| This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a Sudbury school in California's Central Valley. Sudbury schools are part of a significant history of radical educational experimentation in the United States, and are framed by practitioners as a counter to the overly competitive, coercive, and authoritarian environment of traditional public schools. As private, non-age-segregated, assessment-free, and student-directed educational communities of practice, Sudbury schools rest upon a counterculture ideology that emphasizes anti-authoritarianism and the radical empowerment of children. Ostensibly freed from the constraints of the public education system, Sudbury schools provide a unique opportunity to research the radical possibilities of alternative schools in order to inform pedagogy and practice in traditional public schools. There is little existing systematic documentation of the social and cultural environment of the Sudbury school culture.;This dissertation, then, unprecedented in its focus, contributes to an understanding of how Sudbury schools as radical experiments in education both reproduce and transform mainstream pedagogical practice. Drawing upon detailed critical ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, the dissertation simultaneously illuminates both the micro-level daily practices and participant meaning-making as well as the larger sociocultural context of Sudbury education in the present historical moment in the United States. Findings are divided into two parts. Part I details the radical possibilities of Sudbury transformation in terms of its pedagogical approach and treatment of children. Part II locates the epistemological limits on such radical possibilities in Sudbury education's reliance upon extreme individualism, meritocracy, and informal power hierarchies. In studying both radical possibilities and epistemological limits, the dissertation is able to conclude with a consideration of how Sudbury education is constrained by the larger neoliberal discourses of school choice, individualism, and education for a private good. Arguing from an explicitly non-neutral critical standpoint, I urge Sudbury educators to consider directly resisting neoliberal ideology to create an educational space that is not only transformative for the select few privileged individuals involved, but instead moves toward collective agency, social change, and Freirean critical consciousness. |
