2026 Theses Doctoral

The Kids of the Pike: Constructing Our Personal Geographies One Block at a Time

Constantine, Dahlia

Walking the streets of “The Pike” with youth who once held my hand as third-graders and now tower over me as teenagers, I found myself tracing the contours of a community in transformation. This dissertation follows diverse young people as they navigate, document, and story their personal geographies in a rapidly gentrifying Northern Virginia corridor—a place where Ethiopian restaurants sit next to Bolivian bakeries, where luxury apartments rise where family pharmacies once stood, where the future keeps arriving before anyone asked for it.

Drawing on childhood geographies, multimodal literacy studies, and place-based education, I posed three research questions: What are the personal geographies of a diverse group of kids in the Commonwealth Pike community? What does it mean to be me in this place? How do a diverse group of kids in the Commonwealth Pike community story their personal geographies?

My methodology embraced walking as both method and metaphor—understanding that some knowledge only emerges in movement, that stories unfold in the space between one step and the next. Through walking interviews, photography, sketching, and participant observation, youth taught me to see their Pike—not the one in planning documents, but the one that lives in sidewalk cracks holding invisible histories, in sketches tracking which businesses "have the flavor of the Pike," in photographs preserving places that will soon exist only in memory.

Findings reveal that personal geographies aren't just mental maps but embodied practices—daily pilgrimages to shuttered stores, deliberate routes that resist efficiency in favor of meaning. Youth navigate through pedagogies of belonging, where landmarks become teachers, instructing them in who they are through accumulated memories. Their geographies are temporal palimpsests, layered with what was, what is, and what might have been. They remain in place while the place itself transforms into something unrecognizable, staying home while home becomes elsewhere.

For curriculum and teaching, this work demonstrates how place-based pedagogies can honor the sophisticated spatial knowledge students already possess. Walking methodologies and multimodal documentation position students as researchers of their own lives, knowledge creators rather than receivers. The dissertation shows how attending to student geographies can inform culturally sustaining teaching practices that recognize young people as experts on their own experiences.

This research extends our understanding of multimodal literacies by revealing how different modes of expression—walking, photographing, sketching—produce distinct ways of knowing a place. It argues that youth perspectives on community change aren't just worthy of inclusion in educational spaces—they're essential for understanding what education might mean in communities where the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet.