When the Clips Are Down: How Students Make Sense of School Discipline

• In Event: 42.083 - Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 42.083-8 - Examining Race and Transgender Identity Politics in Early Childhood Literacy, School Discipline, and Pedagogy

Abstract

Researchers generally have not studied classroom management from the perspectives of children or with attention to the ways that management practices interact with marginalized identities, but have instead focused on measuring the impact of strategies designed to create orderly children. Taking a critical perspective, this study sought to understand a common classroom management practice – the use of clip charts – through interviews with third grade children in a culturally and linguistically diverse public school. Thematic analysis of these interviews showed that the use of the clip chart shaped in significant ways students’ understandings of themselves and others and that these understandings were located within broader discourses around race.

Authors

• Amy Noelle Parks, Michigan State University

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto