Stephanie E. Schroeder
Professional Bio
Stephanie Schroeder joined the Penn State faculty as an Assistant Professor of Social Studies education in 2018. Her current work focuses on how teachers and activists use and learn from social media as they engage in the civic and professional sphere.
Research Interests
Social Media, Education Activism, Civic EngagementRelated Materials
This article explores adult participation in online social media resistance groups that formed after the 2016 U.S. presidential election (e.g., Indivisible), why individuals participate, and how their views of citizenship are transformed as a result of their participation. Reporting on demographic and open-ended qualitative survey data, this study describes the demographics of participants and employs inductive and deductive coding as analytic methods. Making use of transformative learning as a metatheory and coding with transformative learning typologies in mind, this article illustrates the range of learning outcomes experienced by participants. Our findings indicate the educative potential of online resistance groups, as participants deepened their understandings of democracy, grew more discerning about information shared online, developed confidence to take action, and saw themselves as newly positioned in democracy, connected and capable of making change.
This paper investigates the impact of the 2016 presidential election on the Opt Out Florida Network (OOFN). Findings indicate that the widespread protests against the Trump presidency after the election highlighted the need to reframe OOFN’s message in order to motivate membership to act for democratic schools. We suggest the outcome of OOFN’s protest largely depends on the resonance of OOFN’s framing tactics with the larger public and their own membership.
Opt Out Florida, a largely White, middle-class social movement comprised of parents – most often, mothers – opposed to high-stakes standardised testing in U.S. public schools, has received media criticism for its homogeneity. This article elucidates that trend while simultaneously offering a more nuanced view, using theories of internalised dominance, colourblindness, and powerblindness to analyse Opt Out members’ racial story lines and testimonies. These discursive frames underscore the paradox of a White, middle-class movement purportedly acting for social justice aims: to democratically solve the problem of high-stakes testing, Opt Out members must seek out diverse perspectives. Otherwise, they are not just opting out, but missing out.
Schroeder, S., Currin, E., & McCardle, T. (2018).“We’re kind of at a pivotal point”:Opt Out’s vision for an ethic of care in a post-neoliberal era. PolicyFutures in Education.
This article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a predominantly woman-led group seeking to dismantle neoliberal education policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Guided by Campbell’s assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a “gender revolution” and Noddings’s belief that those who have claimed power in the “traditional masculine structure” of our educational institutions will not readily cede their authority, we assert that movements like Opt Out are not only necessary to bring about a post-neoliberal future, but offer important insight into the role activist mothers may play in fulfilling that vision for all children. As a noticeably maternal movement, Opt Out displays a commitment to Noddings’s description of moral education and her assertion that “if an enterprise precludes…meeting the other in a caring relation, [one] must refuse to participate in that enterprise.” Understanding standardized tests as instruments of control meant to defund and privatize public education, Opt Out members actively resist them. Their ethic of care eschews corporate influence, and guides both their mission to return control of the classroom to the local level and their rejection of the deskilling and intensification of the teaching profession. Drawing on critical ethnographic data from OOF, we ultimately argue that the movement’s emphasis on the ideal moral and caring relations between school and child offers one example of what post-neoliberal education might look and sound like from a distinctly feminine perspective.
Schroeder, S., Currin, E., & McCardle, T. (2018). Mother tongues: the Opt Out movement’s vocal response to patriarchal, neoliberal education reform. Gender and Education, 30(8), 1001-1018.
This article explores the widespread and growing public backlash against high-stakes standardised testing in the United States, following the parent-led Opt Out movement’s quest to dismantle neoliberal educational policy by coaching children to boycott standardised tests. We analyse how our participants, mothers and female teachers in Opt Out Florida, use Facebook group pages as on-going critical sites of consciousness development where connected learning, knowing, and action occur. We illustrate how our participants, perceiving their children’s teachers as muzzled by neoliberal, patriarchal education reform, banded together to collectively attack a corporatised and violent system of American public education. Our focus on the role of mothers, their defence of teachers, and their attack on patriarchal neoliberalism fits within the larger history of the feminisation of the teaching profession and reveals how mothers in the domestic sphere have organised to wrest teaching from neoliberal reformers.
Schroeder, S. (2017). Democratic teacher education: From theory to praxis. Professing Education, 16(1), 10-24.
Since the founding of the United States, many Americans have recognized the “fragility and rarity” of democracy (Michelli & Keiser, 2005, p. 246). As a result, many have called for schools to inculcate the values of democracy in American youth (Barber, 1994). As one would expect, the nature of these calls has shifted over time as the perceived needs of the nation have fluctuated. This paper is yet another call for democratic education, an education that is as Ayers (2009) argues “eye-popping and mindblowing” (p. 3), an education that not only promotes and inspires democratic dispositions, knowledge, and values in students, but leads students through and engages them in the deliberative and collaborative processes of democracy. While contemporary scholars have called for democratic education at the K-12 level in order to increase civic participation (Apple & Beane, 2007; Ayers, 2009; Collins, 2009; Mitra & Serriere, 2015), I join the ranks of those scholars who call for the democratization of teacher education programs as a means to that same end. Soder (1996) explains that while “much has been said about the importance of schools in a democracy…many of those very same people…lapse into uncharacteristic silence as to the education of educators in these matters” (p. 249). In the twenty years since Soder made this claim, more has indeed been written, but arguably the silence around democratic teacher education has been raised to barely a whisper.
This paper is an attempt to bridge the divide between the scholarship calling for democratic education in our K-12 schools and the scholarship calling for the democratization of the institutions that educate and prepare our nation’s teachers. More specifically, I argue that any attempt to promote democratic education in K-12 schools must first begin by engaging teachers in the process of democratic education (Apple, 2000; Michelli, 2005), a shift that requires a drastic turn from the status quo and more mechanistic or methods-oriented models of teacher education. Indeed, “if democratic principles are to become an integral part of public education, such understanding must be incorporated into teacher education programs” (Pearl & Pryor, 2005, p. x). Incorporating democratic pedagogies and redesigning teacher education to be more democratic, then, is necessary if we wish to develop democratic citizenship in K-12 students. To foster a move towards democratic teacher education, I offer in this article both a philosophical framework for democratic teacher education and, tied to this framework, examples of democratic pedagogies, structures, and content that democratic teacher education programs may wish to implement to live up to the demands of a thriving democracy
Bondy, E., Beck, B., Curcio, R., & Schroeder, S. (2017). Dispositions for critical social justice teaching and learning. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 6(3).
This article examines the social justice dispositions that, when honed and developed over time, enable prospective teachers—and teacher educators—to embrace social justice praxis and persist in their everyday quest for equitable educational conditions, opportunities, and outcomes. Developed through work in a Community of Practice (CoP), these dispositions include radical openness, humility, and self-vigilance. In this article, we define each disposition and explore how they may be cultivated, enacted, and modeled in teacher education. These dispositions, we argue, serve as reminders of the unfinishedness of our work and the effort required to stay the course of equity and justice in the rough waters of the status quo.