Canary in the Coal mine

Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Carla Shalaby 

“Criminalizing troublemakers is part of our historic and cultural routine. People who demand the rights of others to be free, like Mahatma Gandhi, Assata Shakur, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Angela Davis, to name just a few—are regularly detained, jailed, and systematically harassed by officers of the state.” 

The analogies here are a bit of a jump. Comparing famous freedom fighters with students who are chronically in trouble. I get the main idea here is to simply point out that our reaction to any actions against the mainstream or powers in charge is to criminalize, lock up, or sequester away, but in Shalaby’s own words, her students were “talking over classmates, being physically aggressive and destroying classroom items”. I applaud her willingness to fight for the freedom of these students, but I wonder about the freedom of other students in class. What about their freedom to be in a safe school where they aren’t physically assaulted in school, or be heard and have a voice in class? Maybe I’m just being defensive because this is my profession, or maybe it’s because I was the shy, quiet kid who was talked over and pushed aside. This is just my honest reaction to many parts of this text. I did try to find quotes and ideals that agree with as well.

“We generally think of “deviance” and of deviant people, as a problem. I have learned to think of deviance as informative.”

I like this approach, trying to take morality out of your perception of behaviors. This is very important when working as a teacher and dealing with behaviors all day long. Off days or deviant behavior from kids is normal and to be expected. They are testing boundaries and learning how to interact with their environment and peers.

“The child who deviates, who refuses to behave like everybody else, maybe telling us loudly, visibly, and memorably that the arrangements of our schools are harmful to human beings.”

This quote to me helped me understand Shalaby’s main argument in the text, which was that these students are “singing” or alerting us that our schools are not set up well or that they are toxic. I think the child who deviates could do so for a plethora of reasons some having to do with how schools are run; curricula that aren't culturally responsive (Sleeter), Not being explicitly taught how to navigate a system of power that has different rules from their own culture (Delpit), or even teachers who unconscious bias against students of color. I additionally think there are many systems in these “troublemakers'” lives that like outside of the school walls and contribute more to their behavior, like poverty or untreated mental health struggles, which are not due to the arrangement of the school.