Deficit-Based Thinking in Justice-focused Education: The case of la Escuela Mirasol in Mexico City

• In Event: Navigating violence, trauma and safety

Proposal

Principles of social justice entail democratic and participatory processes that include and affirm people from all social identity groups. They also point out multiple forms of oppression and unbalanced power relations. The seminal works of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the American philosopher Nancy Fraser have helped educators and scholars develop a conceptual framework for Social Justice Education (Keddie, 2019; Bajaj, 2018; Lee & Walsh, 2015). Their ideas have paved the way to rethink and reshape the unjust and unequal social structures in schools. However, Social Justice Education is far from being a stable and fixed construct. Discourses rooted in deficit thinking, accountability, and punitive school discipline often tension the practices of social justice educators, corroborating what Latta calls a “historical love affair” with deficit thinking, especially toward urban youth that are closer to drug-related scenarios. This presentation will address the findings of a study that took place in the summer of 2022 at the Mirasol School, an urban school located on the outskirts of Mexico City that embraces Freire’s Popular Education philosophy. In this part of the urban margins of Mexico City, almost half of the population works in the informal sector of the economy, and the average monthly salary is below the national average (INEGI, 2020).

This qualitative study asks how teachers enact ideas around drug-related violence at the urban margins and how they put into practice such ideas at the school and classroom levels. My findings suggest that teachers' ideas toward urban students who are close to drug-related contexts (either as spectators via their families' affiliations, as consumers, or as dealers) are located on a continuum that tensions their understanding of social justice approaches when the lived experience of youth is explained from a deficit perspective. Here, the deficit view materializes in the figure of the Mirasol family. Teachers referred to families as "disengaged," "problematic," "dysfunctional," and holding "low skill" jobs. According to the interviewed teachers, these aspects place young people "at risk."

Regarding school discipline devices (e.g., the installation of security cameras and anti-doping tests for students), the Mirasol school borders disciplinary procedures that praise the compliant students and "push out" (Chavez & Butti, 2020) those that do not comply with "school-centric" ideas (Posey-Maddox & Haley-Lock, 2020). As this study shows, teachers' cultural and social representations of the students' "problematic scenarios" and their depictions of risk undermine tenets of Popular Education and miss the opportunity to make students' experiences matter in a positive way (Dutro & Zenkov, 2008). The contribution of this study to teacher education is that we must constantly review our assumptions and practices instead of taking for granted principles of Social Justice Education since deficit discourses often catch us up when we make sense of urban young people and their families.

Author

• Zaira Magana, University of Wisconsin Madison