Designing Education for Living Well? Rethinking Public Education and Ethnographic Intervention

Escalating incidents of social suffering take the form of anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts among students in the United States. Often this emotional insecurity overlaps with an increased sense of precarity and economic insecurity. Is it possible that the very conditions that are producing sufferings may also open a possibility for interventions on an ontological level that produce new possibilities for redefining success and how to live well together? Exploring a collaborative engagement within a high performing, midwestern United States K–12 public school system, this article analyzes community members' struggles to respond. Emphasis is placed upon considering how ethnographers and community members dialogically begin to think differently and collectively design new educational practices that allow for community members to think through the range of possibilities for what it might mean to educate for flexibility, striving for collective autonomy, and for producing the possibility of living well together in today's world

Autonomy · Ethnography · Flexibility (engineering · Intervention (counseling · Management · Pedagogy · Political science · Precarity · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Sociology · Community Health and Development · Gender Studies · Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education · Psychology · Service-Learning and Community Engagement