Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades 9780226765754

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Segregation by Experience

Segregation by Experience Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades j e n n i f e r k e y s a da i r a n d k i y o m i sa´ n c h e z - s u z u k i c o l e g r ov e

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-76558-7 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-76561-7 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-76575-4 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226765754.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adair, Jennifer Keys, author. | Colegrove, Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki, author. Title: Segregation by experience : agency, racism, and learning in the early grades / Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020038853 | isbn 9780226765587 (cloth) | isbn 9780226765617 (paperback) | isbn 9780226765754 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Student-centered learning— Texas. | Active learning— Texas. | Experiential learning— Texas. | Minorities—Education (Elementary)— Texas. | First grade (Education)— Texas. | Segregation in education— Texas. Classification: lcc lb1027.23 .a33 2021 | ddc 379.2/6309764 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038853 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For the children of Ms. Bailey’s class for Berkeley, Atticus, Gideon, and Nicolás and for Ms. Bailey and all those engaged in the ongoing fight against White supremacy

Contents

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White Supremacy in the Early Grades

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2

Everyday Life in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom

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3

How Educators Responded to Ms. Bailey’s Classroom

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4 Limits and Balance

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Complication and Politics

6 Children’s Responses

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7

Justifying a Segregation by Experience

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Epilogue: The Children in Ms. Bailey’s Class Six Years Later

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Acknowledgments 179 Appendix 187 References 193 Index 211

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White Supremacy in the Early Grades

In schools across the United States, many young children of color are forced to walk in prisonlike lines with silent “bubbles in their mouths” and hands behind their backs. They go through much of the day disconnected from their real lives, asked to submit to significant controlling mechanisms such as behavior charts, monolingualism, punishment systems, and the denial of movement. In other schools, meanwhile, young White children walk in zigzag formations, taking their time, chatting, joking, and sometimes singing with their friends. They read and hear stories that reflect their realities and comfort. What makes it “acceptable” for children in the United States of America to have such different kinds of schooling experiences, especially in the earliest grades? In 2011 we received a grant from the Foundation for Child Development to figure out how children’s agency— the ability to influence and make decisions about learning— affects academic and social development. The plan was to spend a year observing first-grade classrooms where children could enact their agency in their learning. We would identify as many forms of agency as we could and then make a video that showed the children using their agency. We would take that video to groups of educators, parents, teachers, and young children and see what forms of agency they noticed and valued. We wanted to work with young children of color— primarily children from Latinx communities. The goal was to create a list of ways that Latinx children enacted their agency in public school settings that would be supported by their families. This list would then be used to advocate for increasing culturally sustaining opportunities for agency of Latinx and other children in early childhood education settings. As planned, we did spend one year in first-grade classrooms. We did make

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a film. And we did show the film to over 250 educators, parents, teachers and young children. But people did not respond the way we predicted. We thought they would be excited and even inspired to see young children of color acting as scientists, formulating questions, working deeply and collaboratively, thinking carefully, and being engaged in their learning. But most were not. Educators admired the practices in the film but did not think these practices would work for the children at their schools. Parents of color— many of whom were immigrants from Mexico and Central America— liked many of the practices but worried that they would endanger or compromise their children. Young children we interviewed thought the practices in the film were terrible. They told us that learning requires students to be quiet, still, and compliant. They thought that the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were behaving badly. We have written about these findings in a number of academic journals. All along, we suspected that the children we interviewed were revealing a problem with early childhood education in the United States that is larger than our initial analysis uncovered. After spending two years analyzing the data from different parts of Texas, we think that our study demonstrates the serious injustice of offering schooling that is engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated to a few while offering everyone else rigid and narrow schooling that is fixated on compliance. This segregation by experience results in short- and long-term injustices that perpetuate an intentional, racist denial of access and opportunity. Segregation by experience is deeply detrimental to young children who are just learning who they are and what society expects of them. In this book, we will spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually, the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. They experienced schooling that was engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated. We open up as much of the operational logic and feeling of Ms. Bailey’s classroom as we can while detailing the capabilities children expanded at school through the supported enactment of their agency. We will also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principals, teachers, immigrant parents, and young children ages five to seven across Texas who watched and responded to the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We try to make sense of why people, especially young children, in our study responded to the film as they did. What do their critical responses to allegedly highquality early childhood practice tell us about the US educational system and about the realities for children of color as they make their way through it?

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Disproportionality in What Children of Color Experience Most young children in the United States today have narrower and more rigid learning experiences at school than children did twenty years ago (Bassok, Latham, and Rorem 2016). Children are having to sit still for longer and longer periods, completing tasks they do not choose in positions and spaces they do not control. Acceptable behavior in a preschool classroom, for example, might be sitting “crisscross applesauce” (legs folded like a pretzel) with hands in their laps and their mouths closed for twenty, thirty, even forty-five minutes at a time. This stillness might serve a purpose if a child was choosing to watch intently what a peer or expert adult was doing. But stillness in most cases is about compliance, not learning. The narrowness of acceptable behavior makes it more likely that children will get into trouble. Narrow limits for how and when a child can move increase the chances of a child’s being seen as distracting or disobedient. This loss has disproportionately impacted young children of color because teachers, schools, and districts serving children of color have to navigate pressures to be efficient, keeping content aligned with what will be on tests. This leaves little room for culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014) that engages with students’ and family stories and other early childhood necessities. Young children of color are also impacted by the historical “ongoingness” of what Ladson-Billings (2006, 9 – 10) termed the “education debt”: fewer resources than White schools enjoy, overburdened and undersupported teachers and principals, and the constant presence of racial, economic, linguistic and ethnic discrimination (see also Cardichon et al 2020; López and López 2009). One result of the education debt is that young children receive very disparate experiences in early schooling. This disproportionality is what we refer to as segregation by experience. As teachers, teacher educators, district consultants, and educational researchers, we have moved within and between a mostly segregated school system in which many White students experience school as a place that welcomes their ideas, identities, and curiosity, while students of color experience school as a place that insists on their compliance, order, and efficiency. Over the course of this study, we watched things happen in schools serving young children of color that we never saw in schools serving wealthy White children. We have seen Brown and Black children line up and give their number to get sleeping mats. We have seen them line up in a straight line for ten minutes, only to go outside to run laps around the playground. We have seen teachers stop and reprimand children who were trying to help

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clean up after a spill, opening up a milk container for a classmate, moving a chair closer to hear better, telling a story while pacing, handing a book to a child who was struggling to wait quietly, moving over to allow more people into an activity, or yelling out excitedly that their friend had arrived at school. We have seen young children persist through such bounded and controlled environments to be successful, but as many education scholars have noted, these experiences complicate and burden lives (Muñoz and Maldonado 2012; Valencia 2010). The already narrowing emphasis on compliance and stillness intersects with historic and ongoing institutional racism in schools. Too often schools have been (and continue to be) sites of harsh discipline more reminiscent of prisons and punishment than deep learning and care (Noguera 2003). Children of color are often in classes where the discipline approach restricts their movement and talk so much that they have minimum opportunities to interact with one another (T. Howard 2013; Milner 2015). Race is still the most salient factor in school discipline (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; McDermott, Raley, and Seyer-Ochi 2009). National Council of La Raza, now called Unidos US (Sallo 2011), reported a severe increase in the mistreatment of Latinx students, citing harsh zero-tolerance policies that control movement and interpret Latinx student behavior (even that of young children) as threatening at worst or distracted at best. Courtney Sherman Robinson’s (2013) research on incarcerated Black men found that their early schooling experiences had been characterized by strict control. Racialized surveillance of young Brown and Black bodies has led to children of color being forced into special education classrooms against their will (Ahram, Fergus, and Noguera 2011; Artiles et al. 2010; Blanchett 2006; Lee 2017) and harsh disciplinary measures such as physical restraints and suspension for younger and younger children (Milner et al. 2019; Skiba and Peterson 1999). Racist ideologies systematically position young children of color as threatening, out of control, wild, disobedient, and misbehaving despite evidence that White children act in similar ways but are not disciplined nor labeled as problems (Adair 2015; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Noguera 2003). Instead of being supported in language use, young children of color are disciplined more harshly for being loud (or similar behaviors) than are their native-born White peers, a trend that starts when they are just four years old (Dumas 2016; Skiba et al. 2011; US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights 2014). Controlling children’s movement as a form of discipline is a continuation of racial trauma that prefigures the school-to-prison pipeline (K. Brown 2016; Ferguson 2000; Robinson 2013). There are powerful exceptions to this patterned segregation by experience

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in the schooling lives of young children of color. Educators and communities do resist the kinds of control and narrowness that have too often been imposed on young children in classrooms. There is, for example, a long history, predating Brown v. Board of Education, of Black teachers offering dynamic, thoughtful learning experiences to children in Black communities (Peters 2019; Acosta, Foster, and Houchen 2018; hooks 2014). Skilled, knowledgeable Black teachers were able to balance the realities of segregation with an empowering and emboldening view of young children of color as capable, smart, and impressive (K. Brown 2016; see also Grant, Brown, and Brown 2016). Indigenous efforts to foster community participation through a range of listening and observational practices that honor elder and ancestral knowledge are found in many communities throughout the United States (Dayton and Rogoff 2013; Nxumalo and Cedillo 2017; Sandoval et al. 2016; Urrieta 2015; Yazzie-Mintz et al. 2018) despite pressures to mirror White-centered practices, regulation, and assessments. Bilingual teachers, before and after Horne v. Flores, have believed in their young children of color so much that they’ve offered dynamic experiences rooted in the reality of segregation and the knowledge that young children are capable. Their effort and conocimiento has been necessary to systemic improvements towards equity and access to higher learning (Goodman and Intercultural Development Research Association 2010; Portes, Canché, Boada, and Whatley 2018). There are tremendous examples of teachers working to empower young children of color to use their minds and critical thinking skills (not just their obedience) to learn (see Love 2016; Palmer et al. 2014; Souto-Manning 2013). Ultimately, offering young children of color a range of rich, dynamic, and sophisticated learning experiences in which they are able to engage their identities and repertoires of practice needs to be normalized so that it doesn’t have to be an act of resistance. All of us play a role in doing this, because we are all involved in a system that is much larger than the teachers, administrators, families, and children in our study. We are all responsible for removing what Charles Mills calls the personhood– subpersonhood line that justifies some receiving freely what others have to earn or demonstrate worthiness for in order to receive. Young Children and the Racial Contract Charles Mills is a philosopher originally from Jamaica who studied in Canada and now teaches in the United States. He calls himself an oppositional political theorist. Others refer to him as a Black liberationist Marxist. He critiques liberal philosophy, particularly the Kantian notion of the ideal social con-

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tract. The social contract is the idea that people give up some of their power to the state in exchange for the state’s protecting the remainder of their freedoms, privileges, and safety. In the social contract, the state is supposed to enforce equality since everyone is living under the terms of the same social contract. The social contract is the means through which human beings work toward an equal society, devoid of status or privilege. Mills (1997), however, asserts that a social contract is not possible— and is actually never attempted. What we call the social contract is for White people only and thus ignores oppressive histories and continued racial injustices. It is tempting to believe in a meritocracy in which everyone should be judged the same because everyone starts out on the same playing field. But such a perspective conveniently ignores ongoing effects of historical and contemporary racist policies, demonstrated, for example, in who goes to college, gets loans, inherits money, owns property, or leads sports teams, hospitals, banks, and technology and investment firms. Instead of a social contract, Mills (1997) explains, there is a “racial contract” that serves to ensure that White people have access to their rights and privileges, often at the expense of people of color. The racial contract happens through the maintenance of the personhood– subpersonhood line, a line that consistently offers rights to full persons (mostly White people) and marks people of color and some poor Whites as subpersons. Full personhood is for persons who are each other’s equal and have full access to their rights and privileges. Subpersonhood is for subpersons who are equal to each other but not equal to Whites and so must show they are worthy of the rights, privileges, and safety afforded to personhood. Full persons have full agency. They enjoy self-rule, or the ability to govern and make decisions over their life, and often (unfairly) the lives of others. In schools, the racial contract writes children of color into a subjecthood in which they have to prove they are ready and worthy of crossing the line into full personhood. Personhood in a schooling context is the privilege of having one’s identities, preferences, interests, knowledges, perspectives, and lives outside of school considered important for learning. The racial contract positions subpersons— children of color— as having to earn affection, encouragement, respect, and high expectations. Leonardo explains this positioning as a systemic institutional effort to maintain White supremacy through thinking of students of color as subpersons. “Epistemologically, ontologically and existentially, students of color are written into the contract as subpersons, where they function as alibis for the provision that Whites are always already persons, a principle that is parasitic on personhood of color” (2015, 1). While full persons— or full students— walk into school with the expecta-

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tion that they will be offered certain rights and privileges of safety, strong curriculum, exceptions, respect, experienced teachers, and some leeway when it comes to behavior, subpersons expect that they will need to change or fight to get the same privileges. These “settled expectations” (Bang et al. 2012, 302) are considered “natural” and difficult, if not impossible, to change. Here, we want to ask “what it might mean for learning and development if we were to dislodge the ‘settled expectations’ that current practice . . . imposes on subject matter, learners and teachers” (Bang et al. 2012, 303). If schools are to be detangled from their racist and segregationist past and offer deep, sophisticated learning to all children, young children must be viewed through a strengths-based lens instead of the settler-colonial one that has justified low expectations for so long. False Promises in the Racial Contract In systems operating with a racial contract, children and families of color are “promised” that if they change (improve) their behavior, dress, attitude, geographical location, neighborhood, friends, immigration status, or economic situation, they can cross over into full personhood and claim all its rights and privileges. Personhood is almost always aligned with what wealthy White people believe and want. The promise is that if you do certain things, you can “earn” passage into personhood with all the accompanying protections and privileges. But this “promise” is rarely actualized, because when enough people start crossing over to full personhood, the requirements or expectations change and the Line essentially moves. Many families from historically marginalized communities are asked to talk, behave, and think like middle-class White parents so that their children can be successful at school (López 2001). Parents are told to play with their children, use flashcards with their children, read to their children, take their children to the library, speak directly to them. They are told to speak English at home even if that isn’t the family’s first language, or to volunteer at the school with the promise that this will result in higher academic achievement. If parents do all of these things, their children have a greater chance of being considered full persons with access to the rights, privileges, and safety of full personhood. Full personhood or Whiteness determines the quality, appearance, and regulation of the personhood– subpersonhood line. Cheryl Harris, in her monumental argument “Whiteness as Property,” posits that Whiteness equals control over one’s life. Her own mother, she says, tried to pass as White to have better opportunities for agency over her life. “Becoming White

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increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s life rather than being the object of others” (Harris 1993, 1713). The closer people came to being considered White, the more legal and practical control they had over their lives. In US schools, children and families of color are not asked directly to racially “pass” as White, yet they can feel pressure to “change” or “fix” aspects of themselves in order to be successful (hooks 1992; Spencer et al. 2001; Tyson 2011). Throughout this book we will give examples of how the racial contract’s false promise was absent from Ms. Bailey’s classroom yet highly visible in the schooling lives of the children and educators to whom we showed the film. Many young children of color across Texas have been positioned as subpersons and so are consistently denied the experiences that were so abundant in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Agency and Personhood Sometimes at school children can choose between markers or pencils, among colors of paper or whether to read a book about pigs or horses. This is not the type of agency we are referring to in this book. Agency is a component of racial justice and related to personhood and humanization. Our definition of agency— the ability to influence and make decisions about how and what is learned in order to expand capabilities— comes from the work of Amartya Sen (see Adair 2014). In 1990 Sen worked under Pakistani economist Mahbab ul Haq to help produce the Human Development Index (HDI) for the United Nations. Their task was to produce a more nuanced and human-centered measurement of a nation’s development. At the time (and still today in many ways) a country was considered “developed” or “developing” based on its gross domestic product, or GDP. GDP refers to the total production of the people and companies in a country. Ul Haq and Sen were publicly critical of using only GDP to determine the development status of a nation. They argued that agency and well-being are the two precursors to development (Anand and Sen 1994). Development, ul Haq explained, is not about a nation’s singular GDP score but about whether people are living the lives that are meaningful to them (ul Haq 2003). In the introduction to the first Human Development Index report, ul Haq wrote, Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. . . . Development enables people to have these choices. No one can guarantee human happiness, and the choices people make are their own concern. But the process of development should at least create a conducive environment for people,

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individually and collectively, to develop their full potential and to have a reasonable chance of leading productive and creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. (ul Haq 1990, 1)

A nation’s development, or the “process of becoming developed,” the UN Human Development Committee argued (ul Haq 1990), should be measured by how well people’s choices are being enlarged so that they can lead “lives in accord with their needs and interests.” Sen extended ul Haq’s argument that development is about human life, not economies. Single-indicator systems such as GDP or, in the case of education, standardized test scores cannot represent how people are doing, because development is about people’s ability to live meaningful lives. Meaningful lives require the expansion of capabilities so that people can ultimately have more choices about what they do and who they want to be (Sen 2004). Development is not simply a biological process or the accumulation of skill sets dictated by others. Development is the expansion of capabilities both of individuals and of peoples. Sen writes, “The process of development can expand human capabilities by expanding the choices that people have to live full and creative lives” (1999, 8). The goal of any economic development in local, national, or international terms, then, should be “the promotion and expansion of valuable capabilities” (Sen 2003, 10). He argues that if a country has an increased or relatively high GDP but its people do not have the well-being or agency that leads to expanded capabilities and choosing lives that are meaningful to them, then this is not actual development. The Capability Approach frames development as the expansion of capabilities. Agency and well-being are critical for capability expansion. According to Sen, agency prompts and motivates experiences that expand skills and knowledge in much broader ways than tasks determined by others (see Saito 2003). Agency is both a means to expanding capabilities and a positive end result of it because more capabilities mean greater agency. Increased agency expands capabilities, improves human well-being, and helps people lead more productive and creative lives. Thus agency is both a means and an end in itself. The whole point of development is agency: that people can choose lives that are meaningful to them. Choosing one’s participation, action, thinking, influence, and contribution to collective pursuits results in a broader, more sophisticated set of experiences and so expands capabilities. Agency is not simply about individual autonomy but about individual and communal agency that is “dynamic and creative, not just reactive and reductive” (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 11). Agency is a part of identity formation, especially of an identity that can

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see around or perhaps outside of an oppressive dominant perspective. As Aimee Cox demonstrates in her ethnographic study of young Black women in Detroit, agency can manipulate and be shaped by “partial citizenship” or discursive identity forces (2015, 19). Urrieta’s work is especially helpful here because he argues that identity is “always a process of ‘figuring’ or becoming” through social formation (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 12). Identity is shaped by social interaction, the availability of agency, and unequal distributions of power (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 4). Agency (both individual and collective) in practice impacts how people see themselves in relation to local and larger systems of power. Agency also impacts how, which, and whether identities are accessible and taken up (Urrieta 2010, 33). Allowances for and support of individual and collective agency impact the enduring self and the identities that shift and change. Agency and Early Childhood Education Agency is essential for children’s development if they are to lead meaningful lives, take on empowered identities and expand the capabilities necessary to follow their needs and interests. Rationales for agency in the context of early childhood education come with varying logic and differ across disciplines. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists suggest that the skills children gain in early childhood lay the foundation for the skills and attributes they will have as adults; if we hope for a nation of adults with agency, we must cultivate this skill in young children (Bandura 1999; Baraldi 2008; Diamond 2002; Farah et al. 2006; Kamii 1984; Shonkoff 2000). Sociologists demonstrate that children use their agency by acting upon their space, even utilizing resistance and peer cultures to enact their ideas and interests (Corsaro 2011). Unfortunately as early childhood classrooms become more and more like higher-grade spaces ruled by control and pressure, children’s use of agency is more often than not resistance rather than a welcomed part of learning. The ability for young children of color to participate in, control, and enact their worlds is innate but almost always restricted by adults at school (Genishi and Dyson 2012; MacNaughton, Hughes, and Smith 2008; Madrid and DunnKenney 2010; Markström and Hallden 2009; Phillips and Maroney 2017; Ritchie 2012). Anthropologists and cultural psychologists have argued that children influence the world around them in accordance to how children are viewed and what types of learning experiences are valued and made available to them (Anderson-Levitt 2002; Cheney 2011; Lancy 2010; Tobin 2005). Barbara

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Rogoff (2003) and her colleagues Angélica López, Maricela Correa-Chávez, and Kris Gutiérrez (López et al. 2010) have been documenting the numerous ways in which children learn without being directly taught in indigenousheritage Mexican and Guatemalan communities. Instead of explicitly being told what to do, children enact their agency to pitch in with the activities adults and older children are involved in (Rogoff, Moore, et al. 2007). Having multiple spaces and opportunities to participate rather than being taught about the acts or told exactly how to do something is an important aspect of agency (Paradise and Rogoff 2009; see also Lancy 2010). Culturally there is also diversity in when and where children can and should enact their agency (Cheney 2011). For example, in one community children may be free to join in a shared activity and participate (without instruction or direction from an adult), but they may not be free to ask questions to adults nor to be loud during an activity. Agency is a range rather than an on-off switch, because there is variety in circumstances, contexts, and repertoires (Gutiérrez 2002). There is tremendous variation in early childhood education and in how children are conceptualized and treated across communities and geographies (Phillips, Ritchie, and Adair 2018; LeVine and New 2008; Tobin, Arzubiaga, and Adair 2013). What is valued, expected, or assumed for children of different ages, social classes, gender, races/ethnicities, and nationalities varies. Ideas about raising children change over time and across contexts (Rogoff 2011; Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa 2009). There is significant cultural variation in what is valued, expected, or assumed for children of different ages. And there is always variation both within and across groups. As an example, my (Jennifer’s) children attended early schooling in Bangalore, India, and then in Arizona and Texas within the US. In Bangalore, my children attended a local nursery (creche) on the second floor of the teacher’s home. There were about fifteen children between eighteen months and five years. Young children were expected to be toilet trained by the time they entered school (much to my shock as a White American parent used to children toilet training at age three). My children felt surprised by the amount of responsibility they had to get out their mats and clean their dishes. At the same, an amazing woman helped them each day with hygiene, something they were expected to do on their own at home. They did daily meditation, sitting silently for fifteen to twenty minutes, a practice I did not believe they were capable of until I saw and filmed it (see Adair and Bhaskaran 2010). I had brought a belief from the US that young children could not sit still or pay attention for long periods. Yet I had also arrived in India believing that my parenting success was based on whether my children could do things on their own without adult help. This

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expectation was not shared by many Indian parents, nor was another parenting assumption that young children need to be punished for hitting, pushing, or misbehaving if they were to learn (Gupta 2006). One major complexity in writing this book has been acknowledging possible variations in how different groups view and think about agency while addressing patterns of inequity among young children in early schooling within the US. Children of color do not get the same kinds of educational spaces as wealthier White peers. In a study of the educational pipeline, Tara J. Yosso powerfully acknowledges how early this inequity begins. Because elementary school serves as an important prerequisite to later educational attainment, one would expect to find a high-quality academic curriculum available to all students. This is not the case. Compared to White schools, elementary school comprised of low-income students of color rarely offer high-quality programs. Most often, the elementary schools Chicanas/os attend stress academic remediation and a slowing down of instruction, rather than academic enrichment or an acceleration of the curriculum. (2006, 22)

For many children of color, agency has not been supported as “a tool for social participation, intellectual exploration, and personal expression” (Genishi and Dyson 2009, 33). Parents and teachers of color hold strong beliefs about young children or early childhood education that come from their own cultural values and life experiences but can find it difficult or damaging to act upon those beliefs because of the power differences between institutions and their communities (Adair, Tobin, and Arzubiaga 2012). As educational anthropologists, we started out trying to understand the varying ways that groups understood agency. However, during data collection and analysis the more urgent issue became how power (more than culture) determined how much and what types of agency young children of color got to enact in their beginning years of school. Method In this context of personhood– subpersonhood and the reality that some young children are able to enact their agency at school while others must prove they are worthy, we offer up what we saw in Ms. Bailey’s classroom and then share how educators, teachers, and first-graders (ages 5 – 7) responded to the film of that classroom. We complicate what we observed in Ms. Bailey’s classroom by arguing that what Ms. Bailey and her students created was not simply child centered nor adult directed. Ms. Bailey created something rather new: she offered young children dynamic, sophisticated learning experiences

