Fugitive Kid Curricula: Unforgetting Children’s Acts of Learning Beyond Adult Control

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Unforgetting as Pedagogy: Reclaiming Histories and Reimagining Futures in Education (Table 9)

Abstract

This paper explores what I call fugitive kid curricula, the overlooked ways in which children resist the structures imposed on them in the classroom. These everyday acts reveal forms of curricula adults often ignore in their attempts to surveille children through testing, behavior charts, and constant assessment. Drawing from one case, I consider what adults might learn about learning when we attune ourselves to children’s fugitive acts.

Critical childhood studies theorizes childhoods as historically situated, socially constructed, and entangled with broader forces such as colonialism, enslavement, and heteronormativity (Spyrou et al., 2018). This ontology sees children as both shaped by and shaping their environments, making their everyday interactions crucial sites of analysis. Fugitive studies, grounded in Black studies and abolitionist thought, examines practices of refusal, escape, and survival within oppressive systems (Harney & Moten, 2013). Together, these frameworks position children as active participants whose relational practices can be read as fugitive acts. With these perspectives in mind, I conducted a six-month case study of a fourth grade classroom in NYC where I served as a participant-observer for five hours per week. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis, including fieldnotes, analytic memos, and pictures (Clarke & Braun, 2017). For this paper, I focus on a particularly meaningful moment that occurred on the first day that state exams were administered online.

As students sat in rows behind their privacy boards (normally used to prevent cheating during tests), waiting to begin the test, the server crashed. Told to remain in “test mode,” the children waited quietly at first. After 30 minutes, the teacher abandoned attempts to maintain order, and the students transformed the privacy boards into elaborate forts, building and rebuilding intricate structures together just as they did during indoor recess.

I argue that the children’s transformation of privacy boards into elaborate forts demonstrates a capacity to reimagine the purposes of institutional materials. This moment shows children asserting agency in shaping the classroom’s intellectual and social fabric, replacing “test-mode” compliance with curiosity, joy, and community-making. The act of building forts suggests that children actively seek privacy from adult surveillance—a desire rarely acknowledged in the literature. Children’s creation of private spaces disrupts the narrative of constant surveillance, asserting that meaningful learning and relationship-building sometimes require freedom from adult oversight. Constant surveillance erodes children’s autonomy, and constrains their imaginative and emotional freedom, undermining the very trust and self-determination that relational development depends on (Steeves & Jones, 2010).

This paper invites educators to imagine curricula beyond content delivery and toward child-led relational world-building that unforgets children’s own desires. What if playful re-purposing were treated not as disruption but as legitimate curriculum? Classrooms could become spaces where materials are open to reinterpretation, and collaborative tinkering is recognized as intellectual and ethical work. Assessment, too, could shift to honor children’s capacity to co-create social fabrics of care, solidarity, and creativity. Attending to fugitive kid curricula offers a way to unforget the histories of resistance, and reframes classrooms as shared laboratories of collective becoming rather than sites of content transmission.

Author

• Kushya Sugarman, Mount Holyoke College