, we see changes in how they participate with one another and their peers as they struggled to move beyond more general prescriptions for teaching toward more specific approaches that were oriented toward leveraging the everyday through the design of the elements of learning. In particular, the teachers in my study focused their efforts on the possibilities that can emerge in the design of more flexible and open-ended discursive classroom practices. In this respect, shifting in their critiques of students, schools and their cooperating teachers toward examining the possibilities in their role in the classroom and their pedagogical approach.

Through the use of theoretical and technological tools, this study contributes to a theory of learning in which youths’ everyday practices are an inherent part of teachers’ transformative learning. But, more importantly, the study offers implications for the design of pre-service teachers’ conversations about practice and theory. As the field begins to shift toward examining teachers’ learning and development in the context of collaborative reflection, we need to know more about the affordances and constraints in how teachers jointly make meaning of pedagogical practices and theories on learning.

In this three-article dissertation, I expand how scholars understand the opt-out movement against statewide testing in the United States and offer a framework for reorganizing learning ecologies outside a testing paradigm. Framed by the ways that knowledge is defined, divided, categorized, and standardized within a system that seeks to hierarchically sort people, I understand statewide testing to be an everyday instantiation of coloniality within education. I thus explore the ways in which the opt-out movement might be viewed as a decolonial attempt, with knowledge claims being tied to claims of humanity, and importantly, rights (including land rights). In the first article, I examine how youth grapple with their own relationships to statewide testing, using an online discussion board, Reddit. I frame their sense-making using the framework of historical action to better understand their nuanced discursive moves. In the second article, I highlight how a subgroup of opt-out participants used public social media posts to vocalize their motives in the movement, centering on themes of race, inequity, civil disobedience, and knowledge subordination, and contextualizing statewide testing within its sordid history. I relate these motives to the agenda of coloniality and how these motives within the movement might indicate a move toward decolonizing knowledge within the K–12 education system. In my final article, I offer the learning as movement framework as a utopian design approach for the literacy learning sciences and an alternate to knowledge standardization. I explore how designing learning ecologies that view learning as movement aligns with the work of decolonial scholars who call for us to re-signify meaning and identity to work towards alternate epistemic futures.

This dissertation project is a critical spatial analysis of urban violence. Using a mixed-methods approach to interrogate youth experiences in Oakland, California, this study contributes to intersectional understandings of race, space, and violence, illustrating the significance of sociospatiality, or the (re)productive function of race and space, in the on-going development of urban space, including material and discursive representations of violence across a local urbanscape. The arc of this dissertation is organized around these central questions: (a) How do a group of Black and other youth of color in Oakland experience and understand everyday urban violence in their local geography, across community and school? How do they understand the racial and spatial contours to risk and safety? (b) How does anti-Blackness, and geographies of race generally, function in the creation and maintenance of urban space, including community violence? how can critical spatial analyses deepen our conceptualization and research of urban violence, including youth experiences with everyday precarity? And (c) How can youth narratives and “theories in the flesh” disrupt and counter-map hegemonic representations of urban communities and violence? Thus, the three-article study is organized around two central pillars: on one hand, it reconceptualizes urban violence beyond the interpersonal and spectacularized, attuned to the mutuality of racial-spatial processes and meanings entrenched in place. Moreover, it provides a richer depiction of (a reconceptualized) urban violence through understudied qualitative youth portraits and “theories of the flesh,” which demonstrate sense-making repertoires and safe-keeping. In demonstrating the sociospatiality of race, space, and violence in Oakland, the gravity and capaciousness of an everyday precarity becomes clearer for these young people’s lives. Overall, the dissertation works as a justice-centered advocacy project to counter-map understandings of urban violence, and asks youth practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers to feel the gravity of their stories and lessons.

English Language Arts has historically been tied to the civic purposes of schools, and this qualitative study of a social design-based project (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) examines the intersection of language and literacy learning and youth civic engagement, a problem space I call “Civics English.” In this dissertation, I describe and analyze the experimentation and inquiry process of a Professional Learning Community of English teachers in a diverse middle school as they integrated civic learning and action into their English teaching practices. The dissertation examines this teacher team’s development and shifts through various tensions and challenges that arise, analyzing through the lenses of Cultural Historical Activity Theory the ways their Professional Learning Community operated as an English teaching activity system attempting to integrate the cultural activity of civic engagement, leading to the teachers’ expansive professional learning (Engeström, 2001) about possibilities and challenges of Civics English.

The English teachers implemented various civic action projects, including producing and sharing multimodal civic advocacy essays online, composing and presenting children’s storybooks about civics issues, and organizing and conducting a Town Hall with local leaders about civic dimensions of allyship and youth sports. This study looks at how, contextualized by these civics activities, they adapt and innovate customary English Language Arts practices, such as reading novels, writing in authentic genres with blended text types, and developing literacy and discourse. As the teachers encounter various tensions that arise in their attempts at Civics English, I present evidence of how these tensions emerge from the contradictions of two intersecting cultural activity systems, and what adaptations and innovations the teachers develop to overcome these tensions.

Integrating civics causes shifts in the teachers’ practices of literary study, writing, and classroom discussion, as they orient students’ learning towards public audiences, collective action, and discursive models of political and professional discourse. I identify how reading literature creates an imaginative space for civic deliberation. And I demonstrate how the Town Hall civics project shifts various dimensions of literacy and language activity by recontextualizing them. The potentials and the constraints of these shifts are examined through studying the teachers’ work, students’ language and activity, and the civic event’s efficacy as an English teaching focal point.