University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring August 2014 On Being and Becoming: An Exploration of Young People’s Experiences with Status and Power Keri L. DeJong University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Other Education Commons Recommended Citation DeJong, Keri L., "On Being and Becoming: An Exploration of Young People’s Experiences with Status and Power" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 71. https://doi.org/10.7275/9zvb-3c13 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/71 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. On Being and Becoming: An Exploration of Young People’s Experiences with Status and Power A Dissertation Presented by KERI L. DEJONG Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF EDUCATION May 2014 College of Education Social Justice Education © Copyright by Keri L. DeJong 2014 All Rights Reserved On Being and Becoming: An Exploration of Young People’s Experiences with Status and Power A Dissertation Presented by KERI L. DEJONG Approved as to style and content by: __________________________________ Barbara J. Love, Chair __________________________________ Ximena Zúñiga, Member _________________________________ Patrick Mensah, Member ______________________________ Christine McCormick, Dean College of Education ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to my Dissertation Committee. To Dr. Barbara Love, you believed in me before I was able to believe in myself. I am so grateful for your guidance, imagination, hard work, commitment to young people, to healing, and to human liberation. Your powerful scholarship and praxis continue to inspire me and inform all of my work. To Dr. Ximena Zúñiga, thank you for challenging me to think about myself as a researcher and for being able to find organization in what felt like sheer literature review chaos. Thank you for also believing in me and for reminding me that when things get stressful, silliness is an excellent coping strategy. To Dr. Patrick Mensah, thank you for your thoughtful treatment of this dissertation. I appreciate your commitment to the integrity of this work. To my nieces, Jacoba Sage and Jasmine Rose, and to my nephew, Nicolas Bair, I dedicate this dissertation to you. I have learned so much about myself getting to be your Auntie Hachoo. Thank you for showing me what’s hard, complicated, sweet, and powerful about your lives. I’m all yours, forever. To my sister, Kimberly De Jong, thank you for being willing to share your struggles, triumphs, and excellent sense of humor with me and for being excited about this work. To my mom, Joanne Feenstra, thank you for your hard work, your commitment to our survival, and your willingness to take a different path from the one that had been carved out for you. You are amazing. To everyone in the Social Justice Education program, past, present, and future, thank you for including adultism/youth oppression in your own social justice work. Thank you, Maurianne Adams and Bailey Jackson, for challenging me to think differently about how to present the issues of adultism. Thank you, Carla Wojczuk and iv Julian Rowand, for dreaming with me, reading drafts, and for encouraging me to explore and include bodies of theory that were new to me. Thank you, Joanna Kent Katz, for cheering me on, for celebrating milestones with sweet notes and new earrings, and for reading my work and listening to my thinking. To Elaine Brigham and Diane Fedorchak, thank you for being my home-away-from-home and for living this work all summer long and for finding new ways to be in relationships with young people that inspire me! Thank you to Jen Daigle-Matos, Ojae Beale, Chase Catalano, Rachel Wagner, Christopher Hughbanks, Tyson Rose, Tommy Thompson, Amy Calandrella, Ananda Timpane, Beth Mattison, Romina Pacheco, Christopher Hamilton, Lisa Wall, and Emily Pritchard for all of your very important contributions to this work. Your friendship, support, challenge, and good thinking have been invaluable. To Nini Hayes, Molly Keehn, and Dre Domingue, thank you for keeping me company on writing dates and making dissertating fun. Also thank you to Tanya Williams, Teeomm Williams, Rani Varghese, Mike Funk, and Marcella Runnell-Hall for showing me how it’s done! And of course, to my editor, Elaine Whitlock, thank you for the challenges, the coaching, and the much needed encouragement. I am deeply grateful for the work and thinking of Yasmina Mattison who has presented sections of this research with me and has been an inspired, knowledgeable, and courageous consultant. Thank you to the students in my Exploring Youth Oppression class at Hampshire College for our thought-provoking discussions on adultism and youth oppression. Thank you to the participants of this study, who have made this work possible. I express my deepest gratitude for your gift of sharing your stories with me. v And finally, to Kris Baker, thank you for being a complete and total love and for seeing me through both the joyful and challenging parts of this process. I love you! vi ABSTRACT ON BEING AND BECOMING: AN EXPLORATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES WITH STATUS AND POWER MAY 2014 KERI L. DEJONG, B.S., COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY M.Ed., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ed.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by Professor Emerita Barbara J. Love The purpose of this qualitative study is to understand how young people in a high school and a community-based setting experience status and power related to age. This study assumes that discourses of childhood are constructed with a socio-political purpose. Literature from Critical Youth Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Feminist Theory, and Social Justice Education provide the theoretical and conceptual foundations. This research expands social justice education literature to include adultism/youth oppression as a social justice issue, centering the voices and experiences of those targeted by youth oppression. Research questions explored 1) what information young people encounter on a daily basis that communicates age as a form of status, 2) the impacts of young people’s status related to age, and 3) ways in which young people see themselves exercising power. Through thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) of structured group and pair interviews, this study explores the thinking and critiques of a diverse group of fourteen young people about the period of childhood Findings suggest that participants regularly navigated negative beliefs about young people that were pervasive at interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels. These beliefs often characterize young people as vii irresponsible, disrespectful, lazy, apathetic, and spoiled. Participants’ challenges were often trivialized or dismissed by adults on the basis of popular understandings that young people are immature, developmentally incomplete, and overly dramatic. Participants described navigating a harmful double standard of respect and a lack of supportive, equitable relationships with adults in a range of reported interactions. Some participants described “giving-up” as a strategy to maintain peace with adults, and forms of economic and political exclusion that kept them from challenging or changing their status. Other participants discussed ways they see “other” young people exercise power while acknowledging their own experience of powerlessness. Many participants described leadership opportunities as “charades of empowerment” that were limited and controlled by adults. This study concludes that young people’s status indicates oppression and that young people’s knowledge should be included in social justice praxis. The suggestions of participants and data analysis revealed nine specific strategies that adults can implement to support more equitable partnerships between young people and adults. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................ iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... xv LIST OF FIGURES .....................................................................................................xvi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................1 Problem Statement ..............................................................................................6 Statement of Purpose ..........................................................................................7 Rationale .............................................................................................................7 Significance for the Researcher ...........................................................................9 Significance for Social Justice Education .......................................................... 11 Research Questions ..........................................................................................