Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

8-3-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational Policy and Leadership

Program

Educational Policy and Leadership

First Advisor

Dr. Deborah Schussler

Committee Members

Donald Peurach; Kristen Wilcox

Keywords

Educational Change, Collaborative planning, educational politics, comparative case study, stakeholder participation, complexity

Subject Categories

Educational Administration and Supervision | Educational Leadership | Education Policy | Elementary and Middle and Secondary Education Administration | International and Comparative Education | Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation

Abstract

Public education in the United States is socially and politically constructed, and ongoing reforms increasingly require collaborative engagement among diverse stakeholders amid heightened divisiveness. This mixed methods comparative case study examined how educational stakeholders make sense of one another’s perspectives during district-level collaborative work and the conditions that may foster conscientization, the critical reflection on one’s positionality. Two school districts developing a Profile of a Graduate (POG) and one engaged in deliberation about the relationship between public and charter schools within its community serve as comparative cases. The study triangulated meeting observations, a post-deliberation survey of stakeholders (N = 43), 18 stakeholder interviews, and five leader interviews across two waves, analyzed through a deductive codebook anchored in sensemaking and conscientization theory and supplemented by inductive thematic analysis.

Three pathways emerged. First, Case A managed complexity by reducing it, through a curated, smaller-scale process led by personal facilitation that produced foundational positionality reflection and directional but partial movement toward agreement. Second, Case B embraced complexity but did not harness it; the open-attendance, public-comment-dominated formal process did not make room for substantive deliberative work, which occurred in informal channels outside it. Third, Case C harnessed complexity through structured design, with third-party facilitation, multi-revision processes, and pre-engagement infrastructure producing broad peer engagement and ownership consolidation within the formal process. Read together, the three pathways indicate that the design conditions of collaborative deliberation determine whether substantive sensemaking, the conditions that may foster conscientization, and agreement-finding work occur within the formal process or are displaced to informal channels. The dissertation contributes practical, theoretical, and methodological resources for educational leaders, policymakers, and researchers concerned with how the design of collaborative processes shapes what those processes can ultimately achieve.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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