Acts of Resistance: Student (In)visibility Acts of Resistance: Student (In)visibility

This paper argues that public school structures are oppressive for all students. Because of racial, class and gender biases, school environments are often especially problematic for African American and working-class/working-poor students. Boys and girls also experience school differently because of gender roles. These intersecting problems include facing dominant narratives based on stereotypes and discrimination. The current study took place in a school building that serves predominately African American and low-income students. The questions examined include: how does school silence children, and how do children resist being silenced? Observational and interview data indicate that children are disciplined into invisibility by treating them stereotypically and consequently demanding uniformity in their behavior as a way to control their mostly colored bodies. Children resist such treatment through creative and collaborative acts that promote their voice and visibility and which cr.

See Full PDF See Full PDF

Related Papers

Download Free PDF View PDF

Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology

In this article an examination of how we, in the everyday, develop critical engagement with the shifting relations of power and oppression around us is presented. The article explores the role of representations in maintaining the racialized patterns of school exclusion in Britain. Social representations theory is used to investigate how racializing re-presentations pervade and create institutionalized practices, how these re-presentations invade young people's sense of self and ultimately how young people collaborate to resist and reject oppressive relations. The material presented here, from interviews with young people excluded from school, and parents, teachers and others involved in school exclusion, illustrates how young people problematize and critique racializing re-presentations while participating in the conditions of oppression and resistance that pervade their experiences of school. The discussion is divided into three sections. The first examines the institutionalization of stigmatizing representations, visible in social practices. The second section looks at the role of re-presentation in the social construction of ‘Black pupils’. The concluding section explores the possibilities of resistance and critical engagement in the everyday. As a whole this reveals how young people develop critical engagement with the re-presentations that filter into and so constitute their realities. This enables an analysis of the role of resistance and contestation in social re-presentation, highlights the importance of participation and community and so invites a critical version of social representations theory. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Download Free PDF View PDF

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Download Free PDF View PDF

This dissertation has received AERA's 2016 Outstanding Dissertation Recognition Award This study explored how normalized structures and interactions impact marginalized high school students’ negotiations of physical places and sociocultural spaces in school. This study includes the voices of 29 students, 2 parents, 4 teachers, the school resource officer, a cafeteria worker, a boys’ basketball coach, and 4 building principals. The study of how students of color negotiated the spaces and places of normalized racist ideas and ideals in this particular Midwestern high school was done through a sonic ethnography. The purpose of this non-traditional ethnographic process was to attend to the ethics of participant voices, shared experiences, and agency that is central to this study. Conclusions from this dissertation include several resonant points to the study of high school education, race, gender, and sexual orientation. First, the performances of self that the students of color implemented in order to participate in the underlife of the institution as well as the broader school culture were, on one hand, layers of protection against the culture in which they worked to participate. On the other, such performances functioned to both constrain and enable students of color in their everyday experiences in school. In addition, this dissertation concludes that the curricula—formal, hidden, enacted, and null—functioned as a mechanism to suffocate the ways of being and knowing of students of color. Finally, this study explores the intersection of gender with race, discussing how marginalization for girls of color functioned in separate and yet imbricated ways to the experiences of their male counterparts.

Download Free PDF View PDF

The ALAN Review

Download Free PDF View PDF

Race Ethnicity and Education

Unjust racial disparities in the United States criminal justice system continue to worsen, fueled in part by a school to prison pipeline which, through criminalizing processes, disproportionately and unjustly targets boys of color in our public schools. This criminalization and the ways in which boys of color resist, remains largely under-researched on the elementary school level. This study utilizes data from multiple qualitative sources collected from three elementary school STEM programs during a year and a half time period to examine acts of resistance in which boys of color engaged, and ways in which educators and school staff responded to this resistance. Findings indicate that criminalization and resistance were regular, normal, and ordinary parts of the daily experiences of boys of color; and that the acts of resistance themselves were regularly hyper-criminalized, creating cycles of escalation. These findings support a counternarrative that boys of color engage in resistance as a normal and healthy response to oppressive measures.

Download Free PDF View PDF

Vignette – “a painting, drawing or photograph that has no border but is gradually faded into its background at the edges.” (Encarta Dictionary) In this paper I use youth vignettes to provide a forum for marginalised voices capturing their cultural identity and experiences in the context of their schooling and family lives. These pictures are exposed to contrast against the rhetoric surrounding The Behaviour Management in Schools Policy (2001) which “requires schools to develop a learning environment that is welcoming, supportive and safe” (3). The ‘environment’ these students reveal is one in which they are expected to ‘perform’, not as the creative, expressive, engaging actor in drama, often embraced and encouraged, but as the docile, compliant unit. Student resistance to dominant discourses is thus “provoked, driven underground, where it becomes a subterranean source of acting out” (Shor 1992, p. 24). It is the intention of this paper that these vignettes have no borders; the stud.

Download Free PDF View PDF

Brock Education Journal

This paper is a theoretical discussion of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Harney & Moten, 2013) as a contribution to critical education in public schools. The undercommons serves here as an epistemic device, or a way of seeing and knowing, in relation to public education. The function of this device is to establish an appreciative view of student survival and activist behaviours and to centre educational policy as a potential mechanism of student exclusion. I propose that the practice of inclusion in schools coexists with unacknowledged operations of exclusion. The undercommons is employed as a lens to make such mechanisms of disenfranchisement apparent. I advocate here for an extension of inclusive education which, in addition to targeted supports for particular demographic groups, must concern itself with more general practices of disenfranchisement.

Download Free PDF View PDF

Annual Meeting of the American …

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a classroom event in which fourth and fifth grade students in a highly diverse urban school interpreted, discussed and responded to a district survey intended to illuminate the social climate of the city's schools, with a particular focus .

Download Free PDF View PDF

See Full PDF

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

Download Free PDF View PDF

Interactions Ucla Journal of Education and Information Studies

Download Free PDF View PDF

Cartographies of Race and Social Difference

Download Free PDF View PDF

Middle School Journal

Download Free PDF View PDF

Race Ethnicity and Education

Download Free PDF View PDF

Equity & Excellence in Education

Download Free PDF View PDF

Radical History Review

Download Free PDF View PDF

Canadian Journal of Sociology

Download Free PDF View PDF

Difficult Dialogues about Twenty-First-Century Girls

Download Free PDF View PDF

Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting

Download Free PDF View PDF

Journal of Science Teacher Education

Download Free PDF View PDF