Imagining Alternatives: Young Black Voices on Discipline, Value, and Community in Education

• In Event: Writing, Righting, and Rioting Against Colonial-Carceral Machineries: School Abolition in Real Life, Time, and Context

Abstract

Objective/Purpose
This paper examines how young Black children interpret the role of school discipline and reflect on their teachers’ practices. This study extends the literature on the permeation of carcerality in education (Sojoyner, 2019) by diving deeper into the lived experiences, insights, and imaginations of young children regarding punishment and restoration at school.

Perspective/Theoretical framework
This paper draws on adult supremacy (Godwin, 2019), educational carcerality (Cabral, 2024) , and school abolition (Stovall, 2018) to examine how Black early elementary (K-2) children make sense of responses to harm in the classroom. The triangulation of these concepts extends literature on the interrogation of the infrastructural relationship between education and incarceration (Shange, 2019) by looking at some of our earliest sites of learning. These concepts form a symbiotic relationship, where adults impose carcerality onto educational spaces by positioning children as subjects to be controlled and disciplined, with Black children being disproportionately targeted by punishment (U.S. Education Department, Office for Civil Rights, 2021), which leads to internalized connections between “good”/“bad” behavior and one’s deservingness in a community.

Methods and Data sources
Through a qualitative narrative-based method, I interviewed six Black children and asked them to engage in three topics: (1) definitions of good and bad (2) imaginative narratives about school discipline (3) story response.

Results/Substantiated conclusions
This project’s findings suggest that children are interpreting school discipline as grounds for belonging in school. The majority of children saw a student’s moral value based on how their teachers treated them in the classroom. In doing so, these children internalized the connection between punishment and value that is evidenced in carceral thinking writ large (Kaba & Meiners, 2014). However, when asked to imagine how they would respond to challenging behavior if they had authority, some participants offered responses that departed from their teacher’s logic to ones rooted in forgiveness, empathy, and accountability, mirroring principles reflected in abolition.

These findings suggest 1) the presence of carceral thinking in early elementary classrooms 2) the ability for young people to critically reflect on the role and implementation of punishment in school 3) the social influence of a teacher’s disciplinary practices on their students starting at a young age 4) when taking the imaginations of children seriously, we can co-create learning spaces that do not rely on punishment.

Scientific/Scholarly Significance
This paper invites consideration of the following question: if carcerality is embodied and experienced in early learning spaces, then what role can abolition play in countering it? It highlights how young Black children are taking notice of carceral logics and applying those mindsets to different scenarios. This study offers potential for 1) more child-centered research methods 2) expansion of social reproduction theories in early learning 3) more intentional focus of abolition thought in early education.

Author

• Alexandrea R. Henry, Stanford University