The leftover kids: centering Black girls’ stories of overdiscipline within ecological systems using a youth participatory action research approach

Black girls in United States schools face discipline at inflated rates over their white peers. While Black girls are suspended out of school six times the rate of white girls (Baumle, 2018), they are also criminalized for trauma responses or mental health issues far more frequently than they are offered treatment services (Marston et al., 2012). Additionally, when Black girls demonstrate qualities such as self-advocacy, agency, resistance, and prioritization of their personal, academic, familial, and professional needs, these acts are frequently read by authority figures as defiance, apathy, or deviance, resulting in further surveillance and punitive measures (Baumle, 2018; Love, 2016, 2019; Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). This consistent pattern of overdisciplining for Black girls results in their removal from educational spaces at alarming rates. Overdiscipline not only distances them from their school environments but from their peers. Further, regular overdisciplining has the potential to affect how Black girls view themselves. This five-month youth participatory action research (YPAR) study focused on three Black teenage girls who were persistently overdisciplined in school. Throughout the project, participants explored their identity and experiences of overdiscipline through storytelling and the examination of childhood photographs. Participants drove most decision-making and goal-setting for the project. During the data-collection process, they learned about the four aspects of viewing and assigning identity – natural, institutional, discursive, and affinity (Gee, 2000) – and considered how these identity markers applied to their internal mindsets. They analyzed their past interactions with schools, teachers and other staff members, peers, and family to interrogate perceived identity in relation to these interactions and the discipline they received, and they made recommendations for how school discipline policy should be changed. This study builds on the extant research of Love (2013, 2016, 2019), Brown (2009, 2013), Butler (2018), Meiners (2007, 2011, 2015, 2016), Reynolds (2019), Taaffe (2016), Wun (2016a, 2016b), and others by exploring the messages that Black girls internalize and how overdiscipline shapes the way Black girls view themselves. Using storytelling and analysis, I expand on the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) and Spencer et al. (1997) to investigate the structures of risk and support in Black girls’ ecological systems.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Curriculum and Instruction

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Harris, Jadyn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Sanders-Smith, Stephanie C
• Stovall, David
• Gutiérrez, Rochelle
• Lucero, Jorge
• Ostrosky, Michaelene

• overdiscipline
• school-to-prison nexus
• Black girls
• PVEST
• ecological systems
• YPAR
• storytelling
• critical race theory
• intersectionality
• transformational resistance
• immediacy of discipline
• suspended for a thought
• school pushout
• code of conduct

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Jadyn K. Harris

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116186

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116186