Classroom Management as the Practice of Freedom: Trading What to Do for How to Be

• In Event: 54.057 - Classroom Discipline and Misbehavior: Student Perspectives and School Practices

Abstract

This paper closely explores the everyday lives of four young “troublemakers,” mining their experiences both at home and at school for lessons in what their noncompliance might signal about the cultural and social conditions of their classrooms.
Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus are first- and second-graders identified by their teachers as particularly difficult to manage, as they regularly proved unwilling and/or unable to meet the demands of schooling. But rather than focus on how to change these behaviors, this paper is interested in understanding them—as social and cultural problems rather than individual and psychological ones. The paper asks what these children can teach us about the conditions of schooling with which they are forced to comply.

Author

• Carla Shalaby, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor