First Time-Out: A Qualitative Study of Classroom Discipline in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Researchers have documented alarming racial disparities in school discipline beginning as early as preschool (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). This project investigates discipline practices during the early childhood years, when educational experiences and relationships powerfully shape young children’s later academic attainment, social development, and school attachment. Through a yearlong ethnographic multi-case study of three kindergarten classrooms in two different schools, this project examines the routine interactions and classroom processes that drive unequal discipline outcomes. Situated in a district—Fairdale1—where recent reforms aim to address longstanding racial disparities in academic achievement and school discipline, this project explores how equity-oriented initiatives are carried out in particular school and classroom contexts. Two overarching research questions guided this inquiry: 1) How do kindergarten teachers understand and enact discipline? 2) What accounts for discipline practices in kindergarten contexts?

To address these questions, I draw on theories of structural racism (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2014) and figured worlds (Holland et al, 1998). This project advances research around the processes driving large-scale racial discipline disparities by examining teachers’ meaning-making around student behavior and showing how these processes are shaped by both longstanding racialized social structures and ideologies, as well as specific classroom contexts and localized meaning systems.

Author

• Kathryn Boonstra, University of Wisconsin - Madison