ABCs unravelled: The time and timing in calls for behavioural change

Abstract

District School Boards across the Global North (which includes my own school board in Toronto, Canada) implement behaviour management policies that remain situated within discourses and practices of developmental and behavioural psychology. The ABC chart (Antecedent, Behaviour and Consequence) is one key aspect of these behaviour management policies as it aims to document the timing, frequency, intensity and duration of behaviour characterized as problematic or troublesome. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the ABC chart utilized by classroom teachers across K-12 school settings in order to document behaviour. Understood as a socio-cultural artifact and phenomenon of current neoliberal schooling practices, I seek to investigate the role of ABC charts in sustaining practices of conditional inclusion/exclusion for children and youth labeled as ‘problems.’ Using an interpretive methodology situated within critical disability studies and anti-colonial theories and practices, this paper will engage in the application of concepts such as being “out of sync” (Knight, 2019: p. 74) and “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson, 2011: p. 592) as they intersect with concepts such as “the ability line” (Broderick and Leonardo, 2016: p. 66). A key aim of this paper is to question the taken for granted assumptions regarding conceptions of linear time, developmental progress and, achieving the performance of normative behaviour. In examining the implicit power imbalances in practices of documenting behaviour, this paper also invites educators to engage in a critical dialogue in order to facilitate a transformation into more interdependent and socially just teaching and learning practices.

As an elementary school teacher, I am perpetually experiencing time, or at least, current western colonial neoliberal conceptions of time (Agathangelou, 2021; Goldberg, 2019; Knight, 2019), as working against the potentialities of inclusion within classroom contexts. In the elementary classroom, time is experienced as being in short supply within the context of attempting to cover a curriculum that expects students to be productive while also preparing them to be productive future workers (Adams and Erevelles, 2017; Erevelles et al., 2006; Manolev et al., 2019; Slee 2018). Sustaining the current neoliberal capitalist order hinges upon using time wisely, not wasting time, and habituating both students and teachers alike to the efficient and productive use of time. I understand time and the hegemony of neoliberalism that shapes current school structures through the critiques occurring at the intersections of decolonial studies, critical disability studies and poststructuralist feminist studies. Within these fields, neoliberalism has been critiqued as a form of hyper individualism that sustains and justifies the stratification of unbalanced relations of power in ways that also co-constitute practices of conditional inclusion or outright exclusion. Through reading across and in these fields, I have also come to understand neoliberalism as the most current iteration of western colonialism that hinges upon sustaining practices of discrimination based on race, gender, class, disability, sexual orientation, religion or cultural backgrounds. Put differently, there is a direct relationship between sustaining the neoliberal order of things which includes sustaining the flow of productive workers with differential access to opportunities and to power, that depends upon sustaining practices of discrimination and exclusion. In other words, my sense that western colonial neoliberal time works against the desire to inhabit inclusive school communities is inextricably linked to my understanding that time itself is shaped by neoliberalism’s codependence on sustaining social injustice.

In his critique of the ways in which our relationship to time is becoming more technologically prescribed in its reproductions of more of the same neoliberal power imbalances and discriminatory practices, critical race theorist David Theo Goldberg (2019, p. 353) has stated: “Human memory is nonlinear… It is layered and relayered through feedback loops, crosscurrents, lateral networks, intersections and intersessions.” This insight invites me, and I hope you too, to critically examine the relationship between time, neoliberalism and schooling practices in at least two important ways. First, there is a contestation here of the taken for granted assumption in western colonial neoliberal conceptions of time as moving in a unidirectional manner towards the development and progression toward a better future. Second, in reminding readers to attend to how time is always and already embedded in multidirectional movements and motions that move forward, backward, sideways and sometimes in circles, the repetitions of western colonial injustices in their current neoliberal form are not inevitable. In fact, it might even be possible to rethink and reimagine how neoliberal “feedback loops” work while also attending to the contestations and resistances present in “crosscurrents, lateral networks, intersections and intersessions” (Goldberg, 2019: p. 353).

