This paper examines the issue of Russian disinformation in Estonia and how the country has built resilience against this threat. Drawing upon existing literature and a series of interviews conducted with Estonians of a variety of professional backgrounds, this work explores Estonia's whole-of-society approach to resilience and examines its incorporation of national security strategy, inter-institutional cooperation, and media literacy education. Ultimately, this paper argues that Estonia's efforts have been largely successful in enabling the country to strengthen its society against Russian disinformation and offers key takeaways for other countries such as the United States.
School participatory budgeting has the potential, at least, to offer students an opportunity to experience deliberative democratic decision-making and thus enhance those capabilities critical for effective citizenship. More ambitiously, school participatory budgeting presents an opportunity to delicately and steadily transform school governance to give real decision-making power to students.
The four stand-alone articles that make up this dissertation are four facets of a single case study on the first large-scale instance of school participatory budgeting in the United States. They began with the question: What were the accomplishments and challenges of school participatory budgeting in a large secondary school district in the Southwestern United States in its initial implementation?
This question was interpreted and answered differently in each article. The first article examines aspects of process design and how participatory budgeting might contribute not only to citizenship learning but also the expansion of student voice. The experiences of students, in the second article, and those of teachers and administrators, in the third article, are explored through analysis of interview data. The final article addresses this question by drawing on my own experience of implementing school participatory budgeting using analytic autoethnography. This dissertation presents school participatory budgeting from multiple perspectives and recommends more empirical research on the structure of the process before, during, and after implementation.
This dissertation examines this approach to citizenship learning dynamically by using various methodologies and bringing together the literature on student voice, citizenship learning, participatory budgeting, and curriculum studies in order to enrich the discussions and provide actionable knowledge for advocates and practitioners.
This undergraduate honors thesis explores the process and motivating factors associated with immigrants from Mexico who are in the process of becoming U.S. citizens. This project is based on 20 interviews with Legal Permanent Residents (LPR) of Mexican origin who have had lawful permanent status for 20 years or more. While immigrants are eligible to apply for citizenship after five years of being LPRs, most, like my respondents, take longer. Why do LPRs experience a delay of 20 years or more in applying for citizenship? Findings from this study reveal that motivating factors associated with becoming a U.S. citizen are 1) a desire to be socially accepted and integrated by and into American society; 2) to overcome the fear of failing their citizenship interview; and 3) to change the growing anti-immigrant rhetoric by becoming citizens and increasing the presence of naturalized citizens in American society. Respondents also revealed that their bilingual-speaking children were the biggest motivators that helped with accessing information in regard to citizenship and voting.