Carcerality, Colonialism, and Cognition: Analyzing the Cultural Cognitive Structures That Uphold the Logics of Seclusion in Schools

• In Event: Beyond Normal: Cripping Policy and Practice to Construct Liberatory Educational Possibilities

Abstract

Purpose
We bring educational research about seclusion rooms into conversation with studies of critical geography, anticolonial theory, and disability studies to “crip” (McRuer, 2006) readings of policy and discourse around restraint and seclusion in schools. We surface how racist and ableist logics for seclusion are invisibilized through policy, examining how these logics persist through colloquial appropriations to dictate who belongs in school, and who does not. Specifically, we study how arguments in favor of seclusion rooms–and hesitations around their prohibition–are formed by and inform ideas around exclusion that are historically situated in colonial constructions of the “violent” or “problem child” (Author, 2019).
Theoretical Framework
Critical geographers argue that colonialism is a technique of domination that naturalizes a single vantage point to narrate where dominant and non-dominant people belong, serving as a presumably natural representation of the world order (McKittrick, 2006; Smith, 2012; Razack, 2002). Crip Theory offers a theoretical lens through which to interrogate rhetorics of “safety” that position some students as in need of isolation in the interest of others. Crip Theory offers a reading on the social exclusion of students that positions “violence” within power imbalances and relational ecologies through the lens of the isolated child. We examine how seclusion rooms carry forward a historical legacy of carcerality in North American schools, and as a contemporary mechanism of coloniality that relies on and reproduces racism and ableism. We disrupt the “safety vs. humanity trade-off” (Zwarenstein, 2019, p. 47) by drawing from critical geography and Crip Theory to interrogate the historical and cultural contexts that underlie cultural cognitive structures and rhetorically “justify” isolated rooms as a “logical” place for some children.
Methods and Data sources
To uncover the cultural cognitive schemas (D’Andrade, 2005) that underlie seclusion room use in North America, we targeted three areas from which to collect public opinions about seclusion rooms: legislation and educational policy and news and social media.
We review the “official” language from federal, state, and provincial guidelines, policies, and regulations pertaining to seclusion in the United States and Canada as we analyze local and colloquial language pertaining to seclusion in news and social media. Social media offers an opportunity to look at “local narratives” in order to “focus on how people and policies interact” (Sam, 2019, p. 336). Using NodeXL to find data on Twitter and YouTube, student researchers search public social media posts available on prominent platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for views of seclusion rooms, using the keywords of “seclusion,” “seclusion rooms,” “isolation rooms” “quiet rooms” “schools,” and “education.”

Findings and Significance
We explore the contradiction of “officially” acknowledging the harms of seclusion rooms in policy and the discursive acceptance–and defense– of their use. By examining carceral rhetorics of seclusion for some children, we can more aptly move toward imagining and constructing schools as relational places that are saturated with power imbalances. By making these imbalances visible, we can redefine “safety” through humanizing practices for those children who are most vulnerable to the risk of being restrained or secluded.

Authors

• Maureen Negrelli Coomer, Colorado College

• Hunter Knight, Western University