UC Berkeley

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.