As an elementary school teacher, these insights are important because I often experience the classroom as inhabiting a series of feedback loops. Meaning I understand myself as inhabiting a set of school structures that reproduce practices of exclusion that disproportionately impact children diagnosed and labeled with disabilities as well as other social categories of difference such as race, gender and class. Of specific interest to me in this paper is taking these insights from Goldberg (2019) and other critical scholars regarding the potentiality in both understanding and questioning the feedback loop, I seem to be stuck in the middle of. Specifically, this paper seeks to critically examine how practices of behaviour management contribute to and sustains the reproduction of inequality and injustice. Throughout the paper, I also wonder about the role of hegemonic, western colonial conceptions of time and its linkages to sustaining co-constituted injustices within the current neoliberal order of things and its interest in promulgating particular types of behaviour valued as good or normal. I posit that time, or at least, current hegemonic western colonial conceptions of time (Agathangelou, 2021; Athanasiou, 2020; Goldberg, 2019; Knight, 2019) work against the potentialities of the experience and practice of inclusion within classroom contexts because of the ways in which our relationship to time is inextricably linked to our relationship to securing future or productive neoliberal progress.

Through more than two decades of service in my local district school board, I have seen countless behaviour programmes come and go. Indeed, several studies have pointed out that good behaviour or normal behaviour is a big business that offers a range of products and services to schools promising efficient productive classrooms through the shaping of efficient, productive children via techniques from the fields of behavioural psychology and developmental psychology (Broderick, 2022; Broderick and Roscigno, 2021; Manolev et al., 2019; Migliarini and Annamma, 2020; Roscigno, 2019, 2020; Slee, 2015, 2018; Williamson, 2021). While behaviour management programmes might vary slightly in their use of terminology and practices of surveillance and monitoring, they all make the very same promise: behaviour management will help move students and teachers toward a more productive, efficient and effective future. In other words, things will get better if we keep moving on, moving up and moving toward tomorrow. Behaviour management programmes and policies such as the one that requires the use of an Antecedent Behaviour and Consequences (ABC) chart (see Appendix A) are attached to the belief that behaviour can and will improve in the future if we keep monitoring and tracking student behaviour today. This linear model of behavioural progress and development hinges upon an understanding of time as also moving forward in a unidirectional manner. This is in contradistinction to Goldberg’s (2019) insight regarding the non-linearity of both memory and time. This is also in contradistinction to my own embodied experiences in the classroom which are full of complex and often a concurrent set of multidirectional movements.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the ABC chart as one specific example of how expected practices of representing childhood behaviour reveals less about their purported focus on individual children’s behaviour and more about the sociocultural context that aims to reproduce the neoliberal order. In critically examining how an ABC chart acts as a feedback loop that sustains neoliberalism’s dependence on hyper individualism, unbalanced relations of power as well as practices of exclusion, this paper seeks to contest and question the neoliberal ordering of time and in particular the role of conceptions of normative development in the labeling of problem children and problem adults. This paper is comprised of two parts. First, I will offer a summary of how teachers are trained to use an ABC chart for the purposes of focusing on the surveillance and monitoring of individual student behaviour. In this section, I will also outline how I have worked to unlearn and subsequently question some of the taken for granted assumptions within practices of monitoring student behaviour through critical concepts in the field of critical disability studies and other related fields of critical inquiry. This portion of the paper will focus upon understanding the relationship between neoliberalism, developmentalism, and time in aiming to reproduce a future through labeling problem behaviour and problem children in the present. The second portion of this paper will focus on the analysis of the Antecedent, Behaviour and Consequences portions in the ABC chart. By critically examining how this chart contributes to representations of individual children as problems, the aim here is to analyze tactics of monitoring and surveillance of childhood behaviour. Throughout this paper, my aim is to demonstrate how the field of critical disability studies can work in tandem with other critical scholarship in order to invite us to rethink our relationship to childhood and to the time and timing of behavioural change. Ultimately, I seek to wonder about and contest how tools of representation such as an ABC chart contribute to the reproduction of more of the same neoliberal injustices. In so doing, I hope to contribute to a reconsideration of some taken for granted assumptions and practices in schools that perpetuate the exclusion or conditional inclusion of students with disabilities and other embodied differences.

Learning and unlearning the ABCs of behaviour

Within the context of education where behavioural psychology and developmental psychology continue to remain hegemonic, the ABC chart (Appendix A) can be understood as one representative example of this hegemony. Learning the ABCs of behavior is directly linked to understanding how practices of surveillance and monitoring in schools are associated with the timing of behaviour labeled as a problem. Tracking the antecdent, behaviour and consequences in the ABC chart takes for granted that by doing so an identifiable pattern can be discerned. Identifying the antecedent for instance, aims to focus on what occurred immediately before the behaviour labeled as a problem occurred. Similarly, identifying the consequences aims to determine what the adult perceives and represents as the child’s intentions. Within behaviourism, determining the reasoning for the child’s intentions falls under categories such as escaping an unwanted situation or task or seeking out attention or a preferred tangible sensory experience. Finally, the behaviour itself fits into the middle of the assumed unidirectional sequence of antecedent, behaviour consequences because within the hegemonic models of behavioural psychology and developmental psychology, the behaviour represented as immediately observable by the teacher, is a response to the external stimulus or antecedent and the subsequent consequence or intention to escape, seek some form of attention or reach out for some other preferred external stimulus. Put differently, one of the ways in which practices of tracking and monitoring behaviour operate via the use of ABC charts is through sustaining the assumption that centers individuals and their labeled problematic behaviours in a purported unidirectional linear sequence of events that can be identified as a set repeating pattern.

For my purposes, I am interested in examining how this hegemony works in tandem with neoliberalism to reproduce the labeling of problem children and problem people. In this portion of the paper the focus is on simultaneously learning and unlearning the ABCs of behaviour and what is seemingly represented as a commonsensical approach to practices of monitoring students. It is expected that the educator will repeatedly follow the same pattern when first identifying and then representing incidences of misbehaviour: ABC, ABC, ABC, etc. Thus, in a sense, an ABC chart can be understood as a feedback loop of reproduction. When situating the ABC chart in a historical and sociocultural context, there are opportunities to consider how this seemingly straightforward repeating pattern of events, actually reveals more about the impositions of linear time as a key mechanism contributing to practices of exclusion. As a tool intended to collect evidence for the purposes of informing decision-making practices in the enactment of behaviour management techniques, the ABC chart can be understood as representing a practice of “algo-instantaneity.” Goldberg (2019, p. 354) refers to “algo-instantaneity” as a process where coding and encoding operate to reproduce “prescriptively formalistic reasoning, of the temporality of instantaneity.” While Goldberg (2019) applies this critical analysis to the growing role computer generated algorithms are playing in regulating and shaping the curation of knowledge systems, I apply it here to an examination of how the ABC chart itself reproduces patterns of representation in several taken for granted assumptions. For instance, we might pause to consider who is doing the representing, who is the focus of representation, what is being represented and how these practices of representation seek to distill a complex set of entangled sociocultural variables into a linear sequence of events that can be attributed to the acts of a singular individual. In pausing to consider what the “algo-instantaneity” of the ABCs are reproducing, there is an opportunity to begin unlearning what is often represented in sequential chart form (see Appendix A) as misbehaviour that requires, prevention, management and rehabilitation.

The field of critical disability studies and its eclectic interconnections with several fields of critical inquiry have been invaluable in my own journey of questioning and unlearning the ABCs of monitoring and representing children’s behaviour and their subsequent relationship to sustaining the neoliberal order of things. For instance, several scholars within the field of critical disability studies have analyzed conceptions of normal or good behaviour and how these are attributed to students with aim of promoting increased productivity, the efficient use of time and preparation for a future of work in the neoliberal economy (Adams and Erevelles, 2017; Broderick and Leonardo, 2016; Erevelles et al., 2006; Manolev et al., 2019; Mills and Lefrançois, 2018; Slee, 2018; Williamson, 2021). These critiques of the surveillance and monitoring of children within schools demonstrate that practices of representation that occur within ABC charts are not neutral acts. Rather, practices of representing children’s misbehaviour are always and already embedded in a set of sociocultural assumptions regarding the types of behaviours in the present that will lead to sustaining a productive neoliberal future. Meaning that the criteria for good or normal behaviour and conversely the tracking of misbehaviour in ABC charts is inextricably linked to a vision of the future where neoliberalism and the productive workers it requires remains hegemonic.

