Beyond the Black Box of the Yellow Bus: Southern School Buses as Epistemic Linchpins

• In Event: Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session II

Abstract

Though this work originally began as an examination of American school bus ridership as an overlooked component of marginalized children’s psycho-emotional and socio-developmental journeys, attempts at peaking into the black box that is school bus sociality revealed a complex array of interactional, geospatial, and socio-political obstructions to inquiry concerning life on and around the school bus. Following in the footsteps of scholars like Hannah Dyer (2017), Kim Rasmussen (2004), and Fikile Nxumalo (2021) this paper challenges adult-centric frameworks for research in education and on children and youth by combining critical childhood studies, black geography perspectives, and socio-historical framing, to reveal how school buses and school busing have re-emerged as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of educational disenfranchisement, generational disinvestment, and social engineering along familiar epistemic boundaries. This is accomplished by mobilizing data collected through multiple qualitative methods (interviews, meme-elicitations, observations, and participant journaling) in order to examine contemporary experiences with school bus ridership in a large, geographically, and racially diverse southern school district. With this district as my case-study I then examine the nature and impact of existing school bus research on contemporary educational policy decisions before using autoethnomethodology to analyze research challenges encountered in the field and reveal how the institutional obstruction of child-centered knowledge production reproduces orthodox views of School Bus usage and School Bus rides as net losses for both educational and broader communities in the U.S. South. This, I argue, occurs in direct contradiction to the vivid combination of agentic creativity, educational opportunity, and socio-emotional support that can arise on school buses, around school buses, and as a result of school busing.

Author

• Alexander J. Holt, University of Texas-Austin