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connected to the reality of their lives. We also try to make sense of how children and adults responded to the film, and specifically to the idea of young children of color being able to enact their agency at school. All of the data we share here comes from the Agency and Young Children (AYC) study conducted between 2010 and 2018. The AYC study used a combination of video-cued and traditional ethnographic methods, inspired by Joseph Tobin and colleagues’ pivotal Preschool in Three Cultures studies (1989; 2009). Tobin’s pioneering video-cued ethnography utilized film to elicit participant interpretations of their own and others’ practices in a way that showcased the cultural-political nature of education. Our ethnographic approach included participant observation with the classroom community over one school year, recording daily life and a range of formal and informal interviews with Ms. Bailey as well as video-cued focus groups with students and parents who served as insightful and patient informants.

the classroom Our research team spent three or four days a week in Ms. Bailey’s classroom for an entire school year. When we first met Ms. Bailey, we immediately noticed that children stayed close to her. She constantly turned her attention to listen, ask questions, and join them in whatever they were interested in. She was and still is an affectionate, caring attentive teacher who is known for being positive, friendly, and warm. An immigrant herself from a country in East Africa, Ms. Bailey had moved several times as a child because of her father’s diplomatic assignments. She received most of her education in European-style schools in Central and West Africa as well as Europe and then completed her university work (including teacher education) in the United States. She speaks four languages: French, Spanish, Kirundi, and English. Before we met her, Ms. Bailey had taught fourth-grade bilingual and elementary Spanish. At Roble Elementary School she taught first grade using English for instruction and Spanish to communicate with parents and occasionally with students for clarification. Ms. Bailey loved sharing stories with her class about her life and adventures as a child while moving between different countries. Her first-grade classroom served twenty-two students— thirteen boys and nine girls— with fifteen children self-reporting as Latina/o, three children as African American, and four children as White. Eight students were identified as English language learners, and ten had at least one immigrant parent. The children in Ms. Bailey’s class had multiple stories, vibrant personalities, and many talents. Each child brought su manera de ser (their personality or “way of being”) and family life to create the learning community

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ta b l e 1 . The children in Ms. Bailey’s class Name

Language

Race/Migration

Interests

Mary

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico

Observant, curious, reflective, creative, persistent, loves to draw and tell family stories, runs fast, plays the piano

Tim

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico

Asks questions, participates, helps classmates, curious, makes friends easily, creates projects easily, has many interests

Jason

English + some Spanish

Mexican American

Amiable, kind, caring, likes to share his ideas and always has questions, long attention span, likes to read— even when he is not the best reader

Robert

English + some Spanish

Mexican American

Asks questions, participates, likes to help his friends, enjoys looking at picture books

Marcela

English + some Spanish

Mexican American

Caring, affectionate, playful, quiet; seems shy at first, but once comfortable with new people, is more outgoing

Kata

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from El Salvador

Quiet, loves to draw and write, likes to follow instructions closely

Max

Spanish + ELL

Mexican American + White

Creative, confident, talented artist, playful, loves to teach his classmates different skills. Possesses a great imagination for drawing and art designs

Nia

English

African American

Observant, highly organized, detail oriented, quiet, likes to share stories and then writes them in her journal

Paloma

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador

Caring, affectionate, helpful, thoughtful; likes reading, writing, and drawing. Creative, persuasive, meticulous, with beautiful penmanship

Peter

English

Mexican American

Friendly, caring, outspoken, thoughtful. playful, likes to ask questions, helps his peers to solve probleMs. Loves to take on leadership roles and guide discussions

Jaime

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico

Observant, sociable, soft-spoken, reflective, persistent— especially while drawing pictures; likes to read picture books 

Lorene

English

African American

Enthusiastic, friendly, playful, curious, detail oriented, observant, likes to remind her classmates to stay focused on their work

Pablo

English + some Spanish

Mexican American

Friendly, witty, creative, funny, outgoing, likes to draw, creates games with any materials he has available

Diana

English

African American + White

Affectionate, engaging, outspoken, inquisitive, caring, funny; loves leading, helping out, and teaching others

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ta b l e 1 . (continued ) Name

Language

Race/Migration

Interests

Charlie

English

White

Talkative, curious, energetic, confident, likes to share during class or group discussions and help others to solve problems

Brad

English

White

Quiet, observant, resourceful, artistic; likes following directions and asks questions

Kevin

English

White

Creative, playful, talkative, inquisitive; loves his dog and goat and likes singing and reading

Samuel

English + some Spanish

Mexican American

Affectionate, attentive, very observant, quiet, a little shy but very friendly, funny, and caring with his friends; likes reading all kinds of books

Elena

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico

Observant, curious, great listener, caring, affectionate, inquisitive; likes to retell stories by looking at picture books, loves to help and clean the classroom

Celeste

Spanish + ELL

Child of immigrants from Mexico and Honduras

Playful, nurturing, considerate, caring, affectionate, peacemaker; likes to sing, draw pictures, and write with everybody.

Gus

English

White

Quiet, very observant, insightful, avid artist; likes to solve problems and offer suggestions to help others

in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Table 1 offers a small glimpse into the children’s personalities and demographics in preparation for the stories that appear throughout this book. True to educational ethnography, we, as researchers, observed while participating in the class community. We assisted Ms. Bailey with daily tasks such as looking at children’s work, listening to students share their writing or project designs, asking questions, and helping supervise students who wanted to work on something outside the classroom. Sometimes, when asked, we talked through project ideas or brainstormed helpful resources with students who were, for example, wanting to study tornadoes, light prisms, plants, or President Obama’s family. We did not, however, assist with any direct instruction or assessment procedures. Most days we filmed and recorded conversations between teacher and students and among students. We took photographs of hundreds of artifacts gathered throughout the year as project topics emerged and were eventually turned into posters, models, experiments, handmade books, mobiles, and dioramas. The videos, recordings, field notes (which included observations and drawings of the classroom), and artifacts all became

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part of the initial analytic process and served as content for a film we created for video-cued ethnography.

video-cued ethnographic process As part of the year in Ms. Bailey’s classroom, we arranged to film full schooldays in order to capture everyday routines and practices. We wanted to use the footage to make a twenty-minute film that showed what children did in a typical day in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. When Ms. Bailey and the children told us that they were ready to be filmed and the parents consented, we made arrangements to film full days of school from the time children arrived to the time they went home. Our research team ended up filming for three days, collecting forty-four hours of footage in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We edited the video recordings, capturing scenes from a typical day, as well as two particular curricular activities that happened on an everyday basis: Daily Five literacy activities (Boushey and Moser 2006) and project-based learning (Katz 1994). Ms. Bailey, the children, and their parents and grandparents watched, commented on, and made suggestions about the film drafts until everyone approved it. The final film opens to children arriving in the classroom and working in their notebooks to write down the date and weather. Then Ms. Bailey gathers all of the children on the carpet to talk with them about the car accident she had been in the day before. The children share their own experiences with car accidents. They are concerned and care very much about her and her child. Instead of dismissing their care and interest, Ms. Bailey changes her plan for the day and initiates a project on car accidents using elements of science and literacy. The film shows the children’s interest in Ms.  Bailey’s car accident, a class discussion, and children brainstorming questions about accidents, creating a web graphic organizer, and gathering information by asking and answering questions and telling stories. The next scene shows a math activity in which children learn and practice how to add to 10 using number cards. Students work in pairs and then, as a class, share their strategies to make ten. Max and Peter each complain to Ms. Bailey that the other has hurt them. Ms. Bailey tells the boys that they need to go “over there” and solve their problem on their own. The class continues working while Max and Peter are in a corner of the room arguing. Max tells Peter that he stepped on his foot without apologizing. Peter responds that he did not do it on purpose and that he did apologize but Max did not hear. Eventually they make their way back to the carpet and rejoin the math discussion.

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After math instruction, students go outside for a thirty-minute recess. They play basketball and tag, use hula hoops or jump ropes, toss balls and Frisbees, and play in the sandbox. After recess, the students walk back to the classroom and sit on the rug to continue their scientific exploration of car accidents. They watch a video of a tow truck and formulate questions to ask a tow truck driver that Ms. Bailey has invited to the class. Then children have literacy time and choose between reading to themselves, reading to a classmate, working on writing stories, putting together words with magnet letters, and listening to stories on the computer. Ms. Bailey reads them a story during which children yell out questions and ideas. They are excited about the book and find a lot to talk about. Ms.  Bailey asks them what the book reminds them of, and some children tell the class that it reminds them of when their grandparents got sick or passed away. The children have another recess and then a spelling lesson. The next scene shows Ms. Bailey disciplining the class because some of the children didn’t do what they were supposed to do during that time. At the end of the school day, Ms.  Bailey reminds the children to be scientists and then dismisses them to go home or to the afterschool program in the gym.

video-cued focus groups We showed the film to educators, parents, teachers, and children in schools that had similar demographics (based on race, class, immigration status, and language) to Ms. Bailey’s school. Using the film as a constant variable, we followed a particular protocol (see appendix A) while conducting focus groups with teachers, administrators (school and district), immigrant parents, and young children (five-, six-, or seven-year-old children of mostly Spanishspeaking immigrants). All five of the sites where we showed the film served a similar community with mostly Latinx immigrant families and some African American families. Our study began focused on Latinx children of immigrants, but because of how segregation works in Texas and through the United States, all of the schools that served Latinx immigrant families also served African American families. The schools we spent time with mirrored the pattern of geographic and economic segregation of their communities. In all cases, schools had a high number of families who were under economic stress and qualified for school services such as free and reduced lunch. We conducted over fifty video-cued ethnographic interviews at five sites with a total of fourteen school and district administrators, twenty-seven

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preK-third teachers, ninety-two mostly Spanish-speaking parents of firstgrade children, and ninety-nine first-grade students. We conducted focus groups in Spanish and/or English, depending on the group’s preference. We also interviewed and met with multiple school staff members, who often helped us build trustworthiness with the school community. Focus groups of three to six participants typically began with a brief explanation of the study and the demographics of El Roble Elementary. Then we showed the twenty-minute film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We filmed participants’ responses to the film in real time and recorded the interviews that followed, in which we asked a series of questions about pedagogy, agency, and what kinds of learning experiences young children should have in the beginning years of school. It was in these reactions and interviews that we realized we had a problem. This was not going to be a best practices study nor one that simply listed a culturally relevant approach to increasing children’s agency. Instead we were left with complicated and somewhat confusing data in which although the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom demonstrated a range of sophisticated active learning experiences, the young children of color we interviewed throughout Texas objected to the practices they saw in the film and argued that learning is more quiet, still, and controlled than what they saw in the film. Intersectionality and Representation in Our Data Identity is complicated in our data, as it is within the lives of those we learned from in our study. None of the participants is simply a member of one community or a static cultural, linguistic, racial, economic, or geographical group (Crenshaw 1990; Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol 2018; Gillborn 2015). Schools, parents, children, and teachers were selected for this study based on intersectional demographics including race, class, language, and country of origin. All of the schools had similar racial, immigration, and economic markers. We spent time with schools and districts that served bilingual, Latinx immigrant, and multigenerational Latinx, Hispanic, and Chicana/o families. Three schools also served African American families and Afro-Latinx families, and one also served Black immigrant families. We interviewed parents from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and El Salvador as well as Hispanic, Chicana/o, biracial, and African American parents born in the US. We interviewed young children who were monolingual and multilingual, born in the US, Mexico, or Guatemala and spoke Spanish, English, or a combination at home. Most children we interviewed, like those at El Roble, had significant economic stressors.