Children diagnosed and labeled with disabilities are more likely to be perceived and represented as problems because of being understood as “out of sync” (Knight, 2019: p. 74) and “misfitting” (Garland-Thomson, 2011: p. 592). To be perceived and represented as misfitting and out of sync because of problematic behaviour also generates the conditions for continued exclusions from the neoliberal present and imagined future. Disability studies scholars Manolev et al. (2019) remind readers behaviour management systems are based on the tenets of behaviourism. Manolev et al. state (2019, p. 38): “Behaviourism relies heavily on compliance techniques, while creating a performative classroom culture in which students are reconstructed as statistical data representations of normalised culturally produced behaviour.” This insight from Manolev et al. (2019, p. 38) points to the ways in which power imbalances are always and already implicated in enacting “compliance techniques.” Similarly, their work serves as a reminder that what is understood as good or normal behaviour is indeed culturally produced even as children labeled as problems become the focal point for being represented as individuals who are out of sync and misfitting. This focus on individual as problems through tracking behaviour in ABC charts detracts from attending to how our social relations are imbued with an interest in preserving and sustaining the neoliberal order things. A neoliberal order that hinges upon ensuring the uneven and unequal distribution of resources, opportunities and access to the social and structural conditions for thriving.

Several scholars within the field of critical disability studies have also pointed out that the discriminatory practice of ableism operates in conjunction with other forms of race, gender and class discrimination in order to sustain neoliberal mechanisms of differential access and inclusion to the supposed rewards of sustaining and reproducing the neoliberal economic order. For example, in their analysis of report card data Parekh et al. (2021) determined the presence of implicit bias in the attribution of qualifiers such as excellent, good, satisfactory and needs improvement. Elsewhere, Migliarini and Annamma (2021) have shown that children who are “multiply-marginalized” (p.1) based on identifications of disability, race, gender and class, experience higher rates of exclusion, surveillance and monitoring. This work within critical disability studies is demonstrative of the need to unlearn and critically examine practices of representing children’s behaviour within ABC charts because of the ways in which practices of representing other people’s lives and stories (Alcoff, 2008) becomes entangled in sustaining unjust power imbalances and exclusions. Labelling a child as a problem or as behaving badly almost always involves an adult judgment that a child is “out-of-sync with their peers when they move or speak at the wrong time” (Knight, 2019: p 76). This insight from Knight (2019) can be read alongside the work of Mills and Lefrançois (2018, p. 520) who consider the importance of “deconstruct [ing] adultism, and the unsettling of adultist forms of knowledge production.” When the insights from Knight (2019) and Mills and Lefrançois (2018) are read alongside the work from other critical disability studies scholarship, the representation of behaviour within ABC charts becomes increasingly problematic because of how such representations also take for granted adult authority in practices of representing children and their experiences.

Practices of surveillance and monitoring are shaped by conceptions of preparing children to become productive adults (Knight, 2019; Mills and Lefrançois, 2018), by the very adults enacting practices of representation in ABC charts. Thus, in conjunction with the important contributions from critical disability studies, work in the field of critical childhood studies also offers important critiques of representations of children’s behaviour. Specifically, here I draw upon scholarship from Mills and Lefrançois (2018) whose work meets at the intersections of critical disability studies, mad studies, decolonial studies and critical childhood studies. I also draw upon the work of Knight (2019) whose recent contribution to the field of critical childhood studies utilizes concepts from Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial scholarship. This critical work invites educators to unlearn the role of both developmentalism and behaviourism in shaping our relationships to children as these relationships meet at the intersections of sustaining numerous unjust and discriminatory practices which include valuing the representations of adults over children. For example, Mills and Lefrançois (2018, p. 504, p. 519) critically examine the historical linkages between colonialism and what they refer to as “psy-governance” by critiquing the concept of progressing through developmental stages and its role in categorizing children as well as entire communities and nations in the Global South as “undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed.” The implications of such unjust categorizing practices include dismissing or outright excluding children as well as adults labeled as problems from decisions that directly impact their lives because they are deemed not yet ready. Yet, as Mills and Lefrançois (2018), Manolev et al. (2019) and Williamson (2021) show, collecting data from observing, measuring, and assessing children is taken for granted as acceptable and necessary even as these practices are implicated in reinforcing power imbalances as well as their co-constituted exclusions. Put differently, by examining the relationship between developmentalist logics and neoliberalism’s promises of ongoing growth and progress, it becomes possible to analyze surveillance tools like ABC charts as always and already participating in practices of exclusion and discrimination in ways that ensure that the promises of a better and more productive future were never meant to include everyone.

