BETWEEN HOPE AND HOPELESSNESS. CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND STUDENT MOBILIZATION IN A CHILEAN PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL Luis Rodrigo Mayorga Camus Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Luis Rodrigo Mayorga Camus All Rights Reserved Abstract Between hope and hopelessness. Citizenship education and student mobilization in a Chilean public high school. Luis Rodrigo Mayorga Camus During the last decade, Chilean high school students have exploded into the international spotlight for social organizing. They also have managed to achieve significant changes in some of the major educational policies governing their schools. In this work I examine how student political mobilization affects the ways in which these young people learn to be citizens inside and outside of public high schools. I also explore the implications of these processes for democratic citizenship education. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a public high school located in Chile’s capital city of Santiago, I analyze the main citizenship education practices in which these high school students engaged. I examine these practices as they occur within schools – namely, those related with the national curriculum for citizenship education and the varied ways in which it is implemented, appropriated and resisted – as well as in the streets – specifically, practices in which these young people engage in the course of their participation in student movements. I also focus on the different ways in which Chilean students make use of history in order to learn new ways of enacting their citizenship, exploring how these high schoolers’ relationships with the past and the future are significant for educational and political processes. This work reaches three main conclusions, all of them significant for researchers and educators interested in citizenship education. First, civic engagement takes varied forms and discourses of youth apathy obscure several of these forms as well as the material obstacles that hinder youth civic engagement. Second, high school students actively participate in the constant production of the state, not only as participants in social movements, but also in their everyday lives within their high schools. Third, that one of the main ways in which students participate of this production is by making use of the past and imagining the future while enacting their citizenship. Table of Contents Table of Contents .........................................................................................................................i List of Figures and Tables ......................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................... iv Dedication .................................................................................................................................. x Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 I.1 Civic engagement as a research problem. ........................................................................... 5 I.2 Conducting ethnographic research in times of contention and upheaval .............................. 8 I.3 Dissertation’s structure..................................................................................................... 20 I.4 Importance of the work .................................................................................................... 23 Chapter 1: Studying citizenship: politics, education and history ................................................ 25 1.1 What is citizenship anyways? .......................................................................................... 26 1.2 Citizenship as a political achievement: state, social movements and democracy .............. 32 1.3 Becoming citizens: anthropology of citizenship education and situated learning .............. 36 1.4 Citizenship as an historical production: the importance of historical consciousness ......... 40 1.5 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 43 Chapter 2: A (very) brief history of citizenship education in Chile ............................................ 45 2.1 Kinds of citizenship education in the history of Chilean public schooling (1842-1973) .... 46 2.2 The Pinochet dictatorship and the neoliberal turn (1973-1990) ........................................ 58 2.3 The Long Democratic Transition (1990-2006) ................................................................. 65 2.4 The Decade of Student Movements (2006-2016) ............................................................. 70 2.5 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 76 Chapter 3: Learning about citizenship in (and from) the classroom............................................ 78 3.1 The formal (national) citizenship education curriculum ................................................... 81 3.2 The formal (school) citizenship education curriculum...................................................... 87 3.3 Expanding the curricular borders through formal citizenship education practices ............. 96 3.4 The material and organizational contexts of citizenship education ................................. 100 3.5 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 107 Chapter 4: Building political communities of practice inside the school: the cohort-group and the student government ................................................................................................................. 109 4.1 The cohort-group as a collective referent ....................................................................... 112 4.2 The cohort-group as a political community of practice................................................... 116 4.3 The student government as a political community of practice ........................................ 125 4.4 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 133 Chapter 5: Of Demonstration IDs and lemons: citizenship education in student protests .......... 136 5.1 The student contentious politics landscape..................................................................... 138 5.2 Adapting to student protests (and learning in the process) .............................................. 142 5.3 Street demonstrations as performative (and instructional) work ..................................... 146 5.4 Learning about state violence and solidarity while protesting ........................................ 151 5.5 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 158 i Chapter 6: Fighting against oblivion: student mobilization and the historical production of a comunidad escolar .................................................................................................................. 160 6.1 Modifying the conditions of a school through contentious politics ................................. 163 6.2 Strategies for legitimizing students’ protest actions ....................................................... 170 6.3 “Nos están condenando al olvido.” Making use of history and producing a comunidad escolar through student protests ........................................................................................... 176 6.4 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 186 Conclusion: Between hope and hopelessness........................................................................... 189 C.1 The multiple faces of civic engagement and the importance of collective endeavors ..... 190 C.2 Schools and social movements as a locus of state production ........................................ 193 C.3 The temporal dimension of citizenship .......................................................................... 196 C.4 Epilogue: Hopelessness and hope ................................................................................. 198 Endnotes ................................................................................................................................. 210 References .............................................................................................................................. 213 ii List of Figures and Tables Table 1: List of 2M students. 11 Table 2: 2M weekly schedule. 12 Table 3: Primary students attending a history of Chile class (1880-1895). 52 Table 4: Number and percentage of Expected Learning Objectives and Required 84 Contents addressing past-present connections in the 10th grade HGSS Curricular Program. Table 5: Number and percentage of Evaluation Standards and Pedagogical Activities 86 addressing past-present connections in the 10th grade HGSS Curricular Program. Figure 1: Student government institutions. 126 Table 6: Liceo Muñoz Hermosilla students’ list of demands and state actors 168 addressed. iii Acknowledgments “It takes a village to write a dissertation.” I heard