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Although this book is both a traditional ethnography that takes context and specificity seriously and a video-cued ethnography aimed at comparing across contexts and groups (see Adair and Kurban 2019), we made the decision not to compare within parent, educator, and child groups for this book once we realized that the responses within each group were similar. Focusing our analytic attention across groups revealed important problems in early childhood education that we believe are hard to see without such a wide but systematically focused lens. Seeing how everyone— administrators, principals, teachers, parents, and children— responded to the practices in the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom (that is, looking at patterns rather than differences), we learned more about the systematic rationales that prevent educators from seeing young children of color as deserving and ready for agency in their learning. For example, we did not address the differences between African American first-graders’ and Latinx first-graders’ responses to the film. We looked for patterns in the way the children of color in our study saw their education differently from or similarly to their teachers and administrators. We tried to understand how and why their understanding of early childhood practices, learning, and what was important at school differed so much from their parents’ and educators’. We analyzed for patterns of agreement within groups and then compared across groups. We did not try to explain children’s, parents’, or educators’ responses by their identities, home lives, or differences but rather by their shared experiences and perspectives in relation to the larger educational system in which they operated. We did compare within groups during analysis but only to find what was common among the parents in their responses to the film. Finding these patterns was not difficult, it turned out, because educators answered similarly to one another across sites, as did parents and children. Because of this decision to compare across rather than within groups, we know that our book cannot tell you much about being a Latinx immigrant, Chicana, or African American parent of young children in US schools in the same way that anthropologists often do in their work. For example, Norma González (2001) locates her early work with Latina mothers in Arizona at the intersection of language, race, and migration in order to show that parents can have similar experiences but differ greatly by how they understand those experiences and respond to them in their lives depending on context, power, or values. Cindy Cruz (2015), whose work with Latinx LGBTQ street youth demonstrates that although a group shares identity in some ways, there will always be differences in how they see the world depending on their own specific experiences, understanding, and relationships to power. Claudia Cervantes-Soon, Enrique Degollado, and Idalia Nuñez (2020) studied Afri-

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can American and Latinx immigrant children together in a Texas two-way (Spanish– English) language immersion classroom. Although they acknowledge the different linguistic, racial, and cultural histories among the families and communities in the classroom, they collectively experienced the program’s “failure to foster bilingualism in children of color . . . because it was rooted in the reproduction of a white supremacist framework through which the children’s overall behaviors (linguistic or else) were continuously assessed and used to position them as devious or deficient.” Marjorie Orellana’s (2009) ethnographic work with immigrant children from Mexico and Central America is especially helpful in thinking about diversity and variation within groups. In her work on language brokering, she examines both the “multifaceted and complex set of practices that involved mediation of language and culture in a wide range of situations and relationships” (2016, 93) and the ways children engaged in language brokering for their families regardless of the place or family of origin (2009, 20). Similarly, we acknowledge that children in our study were very different based on nations of origin and backgrounds, but the consensus about the type of learning and teaching they experienced was devastatingly similar. What we can offer is an understanding of what their collective understanding as children of color and educators and parents tell us about what is happening in the early grades and why young children of color are segregated away from experiences that require and support their agency. Finally, we used the word children rather than students to reference the first-graders in Ms. Bailey’s classroom and the first-graders we interviewed at other school sites. This decision was meant to bring attention to the fact that we are talking about very young children. When we describe their walking in prisonlike lines, following strict orders, speaking about learning as something still, quiet, and obedient, and being reprimanded for excitedly yelling out ideas, we want to keep reminding you, the reader, that they are young children. Using the term children does not mean that we think little of them or condescend to them in any way. To us, children are capable, smart, and worthy of our serious attention. An Overview of the Book Chapter 2 details Ms. Bailey’s classroom and the rich, sophisticated learning experiences the children received. We describe what children did with the opportunity to enact their agency at school, what capabilities they demonstrated, and the richness of their experiences.

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Chapter 3 describes how the educators we interviewed responded to the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We detail what kinds of practices teachers and administrators liked and whether they thought they would be good for the students at their own schools. Chapter 4 explores why and how the young children in Ms. Bailey’s class enacted their agency collectively as much as they possibly could. Ms. Bailey’s classroom was not rooted in Whiteness nor in progressivism but something different: a hybrid of children’s real lives and rich community wealth alongside attention to children’s agency. We share the ways in which parents and grandparents we interviewed embraced and worried about the practices in the film. Chapter 5 explores the complications Ms.  Bailey experienced trying to offer a version of early childhood education that was neither fully child centered nor fully adult directed. We detail the moments during the year where her prioritization of community and communal agency was challenged by the larger educational system’s emphasis on individuality and control. Chapter 6 explores how all the children we interviewed at multiple sites in Texas responded when they watched the film of Ms.  Bailey’s classroom. We detail the behaviors, environments, teaching approaches, and peer interactions that the young children noticed in the film— what stood out to them and what prompted commentary, opinions, and often criticism. We try to make sense of why they responded so negatively to the practices in the film and put their responses in dialogue with larger societal struggles to see young children, and specifically young children of color, as full persons. Chapter 7 places the responses of the parents, teachers, administrators, and children in dialogue with one another. Why did the teachers and administrators love the practices but think they would not work? Why did young children of those educators say that the practices were bad for learning? Why did parents appreciate and want many of the practices in the film but also worry about teachers’ abilities to do them well? The answers to these questions demonstrate how a segregation by experience marks early childhood education across the United States. We center Ms. Bailey’s classroom as an example of practices that are present when children are considered full persons and not segregated from the enactment of their agency. Our book ends with an epilogue that recounts what happened when we showed the film to children from Ms.  Bailey’s class six years later— as twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. Together they reflected on what Ms. Bailey’s classroom was like in relation to their other educational experiences. The children— now teens—have a message for everyone who said they could not

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handle the practices in the film, and they reflect and make predictions about themselves as learners. This Book Is Not about Best Practices Before we start sharing stories and analysis from Ms. Bailey’s class, we would like to clarify that this book is not a simple story of success. This book is not a manual. It is not a book about a teacher who overcomes difficult odds to effectively teach her students. In some ways this book is about Ms.  Bailey, her incredible, unique students, and all of the amazing capabilities they got to demonstrate because of what they were allowed to do at school. But it is also about our educational system’s failure to provide children of color with learning experiences that support and extend their agency. This book gets somewhat depressing at times. We know because we have been sharing this data for a few years now, and at some points there is just awkward silence as people realize what we are saying. And what we are saying is that narrow, controlled spaces in early childhood education serve White supremacy and the elite by segregating most children of color from enacting their agency at school. We are saying that many children are being taught at school that society expects nothing more from them than their compliance while others are learning that society expects their ideas, risk-taking, leadership, and discoveries. Our data point out how early this is all happening— this segregation by experience— in the schooling lives of very young children.

2

Everyday Life in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom

“Own What You Are Doing” (Ms. Bailey) One morning in late September, the children in Ms.  Bailey’s class chatted their way to the carpet area where they sat, most of them squished together or touching in some way. Ms. Bailey faced them, her small frame in a child-sized chair. Her lesson plan sat on her lap. The class had spent the last few days talking together, reading examples, and brainstorming about how authors include details in their writing. Instead of writing “I like pizza,” she was encouraging them to write “I like warm pepperoni pizza.” This particular day Ms. Bailey had selected a book to introduce the concept of adjectives. As soon as she started to read, however, there was a loud screeching sound. Everyone turned their heads to see what it was. Mary, a seven-yearold with large, brown, rather serious eyes and a bow in her brown hair, was the first to realize what had happened. She jumped up and motioned to the back of the room. Her noticing got everyone’s attention. Mary was not someone who spoke up first or very often. She was known for being the fastest first-grade runner in the school and had significant motor skills for her age. She moved with strength and easily challenged people to races on the playground. She navigated Spanish and English at the same time and communicated back and forth in both languages. Both of Mary’s parents were recent immigrants from Mexico, and Mary was the middle child with a baby brother and older sister. We often saw her hugging her baby brother and walking hand in hand with her parents. Though she had a supportive family and impressive interpersonal skills, Mary’s academic trajectory was labeled “at risk.” The school worried because her diagnostic reading score in English was at level 1 (the lowest). Her writing and math skills were considered low kindergarten level. Mary’s enthusiasm for school and involvement in discussions around reading and math were inconsistent. By standardized measures

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endorsed by the state, she was an underachieving student in need of academic and remedial interventions. Ms. Bailey felt intense pressure to focus on, track, report, prioritize, and improve Mary’s reading and math scores on English language tests, as she did with all of the bilingual children in her class. Volcanoes Soon everyone was pointing and yelling with a mix of excitement and confusion. The old computer printer at the back of the classroom seemed to have turned on noisily all by itself. Pages printed out and fell to the ground. Mary and her classmates, now deeply curious, wondered out loud, “What is that for?” Suddenly the connecting door to the other first-grade classroom opened, and two students rushed over to the computer printer. The visitors announced that their class was going to make a volcano. Immediately children shouted over one another with enthusiasm. Mary jumped in with force. “Hey, I want to make a volcano!” Mary’s excitement about the volcano was contagious, and almost immediately sixyear-old Max and seven-year-old Diana joined in. “I want to make a volcano!” they shouted on top of each other. Now everyone in the class began shouting out volcano facts. Ms. Bailey looked around, taking in the children’s excited yelling. They were shaking one another and putting their arms as high in the air as they could go to get her attention. Ms. Bailey was obviously delighted. With a big, showy movement the kids could see, she took the lesson plan sitting in her lap and dropped it on the floor. Then she leaned in toward the children. “What about volcanoes?” Ms.  Bailey asked. “What do you know about them?” Mary and the other children shouted out so many ideas that Ms. Bailey grabbed a piece of chart paper and started a list of what they knew about volcanoes and what they wanted to find out. “I want to build one!” “They have lava under the earth!” “There are no volcanoes in Texas!” As the kids yelled out volcano facts, Ms.  Bailey looked around at the children and the classroom as if figuring out what to do next. She told the children to go get their clipboards. They ran to their tables, knocking things down in their excitement. They hurried back to the carpet only to realize that it was library time as scheduled by the school. The children and Ms. Bailey talked excitedly about volcanoes as they walked down the wooden walkway to the library. They looked for books about volcanoes in the library, asked the librarian for recommendations, and shared ideas at a relatively high volume inside the library and on the walk back. Mary worked with the librarian to

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find two volcano books. Although their pictures and print were small, Mary looked through them at the library, mesmerized. Back in the classroom, the children sat down at the carpet again and listened as Ms.  Bailey shared with them the books she had just found at the library. After showing the class some pictures of volcanoes, she asked them to go draw models of volcanoes and use whatever they knew to explain their model on paper. Students initially followed these directions, but soon they were moving around the room, asking one another questions, getting materials, and asking classmates for ideas. One by one they came and asked Ms. Bailey if they could use some of the books to help them draw models. Then they approached her with sketches. When they did, she asked them questions. To the pencil sketches, she responded, “What color are these?” If a drawing had no label, she asked, “What is this called?” When a drawing was labeled, she asked, “How does this work?” Students worked on their models for the next three days, referencing the many books from the library as well as online resources that Ms. Bailey found for them. They started copying words out of the books and writing them down on their models. Children got to make decisions about whom they worked by and whom they consulted with about their projects. Some children started out working alone, but all of them ended up in some kind of group. Children spoke Spanish and English words, trying to figure out more about volcanoes, even though instruction was primarily in English. They decided how they wanted to share what they learned with the class. The “volcano project” was not significant because it was innovative practice. The fields of early childhood education, learning sciences, and developmental psychology have decades of empirical research showing that children learn through moving around, discovery, observation, helping out, collaboration, and exploring in shared endeavors over time with peers and caring adults (Gopnik 2012; Paradise and Rogoff 2009). What is significant about Ms. Bailey’s classroom was that she was offering these kinds of practices to Black and Brown children regardless of their behavior, languages, families, or economic situation, in a classroom governed by state standards and testing pressures. Unlike most children of color in the US schooling system, the children in her class did not have to “earn” these experiences. In this chapter we look at the experiences young children got to have in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. These dynamic, active, and agency-supportive learning experiences reflected both an operationalization of agency and an allowance for embodied learning. The mostly Latinx and African American children got to enact their agency in the classroom often and in many different forms.  They got to move around, talk to one another often, and use their