In enacting practices of representing the ABCs of behaviour, educators continue to contribute to the labeling and categorizing of problem children and problem people. This present-day practice hinges upon the underlying assumption within developmentalism, behaviourism and neoliberalism that monitoring behaviour today will help to work toward a better more productive future. Knight’s (2019) work in critical childhood studies can be read in conjunction with the work of Mills and Lefrançois (2018) as they both contest what Knight refers to as “an understanding of a neutral, linear, progressive temporality that theories of the child depend on” (2019, p. 76). Through focusing on what it means when a child is perceived and represented as “out-of-sync”, Knight (2019) demonstrates that the better and productive future neoliberalism promises is not meant to include children or adults labeled as problems. In a distinct yet linked way to the work of Mills and Lefrançois (2018), Knight (2019) works to show how colonialism haunts theorizations and representations of childhood in the present as well as visions of the future. Knight’s (2019) work serves to demonstrate how children labeled as problems are pushed out of western colonial neoliberal time and its story of progress in ways that entangle visions of the future in the reproduction of past “colonial violences” (p. 79). Through this work the unidirectional movement of time is not only contested but also shown to be deeply implicated in sustaining practices of exclusion that disproportionately impact both children and adults whose identifications meet at the intersections of race, class, disability and heteronormativity. Not only is the “algo-instantaneity” (Goldberg, 2019: p. 354) of the ABCs of behaviour disrupted but what is also revealed is how they represent a commitment to reproducing a neoliberal future mired in past and present injustices and exclusions.

Thus far, in focusing on learning and unlearning the ABCs of representing children as problems, this paper has sought to critically examine how our relationship to time and neoliberalism reproduces present practices of discrimination and exclusion. ABC charts contribute to sustaining the repeating pattern of neoliberal reproduction by collecting data and facilitating the interpretation and representation of the identified child as the problem. Thus, there is a need to find new ways to understand each other as well as the types of evidence or data that is needed to cultivate relationships with each other both within and against past and present iterations of colonial violences. Athanasiou (2020, p. 207) suggests that one important way to contribute to these efforts is to embrace a “critical temporality” by cultivating an “out of placeness enacted by the knowledges, desires, and troubling affects of displaced and spaced-out bodies.” In a sense, both Knight’s (2019, p. 76) concept of being “out-of-sync” and the concept of “psy-governance” offered by Mills and Lefrançois (2018) can be understood as working in tandem with Athanasiou’s (2020, p. 207) invocation to engage in a “critical temporality” that intentionally stays “out of place” because each of these concepts invite us to stop and reconsider what is being reproduced in the neoliberal calls for a focus on efficiency and increased productivity in schools. Similarly, these concepts work in tandem with scholarship in the field of critical disability studies and the ongoing efforts to critically examine the role of conceptions of normalcy as perpetuating neoliberalism’s exclusions, discriminations and injustices. The second portion of this paper will further delve into and focus on the analysis of the Antecedent, Behaviour and Consequences portions in the ABC chart. By exploring each of these elements separately through engaging in the work of critical disability studies as well as remaining both “out-of-sync” (Knight, 2019: p. 76) and “out of place” (Athanasiou, 2020: p. 207), this portion of the paper seeks to further examine the implications of current behaviour management practices in schools.

