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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2010 "People Who Look Like Me": Community, Space and Power in a Segregated East Tennessee School Nicholas Scott Mariner University of Tennesse - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons Recommended Citation Mariner, Nicholas Scott, ""People Who Look Like Me": Community, Space and Power in a Segregated East Tennessee School. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2010. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/898 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Nicholas Scott Mariner entitled ""People Who Look Like Me": Community, Space and Power in a Segregated East Tennessee School." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Education. Barbara Thayer-Bacon, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allison D. Anders, Diana Moyer, Robert K. Kronick, Lynn Sacco Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Nicholas Scott Mariner entitled "‗People Who Look Like Me‘: Community, Space and Power in a Segregated East Tennessee School.‖ I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Education. Barbara Thayer-Bacon, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allison D. Anders Diana Moyer Robert K. Kronick Lynn Sacco Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) "People Who Look Like Me": Community, Space and Power in a Segregated East Tennessee School A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Nicholas Scott Mariner December 2010 For Owen and Lily two beautiful souls who give all my work meaning daddy loves you so iii Acknowledgments For as much work as this dissertation has been, for as much joy and struggle the process of creating my own research project and submitting it to a committee of mentors has created, this is the section to which I have looked forward the most. This process has been exciting, trying, emotional and captivating. Sometimes it has been lonely. Sometimes I could not get a minute alone. Throughout the work, I have developed personal and intellectual relationships that, I hope, will last much longer than this work or any other I produce, and I would like to take just a few brief moments to recognize and thank all of the people who provided guidance and support for the last four years. I have been keeping a running mental list of all of these people, crossing off those whose importance once seemed incalculable but now not so much (i.e. the guy at the sub shop who knew exactly how to put together my favorite comfort sub on stressful nights) and keeping those who I cannot and will not forget as I make the terrifying move from student to whatever-comes-next. If in this process I forgot someone whose contributions are not recognized here, I apologize and hope that it is taken as little more than the forgetfulness of a man who tries to remember everything but rarely writes anything down. Putting together a committee for this process was difficult, to say the least. Attempting to do an interdisciplinary project in an interdisciplinary program provided a few challenges in finding the right group of scholars that could contribute to the overall direction of the work. Diana Moyer offered incredible insight and guidance as an education historian, not only in this iv project but in most of my graduate study and transition from historian to education historian. Barbara Thayer-Bacon, as a philosopher and chair of the committee, made critical suggestions to improve the strength of the work and the care I gave to the arguments and assertions made herein. Her willingness to hold me to deadlines and read drafts of chapters until late into the night, on flights to conferences, and in what little spare time she had ensured that this project, which despite my hopes never seemed to write itself, was actually submitted and defended on time. There are no words to express the gratitude I have for that commitment to this project. Lynn Sacco and Robert Kronick both provided essential viewpoints from outside the field of educational foundations that challenged me to broaden the questions I asked in the process and, I believe, helped make this work applicable further outside a very small pocket of the much larger umbrella of education scholarship. So much of this work intellectually is owed to Allison Anders. Her suggestions, questions and willingness to engage conversations about new interviews and artifacts I collected opened new interpretations for me and continually pushed me to move beyond a typical approach to history and discover new ways of sharing a story. I came to Allison in trust at a point in this process when the project had been derailed by an incredibly difficult emotional struggle, and the care and compassion she showed as a faculty mentor and friend allowed me the space to understand that, even in the academy, we still get to be human, still have lives and emotions to which we must attend, and as important as we want our work to be, it sometimes needs to come second. Out of all of the things I learned through this process, that is perhaps the most meaningful and I am grateful to Allison for helping me reach that understanding. v I came to the University of Tennessee as a part of a graduate cohort that saw this project take shape and grow through countless iterations and possible directions, and having them along for the journey to listen to new ideas and offer thoughts and suggestions took the work to places that it never would have reached with my intentions alone. Corey Kittrell, Katharine Sprecher, Tingting Qi, Hui Huang, Tracia Cloud, and Scott Ellison transformed me as a scholar and as a person through countless hours discussing new ideas in class or over pizza and those simple, frank conversations led to many of the ideas expressed in this dissertation. I had contributions from others in the field, as well, as I traveled to conferences and lectures and made new friends across campuses that were always willing to hear about the project and any other goings on to which they could offer insight. Erin Castro, Josh Diem, Billye Chabot, Robert Helfenbein, Amy Swain and Karla Martin came into my life at different stages of the research, and their willingness to listen, offer reactions, and share laughs, to create for me my own community of lovers of thought, made the entire process more enjoyable and more rewarding. The focus of this study is on the building and commitment to community, and through this project I have built a community of my own that I hold close to my heart and know I will remain connected to these souls for the inspiration they were in my life. The dear friends that always listened, always cared and offered support in ways indescribable need to be named here explicitly so I can finally have a chance, insufficient as it might be in comparison to the love and kindness they gave, to express one more debt of gratitude for everything they mean to me. James DeVita, Jessica Lester, Amelia Davis, Sara Cohen, Brandon Swinehart, Katharine Sprecher, Erin Castro and Allison Anders overwhelmed me with the daily knowledge that I was vi surrounded by friends who would give up their time, their emotions, sometimes even a spare room, to help me navigate this long process and find meaning in a time of incredible confusion, exhaustion and frustration. I would love to write here everything that this group of friends means to me, this work, and my time in Tennessee, but the acknowledgments section is not supposed to be longer than the dissertation itself. Because no words can come close to capturing how much their friendships have meant, I will simply say this: thank you. Thank you all, so very much. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the contribution of the participants in this study. These men opened their doors and their spaces to me, sharing stories and private moments, trusting me to care for the lives they shared, and to them I am forever thankful. I hope the work I present here is one in which they can take pride and know that the trust they gave was respected. I also hope to end by reminding them that the stories they shared of themselves contributed to a deeper understanding of myself and my own life as a white man from the Midwest growing up in a world of unspoken segregation. I believe the work I present here, which would not exist without the support of these men, will allow others to ask similar questions about their own lives and their own experiences in public schools.

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