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initiative because they had the space and time to do so. Sometimes they got to choose their topics of study. They made lots of decisions about what and how they learned. The opportunities to move around, talk to one another, notice new things, contribute effort, and share ideas led to a range of developed and practiced capabilities across social and academic domains. These opportunities were justified and motivated by Ms. Bailey’s belief that children need to own what they are doing so that they can be empowered learners throughout their lives. “Own What You Are Doing” as Pedagogy When we asked Ms. Bailey why she let children direct so much of their learning, she usually framed these opportunities as ways to help children “own what they are doing.” Children’s moving around, talking to one another, observing what classmates were working on, and making decisions about how and what they learned were all part of Ms.  Bailey’s concept of “own what you are doing.” She told us both informally and during our more formal interviews that she wanted children to feel in charge of their learning so they would be empowered. She wanted them to have a say in what they did in class. “Someone does not need to always be in charge of you and give you the answers,” she often said to the children. Ms. Bailey believed the children needed to know that they could figure out a range of things including conflict, academic content, procedures, word decoding, and even complicated understandings of why volcanoes erupt. In many ways the concept of “own what you are doing” was Ms. Bailey’s version of agency, her mechanism to remove the personhood– subpersonhood line. “Own what you are doing” was not about compliance or about choosing  what the teacher already wanted you to do. It was about children’s influencing the academic direction of the classroom with their spontaneous ideas, knowledge, and concerns. This concept of “own what you are doing” is perhaps best illustrated in what happened a few days after the paper flew off the printer and the class got excited about volcanoes. It happened that parent– teacher conferences took place about one week into the volcano project. Mary’s mother told Ms. Bailey how excited Mary was about volcanoes. She asked if Mary could make a volcano at home and bring it to school. Ms. Bailey told her that this was a great idea and to bring the volcano whenever they finished working on it. The parent– teacher conference was on a Friday. The following Monday, Mary arrived at school with a large clay model of her volcano, Sal de Uvas Picot (a Mexican version of Alka-Seltzer), and food dye. Immediately the children gathered around Mary

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f i g u r e 1 . Mary brought the volcano she made at home and led the class discussion about how it worked.

and her volcano, asking questions and begging to be the one to pour ingredients into the volcano. Instead of telling everyone to go back to their seats or shushing the class, Ms. Bailey joined them. “Mary, what did you bring us?” she asked. Mary started explaining that she had made the volcano with her family at home. She pointed to each element of the volcano model, echoing the knowledge she and her classmates had been learning the previous week. Ms. Bailey ran to get her small flip camera and started filming. Meanwhile, classmates bombarded Mary with questions, so much so that her face turned red. She looked stunned by all the attention. A good friend of hers, Lorene, argued with her about the color of the food dye that she had brought. “Here’s some red dye,” Mary explained to the group when someone asked her about the small bottle. “It’s pink!” Lorene countered. “No, it’s red!” Mary insisted. Some of Mary’s classmates wanted her to get the volcano to erupt with the sal de uvas and food coloring. “Are you going to do it right now?” they excitedly wondered. Mary’s face shifted from smiley to worried; she seemed unsure of whether she could just go ahead and make it explode. Ms. Bailey nodded reassuringly at her, and then Mary posed a problem to the group, as she had often heard Ms. Bailey do: “But I need water!” Gus, a monolingual English-speaking White American child with curly hair who loved to read and draw, yelled out to Mary and the rest of the group, “I’ll go get my water bottle.” He ran to his backpack and pulled out an orange metal water bottle. He handed it to Mary, who poured the water into the volcano.

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The purple “lava” rose and then flooded over the volcano walls and onto the desk. The children cheered, except for one classmate who disapproved of how much water Mary poured into the other ingredients: “You weren’t supposed to pour all of it.” Mary again looked around for Ms. Bailey, who was still filming the scene. Ms. Bailey looked back at her and nodded again. Mary smiled shyly and did not say anything. One of Mary’s closest friends, Elena, exclaimed, “Oh, what a cute little volcano!” Mary smiled again and looked around at everyone watching her family’s volcano. As the purple lava flowed over the side of the volcano, close to the table’s edge, some of the children ran to get paper towels and then hovered them over the lava in case it started to flow onto the floor. Ownership over Learning When Mary walked into the classroom with the model she made with her family, ownership over what happened, what was learned, and who did the teaching shifted from the teacher to the children. This was not a unique or new experience for the children, because it happened often. The children in Ms. Bailey’s class learned quickly that they could lead discussions, projects, and inquiries. The volcano project was early in the year, though, so Mary’s glances at Ms.  Bailey seemed to be asking, “Are you really OK with this?” “Are you really OK with me leading this whole thing?” “Can I really just pour water into the volcano now?” Reflecting later on this moment with Mary and the class, Ms. Bailey told us that by picking up the camera to film Mary, she became a classmate too. Her hands were occupied, and so students took up the responsibility to debate with Mary (“It’s not red, it’s pink!”), to offer suggestions (“Pour the water in!”), to solve problems (“I’ll get my water bottle!”) and to contribute to the shared experience Mary and her family offered the class through the model volcano. Ms. Bailey did not rescue Mary from the experience of being challenged about the food dye color, nor did she intervene as Mary got nervous leading the activity. She did not solve the water bottle problem. There were no comments about how the eruption was making a mess, how it might run onto the floor, how it needed to be cleaned up immediately. She didn’t even tell the children to get paper towels to clean up the lava. Children noticed the potential for the lava to get on the floor, and they went to get paper towels. The experience was about self-rule not in an individual sense but in a collective childhood sense, with children initiating the volcano topic. This kind of ownership was the overall goal of learning throughout the year.

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This ownership extended to ideas as well as academic content. During the volcano project Ms. Bailey talked to the class about their progress. Often these conversations were loud, passionate, and multidirectional. Ms. Bailey’s emphasis again was on getting them to own their learning. So, for example, when children brought up a topic related to volcanoes that she had not planned on, she stopped what she was doing and tried to show them that their idea was important. Mary’s volcano eruption prompted a lot of conversation over the following days about volcanoes, particularly the types of explosions that volcanoes make. One day after hearing her classmates shout out about volcanoes exploding and shooting out lava, Celeste, an empathetic student with big brown expressive eyes, dimples, and short black hair usually held back by an orange headband, seemed uncomfortable. Celeste and her two siblings (who attended the same school) spoke Spanish at home with her father from Honduras and her mother from Mexico. She liked to sing and write and draw. Usually eager to comment and to get other children to include her in their play, Celeste, with a sad look on her face, interrupted the enthusiastic discussion by reminding her classmates: “The volcanoes are not in the middle of nowhere. Some people live very close to volcanoes. It can hurt people.” She went on to explain that her father is from Honduras and that “there are volcanoes in Honduras.” The children grew quiet. Humanizing the issue of volcanoes was new to the group. Celeste’s words, like Mary’s, had an immediate and powerful effect. When it was time to go back to their seats and continue working on their volcano models, many children started drawing people into their models, bringing into their work what Celeste had helped them understand. Embodied Learning Included in the concept of “own what you are doing” was a recognition that children learn through using their bodies. And in Ms.  Bailey’s classroom, children were very busy. They moved around a lot. They could see what their peers were working on. They observed one another and joined into one another’s work and play. They could show their enthusiasm about a topic and Ms. Bailey would take their interest seriously by finding materials, infrastructure, and space to further their interest. This could mean books, an experiment, or even a unit. Sometimes she would hear the children talk about something a lot and then build curriculum around it. She was not bound by a specific curriculum other than the Daily Five curriculum for literacy (which has elements of children choosing space and materials) and the math curriculum called Investigation. So she made a lot of decisions herself. This sense

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of her own teacher agency seemed to have a strong impact on how she could support children’s agency in her classroom. One morning in November, Ms. Bailey and her partner first-grade teacher in the adjoining room— Ms. Leslie— asked their classes to go to the cafeteria instead of heading straight to their classroom. They started a discussion about the differences between humans and other animals and wrote the children’s ideas on large pieces of butcher paper. Then they explained to their students that they would have two hours to explore a lot of materials about animals. Their job, Ms.  Bailey explained, “was to explore and think.” She added, “Because this is what scientists do a lot.” The only rules were (1) they always had to be learning and (2) no running. Children hopped up, waited at the door for their teachers to open it, and then walked very, very fast to their classrooms in a wobbly, snakelike formation loosely resembling a line. Breathless, the children excitedly read aloud the signs on their classroom doors. Ms.  Bailey’s door read “animal.” Ms.  Leslie’s read “human.” Those who opened the human door found a large skeleton standing beside one of the tables with a real-life doctor ready to show the children how reflexes work. A nurse sat at the far table ready to show the children how to check their blood pressure. Books and posters about the human body filled the rest of the available wall and table space in the room. Those who opened the “animal” room were stunned to see surprisingly huge animal bones on all of the tables as well as pictures of hearts and organs of different animals up on the walls. In the “human” room, Marcela hunched over the nurse’s table to watch her measure students’ blood pressure and heartbeat. She was as close as she could be without sitting right on her lap. Marcela’s black hair was done up in a big ponytail. She wore burgundy glasses with a thin frame that contrasted with her black eyes and long eyelashes. Her parents were both Mexican American; she spoke English and some Spanish at home. Marcela had her own blood pressure taken first but then stayed to watch, seemingly enthralled with how the blood pressure cuff worked. She was usually observant, so her observation skills were not surprising, but her questions were. It was unusual for Marcela to talk or initiate conversation, especially with adults. But now she asked the nurse a lot of questions. “Is the band tight?” “Why do you pump it up?” “How does it stay on there?” “What are the numbers for?” The nurse answered her questions while taking the blood pressure of the other children surrounding her. When there were no more children waiting, Marcela picked up the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope and moved it all around, examining it from all angles. “Can I take this to get the people’s blood pressure?” she asked the nurse. Marcela then marched all over the room taking and recording everyone’s

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f i g u r e 2 . Marcela initiated a research study about her classmates’ blood pressure using a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope.

blood pressure. She recruited Paloma, who said she was willing to have her arm wrapped in the blood pressure cuff. More classmates volunteered or were happily recruited. After the first few patients, Marcela went to her cubby to get what Ms. Bailey called their “learning logs.” In her learning log, Marcela drew lines resembling a table or chart. She made notes in the different boxes with people’s names and numbers she read on the blood pressure gauge. When she wrapped the band around each classmate’s arm, they asked her questions about blood pressure. Marcela told them what the nurse had told her or guessed when she did not know or could not remember the answer. Planning for Agency Children were in charge of whether they stayed and watched something for a long time, moved from one activity to another or observed the room for a while before deciding where to go. Being able to move made a diverse and unpredictable set of learning experiences happen. Marcela stayed and observed the nurse taking everyone’s blood pressure. The nurse stayed in her seat instead of following Marcela around the room and reminding her to be careful. Children in the class were willing to stay still and not move to another activity so that Marcela could put the cuff on them. They practiced waiting patiently while she wrote down their numbers on her newly created chart. Ms. Bailey and Ms. Leslie exchanged surprised wide-eyed looks with us and each other all morning. We were collectively stunned by the variety of ways the children had taken up the science content.

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Ms. Bailey and Ms. Leslie had set up the classrooms to be enticing. They spread out the materials all over the room. Children had to move in order to engage and follow their interests. Children did not have to resist or rebel to move; teachers allowed them to move around for over two hours. The teachers got to observe and encourage, instead of leading instruction. By watching all of the activity, they learned that Marcela was internalizing math in an organized, applied way that contradicted her benchmark scores. They saw her take content and set up her own experiment— something that surprised them because she had not taken on a leadership role before at school. At the same time that Marcela was making charts and taking her classmates’ blood pressure, Jaime was in the “animal” room, examining large horse bones on one of the tables. He turned the largest bone over and over in his hands. Jaime was Mexican American and a native Spanish speaker whose parents were both immigrants from Mexico and spoke Spanish with him at home. Jaime, along with Elena, was the most vocal Spanish speaker in the class. He had straight black hair that was always combed perfectly and brown eyes that somehow seemed observant and worried at the same time. Jaime asked a lot of questions but rarely took a leadership role during group projects. Sometimes Ms. Bailey lovingly described him as spacy because he often got lost in his thoughts. The father who had found the large horse bones in a field by his house and brought it to Ms. Bailey was watching from the side. Eventually he walked over to the table and asked Jaime what he was trying to figure out about the bone. Jaime took two bones in his hand, trying to see if they fit together as part of the skeleton. “Do they go like this?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, Jaime started asking the dad a lot of questions about the bones. “Where did you find them?” “How did you clean them?” “Is this the arm bone?” “Why is this hole in the bone?” The visiting dad answered as much as he could, even as Jaime started trying to stack a few of the bones to make them fit together. Sometimes the dad would tell Jaime that his question was a good one but that he didn’t know the answer. Eventually Jaime put his head through the largest bone and figured out that it was the pelvic bone. “A butt bone! A butt bone!” he exclaimed to himself. The dad stepped back to the periphery as Jaime recruited classmates nearby to come see. Seeing that Jaime was able to put his head through the bone got other children interested. Soon there was a curious group at the table asking a lot of questions. Jaime, using the knowledge he’d gotten from the dad and some he brought from home, started answering their questions. Jaime did not tell them it was the pelvic bone and was elated when someone in the new group figured it out on their own. After a few minutes, Jaime wandered

