Abstract
Situating the body as a lens of analysis, this article examines how linguistic and ethnic minority children are exposed to discourses of control. In this reflective essay, we share our theorized memories of working with schools and examine how educators, including ourselves, become discursive subjects. Furthermore, we become invested in enacting discourses of control toward linguistic and ethnic minority children through the programs, educational reform mandates, and pedagogies we perform.
Introduction
Poststructuralism opens the door to the examination of the body as text that can be theorized and analyzed (Bailey, 1998; Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1996; Wright, 2003). As such, this reflective essay follows and contributes to the scholarship that centers the body in educational research (Boldt, 2001; Fine, 1993; Leavitt, 1991; Leavitt and Power, 1997; Nespor, 1994; O’Farrell et al., 2000; Phelan, 1997; Saavedra, 2006; Silin, 1995, 1997; Tobin, 1997). Our study also speaks to feminist concerns about the work of teachers and how they/we are disciplined in schools (Acker, 1983, 1989; Apple, 1986; Grumet, 1988; Saavedra, 2006). In paying close attention to bodies, we note the reality that bodies are gendered, classed, and racialized; thus, they experience the world in substantially different ways.
Through this framework, we share our memories of working within schools, calling attention to the ways educators, usually white, participate in the surveillance and control of young linguistic minority students’ racialized bodies through careful discourse management of top-down reform policies. Importantly, we do not place blame on particular educators for the marginalization of linguistic and ethnic minority students; rather, we illuminate the ways discursive practices function in schools through the bodies and subjectivities of educators, as vessels, and onto the brown bodies of linguistic and ethnic minority students through their education.
In this article, we first introduce the body as a theoretical concept that allows it to be centered in educational scholarship and discussed in relation to how the work and bodies of teachers are regulated. Second, we offer a (re)reading of our memories of working with schools as teachers, observers, and collaborators. In this (re)reading, we discuss how schooling disciplines both educators and students. We conclude with suggestions for rethinking teacher education, not to offer answers to complex phenomena, but as reminders that our work with teachers and children must take into account the body (Bailey, 1998).
The body
Examinations of the body in society contribute to critical understanding of Western culture and thought as discourses can be revealed and deconstructed, exposing power relationships (Bailey, 1998). These insights are helpful for researchers and educators as they offer another dimension to the story of educating “other people’s children” (Delpit, 2006).
Michele Foucault (1977, 1978) contributes significantly to understanding of the body as a social construction imbued with discourses, knowledges, and power that manage and control it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) examines how bodies are produced as docile and obedient subjects. In particular, he considers how control of the body transformed from overt and brutal authority in monarchial times, in the age of public executions and punishment, to more subtle forms of control in prisons during the 19th century. In these later times, the body was believed to be capable of metamorphosis through the services of the prison. In this sense, prison could offer what brute force could not: Rehabilitation of the soul.
Through this change in the role of prisons and the understanding of rehabilitation, humans went from being overtly controlled by others to being internally controlled by self. Foucault (1977) calls these techniques of self-control, such as schedules, evaluations, diagnostics, and so on, disciplines. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the disciplines of self-control used in institutions such as monasteries and armies were now applied to the general population, becoming the everyday formulas of domination. For Foucault, the change in controlling the body became the historical moment “when an art of human body was born … entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it” (pp. 137–138). In schools, much like prisons, children enter the world of education via these techniques of self-control and disciplines such as tests, curriculum, standards, measurements, and accountability, to name a few, in order to be rearranged and “civilized” into rational, self-controlled adults.
Contemporary social theory builds on Foucault’s ideas to expand and create a deeper examination of the intersection of race, class, gender, and disability, as well as religion and medicine. For example, in the sociology of the body, Turner (1996) and Shilling (1993) assert that centering the body challenges the Cartesian mind/body split pervasive in the field of sociology. They conclude that the body of the social actor is important and crucial in the study of social actions.
The work of Erving Goffman (1963, 1969) has also influenced the social constructionist view of the body in sociology. He contends that, through management of the body, individuals interact and maintain social relations and social roles. This is evident in daily routines, leisure, work, and family life encounters. Encounters are important because it is in these situations that people play out specific roles, such as that of teacher, professor, principal, and so forth. Thus, for Goffman, the body is inextricably linked to social identity as well as self-identity. Furthermore, he notes that, once a concept, idea, or body is identified, categorized, and classified, it is easier to regulate and control through the management of discourse. The same can be said about managing educational subjects and objects of education: Teachers and students. Educators and scholars identify and classify students constantly, as labels such as “the English learner,” “the at-risk child,” “the special education student,” and “the honor student” all illustrate. These classifications are useful in discursively managing the experiences and bodies of children in schools.
The body and educational research
Centering the body in educational research allows us to examine the ways in which the body has been constructed, monitored, controlled, and resisted in education and other pedagogical settings and moments (Bailey, 1998; Boldt, 2001; Fine, 1993; Leavitt, 1991; Leavitt and Power, 1997; Nespor, 1994; O’Farrell et al., 2000; Phelan, 1997; Silin, 1995, 1997; Tobin, 1997). Boldt (2001), Nespor (1997), Phelan (1997), and Macrine (2002), among others, suggest that schools work hard to separate the mind from the body. This Cartesian dualism is pervasive throughout school settings. As Cannella (1997) explains,
[C]hildren are described today, as innocent, weak, needy, lacking (in skill or knowledge), immature, fearful, savage, vulnerable, undefined, or open-ended, as opposed to adults who are intelligent, strong, competent, mature, civilized and in control. Children are the “Other” than the adult. (p. 34)
In school, because they are not like adults, children must have the “right” bodily experiences so that they can develop into mature adult bodies. Educators persistently struggle to teach students not only abstract concepts associated with the mind, such as mathematics, reading, and writing, but behaviors associated with the body, such as listening, holding still, acting respectful, and showing maturity.
Boldt (2001) notes that when a child is believed not to be in control of his/her body, then s/he is believed not to be learning or developing. In schools, bodies are often perceived as interfering with academic learning. It comes as no surprise then that an estimated 70% of the time spent in school is spent in disciplining bodies (Weinstein and Mignano, 1993). When the motionless body is perceived to be in control and successful, the “wild” body is assessed as the opposite: Out of control and doomed to failure.
Boldt (2001) furthermore notes the persistent obsession of educators with how students move and position themselves. The incongruence between required behaviors and children’s own physical needs and desires in the classroom functions as “a central site for the enactment of power relations” (p. 94). The tremendous focus on behavior allows a space for children and families to comply and/or seek the advice of the experts for what “good” children should look like and be doing in schools (Boldt, 2001). The child experts, educators, and even curriculum designers are then granted control over the knowledge and experiences of students and their families (Cannella, 1997), leading to prescriptive education programs that prevent teachers from bringing the experiences of students into the curriculum.
The body and minoritized groups
It is well understood that success and failure in schools are now and historically have been correlated with race, class, and language (e.g. Kena et al., 2014; Noguera and Wing, 2006). Examinations of the body contribute to understanding the achievement gap by revealing that children who are minoritized, that is low income children, children of color, and children learning English as a second language (ESL), groups of children that largely overlap, are often perceived as incapable of disciplining and being in control of themselves in school. These children are regularly constructed as “wild,” “other,” unruly, and in need of taming as the overrepresentation of African American, Native American, and Latina/o—but particularly African American—children, in special education and “emotional behavioral disability” programs indicate (Harry and Klingner, 2014: 2).
Skiba et al. (2011) note that,
For over 25 years, in national-, state-, district-, and building-level data, students of color have been found to be suspended at rates two to three times that of other students, and similarly overrepresented in office referrals, corporal punishment, and school expulsion. (p. 86, citing Skiba et al., 2002)
The authors add that, while no clear evidence exists that African American students behave differently than white students, African American students “receive harsher levels of punishment for less serious behavior than other students” and tend “to be referred to the office more often for offenses that require a higher degree of subjectivity, such as disrespect or loitering” (p. 87, citing McFadden et al., 1992; Shaw and Braden, 1990; Skiba et al., 2002, emphasis in original). In 2014 and 2015, several unarmed African American youth were shot by US police officers around the country, offering more examples of ways that “African Americans receive harsher levels of punishment” than whites, outside and beyond the school building. As these examples show, constant surveillance and regulation of the body are not colorblind and reify the racialization of all bodies.
Regulating the work and bodies of teachers
Like the bodies of students, the bodies of teachers are also dissected from the mind and constantly under surveillance (Bailey, 1998; Macrine, 2002; Phelan, 1997). Teaching has been examined, documented, and discussed as a gendered and classed profession (Acker, 1983, 1989; Apple, 1986). Women traditionally have filled the profession of teacher and teaching has and continues to be constructed as a woman’s sphere and a feminine space (Galman, 2012; Grumet, 1988). Largely because of this feminine space, scholars such as Engvall (1997) question the validity of calling teaching a “profession.” He and others such as Kanpol (1997) and Smyth (2001) contend that teaching does not have the same work autonomy as other professions, such as medicine and law, because the work of teachers is externally controlled. Smyth (2001) explains that teaching expectations are driven by educational reform movements such as No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and Race to the Top, with very little input from teachers.
These educational reforms are part of a neoliberal mindset. Neoliberalism is an ideological framework that privileges the idea that the social sphere is an economic reality (Lemke, 2001). This is the reason why we see a “free market” approach to education via the creation of stricter measures of control. These accountability measures then create ways to keep tight regulations on the work of teachers. It is believed that, through these regulations, teachers will produce the outcomes necessary for their public schools to compete with private and charter schools, resulting in educational excellence (Ross and Gibson, 2007). Thus, this constant regulation and control of teachers’ work has implications for constructing the subjectivities and bodies of teachers.
McLaren (1999) astutely observes that “The act of knowing is largely a form of corporal shaping in which women are transformed into objects of display and … their image circumscribed and policed by the male gaze” (p. x). In education, the male gaze (or control) is disguised as curriculum, standards, and accountability measures. As such, it becomes a discipline causing teachers to self-regulate based on the belief that they must follow mandated curriculum and standards to be accountable for the success and failure of their students. As scholars have acknowledged, pedagogy is clearly implicated and enfleshed through the body of the teacher (McWilliam, 1996; Shapiro, 1999).
In summary, bodies are objects of manipulation, surveillance, and control. As Boldt (2001) writes, “Whole groups of children find themselves marked as successes and failures in ways that reflect and reinforce larger societal patterns of discrimination” (p. 102). While docile bodies are seen as successful, bodies that resist control are punished, pushed out, and labeled “at risk.” In the age of NCLB and subsequent educational reforms, it is particularly important to continue the conversation of how education controls and disciplines students and their teachers. Our memories of time spent in schools is meant to continue this conversation.
Enfleshing memories: Disciplining educators and linguistic minorities
The accounts we share in this article reflect memories of teaching in, working with, and observing in schools over many years. In our portrayals, we lightly fictionalize some stories and make composites of others to highlight the pattern of control of body in schooling while also ensuring that the identities of individuals are disguised. Centering the body in our recollections allows us to examine the ways educational reform, in its multiple and varied manifestations (testing, curriculum, accountability, and more), discursively impacts the bodies of young children and female educators. We also acknowledge that NCLB is but an expression of the larger discourse within Western education. Herein, we provide snapshots of our experiences where the Western modern educational project of controlling bodies and subjectivities were evident (Bailey, 1998).
NCLB language channeled through the educator
As we have observed and taught in many schools over our careers, one of the issues that concerns us is how readily many educators, including ourselves, use, repeat, and dwell on the language of NCLB. Granted this is a “legitimate” discourse: It is presently the educational law that guides the work of teachers and schools. However, NCLB is not necessarily overly prescriptive. For example, it does not prescribe how ESL education or other programs must be designed and performed. What is equally concerning is how years of research in multicultural, bilingual, and ESL education are often ignored by schools with large amounts of ethnic and linguistic minorities (e.g. Banks and Banks, 2004; Ovando et al., 2006; Thomas and Collier, 1997, 2002; Zirkel, 2008). Pre-k-12 schooling perhaps ignores this research because of its social justice focus.
Direct instruction
Cinthya, having been a third grade bilingual teacher in Texas, remembers that some bilingual programs were based on Direct Instruction. Adopters of these programs believed they were and are “effective” for teaching linguistic minority children in particular because Direct Instruction can be more easily “measured” for visible outcomes. It also requires students to sit quietly in control of themselves and wait for teachers to initiate their turn to talk or act. It is a controversial instruction method most often used in remedial programs for low-income children, children of color, and children learning ESL—children who are the most marginalized and minoritized in their schooling. It is based on cognitive psychology and relies on scripted curriculum, choral readings, repetition, and memorization, followed by external rewards (Beatty, 2011; Hollingsworth and Ybarra, 2009). Earick (2009) remembers similar accounts of her own teaching. When she worked with children predominantly of color, she was told to run a “tight ship.” When she later worked with predominantly white children, chatting and movement were the norm.
Direct Instruction likely fits NCLB Act of 2001 (2002) funding requirements as an example of “Programs that employ research-based cognitive and perceptual development approaches and rely on a diagnostic prescriptive model to improve students’ learning of academic content at the preschool, elementary, and secondary levels” (p. 1782). However, it is not directly aimed at linguistic minority children, nor is it the only program potentially funded by NCLB. Rather, it is one of 27 loosely defined “innovative assistance programs” (p. 1781) described in the NCLB legal document. Yet, educators often equate Direct Instruction with “researched-based” instruction, promoting and adhering to a skewed notion of “good” education for all children.
“Raising test scores.”
In the age of NCLB, another discourse is the importance of “raising test scores.” Cinthya was a teacher during the first implementation of high stake testing; raising test scores served as the raison d’etre for all professional development and educational reforms that affected many schools. She recalls that it was hard not to refer to students’ tests scores in any conversation with administrators regarding emergent bilingual students. Eventually, even she began to explore ways to raise test scores because, ultimately, her students’ identities and reputations were directly linked to them.
As a teacher in a continuation high school, Sherry likewise experienced the effects of high stakes testing. The school where she worked, serving predominantly Latina/o students, grew substantially in size right before spring testing season when other district high schools pressured low performing students and their parents to leave the regular program. Administrators and teachers in the continuation school were frustrated by this annual occurrence and the need to elicit strong test scores from students they had barely met. The staff at this school, whose student body was low performing with a high absentee rate, was generally critical of the high stakes testing movement. Nevertheless, they begrudgingly emphasized to students how important testing was to show the progress of the school. Sherry remembers how some students would doze off during the hours of enervating testing. When student heads inevitably nodded, she would loudly rap on their desks to wake them up, then apologize for doing so and again stress the important of the test. As a white teacher, she was empowered to regularly disrupt brown bodies as necessary. Only much later did she become aware of the racism entangled with this performance. As these stories illustrate, disciplining discourses often times “make sense” in the reality of schooling. Even when we are critical of them, we may come to appropriate them. If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes true.
Taming wild tongues and bodies
“We’re going to have to do something about your tongue,” I hear the anger rising in his [dentist] voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. “I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn,” he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down? (Anzaldúa, 1987: 53)
In discussing our memories working as teachers and teacher educators in the age of NCLB, we feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), traveling deep into the rabbit hole. In the NCLB rabbit hole, we travel from federal mandates to districts to administrators to teachers. From there, we find the targets of all this control from the top: The bodies of children.
Placing young bodies in the margins
Working with early childhood teachers in North Carolina, Cinthya, remembers how even the very placement of classrooms were indicative of the value of children of color. Many of the early childhood classrooms that also happened to be mostly made up of children of color and linguistic minorities were all housed in portable buildings outside the main school structure. In the mainstream classroom, children also experienced physical alienation. Cinthya recalls many incidents where, during whole classroom instruction, all the English language learners (ELLs) were placed in the back of the room under the pretense of working with the ESL teacher. However, the ESL teacher was usually not instructing children or helping them with the class lesson. The language learning children were invisible, physically relegated to the margins. Sherry has experienced this phenomenon wherever she has worked in schools, across the United States. In Kentucky, she has observed white and Black students separated into different parts of the school or classroom; in Utah, it has been white and Latina/o students. In the continuation school in California, nearly all the students were Latino and the entire school was made of portable buildings.
Constant surveillance and regulation
Even though she is a critical educator of color, Cinthya realizes that she, too can fall into the trap of constant surveillance and regulation of brown bodies. As a pre-k teacher in Texas, this was brought to her attention in the many interactions she had with parents of color. During parent–teacher conferences, Cinthya and the parents would discuss a child’s performance and Cinthya would go over the student’s behavior reports. At that moment, she noticed the kind of message she was sending the parents on the daily behavior report—that the child was incorrigible. Many of the daily reports home showed nothing but sad faces. However, as she talked to the parents, she realized that, really, the children were like most 4-year-olds. In another example, Cinthya recalls a boisterous third-grade classroom where all children were engaged in “off task” behaviors. The teacher, however, only called on one boy of color to settle down and pay attention.
Sherry remembers similar experiences visiting classroom where all but one of the children were white. The lone children of color in these classes were regularly reprimanded by their teachers, even though all children were sometimes “out of control” during her visits. Teachers separated these children from their white classmates several times each day. Soon, the white children in the class did not want to play with them. The isolated children became “the bad children” whom other kids did not want to play with. In another example, Sherry observed a class taught by a teacher proud of her commitment to diversity. At one point, students turned away from the teacher and chatted with one another because they did not understand the directions. Frustrated, the teacher dismissed the quiet students and kept all the unruly students in the classroom so she could reprimand them. Every student remaining in the class was a person of color. Every student dismissed to social time was white. Teachers in these incidents likely felt they were doing their best and acting logically. Nevertheless, they channeled the authoritative discourse of discipline and punishment to control the brown bodies in their care. This kind of societal conditioning of educators can be so subtle that we may not even notice how we become like the empire through our actions and performances.
Disciplining children through English language curriculum
One of the subtlest aspects of language curriculum (visible or hidden) for ELLs is the way it can serve as a technology of bodily control. For example, at many pre-k teacher ESL trainings in North Carolina, teachers commented that they would not allow their students to go to the bathroom unless they were able to ask in English, “May I go to the bathroom?” After ESL training, they shared with Cinthya that they finally realized their own English-only pedagogy in the classroom was doing more harm than good.
In another experience, Cinthya and her colleagues (Saavedra et al., 2009) observed how teachers are uneasy with young language learners, especially at the beginning of their schooling experience. The actions of these children often defy the “normal” actions of their white middle class peers. In this setting, Cinthya recalls a Vietnamese boy who would sit quietly and do nothing but observe. The teachers were worried that he was not like the others. After a couple of months, the teachers were excited to share how the boy was now just like everyone else and was beginning to use English.
Regulating the experience of learning
For many children, using their native language is seen as a danger to the establishment. Cinthya remembers one interaction she had with teachers in North Carolina during a professional development session. Cinthya was discussing the need to contextualize learning for ELLs. She discussed that deviating from the books to explore vocabulary would be a much better approach than readings from scripted curricula and looking at pictures about the experiences. She discussed how, for example, reading about experiences like playing ball could be extended by actually playing ball. One teacher felt that this might not be good because the children might not be able to describe the game in English. Cinthya then mentioned that the children could use their native language, in this case, Arabic, as they played the game. This suggestion visibly surprised the teacher, who explained that he was worried that the children would inaccurately describe the game. Because he didn’t speak Arabic, he was concerned he would not be able to accurately control the discussion.
Reflections
What we experienced in these examples is a reminder of how much marginalization, surveillance, and regulation are part of the curriculum all children experience in schooling. The placement and constant surveillance of minority children’s bodies in the classroom demonstrate the pushing out of unruly bodies that do not fit the norm. However, even when linguistic and ethnic minority children do fit into the culture of a noisy, lively classroom, they will be reminded that the inhibitions allowed in the classroom do not apply to them; they must stay in their place. These unsuccessful bodies are controlled in the classroom through physical isolation and/or constant surveillance (Boldt, 2001).
The relentless attention to behavior is also a reminder that, for children of color and linguistic minority children, language, culture, and much of life are vivisected. Culture, race, experiences, native languages, and families are outside the scope of schooling for these children. In contrast, all these dimensions of life for white middle-class children are upheld, celebrated, and fostered in schools; however, schools do not realize this fact. White middle-class children are seen as just “learning”; they comprise “the standard” that all children need to mirror. In this way, linguistic and ethnic minority children are colonized, “rearranged” and made into the rational, self-controlled adult (Cannella, 1997).
Disrupting discourses of control
Embracing the possibility that schooling as we know it functions by being an actively harmful place for the bodies of at least some children strikes me as a good place to begin the forceful dialogue—a dialogue that could lead to positives for children, that group of people whose bodies we have both denied and attempted to control. (Boldt, 2001: 103)
As we reflect on these memories of schooling, we wish they were anomalies. Unfortunately, they are not. Every day, children are asked to sit still, stay in line, look at the teacher, remain in their place, and so on. Unfortunately, we don’t have a list of solutions; rather we have some suggestions to consider that de-center the constant neoliberal and patriarchal male gaze that constructs educators as subjects and objects of control, and translates into the regulation of children. Our patriarchal, advanced democratic society always has new forms of control and regulation that reify patriarchal views, neoliberal goals, and contribute to the racialization and (re)colonization of children’s bodies. Educators, scholars, and children are constantly reminded of our sanctioned place in society: Who we are and who we are supposed to be.
For neoliberal educational policies like NCLB to propagate, they must be made seductive. They must be made to seem logical and rational. Through these policies, educators become discursive subjects, entangled in a web of national discourses simultaneously configuring particular subjects and making them the product of dominant values in education (white, middle class, Anglo-American English speaking). From that position, educators create and re-create dominant discursive practices in education for “all.” Notably, we are not suggesting that teachers are passive or that they—and we—signed up for such a task; rather, we propose that the discourse of Western American education helps to construct our reality in such a way that it is made rational, logical, and part of us—part of our souls—if we are rational adults (Peters, 2005).
It is this “rational” adult that we seek to model and inculcate to children. However, even this construct is an illusion because, as we and other scholars have shown, this line of thinking just creates more inequality (Lipman, 2007; McLaren, 2005; Marx and Saavedra, 2014; Ross and Gibson, 2007). For young children of color, it means an education aimed at their “unruly” bodies. And even if they do adhere to what is asked of them, they will never really be “in” like the white children in the classroom. Of course, the lucky few, the go-getters, and the model minorities are sometimes given a pass.
In examining our memories of schooling, we have come to realize the insidious nature of inequality. The experiences of language and ethnic minority children are part of a complex web of regulation and control that begs a deeper examination of the ways discourses are manifested and channeled through educators—ourselves included. It seems that the education of minority children is also about the taming of the soul, as Foucault (1977) would claim.
Where do we go from here?
Perhaps a plan of action does not necessarily begin with a list of “what to do” but more like a list of “how to become aware.” Working in teacher education, we, along with others (Hooks, 1994; Robertson, 1994), see a need for critical feminist lenses to be part of the education of teachers in addition to multicultural education. This might allow a space to contemplate how our profession was created to serve the needs of the State and white men (Grumet, 1988). These forces are not new; they have been explored as continuity in the teaching profession since its inception (e.g. Biklen, 1995; Saavedra, 2006). Of course, it is not just up to educators to resist; that would be blaming the victim. We believe that teacher education is complicit and part of the problem. If we have a strong sense of what influences our identities and our own discursive practices as educators, we might be able to navigate, perhaps even transform, these policies of regulation and control and move away from the constant need to tame wild tongues and bodies.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
