(Dys)regulation and the "Revolutionary Mindstate": Care as Proximity

• In Event: Schooling and Intergenerational Mental Health

Abstract

This paper, a chapter from a book project-in-process, brings us into Charter School Network (CSN) in Chicago for an ethnographic exploration of educators who work with students who display high levels of trauma-related dysregulation. In the paper, I examine the experiences of “climate coaches,” the non-instructional educators whose role vacillates between unwitting security guard and de-facto therapist. I first locate this team of mostly Black women and queer people within a lineage of care laborers. I show how their work provides much-needed nurturance to struggling students but simultaneously is co-opted into the carceral social order that positions students who fight or use drugs as violent offenders rather than students with heightened mental health needs. I then examine how the climate coaches’ experiences navigating their own non-dominant social locations (race, gender, sexuality, wage-laborer) afford them the capacity to reconsider the ways that they can enact care inside their schools. By offering 'proximity' as a key mechanism by which educators eschew normative assumptions of Black children as violent, I explore how the climate coaches in this chapter refuse to distance themselves from children in distress and instead draw on institutionally illegitimate sources of expertise to respond to rule-breaking as politically resistant and/or help-seeking behavior. Data for this paper come from an ethnographic study of three high schools within CSN, a public charter organization in Chicago that was in the midst of institutional reform to reinvent previously punitive and anti-Black discipline and academic codes. The findings presented are the result of document analysis, semi-structured interviews with 73 educators, and over two years of participant observation.

Author

• Ana Vasan, University of Chicago