Learning Lessons and Being Schooled: The Relational Lessons of Young Women in an Alternative High School

This dissertation is a qualitative investigation of 12 female high school graduates who had previously dropped out or were pushed out of public high school and who attended and graduated from Conservation High School (CHS), located in the Pacific Northwest. CHS is an alternative high school organized around an environmental conservation theme. In this study, participants describe how their relationships with peers and teachers in each school affected their commitment to finish school. I analyze participants\u27 awareness of how power dynamics were communicated to students through social organization, school practices, meaning making systems, constructions of identity, and others\u27 behavior. The youth interacted with peers and teachers based on their perceptions of their place in the social order of the school, reinforced by hearing such terms as at-risk, dropouts, behaviorally-disordered, and special education. I used Foucault\u27s concept of the self as a product of the disciplinary power of discourse to frame the study of these youth\u27s experience of being socially and therefore relationally positioned, a phenomenon I named relational regulation. In Chapter 4 participants describe how institutionalized practices, such as the management of school space, time, and organization, and informal regulations, such as emotional expression and bodily representations, were managed in their relationships in school. Participants describe the relational possibilities they experienced at CHS in comparison to their public school experiences. Themes were developed from their narratives, including getting to know you, being at each other\u27s throats, and schooling effects. In Chapter 5, I consider how participants use the discourses of being fake and being real to inform themselves about the relational terrain. Being fake is their term for a deceptive representation of self, while being real is their term for an honest one. I show how they use these discourses to resist and also reproduce some of the exclusionary politics they rejected in their public school that were central to their leaving school. In Chapter 6, I look at how the students negotiated the dominant discourse of hygienic femininity, while doing conservation work in the muddy outdoors. Last, I address why relational regulation matters and discuss implications for future research