“Uh-Uh, I don’t go for that!” Young Disabled Children of Color Subverting Schooling’s Carceral Logics

• In Event: Sustaining Agency Across Social Contexts: How Young Children and their Communities are Reclaiming Agency

Abstract

Purpose and Theoretical Perspectives
For multiply-marginalized communities, education has historically been a site of possibility, resistance, and liberation, a space to reimagine the world in the face of oppression, assimilation, and erasure (e.g. Walker, 2018; Valenzuela, 1999). Yet today, in many U.S. schools serving these same communities, young children – particularly disabled children – often encounter schooling not as liberatory, but as a mechanism of control. Classrooms are shaped by carceral logics in which children are closely monitored, swiftly disciplined, and measured against norms rooted in whiteness, ableism, individualism, and neoliberal values (Annamma & Morrison, 2018; Nanda, 2019). In these contexts, disabled children of color are policed to maintain social hierarchies (Annamma, 2018; Beneke et al., 2022).

How do young disabled children of color sustain their humanity in restrictive settings? Drawing from the DisCrit Classroom Ecology framework (Annamma & Morrison, 2018), we explore how disabled Black and Latinx kindergartners enact their brilliance in subversive ways. Through everyday acts of resistance to dominant, nondisabled norms, the children subversively asserted agency – playing, building relationships, and experiencing joy – to protest carceral logics and maintain their humanity even in the settings structured by surveillance and control.

Methods and Data Sources
Data come from a larger participant observation study involving 6 classrooms in an inclusive public charter school serving Black and Latinx youth. All classrooms had 2-3 teachers, and up to 40% of the students had IEPs. We focus on two kindergarten classrooms where carceral logics were particularly strong. We conducted five days of observation in each classroom, collecting field notes focused on children’s agency. We also conducted three 1-1.5 hour interviews with the teaching teams, which were recorded and transcribed. A thematic comparative analysis across classrooms and data sources surfaced patterns in how children enacted agency and how adults responded.

Results
Even within restrictive environments, children leveraged their gifts (Annamma & Morrison, 2018), or their genius (Muhammad, 2023) to express themselves, connect with peers and contexts, and create their own liberatory encounters. Though their movement, language, and interactions were strictly managed, they subversively found moments to experience joy, develop relationships, and engage in accessible, collaborative, playful learning. Children initiated inquiry, helped one another, told stories, solved problems, played, and made home/community connections – engagements often unrecognized or disciplined in compliance-focused ecologies. Carceral norms limited teachers’ ability to notice and nurture the agency and brilliance embodied by children. These findings illustrate how a DisCrit Classroom Ecology can emerge when adults reframe everyday child-led encounters as invitations to root pedagogy in relationships, care, and curiosity toward the multiple and dynamic ways young children of color with disabilities engage.

Significance
This study underscores how educators can reimagine schools from pathologizing spaces into liberatory ones by paying close attention to young disabled children’s subversive agency and viewing their behaviors as brilliant acts of resistance. Attending to multiply-marginalized children’s everyday refusals, joys, and connections invites more humanizing and just classroom ecologies.

Authors

• Soyoung Park, Bank Street College of Education

• Natacha Ndabahagamye Jones, University of North Texas