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f i g u r e 3 . Jaime examined bones as part of a large class project and then taught classmates what he found out.

off to  explore other areas of the two classrooms. Three of the boys stayed, waiting for other kids to come to the table. When they did, the boys answered their questions just as Jaime had done for them and the dad had done for Jaime. This went on for almost forty uninterrupted minutes: kids asking questions, learning about the bones, and then teaching the kids who arrived next at the table. Adults had planned for these young children to have a variety of (and make decisions about) entry points into the content. Rather than leave children to their own devices, adults facilitated collective agency and gave the children important information, encouragement, and challenge. The nurse with the blood pressure cuff inspired and then supported Marcela. The dad who brought the bones provided information to Jaime. This was just one example of how Ms. Bailey and Ms. Leslie often put together activities, assignments, and lessons in which they determined the content and context but allowed for authentic decision-making. Adults were sources of information, but they did not make all of the decisions. Children made lots of decisions. Building Relationships through Materials and Movement Marcela and Jaime developed a deeper intellectual understanding of blood pressure and bones, respectively. The willingness and availability of the adult

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resources in the room made this learning possible. Children’s agency, in Ms. Bailey’s classroom, depended on the agentic environment surrounding them. The environment was an active part of the knowledge-making process in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Freedom of movement and the unstructured connection with their environment helped children connect and form relationships with the materials that mattered to them. Their relationships with the materials seemed meaningful to the children because they appreciated what the materials were offering them. Before Marcela and Jaime brought their learning to others in the classroom, they spent time alone with the materials, getting to know them, how they worked, what they felt like, and the meaning of their physical and practical features. They turned and moved the cuff and bones in their hands, looking at them from many angles. Developing a relationship with the materials preceded the material’s eventual participation in helping children build relationships with one another. In both Marcela’s and Jaime’s case, the presence of the bones and blood pressure cuff enabled relationship building. The cuff and the bones fostered interaction among the children. Marcela and Jaime welcomed children to see the materials and how they were interacting with them. For Marcela, the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope created a relationship between her and the nurse as she watched how the nurse used the cuff to measure blood pressure. The nurse seemed proud of Marcela and connected with her though touching her arm, smiling, and making eye contact. For Jaime, the bones offered a relationship as he turned them in his hands, touched them, and moved them in order to welcome others to share in his connection with the bones. Materials used to build relationships are what Ananda Marin and Megan Bang (2018) refer to as semiotic resources. They define semiotic resources as “those material artifacts, ideas, and actions people both perceive and create to engage in interaction” (89). Semiotic resources are both a part of learning and a way to create relationships that also impact learning. For example, after Marcela watched the nurse take the blood pressure, she asked to use the cuff. After trying out the cuff, she asked Paloma if she could take her blood pressure. When she got a number, she went and got her “learning log” book and wrote out a graph. Perhaps this graph reflected how Marcela had learned to record numbers. It could also have been anticipatory, because Marcela made several lines as if hoping that she could take the blood pressure of many classmates. With her notebook, pen, and cuff, Marcela moved throughout the room approaching classmates to take and record their blood pressure. Sometimes we could see Marcela gently patting the blood pressure cuff while someone else was holding it.

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These young children related to materials and the environment in ways that asserted their own agency and ultimately engaged in collective relationships and sophisticated knowledge development that as Fikile Nxumalo (2017; 2019) explains, counter colonial and capitalistic assertions that the environment is passive or disconnected from them. Being able to move and connect with materials in ways the children controlled enabled a depth of learning that included and was made possible through the presence and insight of the materials (see Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher 2016). The materials were not static to the young children; they were active and engaging and important to learning and feeling good. Giving Over Some Control Through the concepts of “own what you are doing” and “embodied learning,” Ms.  Bailey gave the children in her classroom some control over the how, what, when, where, and why of their learning. Giving up control resulted in specific kinds of learning experiences that became everyday, normalized parts of the day, including noise, movement, time, and collective work.

noise The noise children made in Ms.  Bailey’s classroom comprised discussion, chatting, arguments, stories, and questions. There was a lot of talk and a range of emotional expressions, including sighs of frustration, yelps of excitement, grunts of anger, and sounds meant to encourage empathy, inclusion, cooperation, and sometimes submission. Children used noise to be social and to engage one another. They talked their way through complicated topics. They motivated one another verbally to keep going even when a task was difficult to complete. Many forms of noise were both intellectual and academic. Being able to make noise in the classroom offered children many ways to interact with the content and with one another’s knowledge. They reminded one another of the rules. They objected and argued over materials and about ideas. They debated whether a word was pronounced a certain way or which numbers added up to ten. They used both Spanish and English words. They asked questions out loud to one another and to themselves. Often children used spontaneous and loud noises to gather one another for the sake of learning. Children would call out to each other that they were learning something, were about to learn something, or had just learned something. “I found a rainbow!” “I’m going to see if the ice melts.” “The wet spot on the table is disappearing because it

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is so hot!” When Ms. Bailey responded to the volcano excitement with enthusiasm rather than discipline, children began to accept that calling out was permissible, even desirable. They tried it out more and more, until eventually calling out about learning became a type of intellectual alert. Ms. Bailey came to see noise as a sign of her students’ readiness as well as an indicator of their willingness, enthusiasm, and interest. In her class all students, regardless of their language dominance, participated all the time. Noise was a price to pay for peer engagement and authentic conversations. Even as the school made efforts to make Ms. Bailey’s classroom quieter, she continued to engage in pedagogies that encouraged participation and noisy spontaneity. Interpreting noise as a signal that learning was going to happen goes against most of the early childhood classroom behaviorist models currently used in the US, which insist on quiet as a sign of readiness to learn. Ms. Bailey cited both developmental and equity arguments for a noisierthan-usual classroom. Multiple forms of noise used in pursuit of academic and social development are extensions of children’s early development. Children begin by mimicking sounds and matching emotion to the ways in which other children and adults interact with them (Leavitt 1994). Robin Lynn Leavitt’s groundbreaking work on power and emotion in infant and child care centers found that the impact of emotional interactions between infants and toddlers and caretakers depended on “a respect for children as active, emotional subjects” and a “responsiveness to their efforts to communicate” (70). Children have a variety of communicative skills and strategies to use, depending on the types of practices in their families and communities (Gutiérrez 2002). Children can move back and forth between languages, dialects, and jargon, depending on the worlds they are trying to participate in and understand (Fránquiz and Reyes 1998; Worthy et al. 2013). Being able to use “hybrid language practices” allows for successful collaborative learning experiences for children (Gutiérrez et al. 1999). Early childhood scholars have written about the strong need to support peer conversation and discussion that is not bound by strict linguistic tasks and structures. The work of Celia Genishi and Anne Haas Dyson (2009) in first-grade and kindergarten classes found that young multilingual children develop sophisticated literacies through varying timelines and varied types of creative interactions with their peers and teachers. Multimodal ways of communicating— including talk and a range of noise— are also about pleasure, ways for children to communicate what they desire and to act in ways that bring them enjoyment (Tobin 1997). Supporting children’s conversations in the language of their choosing demonstrated how Ms.  Bailey valued translanguaging as part of teaching and learning in her classroom (García and Wei 2014). She valued children’s

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home languages and the right of children to choose and use their home language in the classroom even when the class was taught primarily in English (Colegrove and Zuñiga 2018). During one of our interviews, she recalled telling Jaime, “When you speak Spanish, that’s powerful! That’s awesome! There are so many of your friends that only know one language. You are a rock star! You’re working on your second language and you’re only six!” (teacher interview, January 2017). In Ms. Bailey’s class children used sophisticated linguistic strategies as they navigated their multilingual spaces. Such sophistication is described in the work of Marjorie Orellana as brokering language practices (Orellana 2016, 93). Children employed sophisticated ways of expressing themselves: translating content between Spanish and English, clarifying instructions, reading for each other, figuring out the meaning of a word, sounding out an unknown word, or helping spell out while writing. Ms. Bailey did discipline or control some types of noise if they worked against a cohesive classroom community. Noise could be disruptive, distracting, and rude. Sometimes comments or side conversations could be mean or so off-topic that they broke the flow of learning and engagement. Children used noise to make fun of one another. They spoke loudly to take over a conversation as a way to control situations they didn’t agree with or like. The children in Ms. Bailey’s class did not scream that year, nor did they get verbally aggressive, but they did talk over one another sometimes and cried openly when they couldn’t get someone’s attention with their presence or voice. These types of noise concerned Ms. Bailey, and she did her best to talk to the children about listening carefully to one another.

movement Seeing children move around Ms. Bailey’s classroom was fascinating to us, because we had never been to a classroom serving children of color that enabled so much movement. We were used to highly controlled environments where silence and stillness was equated with learning. In Ms. Bailey’s class, however, children moved to learn. Children’s moving was equated with making decisions toward learning new things. Children’s moving around was not interpreted as distracting or avoiding work, nor was it normally seen as deviant. For example, children would get up from their seat without permission to observe a classmate’s work, ask someone a question, lend a hand to someone struggling, or act on an intellectual idea. Children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom could move their bodies. They were able to make a lot of decisions about their bodies. Their bodies were not constantly ordered and assessed as we had often seen happen in other early

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childhood classrooms serving children of color. They were not constantly told to look at their bodies and make sure they were standing straight or sitting cross-legged or “criss-cross applesauce” or walking with their hands at their sides or listening with their mouths closed as if they had bubbles in them. Children sat on the rug in a variety of positions. They meandered to their seats and got up from their seats when others called out about something interesting. Sometimes they braided one another’s hair or stroked the ground or lightly patted their legs while listening to a story. While certainly there is cultural variance to the types of order and control imposed at school, the control of children’s bodies throughout the day across almost all activities (lunch, walking in the hallway, sitting to hear a story, walking to the bathroom, sitting at a table, waiting in line, listening on the rug) is often unrelenting for young children of color in the US (Milner et al. 2019). In the developmental sciences, self-control and self-regulation are common terms that claim to assess the extent to which children are in control of their bodies (Boldt 2001). And yet these terms also justify harsh control protocols when children are not able or do not want to match the desired limitations of movement or strict body positions required by teachers or reported as optimal. Kyunghwa Lee (2017) critiques the use of self-control and self-regulation as a way to assess young children operating and being assessed within racially biased and adult-centered systems. Lee’s research shows that when young children of color are assessed as not having enough “selfregulation,” teachers use more restraints and behavior modifications. This is the equivalent of someone not playing piano well and the punishment being a severe limit on practicing piano. When children cannot “self-regulate,” teachers may take away their recess, play, interactions with classmates, and ability to participate in learning. Essentially, Lee explains, when children are asked to use their self-control, they are usually being required to do what teachers want them to do instead of being permitted to use their bodies to learn in ways that make sense to them. Not allowing children to move and control their own bodies forestalls a range of cognitive and academic development. Recent work into active and embodied learning suggests that children learn more and more deeply (lastingly) when they are moving rather than static (Fusaro and Smith 2018; Vredenburgh and Kushnir 2016). And yet as Gail Boldt (2020) points out, “The ongoing devaluing of the bodies of marginalized and minoritized students means that their embodiment, instead of being understood as an occasion for interpersonal connection and energetic participation, is often pathologized and punished” (2020, 4). The desire of young children of color to move their bodies keeps being

