“Holding ___ Accountable” : Laying the Groundwork for Accountability Culture in Secondary Education

• In Event: Imagining Beyond the Epistemes, Structures, and Practices of Schooling: Black Intergenerational and Interdisciplinary Abolitionist Perspectives

Abstract

This paper delves into the prospect of adopting a communal understanding and approach to "accountability" in secondary education and examines its implications for abolitionist pedagogy. Conclusions are based on close reading and linguistic analysis of transcripts drawn from interviews between researchers and seventh-grade students after an abolitionist curricular intervention. The application of curated abolitionist principles provided a medium for communal accountability instruction for middle school students, specifically Black and brown students, with a focus on each individual’s responsibility to a whole.
Literature on accountability in education most commonly describes teachers as instructors of accountability. Most often, accountability is used to describe a mechanism that teachers use to encourage young people to maintain effort and motivation for high performance (e.g. Carnoy & Loeb, 2002; Figlio & Loeb, 2011; Wormeli, 2006). In this conception, bad grades indicate a lack of effort and some form of “accountability” consequently fuels a guilt-ridden approach to students’ studies. Thus, only self-focused accountability is conveyed, but no other-focused accountability is taught. Understandings of accountability like this, such as we see in most school settings, especially in the arena of discipline, have proven to be harmful to marginalized students, as can be seen in the disproportionate rates of disciplinary measures taken and fewer increases in academic performance for Black students specifically (e.g. Ladd, 1999; Nowicki, 1999). Pushing back against these punitive and self-focused forms of accountability, the approach to this paper hinges upon the logic of Black liberation theorists like bell hooks (1998) and the concepts of linguistic justice and agency of April Baker-Bell (2020) to highlight the potential that rests in pedagogy that teaches communal accountability. The results of the analysis of 10 students interviewed after an abolitionist curricular intervention indicate key implications for accountability instruction for Black and brown students. The sociolinguistic analysis performed on the young people’s words uncovers how a communal accountability pedagogy can help Black students foster a sense of responsibility to both themselves and their communities.
The analysis of the project detailed in this paper is rooted in the sociolinguistic theory of Rickford (1997) and Labov (1970), which provide guides on both navigating non-standard language practices and performing linguistic research with these marginalized communities. More specifically, analysis relied upon the identification of any mentions of keywords/phrases “accountability” and “accountable” in interview transcripts to assess linguistic attributes of student responses relating to accountability. The results of said analysis are: 1) students exhibited typical syntactic structure to express community accountability, indicating comprehension of an other-focused version of accountability and 2) students exhibited atypical structure to emphasize negative or harmful actions. These findings highlight tensions between a societal labeling of accountability that demeans individuals based on their actions versus what we describe as an understanding of accountability that focuses on the valence of individual actions rather than the individuals themselves. Implications for this work include teaching community-based accountability that inherently links to the communal nature involved in abolitionist movements (Hayes and Kaba, 2023).

Authors

• Mikaela Belle Martin, University of Pennsylvania

• Zoria Thomas, Florida A&M University