Canaries in the mine

Description

Despite decades of research on classroom management and discipline, so-called "bad behavior" persists and so does our exasperation with it. Elementary teachers in urban schools name behavioral challenges as their number one concern, and many cite behavioral problems as their top reason for leaving the profession (Walter, Gouze & Lim, 2006). Misbehaved youth are punished by exclusion, missing academic content and sometimes getting suspended and expelled so often that graduation becomes impossible (Ayers, Dohrn & Ayers, 2001). Importantly, the problem starts early. Children as young as 2 years old are expelled from preschool in alarming rates (Gilliam, 2005). This study is a collection of four portraits of first- and second-graders identified by their teachers as "significantly misbehaved." Understanding these children as miner's canaries, I ask how their noncompliance signals aspects of schooling potentially toxic to all children. Specifically, I address the following research questions: 1. How does each child understand, negotiate, and otherwise interact with the cultural arrangements of school life—the rules, the categories and groupings, the routines, the expectations? 2. How does each child understand and make sense of her/his own behavior, and her/his relationship to school? 3. Taking these four cases together, what—if anything—might we learn about the cultural arrangements of schooling from the nature of the children's noncompliance?

I use observations of children at school and at home, formal, semi-structured interviews with key adults in the child's life, and visual methods—drawings and photography produced by the children—to weave portraits of each child. Both individually and collectively, these children offer up rich lessons about how to make human being visible in schools. Ultimately, I argue that they urge us toward three critical shifts in paradigm: from "fixing" children to understanding them; from discarding children to loving them; and from powering over children to sharing power with them.