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interpreted and punished through old lenses of racism and White supremacy. If children of color want to move a lot, they are often assessed through discourses and expectations set up and maintained by (mostly White) administrators and policymakers who are, like the institutions they serve, blinded by a White supremacist’s intuition to control and be in charge of Black and Brown bodies. Just at the time between three and eight years old when children are learning who they are in relation to the larger society— outside of their immediate families and neighborhoods— they receive the message that they cannot control their bodies safely and no one trusts them enough to let them try. This doesn’t lead to disciplined and obedient children. This leads to angry, underperforming, and distrustful children (Gay 2000). Such a control of movement can be harmful and embolden stereotypes. Ann Arnett Ferguson’s (2000) powerful ethnographic study of young Black male masculinity in schools describes two tracks, one for students to become “doctors, scientists, engineers” and another that leads to prison. She tells the story of an adult who was showing her through a school. He pointed to one child, “a tenyear-old, barely four feet tall whose frail body was shrouded in baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt,” and said, “That one has a jail-cell with his name on it” (Ferguson 2000, 1). For young children these pathways are not necessarily overt, but they are suggestive of the ongoing school-to-prison pipeline running through the US school system (Robinson 2013). Controlling children’s movement, even just forcing children to walk in lines with their hands behind their backs, is reminiscent of prisons, not of intellectual centers that position children of color as smart and capable.

time We never heard Ms. Bailey tell the children to hurry. She did not rush her class or say “Hurry up!,” a phrase used often in classrooms we visited before, during, and after this study. Sometimes Ms. Bailey was tired or stressed or sick or annoyed (she is a normal human being), but she never rushed. She did not stress time. She did not count down from ten. She did not give fiveminute warnings. She did not tell children she was waiting for them. She would say, “OK, it’s time for Daily Five.” Or “It’s time for recess; let’s line up.” And children meandered to whatever Ms. Bailey said it was time for. Children were not efficient movers from their desks and chairs to the carpet or to line up at the door. They took their time, chatting along the way. Ms. Bailey did too. There was a routine and a posted schedule in Ms.  Bailey’s class. There was definitely a general timeframe for the Daily Five, for math and for proj-

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ect learning as well as for the art, music, and physical education classes they called “specials.” And yet the schedule frequently shifted. Time flexibility was characteristic of the classroom space. This flexibility made it possible for young children in the class to have some influence over time. This worked two ways. First, Ms. Bailey often built in large amounts of time for experiments, projects, and other open-ended, process-heavy activities. Instead of breaking up the day into fifteen- or thirty-minute segments, Ms. Bailey allowed the children an hour or hour and a half to work on projects. This large amount of time was welcomed by the children, who could go slow or work with friends or try multiple experiments to get something to work. The long stretches of time allowed many possibilities for learning and leadership. Second, when children were deeply engaged in a learning activity or just about to figure something out, Ms. Bailey tried to extend time for them. She rarely interrupted such an experience. Many times we saw her announce it was time to line up for lunch, only to notice a group deeply debating or actively constructing or discussing something. She would watch them admiringly, waiting to see a good stopping point. This kind of engaged ownership of learning was her main goal for children in her class. And she really enjoyed watching children in such an engaged state. In many classrooms routine is prioritized over children’s interests. Children need to expand their range of learning capabilities; however, this is not usually prioritized. We see teachers frequently tell children to be quiet when they are sharing significant details about their lives with peers— because it is time for science or phonics or social emotional learning (SEL). We have seen teachers tell immigrant parents they cannot share a story with the class for a holiday or special family occasion because music class or a benchmark test or math activities are scheduled at that time. Children are often interrupted by adults telling them that it is time to move on from what they are doing. This emphasis on routine fits nicely with an ideology of efficiency. The faster the better. Staying on task. Ironically, we are not sure that this has created a more efficient child. Sometimes the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were given almost complete control over their time. The human– animal project— which lasted for over three hours— is a good example. Marcela used her time to observe, wander around, and recruit others to participate in her blood pressure study. Children also found hidden or unofficial time in the interstices of the schedule: getting in line, waiting for the teacher at circle time, playing math games, getting materials out, cleaning up, organizing supplies, walking in the hallways, writing in morning journals, or while Ms. Bailey spoke with a parent or other teachers who had a question. Children found lots of space to talk.

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The different inquiries (such as the volcano project) that lasted over days and weeks were elongated in part because children kept their conversation about them going in these pockets of time. They followed up on previous conversations. They wondered aloud together about what might happen tomorrow with the ice or where the bones went when they left the class or what happened to Ms. Bailey’s crashed car or how they could build a better volcano the following day. Children had a lot to talk about because their talk and movement toward one another was not constantly controlled. The power in Ms. Bailey’s approach to time was that children had consistent access to time to pursue what they desired. Many times a day children needed to focus, follow directions, and complete specific tasks, yet they had time throughout each day to pursue a conversation with a friend or an activity they were interested in without being reprimanded. This meant that children did not need to resist so much, because they had some (even if limited) time to pursue their interests each day. They could chat or share or walk or listen or observe without reprimand. In this way they could control (some) time. Children had some influence over how much time they spent on academic things. They got excited about certain topics and then asked to form a project group or study the topic as a class. They influenced others with their support, enthusiasm, and participation. They influenced some of the academic topics that were covered during the year and how long they spent on them. Conversations Ms. Bailey planned to have for fifteen minutes would turn into inquiry projects that lasted days and weeks. Ms. Bailey had not planned on many of the projects children talked about nonstop over a number of weeks: Volcanoes. The Obamas. Bones. Blood pressure. Reflexes. Ice. Rainbows.

the rainbow project In early January, Samuel and Charlie walked into the classroom and noticed light shining down through the fish tank. “Oh, a rainbow!” they shouted, surprised and wide eyed. The boys ran over together and put their hands through the rainbow, letting the colors run over their hands, arms, and faces. They looked up, trying to figure out how the rainbow happened. Samuel was one of the smallest and youngest children in the class but managed to be friends with almost everyone. He had very short black hair. His parents were Mexican American and spoke a mixture of Spanish and English at home. He felt comfortable offering ideas and listening to his classmates, and most were happy to have him in their groups during project time. Charlie, one of the few White children in the class, had blond hair, blue eyes, and an energetic

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way of interacting. He also happened to be the tallest and oldest child in the class. Charlie talked a lot and shared many stories and facts about his life and, with varied success, tried often to give information and help to his classmates. When Samuel and Charlie looked up to examine the origins of the rainbow, they saw that it had streamed through the tank itself. Immediately they tried to figure out how to stop and restart the rainbow by blocking the light. They moved books in front of the tank. They moved posters on the wall. They stood in front of where the light was shining through the tank, attempting to block it with their bodies. Still the rainbow persisted. Pablo noticed the activity at the fish tank. Pablo was curious and very popular in the class. He was short with buzz-cut brown hair and large brown eyes that seemed to always be searching for the next fun thing to do. Pablo was confident and a little bit travieso— witty, playful, and always up to something interesting. His parents were Mexican American and he lived with his mom, who spoke a mixture of Spanish and English with him at home. He understood Spanish and spoke some words with Jaime and others in the class. Along with Mary, he had been a major proponent of the volcano project. After watching Samuel and Charlie for a second, Pablo ran over to open and shut the bathroom door to see if he could block the sun. Watching the scientific scene unfold and perhaps being a little annoyed at the door repeatedly being open and shut, Ms. Bailey asked Pablo, “Why are you doing that?” Pablo looked up at her: “Well, I just wanted to see if the wood, the door, was gonna stop the rainbow.” Ms. Bailey sighed and smiled. She congratulated him on a really good question. “I’m wondering the same thing,” she admitted. She stayed with them for a few more seconds. Then she turned to the class and reminded everyone to get out their journals and write down the date. The boys, though, did not go get their journals. They were still trying to figure out the rainbow. Eventually the three boys collectively marched over to Ms. Bailey to ask if they could create a “rainbow group.” Over the previous few weeks students had been asking to create their own project groups. Ms.  Bailey had introduced the idea, and it had taken a few days for students to get ideas and form groups. They had project time almost every day. Some students who had not formed groups wandered around the classroom watching what other groups were doing. Sometimes groups lasted a day or two, sometimes only an hour. Nia, Lorene, and Diana— the three Black girls in the class— wanted to study President Obama’s daughters and what their lives were like in the White House. The three girls did not usually work together on projects, but on their own, they decided they wanted to do this one together. Lorene had started the project with her desire to share facts and ask lots of ques-

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tions about President Obama’s family. Lorene was a bright and active student who participated in most class discussions and was excited about learning, no matter the topic. Lorene was almost like a teacher herself, reminding her classmates to sit down, listen, complete their work, and figure out solutions to difficult assignments. Her parents were African American, and she lived mostly with her mother, who was an educator herself. Lorene always wore earrings and had her hair in perfectly combed braids. She was almost always deeply engaged in whatever the class was working on and never seemed to be in a bad mood. She sought out books with Black characters and was best friends with Nia. When she found pictures of Malia and Sasha Obama on the computer or in books, she would often say, “I could have been them!” The Obama family group had already lasted two weeks and would continue for another until they presented their findings. When the girls worked together, Lorene kept them on task and engaged with more and more books, videos, and facts she brought from home. The boys had seen projects like the one Lorene led about the Obama family happen all throughout the class, so they knew what to do next. They knew that Ms. Bailey would ask them at least one of the typical questions she always asked of newly formed project groups, such as “What is the purpose of your group?” and “What do you need to research your topic?” The boys told Ms. Bailey that their group was going to try to “redo a rainbow.” Ms. Bailey nodded and asked what materials they would need to work on their project. The boys didn’t know. They looked at the computers, then back at Ms. Bailey, searching for a signal from her that it was OK to go over there and research. She looked at them smiling, seemingly impressed with their interest and initiative. Her pleasure and impressed face seemed to be the sign they were looking for. They walked quickly to the computer and started looking up “rainbow” and “make a rainbow.” After a few minutes, Charlie came back to Ms. Bailey and asked for a cup to make a rainbow. She told him that she would bring it the next day and instructed the three boys to get their journals and join in what the rest of the class was doing. The next day, Ms.  Bailey brought a plastic cup to school for Charlie, Samuel, and Pablo. During project time, the newly formed research group moved the cup in, through, and over different angles in front of the window. It didn’t work, though— no rainbows appeared. The boys huddled up to determine what went wrong. They tried making light with a lamp. They tried to find spots where the sunlight was shining in the window. Soon they wondered if they needed a glass cup instead of a plastic one. The fish tank was glass, so maybe their cup needed to be glass too. They looked around the room and noticed the glass jar that held the classroom’s now defunct marble

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reward system. They ran over to the jar, emptied the marbles, and tried their experiment again. Over the next few weeks during project time, the three boys and a steady stream of curious but temporary group members tried different ways to make rainbows. Some days, when they managed to get some colors shining through different kinds of glass from different angles inside and outside the classroom, they announced their success to the class. Children dropped what they were doing and came over to see. On other days the boys came up short. They would yell out to the class that they had a rainbow, but when everyone ran over, the rainbow would already be gone and the boys couldn’t get it back. This didn’t sour everyone in the class, though. New announcements still drew everyone over to see a possible rainbow. The class’s excitement and support for the boys’ rainbow attempts illustrate how children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom influenced and made decisions about their learning collectively. They had time to pursue their interests. The boys chose their topic of study and influenced how long they got to spend on it. They chose to work with one another, although they were not technically allowed to refuse someone who wanted to join in with their group. They determined how they learned about rainbows and what materials (among those available) they would use. They influenced the flow of the day with their interest because it took them longer to join in with the big group, or to get quiet because they kept talking about the rainbow, especially for the first few days. Yet they did follow the routines. And the teacher made space each day for them to work on and talk through their interests with one another. Agency or the process of owning what you are doing in Ms. Bailey’s classroom meant influencing and making decisions in order to develop. Children had a role in determining what kinds of development or capabilities they expanded. If children really wanted to learn about a particular topic, they trusted there would be time and opportunity to pursue it. They had project time almost every day. They could discuss and talk often about their ideas with their classmates without being shushed. They could move around to watch one another, get materials, and work in appropriate areas of the room. And they had time to work, time that they controlled. When the boys saw the rainbow and went right over to start experimenting, they put in motion a collective agentic act. The rainbow project was a learning opportunity that was fueled by their interest as well as the time to pursue it. As Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, a teacher-scholar who created curriculum with young children, explains, “Time is an important element. Does the classroom provide time for kids to relax and enjoy? To be kids? To ask

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questions and explore their own interests? To learn at their own pace? To be with each other in learning and in friendship? Time to create? . . . Time to change directions, reflect, to resolve?” (in Rogoff, Turkanis, and Bartlett 2001, 100). This ability to pursue an interest was made possible by Ms. Bailey’s willingness to engage in what Susan Jurow and Laura Creighton label as “improvisational teaching” that is “purposeful, but not predetermined” (2005, 276).

collective work When children had the opportunity to influence and make decisions in the classroom, they almost always acted collectively. The decisions children made were almost always communal. Pablo could have acted alone to figure out the door blocking the light. Samuel and Charlie could have noted the rainbow but kept it to themselves. The teacher could have asked them to wait and do a project on rainbows in the future, at a more convenient time. The teachers could have noted their interest and created a fun, hands-on lesson about light, prisms, and rainbows. Instead the scene unfolded in a way that was “natural” to the space. The boys knew that they had at least a few minutes right then to follow their curiosity and develop an inquiry project as a group. And although they anticipated that they would have many whole group lessons where they were required to pay attention and listen quietly to the teacher, they also trusted that later in the day they would have time to pursue the topic further with little restriction. Children in Ms.  Bailey’s classroom knew they could announce ideas, move to participate, and take extra time to follow their interests. They almost always chose to use their agency collectively. They welcomed and joined in their classmates’ pursuits, which then became shared endeavors. The children in Ms.  Bailey’s class responded to being encouraged to be agentic in their learning by working, acting, experimenting, discussing, and problem solving in groups. Children watched one another carefully, for a number of minutes sometimes, to see what others were working on. This happened when Marcela initiated a blood pressure experiment and when Mary brought in her volcano and allowed her classmates to join the inquiry. When children shared new information that they had figured out or when they wanted to try out an experiment, they made announcements, much like the boys did with the rainbow. Children responded to one another’s excitement and learning. Even during brief moments of getting ready for circle time on the carpet, children enacted their agency most often in ways that engaged, supported, and expanded one another’s capabilities.