The ABCs out of sync and out of place

In Athanasiou’s (2020) critical analysis of colonial temporalities and how we might reimagine our futures without them, there is an analysis of the risks of conceptualizing some type of future utopia in a teleological manner. According to Athanasiou (2020, p. 251): “the notion of utopia, as it is implicit—and has been historically imbricated—in colonialist, imperialist, and nationalist projects, is often posited in essentialist terms, as a means of attaining all encompassing ideals of a ‘true’ and ‘full,’ ‘newly-founded,’ and ‘well-ordered’ society.” Athanasiou’s (2020) insight here facilitates a further critical examination of the false promises of a better future from neoliberalism and its helpmates developmentalism and behaviorism because it cautions against repeatedly returning to the kinds of western colonial/neoliberal linear thinking about a teleological future built upon exclusions. As I explored in the previous section, the better future promised by neoliberalism has never been meant for everyone and indeed hinges upon the reproduction of humans labeled as problems as a key element in ensuring differential and unequal access and inclusion. In critically reflecting on her own embodied disability, Kafer (2021) also questions the teleological seemingly problem-free utopia Athanasiou, 2020 references by pointing out the ways that this version of a neoliberal future always and already excludes disability and disabled persons. In her own questioning of neoliberalism’s linear and unidirectional storyline, Kafer (2021, p. 423) asks: “Which traumas are erased in assuming that everyone has lived a pre trauma life, that distress comes to find you after? Or in the assumption that one can move up and away from trauma, leaving it behind in time and space, safely nestled in the past?”

Both Athanasiou’s (2020) and Kafer’s (2021) insights are particularly salient in the analysis of practices of representing children’s behaviour in ABC charts because of the ways they call into question everything and everyone that is left out of the simplistic singular storyline that comprises evidence of misbehaviour. Similarly, what is inescapable here is how our relationship to western colonial neoliberal conceptions of time shapes how we tell stories, whom we accept as storytellers along with the happy endings that we think might await us in the future. How might our imagined happy futures include disabled people as well as other individual labeled as problems? What contributions might be made by remaining out of sync and out place with the current neoliberal storyline we are inhabiting? One contribution to this reimagining that I offer here, is to reconsider and question the ways in which representations in ABC charts seek to attribute the problem of misbehaviour to an individual child. As I mentioned earlier, the identification and representation of the antecedent is one of the key elements of the unidirectional ABC storyline.

As indicated in Appendix A the box where the antecedent is to be documented is small, intended to be filled out quickly and efficiently by a busy teacher as well as focused on what has immediately occurred in the present moment. As a teacher who has been required to read and write a countless number of ABC charts, this focus on the immediacy of incidences invariably poses challenges regarding how problem behaviour is represented. For example, if a student begins to cry and throw objects in the middle of story time, something must be included as the ‘antecedent’ of this incident in the ABC chart. I might write story time in the box under antecedent even though, it is impossible for me to actually know if story time was indeed the antecedent. It is impossible for me know if story time was the antecedent to the throwing of objects because as Goldberg (2019, p. 353) has stated: “Human memory is nonlinear.,,. It is layered and relayered through feedback loops, crosscurrents, lateral networks, intersections, and intersessions.” Meaning that while the student might be physically present in the classroom, the student may be remembering or reliving an experience from their past or imagining a future or distracted by another classmate’s actions or something they noticed outside the classroom door or window, etc. In this sense, what immediately appears to be the antecedent may in fact be unrelated to how the student is experiencing distress in that moment because the student may indeed be “out of sync” (Knight, 2019: p. 76) with the unidirectional sequence of western colonial neoliberal time. Similarly, I as the educator in this scenario, may also be focused on, in the middle of or distracted by any number of memories, current experiences or ponderings of the future in ways that also influence and shape my experience of that particular moment of distress that is not experienced merely by the student throwing objects but also by the educator and students in the classroom. In this sense, by representing the antecedent as story time in the ABC chart, I am the one who is likely both out of sync and out of place because there is already a great deal I do not know and cannot represent as part of linear sequence of events that will comprise how this moment in time is represented in the ABCs of behaviour management.

Thus, what is recorded as immediately occurring before the problem behaviour might actually misrepresent how the student is experiencing distress in that moment because of the numerous potential variables that are necessarily excluded from representing the circumstances and context of problem behaviour. In this sense, determining what the immediate ‘antecedent’ might be is always already mired in dilemmas of (mis)representation. The dilemmas of (mis)representation are involved anytime there is a need to identify a starting point in time for distress enacted and experienced because both the children and their teachers are always and already in middle of the western colonial neoliberal ordering of time and its co-constituted injustices. The focus when completing the antecedent portion of the ABC chart is attributing the problematic response to the individual child even as they are entangled in a complex set of social relations. I would posit that it is important to reconsider the practice of claiming to know or represent any point in time as the starting point to the ABC linear sequence because of the ways in which such a representation of events attributed to an individual child is always and already an incomplete and partial story. As Kafer (2021, p.424) reminds readers: “Remember: what came before violence is often other violence. And what comes before disability is often other disabilities. Release the assumption—one born of ableism, white innocence, a denial of violence across generations—that the time before crip is one without disability.” To put it differently, if one of the aims of tracking and monitoring the ABC of childhood behaviour is to prevent, manage, cure or rehabilitate problems by tracing the sequence of events in a western colonial neoliberal model of time, this very aim discounts the everyday embodied realities of being embedded in the co-constituted violences and exclusions that neoliberalism itself sustains and generates. It also discounts the ways that neoliberalist systems and structures hinge upon sustaining a hegemonic normative order that eschews disability and other embodied differences historically, presently and in its teleological utopic future of ongoing progress and productivity.

“How does it feel to be a problem” (Dubois, 1999: p. 9)? This oft quoted line from W.E.B Dubois remains as relevant today as it was over hundred years ago. W.E.B Dubois asked this provocative question within the context of confronting and questioning the injustices of racism. I evoke this question here in order to focus upon the representation of behaviour in the second key element of the ABC chart. I also evoke this question in order to critically examine how representing behaviour in ABC charts meets at the intersections of several discriminatory practices such as racism, ableism, sexism and classism. As stated earlier, several studies within the field of critical disability studies have demonstrated that practices of surveillance, monitoring and labeling children as problems disproportionately impacts children based on ableism and racism among other embodied differences (Adams and Erevelles, 2017; Broderick and Leonardo, 2016; Erevelles et al., 2006; Love and Beneke, 2021; Migliarini and Annamma, 2020; Mills and Lefrançois, 2018; Parekh et al., 2021). Meaning that representations of children’s misbehaviour in ABC charts is unevenly distributed in ways that are racist and ableist. Both Erevelles et al. (2006) and Broderick and Leonardo (2016) draw upon W.E.B. Dubois in their own respective analyses of the injustices that are reproduced in schooling practices that persist in labeling individual children as problems. Erevelles et al. (2006, p. 93-94) draw upon the concept of “whiteness as property” to consider how “ability as property is bartered for socioeconomic status in the capitalist economy.” In distinct yet linked ways Broderick and Leonardo (2016, p. 66) draw upon W.E.B Dubois concept of the colour line in order to demonstrate the co-constituted role of “the ability line.” Broderick and Leonardo (2016) show how the ability line works to offer a smoother path of moving on and forward for Broderick’s son who is white and able-bodied, while also presenting barriers to inclusion for her son’s Black friend who receives differential attention and a differential set of consequences for the same behaviour while in the same class.

“How does it feel to be a problem” (Dubois, 1999: p. 9)? If educators as well as the educational systems they inhabit are serious about stopping and redirecting the flow of current trends that persistently reinforce and operationalize “ability as property” (Erevelles et al., 2006: p. 94) and “the ability line” (Broderick and Leonardo, 2016: p. 66), one way to do so would be to find ways to reconsider and question the kinds of evidence that is gathered from tools such as ABC charts and the ways such evidence informs the kinds of decision making that amplify the current neoliberal feedback loop we inhabit. Applying concepts such as “ability as property” (Erevelles et al., 2006: p. 94) and “the ability line” (Broderick and Leonardo, 2016: p. 66) show that practices of monitoring, surveillance and representation in classrooms are implemented unevenly. They also show how a preoccupation with preparing children to be productive adults in the imagined future of sustained reproduction in the neoliberal economy depends upon a stratification of access and inclusion to opportunities that remains unjustly discriminatory. The developmentalist and behaviourist logics that support the reproduction of neoliberalism and govern the implementation of behaviour management practices in schools also generate the conditions where some children can claim “ability as property” or in a complimentary manner find themselves on the right side of “the ability line” (Broderick and Leonardo, 2016: p. 66; Erevelles et al., 2006: p. 94). In this sense, the continued use of ABC charts can be understood as a mechanism through which neoliberalism’s co-constituted discriminatory practices are also perpetuated and sustained.

