The Coloniality of Statewide Literacy Testing and #OptOut as a Decolonial Option
Kris Gutierrez, Professor
Education
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
The anti-testing opt-out movement is a grassroots movement in which parents/guardians choose not to have their children participate in their school’s statewide testing. This research is a social media ethnography in which we critically examine the discourse used in posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to promote the movement. Informed by decolonial theory on language, literacy, and institutionalized knowledge, we explore motives for opting out, and how opt-out pushes against the role that standardized testing plays in reinforcing colonial ideologies about language, knowledge, and in turn, being. In doing so, we examine whether this resistance movement represents a possibility towards decolonizing literacy from within the U.S. education system.
Role: The undergraduate research assistant’s tasks will include:
1. Screening for social media posts to include based on hashtags and dates
2. Assisting with coding posts using a qualitative coding system
3. Highlighting themes that emerge in the posts, and proposing new codes, as relevant
4. Checking in with the research supervisor weekly to discuss the project’s direction and emergent findings
The learning outcomes of this project are:
1. To understand the political motives of the opt-out movement as represented on social media
2. To examine the potential of the movement to push against colonial beliefs about education and academic achievement
3. For the undergraduate research assistant to gain skills in social media ethnography, data collection and cataloging, qualitative data coding, critical discourse analysis, and memoing.
Qualifications: The undergraduate research assistant will:
1. Be in their 3rd year or later;
2. Ideally have an interest in education, systemic inequity, decoloniality, and/or social media movements; and
3. Appreciate thoroughness and nuance, especially in the meaning of language.
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: This research can be done from home/remotely with virtual check-ins.
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology