Drawing the line: Teachers affectively and discursively question what counts as “appropriate behavior” in schools

Abstract

School rules, classroom norms, and social and emotional learning (SEL) modules carefully define, hone, and regulate what counts as “appropriate” and “inappropriate” behavior from students. While the stated intention behind these practices is typically to promote a sense of safety, well-being, and productivity in schooling, behavioral rules can also uphold racist, ableist, and neoliberal practices that pathologize and exclude children’s bodily expressions. The line between behaviors that are “dangerous” versus “different” is laden with hegemonic power dynamics, and teachers must be encouraged to recognize these dynamics and resist them. I collaborated with six elementary-school teachers in the northwest United States to speak critically and self-reflectively about educational practices including SEL and classroom management. This paper explores instances in which the teachers grappled with where and how to draw lines around acceptable and unacceptable behavior, resisting an immediate exclusionary response to any behavior deemed undesirable. The teachers’ affective dialogue demonstrates that reconsidering the limits of appropriate behavior is crucial yet complicated. I call for greater value and support to be placed on opportunities for teachers to openly discuss where lines should be drawn and where they might be loosened in ways that advocate for children’s agency, diversity, and social-emotional wholeness.

Introduction

Elphaba Marie and I entered the Zoom meeting for our follow-up conversation after a 6-week “discourse community,” in which a group of elementary-school teachers and I met to discuss critical topics around social and emotional learning (SEL). Tonight, Elphaba Marie—a Special Educator—brought up her experiences writing Individual Education Plans (IEPs) for students with autism.

“It’s a pet peeve of mine,” said Elphaba Marie, “when a teacher writes into an IEP goal that [students] will control their flapping [a type of self-stimulating behavior].” Her intonation rose. “No! That’s part of who they are … It’s other people on the outside that need to be more tolerant of differences. And they’re the ones who should be doing the learning. Not the person that knows who they are and knows what their body needs. They obviously know what their body needs! So why are they the ones that have to be taught?”

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t realize that’s in an IEP.”

“Well, it has been,” replied Elphaba Marie, her voice lowering to a more matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly.”

Teachers like Elphaba Marie often share stories of student behaviors that are and are not deemed normal, appropriate, or acceptable in a learning environment. From self-stimulating (“stimming”) to flipping tables to refusing to sit on the rug at Circle Time, children’s behaviors are monitored, scrutinized, and carefully honed in public school classrooms (Apple, 2004; Davies, 2014; Stearns, 2019; Yoon and Templeton, 2019). Without claiming that any and all behaviors should be tolerated, educators must recognize that commonly accepted definitions of “good/healthy behaviors” or “classroom norms” are often bound to white, middle-class, heteropatriarchal, and neurotypical/able-bodied assumptions (Boler, 1999; Fishman, 2020; Kaler-Jones, 2020). In effect, school classrooms become sites of reinforced hegemony, closing off or shutting down versions of personhood that run counter to dominant understandings. The hegemonic discourses around good behaviors are often treated as universal and indisputable facts (Apple, 2004), and educators frequently use the euphemism of “behaviors” in reference to what are deemed misbehaviors (e.g., “this student has a lot of behaviors”). From a discourse analysis lens, the very existence of a “behavior” thus becomes equated with something undesirable. As Stearns (2019) writes, “the thing is, though, when “behaviors” stop, humanity stops too” (5).

Without condoning all behaviors, there is a need for close and critical inquiry into how and what emerges as an acceptable or appropriate behavior within educational discourse. There is also a need to consider people’s behaviors not as purely individual choices but as forms of communication that are always situated in complex sociopolitical contexts (Boler, 1999; Stearns, 2022). For instance, Kapp et al. (2019) demonstrate that stimming can be a negative experience for people with autism only because it is stigmatized and subjected to “treatment” for elimination. Bakan (2014) interprets stimming as a difference, not a deficit. Stimming can be recognized as a personally and socially valuable form of soothing, processing, communicating, and even enjoying one’s emotional experiences (Bakan, 2014; Kapp et al., 2019). Often, however, differences are cast as deficits in need of remediation toward social and emotional competency, skill development, or “emotional hygiene” (Boler, 1999; Simmons, 2017).

Much of the discourse around appropriate student behavior unfolds within the zeitgeist of social and emotional learning (SEL), particularly in the United States, Northern and Western Europe, and Australia. SEL, an umbrella term for a vast range of programs, curricula, and interventions that seek to promote competencies such as self-awareness and self-regulation (CASEL, 2022), plays a considerable role in shaping and condoning what is and is not seen as tolerable in educational spaces. A common premise of SEL is that while all emotions are good and ok to feel, not all behaviors are acceptable (Hulton, 2021; Osher et al., 2016; Philibert, 2016). The question becomes then, what divides an internal emotion from an external expression? Who gets to say what is and is not acceptable? How can educators prevent SEL from being used as a form of behavioral management and policing that focuses less on how students experience their emotions and more on how students direct those emotions into external and internal compliance with rules and norms (Hoffman, 2009; Hulton, 2021; Kaler-Jones, 2020; Stearns, 2019)? Conversations with teachers about SEL specifically and educational practices more broadly can reveal important tensions, limits, and considerations on what it means to “draw the line” around particular behaviors. The purpose of this article is to explore how discourses of tolerance and intolerance, inclusion and exclusion, and conformity and difference manifest in teacher conversations about student behaviors. This includes considering how teachers express and self-reflect on their own conflicting thoughts and feelings in response to students’ behaviors.

Research questions

My interest in this topic grew during the discourse community I conducted with six elementary educators including Elphaba Marie, mentioned above. A recurrent question that appeared in our discussions was, “How do we welcome all student emotions without tolerating any and all behaviors?” I became intrigued with how the teachers described student behaviors that seemed to muddy the boundaries between what was deemed acceptable and unacceptable, leading me to ask, Where and how do teachers draw lines around acceptable versus unacceptable behaviors? How do they discuss and self-reflect on situations in which these lines are blurry? My goal is not to judge these teachers’ quality or morality, nor to advocate for a mindset of “anything goes” when it comes to behavior, nor to generate a cut-and-dried line between good and bad behaviors. My inquiry is focused on how teachers create, recreate, and navigate such limits, and what those limits can tell us about the entanglements of discourse and affect that shape and uphold educational practices and social (in)justices.

Theoretical framework: affective-discursive practices

The notion of “affective-discursive practices” acknowledges the entanglement between how people make sense of situations and how they sense situations (Wetherell, 2013), which is important when examining how behavioral limits are constructed not just cognitively but emotionally. Through a poststructural lens, discourses are dynamic and socially shared patterns of words, thoughts, images, and actions that shape our identities, relationships, and realities (Allan, 2003; Butler, 2004). The discourses around any particular phenomenon are multiple, and they may clash or compete to render particular discourses more dominant than others. The concept of discourse helps inquirers connect language (what is said) to subjectivities (the “selves” people perform) to systemic flows of power (which make some ways of being more valued, acceptable, or sayable than others). Discourses are always intertwined with affect, which is often defined as the non-conscious intensities of embodiment and sensation that enable us to affect and be affected by other material forces (Massumi, 2002). Affect exists in a slippery sort of way that thwarts identification and description, and some theorists argue that affect exists prior to, or separate from, sense-making. In alignment with Wetherell (2013), I argue that affect and discourse cannot and should not be disentangled from one another: “bits of the body…get patterned together with feelings and thoughts, interaction patterns and relationships, narratives and interpretative repertoires…” (ibid, pp. 13–14).

To use the opening vignette as an example, multiple discourses were at play. Elphaba Marie pushed against a discourse of “stimming should be self-regulated,” flipped a discourse of “people with autism are outsiders” into “people without autism are the outsiders,” promoted a discourse of “knowing what your body needs,” and disrupted a discourse of “children are the students and adults are the teachers.” Each of these discourses, importantly, was charged with affect. Though it is impossible to pin down and label each inarticulable affective energy, one can note that Elphaba Marie’s rising intonation drew a sense of distance or proximity between her and each discourse. What many listeners/readers would perceive as anger served not only to attach a sense of scorn or repulsion to some of the discourses (“stimming should be self-regulated”) but also to attach a sense of desirability or fierce approval to others (“knowing what your body needs”). Attending to affective-discursive practices means recognizing that social practices are not just verbalized thoughts but are also laden with affective pressures and emotional investments. When analyzing the language used by teachers, I listen not only for what they say but also how they say it, and how it is patterned with bodily/emotive experience alongside meaning-making. This helps me consider what is deemed and what feels good or bad, comfortable or uncomfortable, and appropriate or inappropriate in their lived experiences.

Methodology

Discourse communities, which are similar to reading or discussion groups, can be used as a form of professional development with teachers on topics relevant to social justice (Boyd and Darragh, 2019). The intimate nature of discourse communities is conducive to self-reflective and open-ended learning for teachers (Glazier, 2003; Grossman et al., 2001) and to discourse analysis from inquirers (Boyd and Darragh, 2019; Boyd et al., 2021). With approval from my university’s Human Research Protection Program, I recruited six elementary-school educators in a state in the US Pacific Northwest. These participants, referred to with self-chosen pseudonyms, were Cindy, a Kindergarten teacher; Joon Lee, a second-grade teacher; Eunice, a paraeducator working specifically on SEL; Elphaba Marie, a Special Educator; Esperanza, a second-grade teacher; and Freeda, a school specialist in SEL. The schools at which the participants taught were spread out across the state. At the time of recruitment, the participants’ years of teaching experience ranged from less than 1 year (Cindy) to more than 30 years (Joon Lee).

Following Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort and Zembylas’s (2013) critical pedagogies of compassion, I grounded the discourse community in collaboration, relationship-building, and openness to emotional ambiguity. The seven of us met weekly on Zoom for 6 weeks to discuss a shared book, Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning: Psychodynamic and Cultural Perspectives (Stearns, 2019), and supplementary articles (e.g., Kaler-Jones, 2020; Krauss, 2022; Simmons, 2017; Weaver, 2020). The authors of these readings shed light on the current context and underlying assumptions about SEL, including how SEL is implicated in social justice issues of class, race, and disability. In addition to the whole-group Zoom meetings, I met individually with each teacher for a semi-structured interview before the first group meeting. These one-on-one interviews served as helpful triangulation to the full-group discourse community meetings by opening space for teachers to share things individually they may not have as a full group, and vice versa. Other researchers (e.g., Boyd et al., 2021) have also utilized the practice of one-on-one interviews to supplement a discourse community. All teachers completed a 22-item, open-ended pre-survey on Qualtrics before this first meeting, and four completed an optional 8-item survey after the sixth group meeting. These same four teachers (Elphaba Marie, Joon Lee, Cindy, and Eunice) also met with me for a one-on-one Zoom conversation after the sixth meeting. The teachers received professional credit for the time they spent participating in the dissertation, and I received funding to provide each of them with a copy of the central text (Stearns, 2019).

My approach to analysis was heavily inspired by Feminist Relational Discourse Analysis (FRDA; Thompson et al., 2018), supplemented with analysis of affective-discursive practices (Wetherell, 2013). FRDA is an approach to discourse analysis that not only recognizes how people are shaped by the discourses that circulate through society but also how their voices and experiences demonstrate the agency to reinforce, resist, and complexly navigate those discourses (Thompson et al., 2018). Bringing FRDA into dialogue with affective-discursive practices meant acknowledging the affective dimensions of discourse. I conceptualized FRDA as a recipe card that I could modify, add to, and iteratively readjust, while tending to a balance between structure/flexibility and preparation/improvisation.

My analytic steps included memoing, reading and re-reading artifacts, “chunking” and coding sections of text, processing themes and affective-discursive practices through multiple modes of engagement (e.g., a dry-erase board, colored sticky-notes, ATLAS.ti software, pen and paper, conversations with thought partners), writing-as-analysis, and a final poetic rendering (see McMain, 2022 for a more detailed account of analysis). Through my iterative practice of recording memos, dialogically engaging with thought partners, examining artifacts from multiple perspectives, and sharing themes with participants for feedback, I enriched the rigor and trustworthiness of the study without claiming to have captured an essential, singular truth (Ravitch and Carl, 2021). I refer to the generated themes as “renderings” rather than “findings” to resist the positivist notion that they were objectively extracted from the data (Davies, 2014).

Analytic renderings

In the book we read as a discourse community, Stearns (2019) shares an ethnographic vignette about a first-grade boy having a meltdown, shoving tables and breaking pencils. The boy’s teacher called support staff for help, described the boy as “inflexible and explosive,” and expressed how she knew she needed to stay calm in front of the students and just wanted the boy to “get better.” In analyzing this exchange, Stearns asks the question of “where in this cycle the stop really needs to happen” (Stearns, 2019: 90). Why, Stearns asks, does the boy need to get better instead of be seen? Does the teacher need to stay calm or share some of her feelings with the class? How can educators hold space for answers to lie uneasily as both/and rather than either/or, recognizing that meltdowns like this may indeed require some sort of containment and merit thoughtful questioning of how/why teachers feel affectively and discursively pulled toward certain responses over others?

The question of “where the stop really needs to happen” was brought up during the discourse community several times, implicitly and explicitly, as the teachers shared about student behaviors that breached the limits of what was deemed “ok.” Through the following stories from Joon Lee, Elphaba Marie, Eunice, and Cindy, I focus on where the teachers draw or drew lines, how they discuss these lines, and and what their dialogue and self-reflections reveal about the tensions teachers experience when it comes to expanding beyond zero-tolerance practices and hegemonic assumptions about students’ behaviors. In the discussion section, I consider the implications of these stories, advocating for greater time and space for teachers to critically reflect on their own practices—and on the broader social discourses that shape and constrain those practices.

Elphaba Marie and the cat kid

Eunice, a paraeducator who previously worked in a Special Education capacity, and Elphaba Marie, the director of Special Education in her district, both described a tendency for general education teachers to send children out of the classroom for behavioral reasons. As Eunice shared, some teachers are “very uncomfortable” with “behaviors that are kind of outside of the scope of normal behavior … it’s so much so that they, they, they just want somebody to come take care of it.”

Eunice refers to these behaviors with descriptors tied to discourses of “comfort” and “normalcy” but not to safety or violence. The notion of “taking care” of an abnormal or uncomfortable behavior connotes a cure-oriented discourse in which deviation from conformity is fixed and alleviated, rather than met with acceptance or inquisitiveness. Elphaba Marie, in agreement with Eunice, shared the following perspective:

I noticed that here, at the job I have here, too. Particularly in two classrooms where the teachers—if there’s any behavior that is even slightly out of this peaceful calm that they’re trying to create, they call for help and backup. And “he just needs to go out” and “you just need to take him for a walk with you” instead of trying to…I don’t know, be ok with it? Like we’re just going to let him be over there, we’re going to continue learning.

Like Eunice, Elphaba Marie describes these behaviors not as dangerous but as deviations from a regime of calmness and comfort. The word “backup,” however, does carry connotations of a danger response, which emphasizes Elphaba Marie’s point that there is a mismatch between child behavior and adult reaction. She explains the specific instance of a fifth-grade boy who, when emotionally overwhelmed, reverts to feline-like behaviors: “He had a lot of behaviors that it was hard for teachers to genuinely like him and connect with him. But it was, the only way that you could get through to him was to make a connection with this kid.” While Elphaba Marie refers to his behaviors simply as “behaviors,” the negative implication is clear. She went on to describe those behaviors in more detail: “He would, you know, carry his picture of his cats around, he’d curl up under the desk, he’d hiss at people, you know, the characteristic things that, you know, when you see the kid coming into your classroom and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the, the cat kid.’”

Elphaba Marie explained that this boy was often sent to the Special Ed room, where they worked to “creat[e] a safe space for him” and to say, “it’s ok for you to feel like that. It’s ok to feel overwhelmed with your class.” After clarifying that “it wasn’t like we said, ‘Ok, this is your cat space’ or anything,” Elphaba described how she and the other Special Ed teachers would dim the lights and give the student a lap desk if he needed to be under a table. “The rule was he had to be working and he had to still be following the rules in the classroom and not be jumping on desks and, you know, causing disruptions to the groups that were trying to work in there.”

Through this explanation, there are still limits in place: the boy could not jump on desks, disrupt the discourse/materiality of a “workspace,” or do whatever he felt like doing. Elphaba Marie’s clarification that the “safe space” was not necessarily a “cat space” avoids going so far as to approve of cat-like behavior, instead holding it at a distance, but the student was accepted in this space rather than excluded, as he had been from his general classroom. “By the end of the year,” said Elphaba Marie, “we had seen a lot of changes in him … you know, it was those kinds of relationship-building things that I think are important with the kids.”

Eunice and the superhero

In our fifth meeting, Eunice shared an “aha!” moment she had recently experienced when working with a kindergartener who was notorious for getting upset, shoving chairs, and breaking crayons and pencils.

But last week, his latest, um...upset...he was standing there with his legs apart and his fists down like some kind of superhero [laughs], you know what I mean? Just staring his teacher down like this. And I thought, he’s feeling powerful. I mean, he’s mad, but he’s also feeling powerful in this little life where this kid has no power whatsoever, you know what I mean? It was kind of like this aha moment, like—because he’s not just like flinging things wildly, he’s very controlled. He’s like, “watch what I’m gonna do next” kind of a thing, you know? Um. Still not okay. But, but it just, it was a different shift for me and you know, thinking, what can we do to give this kid a sense of power and control in his life where he has absolutely none?

The behaviors Eunice describes—such as flinging chairs—may sound horrifying and dangerous at a first glance. However, Eunice’s differentiation between wild flinging and controlled flinging is important: while it still portrays “wild” as outside the scope of “tolerable,” it recognizes the motivation behind a behavior. While some aggressive displays of anger may still be unacceptable, the response to a behavior may not just be to quell it but to consider its underlying environmental and relational factors. In this excerpt, Eunice seems to be mostly considering factors at the level of the individual student. What if she were to also examine the power structures that position children as “powerless” (perhaps intersectionally, considering race and socioeconomic class) and that fail to recognize where students are agentic? Children’s “misbehaving” can also be read as “actively communicating a lack of consent for the conditions around them” (Stearns, 2022). “Yeah,” said Eunice, “I don’t know. It’s interesting…”

The interesting thing is that he is very controlled in where he throws and what he throws; he never throws it at another student. He just, you know, he’ll throw it towards the wall or, so it’s not like he’s trying to hurt anybody. He’s just, you know, it’s not safe … And he’s not really broken anything except for crayons and pencils, so. I don’t know. We’ve got to figure it out, but that was definitely a new insight.

Here, Eunice implicitly differentiates between what would be more blatantly unacceptable (like trying to hurt someone, overstepping limits of “safety”), and what is more ambiguous (like breaking inanimate objects in a “controlled” manner). This differentiation illuminates the discursive construction of tolerable behavior, and how “safety” and “control” are subjective—for instance, the crayons and pencils certainly do not seem “safe” in this context, but is there great harm in snapping a pencil as an expression of rage? If “inanimate” objects are viewed, as they are in many cultures, not as dead matter but as parts of the world that possess agency, does the behavioral line change? In this excerpt, there is also a discursive current and affective desire to “figure it out” and identify the root cause of the problem, which could be fruitful (rather than simply adhering to a checklist of “good” and “bad” behaviors) but also futile if taken to a diagnostic extreme (as Eunice and Esperanza discussed during another conversation, there may be no single “why” behind a particular behavior). In any case, Eunice displays a willingness to step back from the binary of “good behaviors to include and reward,” versus “bad behaviors to exclude and punish,” and thoughtfully consider the links across emotion, identity, and behavior.

Notions of normalcy and comfort re-emerged in Elphaba Marie’s experiences with the boy who behaves like a cat. As Elphaba Marie described, perceivably unusual behaviors like these are “pushed to the fringe” instead of “just brought in and accepted as the norm.”

Because [teachers] are afraid—like I hear so many times, “But the other kids are going to think it’s okay, the other kids are going to copy him.” Well no, they’re not. You know, they see that this kid is not acting the way that they want to act. They know the difference between someone who can help it and someone who, who can’t…

Eunice replied, “Yeah, and, if anything, I think it creates more empathy from the rest of the classroom instead of shame, you know? Hiding it away or wanting it to leave.” Many emotions are embedded in this exchange: classroom teachers’ fear and discomfort (proclaimed as concern for students but perhaps also for themselves), perceived empathy from other children, and uncomfortable emotions like shame that occur when a behavior is deemed abnormal.

In these examples, Eunice and Elphaba Marie pushed against a practice of quick exclusion in which a check-listed “bad behavior” merits an immediate removal from the classroom. Enacting a practice of inclusion in this sense meant questioning affective-discursive investments in normalcy and comfort, recognizing that behavioral boundaries can still exist but should be examined for whom and what they deem intolerable. Considering the bodily discomfort that can arise when we feel or recognize negative emotion, however (Ahmed, 2010; McMain, 2023; Stearns, 2019), teachers in the discourse community also expressed uncertainties and difficulties in widening typical limits of acceptable behavior.

Cindy and the girl (not) on the rug

Cindy, a first-year kindergarten teacher, spoke about tolerating certain behaviors from her kindergarten students.

As the year has gone on, I’ve let certain things go. You know, a student who really does not want to be on the rug … So everyone else will be there, but maybe she’ll be at the back of the room. But pretty quickly, I realized she’s hearing everything I’m saying, even though she’s not on the rug, and so I kind of had to let go of that notion of having her behavior match everybody else’s. And like, you know what, it’s okay she’s in the back and I’ll just keep inviting her. Maybe 1 day she’ll join us, and now I find she does join us, but she brings something with her, which I don’t normally tolerate. But if she has a book that she’s flipping through, I just always go back to that...if she’s not causing a problem for anybody else, then I just need to let it go. But it doesn’t feel good to me [laughs] to have somebody looking at a book with her face down while I’m teaching or inviting the class to share different things. But it’s so great to have her in close proximity to us and just to feel like she’s with her peers that that's fine. She’s reading a book, then so be it. And I’ve just, you know, let that go. Or [laughs] tried to let that go.

Here, Cindy describes the importance of not expecting all students’ behavior to “match everyone else’s.” Twice, Cindy uses the word “invite” where she could have used a word with more rule-based connotations such as “request,” “ask,” or “tell.” As a first-year teacher, Cindy is surely juggling the myriad layers of discourse and expectation that are heaped onto teachers, but without the years of experience to bring those discourses and expectations into encounter with her own teacher identity. Still, she frequently reflected on her shifting teacher identity, contemplating how specific situations might (mis)align with norms or expectations.