Thus far in this portion of the paper I have offered a critical analysis of the unidirectional sequence of events in ABC charts that has focused representations of the antecedent and behaviour portions of this storyline. In doing so, I have engaged in a disruption with this unidirectional flow of western colonial neoliberal time by contesting how behaviour comes to be represented as an individual problem rather than always and already a partial and limited representation of an entangled set of social relations. Finally, I would like to take some time to critically analyze the representation of consequences within the neoliberalist, developmentalist and behaviorist paradigm within which ABC charts operate. As mentioned earlier, the consequences portion of this unidirectional ABC sequence, requires the educator to represent the child’s behavioural intent (e.g. attention seeking, avoidance/escape, sensory/tangible) as it pertains to the represented response of the antecedent. Much like the numerous exclusions that occur in representing the antecedent or behaviour, the consequences portion of the ABC chart also calls for not only exclusions to be enacted but also speculations on the part of the educator. To put it differently, since what has been recorded in the antecedent and beahviour portions of the chart is always and already a partial and limited rendering of what has occurred the representation of the individual child’s intent or desired consequences can also only be a partial or limited or even misrepresented rendering of what has occurred. In Knight’s (2019, p. 78) critical analysis of how children are labeled as problems “out-of-sync” with time she states: “understandings of linear temporality itself work to remove children from what we understand to be a child.” Within the context of my analysis of ABC charts, I draw upon this insight to point out the paradox of this linear system of behavioural surveillance. It is a paradox because the broader implications and consequences of these tactics of representation are that the child who is at the supposed centre of this process remains unknown. They remain unknown because they are always and already excluded from the western colonial neoliberal conception of time. They are out of sync and out of place with the very practice of linear representation in the ABCs and their adherence to reproducing neoliberalism’s version of normalcy.

Concluding thoughts

In this paper, I have sought to critically examine and explore how representations of problem behaviour in ABC charts are inextricably linked to and shaped by a western colonial neoliberal conception of time and its co-constituted power imbalances, exclusions and injustices. I have done so, in part, through Goldberg’s (2019) invocation to enact counter storytelling practices as a way to contest the hegemony of neoliberal injustices. Similarly, I have relied on the work of several scholars within critical disability studies in order to question and critically examine the role of developmentalism and behaviourism as helpmates in the pursuit of the teleological utopia offered by neoliberalism’s interest in reproducing itself. I have also relied upon the work of Knight (2019), Athanasiou (2020) and Kafer (2021) in my own analysis of neoliberal temporalities and how we might point to their limits as we consider moving beyond them. Athanasiou (p. 251) provocatively asks: “How then can we reclaim an expansive space-time for imagining collective life otherwise amidst a present that limits and allocates unjustly the possibility of imagining differently?” In a distinct yet linked way Kafer (2021, p. 421) asks: “What are the temporalities that unfold beyond, away from, askance of productivity, capacity, self-sufficiency, independence and achievement?” When contemplating these questions alongside the injustices and exclusions perpetuated by the use of ABC charts, I remain hopeful that the current neoliberal feedback loop schools, teachers and children inhabit, will have its own telos as all things do. I remain hopeful in simply asking these questions and contemplating the possibilities of an otherwise beyond neoliberalism that the under representations, misrepresentations and always and already excluded storylines of children with disabilities among other children labeled as problems will find a future. In the meantime, I invite you to become “out-of-sync” (Knight, 2019: p. 74) with the ABCs of neoliberal time because it is past time for rethinking what we mean in calls for behavioural change.