Navigating a Violent Production: Students, Race, Violence, and School Discipline

• In Event: Reclaiming Education: Youth Counternarratives in the Neoliberal Reform Era

Abstract

Purpose
This paper draws from studies that analyze the widespread racial inequalities of these institutional practices (Bowditch, 1993; Ferguson, 2001), but also departs from them by exploring the relationship between structural racism, “interracial” violence and school discipline practices from the perspectives of students, those most affected by violence and institutional anti-violence strategies. To this end, the paper also critically examines how students organize and resist the various forms of violence that impact their daily lives. In the past decade, there has been a renewal of national attention toward the issue of violence among young people in the United States (Peterson et al., 2007; Watts & Erevelles, 2004). However, there are growing concerns of racial biases against students of color in institutional anti-violence practices resulting in disproportionate rates of suspensions and expulsions of Black and Latino youth (Skiba, et al. 2002). Consequently, in 2010 the United States’ Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Education (DOE) hosted a joint conference, inviting school discipline scholars and researchers to discuss racial discrimination in school violence prevention practices.

Theoretical Perspective
Using the concept of counter-storytelling from critical race theory (CRT) (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) as guiding conceptual framework for this qualitative study, I examine the perspectives of students on issues of violence, particularly interracial violence, and school-based violence prevention policies. CRT investigates race and racism as productive constructs in the United States with material effects. Counter-storytelling highlights students’ perspectives on dominant discourses and their experiences navigating through and against various forms of violence.

Methods and Data
Data is based on semi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2006) with six students from a large suburb in Northern California and six students from South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both of these communities have received national attention regarding issues of race and youth violence. Students from this study met the following criteria: 1) experienced or witnessed violence 2) experienced or witnessed the implementation of school-based violence prevention practices. Guided by the following questions, youth narratives were evaluated for recurrent themes:
• How do students understand or define violence?
• What violence prevention policies or practices do they perceive are being used in the school?
• How do students understand and navigate through their experiences with violence and current violence prevention practices?

Results
Student narratives demonstrate that interpersonal violence and institutional anti-violence practices are inextricably connected to the problem of paradigmatic, structural and interpersonal racism (Sexton, 2010). Findings challenge popular discourses on race in the U.S., which are increasingly shaped by post-racial debates and multiculturalism. Student narratives also demonstrate that some of their experiences in school and youth organizing are shaped and affected by an interconnected relationship between violence, institutional antiviolence policies, and racism, as well as their efforts to alter or resist complex structures of school violence.

Significance
This paper contributes to education research on school discipline, urban school reform and race studies by including data from student perspectives on how they understand and navigate through multiple forms and levels of violence.

Author

• Connie Wun, University of California - Berkeley