For instance, Cindy first indicates her realization that the girl in the back of the room could still hear what the teacher was saying, which retains the importance of “listening” as a classroom expectation but loosens the requirement for children to all be at the same level of physical proximity while doing so. Cindy shares that she does not “normally tolerate” children bringing books to the rug for circle time but that she made an exception because at least this child was deciding to join the rest of the group. “As long as she’s not causing a problem,” says Cindy, she can be permitted to stay. What, in this setting, entails a “problem?” When discussing behavioral limits, teachers often draw upon the importance of not being “disruptive” or “disturbing,” and not interfering with others’ “learning.” I am interested in what is perceived as a distraction and how distractions are understood as separate from “learning.” With behaviors like stimming, creating a side conversation, or mimicking the body language of a cat, is there nothing to be learned? As Eunice pointed out earlier, what if children are prompted to learn empathy from these observations, as they observe differences in action and watch how other children have learned to exist in their bodies in unusual ways (Davies, 2014)?

In this example of the child on the rug with a book, Cindy not only highlights the variety of discourses that determine what behaviors can be included and excluded, tolerable and intolerable, but also her own affective responses. “It doesn’t feel good to me,” she says, to have the child immersed in a book while Cindy is speaking. This makes sense at an emotional level—surely many people would feel a sense of disrespect, unease, and distraction as they attempt to connect with someone who is clearly immersed in another task. Cindy also expresses how it is “so great to have her in close proximity to us,” suggesting an affective dimension where it feels good to experience a sense of physical togetherness or cohesion with the students in a classroom. Thus, an ambivalence emerges between wanting to embrace differences, loosen behavioral boundaries, and “let things go,” while simultaneously “not feeling good” about what this loosening may produce at an affective level.

I read Cindy’s last follow-up sentence—“[I’ve] tried to let that go”—as an honest acknowledgement that redrawing boundaries and questioning behavioral limits is an emotional task, not just a cognitive or pedagogical one. As scholars and educators engage in the critical work of questioning dominant practices and assumptions, particularly those that reinforce systems of oppression, teachers should not be positioned as mere vessels of discourse but as self-reflecting, feeling, and agentic humans whose personal histories, preferences, habits, and experimentation are all valuable to honor and explore. Joon Lee’s reflections on bodily control, which I turn to next, demonstrate the paradoxical agency (Butler, 2004) in which teachers are shaped but never completely determined by dominant affective-discursive practices.

Joon Lee and bodily control

A prevalent discourse in K-12 schooling in the US and other Westernized countries is that learning environments should be calm, quiet, and focused (Apple, 2004; Davies, 2014; Stearns, 2022; Yoon and Templeton, 2019). Wiggly children are reminded to sit criss-cross applesauce, wandering eyes are redirected (usually to the teacher), and voices are carefully monitored to remain at an “inside volume.” Several times, Joon Lee reflected on bodily control.

I was just thinking about how, in education, we value those children who have control over their bodies. And those who don’t … it’s something that annoys us or is pointed out or thought of as a negative behavior. And you know, maybe that’s more of how they show their understanding or their learning or it is just, it’s like they can’t all control it, for whatever reason. And yet we don’t accept that, and we may be more accepting of other differences or challenges that kids face, but I think body control is one of those that’s—at least maybe I should just speak for myself [laughing]—is more challenging.

First, Joon Lee illuminates the associations between a lack of bodily control and terms such as “negative” and “annoying,” recognizing its distance from the notion of acceptance. More subtly, by referring to “other differences or challenges,” Joon Lee implicitly identifies bodily control as something that is “different” or “challenging.” Even through her critique, Joon Lee’s language reproduces the idea that a lack of bodily control is a deviation from an implied norm. Joon Lee disrupts the discourse that bodily control interferes with learning by stating that maybe it is actually a means of showing learning or understanding. In doing so, she maintains the notion that learning/understanding is an agreed-upon goal in the classroom (Biesta, 2015) but expands the ways in which learning may be recognized.

Joon Lee uses the collective “we” and “us” four times, referencing herself among other teachers, before ending with a laugh and a recognition that maybe she should just “speak for herself.” One reading of this shift is that self-reflection can be a painful and shameful process, and the broader nature of “we” as opposed to “I” may be a way to shield one’s identity amidst hypothetical others. Laughter can function as a softener for uncomfortable affect (Warner-Garcia, 2014), and it may have been easier for Joon Lee to begin her reflection with a group critique before narrowing in on the ways in which she, herself, reproduces something hegemonic. Another reading is that the use of “we” demonstrates an awareness that cultural habits span beyond the individual, and for Joon Lee to self-reflect exclusively on her own practice would be to ignore the systemic nature of it. Through a poststructural lens, this excerpt can be read as an enactment of teacher agency in which agency “seems to lie in the subject’s ability to decode and recode its identity within discursive formations and cultural practices” (St. Pierre, 2000: 504). Joon Lee’s affective-discursive contribution, which disrupts and at other times reproduces the very discourses she is disrupting, is laden with the currents of discomfort, humor, and humility that are crucial for a pedagogical practice of criticality (Boler, 1999).

