Abstract

My dissertation is a four-year critical ethnographic study of a performance group created by Ph. D. students in education in a School of Education in a university in California. Since its initiation in 2008, participants in this performance group employed critical methods in order to analyze, challenge and re-imagine the role of education and of schools of education in society, their role as educators and researchers, and the ways in which human beings can transform society through critical and transformative education. In doing so, my dissertation is situated within the recent call to revise higher education for the 21st century (Bronson, 2005; Freire, 1994; Giroux, 2001, 2007; Watson-Gegeo, 2005; Williams, 2012), particularly as the corporatization and privatization of public education is exacerbating practices of social reproduction in academia. Giroux (2001) argues that within the current neoliberal political and economic system, public schools are seen as a private good rather than as a public good, which complicates the "very possibility of creating non-commodified public spheres and forums that provide the conditions for critical education" (p.30). Within these current economic pressures to further corporatize and privatize higher education, several authors (Aronowitz, 2001; Bronson, 2005; Esbjorn-Hargens, 2006; Giroux, 2001, 2007; hooks, 1994; Rendón, 2009; Subbiondo, 2005; Watson-Gegeo, 2005; Williams, 2012) have critically denounced the systems of domination that specifically govern the academy, and the ways in which universities have followed societal biases that uphold and maintain white supremacy, imperialism, monoculturalism, sexism and racism. These authors have highlighted the importance to share stories that speak about experiences of resistance and the enactment of new possibilities within graduate education (Castellanos et al., 2006; Giroux, 2001; hooks, 1993; Yosso, 2006), and have invited faculty, administrators, and students to embrace a pedagogy of wholeness with an emphasis on social justice and equity that could transform their work in higher education (Darder, 2002; Rendón, 2009). Using a critical framework built upon theories of Transformative Education (Freire, 1973, 1990, 1997; hooks, 1994; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), Identities (Cameron, 2005; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Weedon, 1987; Wenger, 1998), Critical Race-Gendered Epistemologies (Delgado Bernal, 2002), and Performance (Boal; 1985, 1998, 2006; Schechner, 2006; Taylor, 2003), I look at the intersections of community, identities, epistemologies, performance and transformation within the space of the performance group and graduate education, with a constant consideration of the macro context that refers to the so called "crisis of higher education" (Giroux, 2001). Specifically, I focus on the ways in which participants are reading the word and the world of graduate education in a school of education (Freire, 1987), while embodying a critical notion of education through performance. By employing critical ethnographic and critical discourse analytic methods, my goal was to create a thick explanation of the performance group and the deep transformative processes and meanings that emerged from it, always integrating the micro- and macrolevels of contextual data collected and analyzed, and attempting to understand how both levels mutually shape and constitute each other. Findings are presented in two chapters. First, I address the process that led the participants to create the performance group, which refers to the way in which participants in the performance group experienced social reproduction in graduate education-specifically in their school of education-and the consequent epistemology of silencing that impeded participants to bring their whole being to their learning and knowledge construction process. Second, I address the complex process involved in creating the performance group community, detailing the embodied language and epistemology that participants created (the language of the "We") in the performance group as a response to the notion of education and epistemology of silencing that the participants were experiencing in their school of education. I also address the processes of transformation that participants experienced by performing the language of the "We". I conclude by emphasizing the need to create communities of solidarity in Schools of Education in order to counter oppressive structures in education and society. The main purpose of my study is to respond to the call to re-envision higher education and to share experiences of hope (Freire, 2004) that provide concrete examples about possibilities of enacting liberatory education in higher education (Yosso, 2006; Castellanos et al., 2006; hooks, 1993). Throughout my dissertation I argue that it is fundamental to address the critical role of universities in challenging the status quo of a society in crisis (Bronson, 2005; Bronson & Gangadean, 2010; Rendón, 2009). In order to do so, as a Ph. D. student in education, I believe that it is crucial that people in graduate education commit to question, challenge and recreate reproductive structures in our everyday practices.