Animating Discipline Disparities Through Disabling Practices: Girls of Color and Unsupportive Classrooms

• In Event: DisCrit: Mapping and Excavating the Intersections of Race and Dis/Ability

Abstract

This qualitative inquiry sought to reveal the school mechanisms that perpetuate, challenge, and interrupt disciplinary and educational disparities for girls of color. Girls of color experience exclusionary discipline more often than their white female peers and these inequitable practices contribute to educational opportunity gaps across the country (Chesney-Lind, 2010; Morris, 2016). The team drew upon tenets of Dis/ability Critical Race Studies to foreground the positioning of the girls. Interviews and focus groups with girls of color afforded the participants opportunities to be knowledge generators, discussing challenges and solutions to dismantle discriminatory school practices. This paper discusses the practices that disable and enable girls of color, from their experiences. Implications for policy, research, and practice will be considered.

Authors

• Subini Ancy Annamma, The University of Kansas

• Amanda L. Miller, University of Kansas

• Elizabeth Jackson, The University of Kansas