Another time, I asked the teachers what they thought about the claim that a calm environment is a necessary condition for learning. “I think we can learn through lots of different emotions,” said Joon Lee. “The question is, can I teach if it’s not calm?” She added to this thought later: “And who’s to say that, you know, just because you walk into a quiet environment, that that’s the place where the most learning is happening?”

Again, Joon Lee’s contributions reveal some of the tensions involved in disrupting dominant discourse. Joon Lee takes my question and distinguishes two ideas: No, she says, learning can unfold through more than just calmness, but teaching may require an element of calm. This breaks the supposition that teaching and learning are inherently bound, naming learning as something that may unfold in ways other than explicit teaching (Biesta, 2015). “Teaching” is currently defined in a neoliberal system upheld by standardized testing toward institutional measures of success (Apple, 2004). If “teaching” unfolded in a different affective-discursive context, would it feel less challenging to teach through a wider range of emotional atmospheres? Would there be more room to build relationships with the recognition that the learning goals of children and teachers may not always align? If the dominant discourse in public schools were not “adults are in control of children,” would it still feel as difficult for teachers when children take back some of that control? In our fifth group meeting, Joon Lee confronted the uncomfortable recognition that teachers may want to control children but know they cannot:

We say you can stand up, you can move around, you can choose your spot, those kinds of things. But then I, I kind of wonder too, how comfortable are teachers with that? You know, we say it, but do we really mean it? Or does it make us feel like we’re not controlling our children, which is kind of the, you know, what we really want to be able to do, but we know we can’t.

In this comment, Joon Lee continues calling out the contradictions she perceives in teaching practices, again using “we” to include herself. Rather than settling in a discourse of choice or freedom (“you can stand up, you can move around, you can choose your spot”), Joon Lee questions whether this discourse functions partly to quell the perhaps guilty or futile feeling of wanting to control children yet knowing that is impossible. “We know we can’t” could be read as an acknowledgement of children’s undeniable agency even within adultist structures (Stearns, 2022; Yoon and Templeton, 2019), or/and it could be read within a moralistic discourse that controlling another person is unacceptable. Either way, Joon Lee refuses to accept the “choice” discourse at face value, instead critically considering its position at the junction of multiple tensions: the discomfort that comes from teachers feeling out of control, the contradictions between what people “say” and what they “mean,” and the tactics people create in attempt to reconcile irreconcilable desires.

Joon Lee’s reflections highlight the importance of teachers openly admitting uncomfortable realizations, contradictions, and affective pressures toward and away from different practices. Teachers may simultaneously feel pulled toward affective-discursive practices of “providing children with choice” and “controlling one’s class,” and it is more valuable to name these tensions rather than gloss over them—and to consider where tight boundaries remain even alongside discourses of freedom, diversity, and inclusivity.

Discussion

Noticing and examining the affective-discursive practices that shape and constrain our realities paradoxically opens space to imagine what else could be. To paraphrase Foucault (1964), what might happen if teachers were asked to consider not just what they do or why they do it but what what they do does at a socio-political level? The excerpts from Joon Lee, Cindy, Eunice, and Elphaba Marie demonstrate how teachers both reproduce and resist hegemonic practices in responding to students’ behaviors, and how they are not just “informed” or “constituted” by dominant affective-discursive practices but actively negotiate and respond to them (Butler, 2004; Thompson et al., 2018). Each teacher upheld some limits on behavior while loosening others, and they all vulnerably shared some of the uncertain and ambiguous feelings that arise when questioning common goals/protocols and entertaining diverse perspectives.

The question of “who gets to say” always emerges when considering the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Acting like a cat, shoving tables, not joining the class for circle time, joining but not paying attention, fidgeting…how might teachers categorize and respond to these behaviors based on where they fall in relation to the line of appropriateness, and can/should this line ever be cleanly drawn? I argue that the goal is not to provide teachers with a carefully crafted rulebook but to support them in grappling with the ever-changing contexts of dynamic interpersonal activity. Providing scripted SEL and classroom management techniques are not enough: rather, teachers should be encouraged to recognize and reckon with the neoliberal discourses of compliance and conformity that shape many practices of SEL and classroom management (Hoffman, 2009; Hulton, 2021; Stearns, 2019; 2022; Yoon and Templeton, 2019). Hoffman (2009) argues that “when it comes to describing and recommending actual practices of classroom management, the language of caring ideals often devolves to a discourse about control, rules, contracts, choices, activities, and organizational structures” (545). When relational care becomes heavily attached to rules and (self-)regulation, it can justify the exclusion of any expression deemed abnormal, uncomfortable, wild, impulsive, or unsafe.

