Educational change as a social, political, and instructional movement

This thesis explores how and under what conditions a countercultural instructional practice - that is, a practice that is qualitatively distinct from the conventional instructional culture and power relations of schooling - can be learned and disseminated on a large scale, using the Learning Community Project (LCP) in Mexico as a case study. By integrating knowledge and theory from the fields of large-scale instructional improvement and widespread cultural change, it examines processes and enabling conditions for radical instructional transformation in the instructional, social, and political arenas. The thesis investigates the role of a critical community in the design, development and introduction of a countercultural practice in a handful of classrooms and schools, and the processes and conditions that enabled its adoption by the Ministry of Education and its rapid expansion to thousands of schools across the country. It also examines the distinctive features of the LCP model as a countercultural practice, the motivations of its actors to participate in and support the project, the processes through which the practice is learned, consolidated, and disseminated to new schools, and the interactions of LCP actors with their surrounding institutional environments as they endeavor to transform their practice. The data analyzed consists of 668 documents, classroom observations in 8 schools in the State of Zacatecas, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 LCP actors.