Looking Across Locations: Exploring Educational Policies and Practices in Different Physical and Future Spaces

I consider a theoretical outlook for education in a post-job leisure-based society involving technological unemployment and universal basic income. Education might involve a hybrid of instrumental and intrinsic types with intrinsic education being dominant. Intrinsic education is a form of leisure rooted in self-actualization. lt may consist of open socialization in a targeted practice based on promoting creative authorship and of examination of the life, self, world; and education itself embedded in a critical dialogue promoting critical authorship. I will discuss, exemplify, and problematize these diverse types of education in a future post-job leisure-based society.

In 2007, Denver Public Schools (DPS) instituted a school co-location policy, allowing two or more schools to operate within the same district facility. In the 2018-19 school year, DPS had 29 shared campuses housing 73 schools (Board of Education, 2018). In spite of the prevalence of school co-location policies across the country, there are few studies that explore the impacts. We address the dearth of literature by exploring school co-location in DPS using geographic information systems to visualize patterns of school co-location and qualitative methods to explore how teachers’ understand and experience this reform..

Utilizing Critical Ethnographic Narrative Analysis (CENA), this paper examines the normalized and seemingly mundane discourses and practices impacting youth sense of belonging in public-school board meetings in a small, rural Midwestern town undergoing demographic shifts. Through noting the politics of access into this educational policy-making space, as well as critically analyzing the narratives positioning nonwhite families as “other,” I argue conceptions of national belonging are continuously contested through social processes and reflected in existing structural hierarchies. Analysis of these processes of exclusion can highlight areas for further inclusion in this town, as well as the United States generally.