Certainly some behaviors are harmful and in need of regulation, but the concern remains that hegemonic teaching practices can inadvertently function to exacerbate systems of exclusion and oppression based on any behavior deemed “other.” As Skiba and Peterson (2014) demonstrate, Black children are continually disciplined at higher rates and severity than white children for the same types of behavior. Well-intended SEL practices can shut down expressions of anger from Black and Indigenous youth particularly, not recognizing how strong collective emotions have historically proven crucial for resisting and dismantling oppressive systems (Camangian and Cariaga, 2021; Kaler-Jones, 2020). Individuals with autism push against the ableist discourses that pathologize their stimming, and Kapp and colleagues (2019) suggest that fidgeting, even from “neurotypical” youth, is not necessarily seen as problematic by children themselves. As Eunice and Elphaba Marie discussed, it may often be teachers who are most uncomfortable with a behavior. I argue that teachers’ emotions still matter, very much so, but they should matter in ways that draw teachers into critical dialogue rather than shame them or position them as unquestioned authorities. Lastly, when discussing whether to remove a student from a classroom or allow them to remain in the name of “inclusivity,” we must ask what it means to be included or excluded from a community. Being dumped into a classroom with little to no support may not be a positive experience of “inclusion” for students with unmet needs (Apple, 2004).

Fishman (2020) promotes a shift away from “classroom rules” into “human needs,” involving children themselves in ongoing conversations about which behaviors fulfill or infringe upon another person’s needs and how they do so. Consensual community agreements are not always possible when it comes to certain situations, and sometimes adult intervention is warranted, but children often rise to the occasion when they are honestly and transparently involved in conversations about interpersonal behaviors (Stearns, 2022). Stearns suggests that teachers should not default to immediately correcting any “bad behavior.” Even when questioning the motivation behind the behavior, they must think beyond factors in the individual’s life. As a deeper step, teachers can examine how social power structures, assumptions, pressures, and demands may contribute to the behavior being identified as “bad” to begin with. Sometimes, the teacher may indeed conclude that the behavior stems from a particular circumstantial problem or that it cannot be tolerated, but the point is to resist a knee-jerk response of elimination. There is the question, “where in this cycle does the stop need to happen,” (Stearns, 2019: 90), but also, “Does a stop need to happen? What does that stop look like? Who enacts it, who is involved, what happens afterward?” These questions span far beyond the scope of this paper, but they are important to name and negotiate. Discourse communities, as discussed, are one approach to engaging teachers in such questions.

It is worth noting that the six teachers who participated in this discourse community, while different in terms of teaching experience, geographic region, and job title, were likely inclined at an intrinsic level to engage in thoughtful discussions about equity and hegemony. Several of the teachers spoke of their efforts to lead conversations on social justice and engage in independent learning in their respective districts. The purpose of this study was never to generalize the experiences and perspectives of these teachers to public schoolteachers in general, but it is important to recognize how the teachers with whom I collaborated who may have been unusually active, interested, and open-minded in social and emotional conversations (and/or situated in sociopolitical contexts that allowed their participation in the study to feel safe and feasible). Other discourse communities with different groups of teachers must recognize the unique context of each group and the need to navigate different starting points for conversation.

Conclusion

As illustrated throughout this article, there remains a pressing need for critical, cultural, and reflective conversation with teachers that troubles the easy classification of student behaviors as appropriate/inappropriate, good/bad, and healthy/unhealthy. This includes questioning to what extent behavioral management functions to uphold systemic racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression, and to what extent SEL manifests as a form of behavior management (Hoffman, 2009; Stearns, 2019). It also means asking how behavioral management could be socially and emotionally helpful, if contextually considered for its sociocultural links to power and identity. My conversations with Joon Lee, Cindy, Eunice, and Elphaba Marie illuminate teachers’ abilities to wrestle with these questions, as they avoid taking “good” and “bad” student behaviors at face value and demonstrate a willingness to self-reflect on the affective-discursive investments that shape and maintain teaching practices.

I end with two central takeaways for educational stakeholders, especially those who have the agency to support and structure teachers’ priorities and responsibilities. These takeaways are (1) the importance of allocating more time and value for relational dialogue (in contrast to “top-down” professional development) that allows for mutual exploration into these questions about behavioral limits, and (2) the importance of more time and value given to questioning itself as an “outcome” of learning. Teachers, as Elphaba Marie would attest, all have lived experiences with what they perceive as the “good, the bad, and the ugly” of their educational worlds, and they must be supported in the deep work it takes to explore and transform those worlds.