Academic grind as enclosure: Proposing a concept of “coursework debt”

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14. Contemporary Dilemmas in K-12

Abstract

I propose a concept of coursework debt, obligations of academic labor carried by students and quantified by the course credits they must accumulate in order to graduate from high school. I develop the concept using analysis from a study of California’s continuation school principals (CSPs) and how they seek to organize their school communities in the face of distinctive pressures to get students ‘caught up.’ I begin by providing a political economic history of California’s continuation schools, and explain how, in the present neoliberal era of market-driven educational reform, ‘problem’ students are constructed as “credit deficient,” or accumulating credits too slowly to fulfill the district’s graduation requirements in what remains of their high school eligibility. I then draw from the work of critical debt scholars to establish an ontological stance on debt, and identify the core properties of debt with which I analogize to develop its coursework form: quantifiable obligation, appropriative of the debtor’s future time and space, control over the debtor, and undermines solidary relations. I then situate the development of the concept in continuation schools’ distinctive political economies of learning (Lave & McDermott, 2002) to illuminate how learning is structured as debt in the neoliberal status quo context of present day schooling. To develop the concept of coursework debt, present evidence of the core properties of debt listed above from a class of CSPs who demonstrated commitments to acting as “empowerment agents” (Stanton-Salazar, 2011). Their accounts are characterized by ongoing negotiations with coursework debt pressures to create spaces of educational dignity and beauty. I finish the paper by conveying the coursework debt concept’s utility as a tool for laying bare and unsettling technologies of enclosure in schools, building on the vital work of scholars who have theorized and advanced efforts to abolish the school-prison nexus in educational scholarship.

Author

• Samuel Corless Stern, UCLA