What Children Know: Counter-Storytelling to Disrupt Castrated Curriculum, Estranged Labor, and Production of Commodified Children

• In Event: Children's Agentic Positioning in Research: A Critical Examination of Participatory Research Methodologies With Young Children

Abstract

Dominant practices in elementary schools, especially those K-5 schools that serve communities of color, often represent oppressive interpretations of curriculum in relation to children. This paper represents findings emerging from the stories told by children - as a participatory methodology - that illustrate their critical perspectives on a dominant curriculum that is often narrow and disconnected from the meaning and “learning” that school promises. Children’s schooled qualities of experience reflect social patterns of what Marx terms “estranged labor” in the context of schooled/capitalist modes of production. “Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity” (Marx 1844/1968, p. 107), and it is so for the children and their school labor. In commodified schooling, curriculum is castrated with surgical precision with a tragic effect of loss of pleasure and possibility of life, and a child experiences her labor as outside of herself, requiring her to deny herself as she feels outside of her efforts and as her work feels outside of herself. As one of the children interviewed noted, “We write something every day, sometimes 2 or 3 pages a day. No one ever reads it.” She knows.
This paper highlights examples of children’s voiced insights that have emerged from gatherings of counter-stories of children from primary grade classrooms in urban schools…stories shared in the context of:
❏ Classroom observations and interactions in the context of collaborations in school settings
❏ Conversations with children about their lived experiences in school and their relationship with school labor (schoolwork)
❏ Drawings and notes generated by children
Thus, children shared clear evidence that the castrated curricula and estranged labor that they experience “constitute a form of alienation that breaks students' intellectual will and forces upon them a regimen of compulsory labor” (Garrison , 2012, p. 13). It is a sad note that children can see and name the emptiness of the tasks they spend their days laboring over, and yet, too often, operate under the assumption that coerced labor on estranged and disembodied tasks is inescapable. A consequence of schooled estranged labor was articulated profoundly by a third-grader when he offered his insights on the purpose and function of his daily lessons in school: “I just do the work, but why? They are just making me do this for another grade. Grade, grade, grade, grade. Grade here, grade there. Like why? This don’t mean nothing to me. What is this even about? What am I actually going to do with this?” He knows.
But all is not lost. The children rise and there is resistance and power to be found in the primary-grade classroom. Children demonstrate their awareness of and struggle against exploitative estranged labor through their counter-storytelling and through their subversive and explicit disruption of castrated and commodified curriculum. They know.
(Word Count: 463)

Author

• Sheri L. Leafgren, Miami University