"Good Kid" or "Behavior Problem": Standardization, Bias, and Discipline in the Figured World of Kindergarten

• In Event: 28.034 - Behind the "Discipline Gap": Racialized Experiences of School and Classroom Discipline

Abstract

Context & Objectives

Recognizing that experiences of exclusionary discipline profoundly shape young children’s attachment relationships, school ties, and long-term academic trajectories (Ferguson, 2000), this paper examines the processes through which kindergarten students come to be positioned as “good kids” or “behavior problems.” Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic study of discipline in three kindergarten classrooms, I investigate how standardized, accountability-driven contexts shape educators’ processes of identifying and responding to misbehavior, and how these dynamics are inflected by assumptions about race and ability.

Theoretical Framework & Methods

This presentation stems from an ethnographic multi-case study exploring how kindergarten teachers understand and enact discipline in kindergarten. Conceptualizing classroom discipline as a situated sociocultural practice, I utilize “figured worlds” to draw attention to the “frames of meaning” (Holland, 1998, p. 271) that mediate teachers’ sense-making around behavior and that shape their decisions to employ discipline. I examine the classroom interactions, discourses, and cultural practices that shape how children’s behavior is perceived and identified as inappropriate, and the ways in which historical relations of power are negotiated, challenged, and reproduced within particular classroom environments.

Research for this project took place in two elementary schools in Fairdale (pseudonym), a mid-sized Midwestern school district that had recently revised its disciplinary code as part of a broader effort to address long-standing racial disparities in academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes. Data sources include approximately 425 hours of participant observation over the course of an academic year; over 30 hours of semi-structured interviews with educators and school staff; and policy documents, curriculum materials, and instructional artifacts.

Findings

I find that Fairdale’s equity aims were undercut, in part, by tensions between the relational approaches to student behavior prescribed by the discipline policy and the mandates and priorities advanced by other district- and school-level initiatives. Specifically, standardized, accountability-driven contexts reinforced narrow conceptions of good behavior, discouraged authentic relationship-building, and shaped educators’ processes of identifying and responding to misbehavior. Building on implicit bias research, I demonstrate how these contexts often impeded individual- and school-level efforts to counter race- and ability-biases, and how the effect of these biases was often magnified in ambiguous situations and when teachers experienced high cognitive load.

Significance

Although a growing literature examines the racial and cultural underpinnings of school discipline (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Monroe, 2005; Skiba, Arredondo, & Williams, 2014), this research is limited by its focus on either individual teachers or school policies as the unit of analysis. In this paper, I focus on examples of “unarchived” discipline (Wun, 2016)—those that do not escalate to the level of office referral or suspension—to highlight the subtle acts of positioning and control that undergird schools’ reported discipline outcomes. By investigating classroom discipline as a situated sociocultural practice (Vavrus & Cole, 2002), this paper sheds light on the web of routine practices and contexts that help drive broader discipline inequities during the critical early childhood years, and uncovers how race- and ability-based biases are perpetuated under ostensibly equity-oriented policies.

Author

• Kathryn Boonstra, University of Wisconsin - Madison