The Second R of the Grammar of School Discipline: Resistance

• In Event: The Grammar of School Discipline in Alabama

Abstract

Purpose. In many ways, a focus on removal positions Black students and families as victims of racism and unfair, discriminatory treatment. But, these students are not just victims; they are agentic, and they exhibit resistance to the structures and practices that victimize them, as do their families and the educational stakeholders who feel responsible for them. Thus, in this paper, we focus on resistance, the second part of the grammar of school discipline.

Perspectives. We define resistance as always happening, though it may manifest differently across contexts and depending on who is enacting it. We suggest that student behavior that practitioners often label as rude, apathetic, or defiant (i.e., subjective discipline incidents) might be reframed as resistance (Raby 2005). This reframing affords opportunities to ask about what students might be resisting in their schools and classrooms.

Modes of inquiry and data sources. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interview data, we engage in the method of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis 1997) to highlight the ways in which Black students and Black school administrators engage in resistance. We amplify the voices of Black students at an alternative school as they engage in play, authentic learning, and relationship building in an effort to prompt resistance to dominant narratives about “bad kids.” We also present portraits of resistance enacted by Black school leaders as they identified and countered taken-for-granted school discipline policies and practices, particularly corporal punishment, in their own buildings, at times at professional cost. We consider our efforts in portraiture to be “a small but meaningful form of social justice” (Chapman 2007, 159).

Conclusions. These portraits are intended to prompt reconsideration of the tendency to position students unidimensionally as only marginalized and victimized by the policies and practices of school discipline; the portraits reveal students’ joy, capability, resistance, and resilience. Likewise, our portraits of school-based practitioners defy a unilateral positioning of them as complicit and villainous. Instead, we position them as resistant and transformative. In this way, we pursue a nuanced and complex treatment of the grammar of school discipline in Alabama.

Significance. School-based practitioners’ reactions to what they perceive as misbehavior from students are often rooted in ideas about respect, and we know that teachers and administrators often take students’ behaviors personally. Indeed, it is hard not to take challenges personally in a profession where the personal and professional are so closely intertwined and when our emotions are so intensely engaged (Zembylas 2007). We recommend emotional work before, and perhaps in lieu of punishing students, approaching the study of patterned behaviors with curiosity rather than value judgments. For example, how might practitioners engage in critical self reflection (Khalifa 2018) as they work to be responsive to their contexts, confronting how stereotypes and preconceived notions about students guide interpretations of their behavior?

Authors

• Benjamin T. Arnberg, Auburn University

• Sean Forbes, Auburn University