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Creating an Unprison Ms. Bailey described her allowances for children to have time, move around, share stories, make decisions, and work together as an effort to provide a classroom experience that was as “unprisonlike” as possible. The desire to “unprison” her classroom arose from her own school experiences. She wanted the children in her classroom to own what they were doing and to embody their learning because she had experienced classrooms that were like prison and others that were more like the one she was trying to create. As the daughter of a diplomat, Ms. Bailey attended schools in different countries. When she was three years old her family moved from France to Cameroon, the homeland of the Baka (Pygmies) as well as the Bantu, who three to four thousand years ago moved throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in hundreds of Bantu languages. When Ms. Bailey arrived as a young child, Cameroon’s educational system was in what continues to be the complex aftermath of colonization and European manipulation. Her school was conducted in French because it was in the area of Cameroon invaded and controlled by France. Independent by 1960, the country had set educational policy in the 1970s reflecting a struggle to reconcile warring linguistic powers and pedagogies between French and English (Esch 2012). Despite many hundreds of languages, cultures, peoples, and learning approaches across a diverse Cameroon, schools were forced to teach with little agency over resources, under instruction from colonial powers. Schools could not reflect local belief systems or pedagogies (Kuchah 2016). Schools were stressful and controlling, as if mirroring the colonial conditions that created them. The result, Ms. Bailey told us, was prisonlike conditions passed on to children. For three years at that school, we could not move. It was like a prison. Even as preschoolers, we had to sit behind rows of desks, and the class sizes were very large. I remember the teacher [for three-year-olds] being very stern and intimidating. We were all scared of her. It was so bad that I would wet myself on my chair because I wasn’t allowed to just go to the bathroom. It was awful. When I think back now, my teachers were probably doing the best that they could given the resources they had and the expectations that were imposed on them. I remember another teacher who was tough but warm, comforting me while trying to get me to toughen up.

After a couple of years, Ms. Bailey attended another school, also in Cameroon, that was very different from a prison. I moved and went to a Canadian school which was the opposite of that. Kids were very free to explore and move around. I was no longer sitting behind a

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desk, learning to be quiet and do as I was told by my teacher. Instead I got to play for most of the day, could choose to sew, knit, animate puppets, plant in the gardens, and talk with other children in the classroom without being reprimanded. It was a private, progressive White school. However, I remained very introverted not only because of the “cultural shock” in expectation but also because of the drastic change in the composition of my classroom, which [had gone from] all Black students and teachers to almost all White students and teachers.

The difference between the schools was not simply pedagogical or curricular but also racial and economic. Ms. Bailey went from a school serving mostly Black students where she could not move at all to a school serving White students in which she was free to move around and explore. She remembered feeling very stressed, embarrassed, and scared in the restrictive school where all of her movements were controlled and had to be performed in the exact way the teacher dictated. And although she loved the schooling environment of the second school, she felt somewhat out of place as one of the only Black students. She told us that this experience of moving schools and seeing how Black and White students were offered such dramatically different learning experiences inspired her teaching. As she put it, “I learned early on that schools were not equal and that children could have very different experiences depending on where they went to school.” Part of her motivation to offer the children of color in her classroom opportunities to enact their agency came from her own early learning experiences. Expanded Capabilities Children demonstrated a range of capabilities in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We watched children expand what they were capable of because they were encouraged to own what they were doing, embody their learning, and work collectively. During the school year, we observed and recorded every moment of children’s influencing and making decisions about their learning that we could. It was obvious to us that children enacted their agency collectively— to be with one another. It also became obvious that children of color in Ms. Bailey’s classroom regularly demonstrated capabilities that countered “culture of poverty” racist stereotypes propped up by Whiteness and White supremacy (see Gorski 2008 and Redeanx 2011 for critiques of the culture of poverty discourse). The capabilities we saw demonstrated on a regular basis in Ms.  Bailey’s classroom included the capability to (1) build community, (2) observe, (3) engage in intellectual discussions, (4) deeply pursue knowledge, (5) curiously approach new topics, (6) listen, and (7) fail without giving

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up. We now believe that when children do not exhibit these capabilities, it is because they were not allowed the types of agentic experiences that lead to them, not because of a deficit in the child or the family’s economic circumstances. Agency, as Sen (2003) explains, is a requisite for expanding capabilities (see also Adair 2014). Without agency, capabilities cannot expand as much. We saw this theoretical argument play out each day we spent in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. For each of the capabilities demonstrated regularly by children in Ms.  Bailey’s classroom, we offer examples and suggest how these capabilities were strengthened throughout everyday opportunities to enact agency.

c a pa b i l i t y : b u i l d c o m m u n i t y In Ms. Bailey’s class, children got to know who was good at what. And they had many opportunities to act on that knowledge by asking certain peers to help with projects, research, writing, drawing, or settling disputes. Being able to choose partners did not mean that children chose the same people. At first they did. Pablo always worked with Jason, for example, until he learned that Mary loved volcanoes as much as he did. Marcela and Elena always worked together at the beginning of the year because they were friends in and outside of school. But later Marcela and Celeste found that they shared interests in singing and math. So they worked together on some projects. All of the children could move around and get information from a range of their peers, and they had time to listen and talk to one another about intellectual things. Over the first few months they came to recognize the particular contributions each student made to their classroom. Celeste was the one who could draw. Max could fold paper and was good at ideas. Elena was a good listener. Paloma could write really well. Nia could read. Peter was good at helping out during projects and asking questions. Mary was good at science. After a few months they also recognized who might need more support to participate, who was shy, or who was too dominant. They learned who was good at teaching them new skills and who would listen carefully to their problems. Ms. Bailey told us that children’s learning about one another as potential experts and unique personalities took time and involved some conflict as they started working together. ms. bailey: Sometimes it’s painful, because they have to disagree. But they do it on their own. It used to be a nightmare. jenn: How was it a nightmare? Would they just argue and not get anything done? Were they coming up to you all the time?

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ms.  bailey: All the time! “Ms. Bailey, he won’t let me draw on this side of the paper.” “Ms.  Bailey, he doesn’t want me to be part of the group.” “Ms. Bailey, he took so and so.” Just every little thing . . . they came to me to figure out the problem. But I said, “Figure it out!” Children got to know one another because Ms. Bailey refused to embody all of the strengths they might need. And she gave them time to work together so that they had to work through differences without her constant intervention.

c a pa b i l i t y : o b s e r v e Children seemed to want a social environment in which they could watch what others were doing and then join in the action (Alcalá et al. 2014; MejíaArauz 2015). Children observed one another often, moving around to watch and then participate. When children noticed something interesting that their classmates were drawing or writing, they would walk over or get closer to observe them. Children observed how their classmates interpreted a particular instruction, direction, activity, or lesson. Children often changed their minds about their own projects after they observed what other groups were doing. Being able to look around while feeling curious, interested, or conflicted motivated children to engage, seek out new information, and have informative conversations. Ms. Bailey explained observation as “floating around” to see what they got excited about. Could be a question, it could be a contribution, it could just be watching and listening, because I do have a couple of students that every time their friends want to start working on projects they’re anxious and they start melting down and they’re like “I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m interested in, and I’m frustrated.” Sometimes you can ask them and try to guide them, and sometimes it’s better to just let them be and let them float around and eventually get excited about something.

One morning Diana dropped some objects into an ice-cube tray and filled it with water. Diana was a tall biracial Black girl with long wavy hair usually pulled into a ponytail. She spoke English at home and was trying to learn Spanish so she could speak it with Elena, her closest friend in the class. Her classmates looked to her often for ideas and leadership because she was an outgoing, engaging, inquisitive student who liked to solve problems and be in charge. During the previous few weeks, the class had been learning about how matter can change from a liquid to a solid. Diana wanted to try it out with ordinary objects, wondering if the object and the water would freeze,

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or just the water. She put the tray into the freezer and kept checking on it throughout the morning. Sometimes she shook or wiggled the ice tray to see whether it was frozen yet. Diana loved to teach her peers, so she explained her process to various groups of classmates who followed her over to the freezer. She predicted out loud that the objects would stay solid and not change shape even though the water was changing into a solid. Students’ observations turned into many similar freezing projects over the next few days. Soon everyone understood the states of matter, and particularly that water can change from a gas to a solid. Observation is a way both to learn and to participate. Marin and Bang show that observation is a way to be in the world that enables relationship building (2018, 92). Rogoff and the Learning through Observation and Pitching-In (LOPI) research collective (Rogoff, Najafi, and Mejía-Arauz 2014) conceptualize observation as a key part of young children’s learning within indigenous communities in Latin America. They have documented that for many communities, learning is done through observation and participation, much more than didactic instruction from adult to child (Bang et al. 2015; Correa-Chávez, Mejía-Arauz, and Rogoff 2015; Urrieta 2015). Children learn by observing and then joining in to demonstrate and practice the new knowledge they’ve gained from watching. We saw children use these learning practices routinely in Ms. Bailey’s classroom— particularly observing and then joining into project groups, work activities, or conversations.

c a pa b i l i t y : e n g a g e i n i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s c u s s i o n Children in the class had extensive opportunities to talk, chat, share, ask questions, and argue. These discussions took a long time to develop and even longer to be prompted by the children themselves. Getting boys and girls, friends and nonfriends, and the whole class as a community to discuss academic topics took time. Ms. Bailey modeled how to be authentically interested in ways that kept children talking about their intellectual endeavors. Conversations in Ms.  Bailey’s class gradually became longer and more spontaneous. The volcano project was extended when Mary brought her volcano model to class. Because the children were so excited about volcanoes, they started talking more with one another. The combination of interest in the volcanoes, the freedom to make noise, and Ms.  Bailey’s persistence in helping children have conversations eventually resulted in children having ten- to fifteen-minute academic discussions as a class. Sometimes children asked questions without even waiting for the answer. Sometimes children

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yelled out their questions or comments with intense excitement and then moved around or smiled at someone next to them instead of listening to the answer. Sometimes children whispered questions, comments, or answers without paying attention or even attempting to get an answer. Asking questions was as much about participation and social interaction as it was about getting academic answers. Toward the end of the year the children in Ms. Bailey’s class got to watch and respond to the film we made of their classroom (the same one that many other children throughout Texas would eventually see). They were struck by how many questions they asked each other— so much so that we ended up asking them to explain why Ms.  Bailey wanted them to ask questions and discuss academic ideas instead of her, as the adult, just leading those discussions. We prompted our inquiry to them with a scene in the film when the children asked questions of the tow truck driver. Lorene, Pablo, and Elena explained that asking questions demonstrates a desire to know more. jenn: But why didn’t Miss Bailey just ask questions? Why was she having you guys do it? pablo: She, she, she, she— elena: It’s because she— lorene:  Because she wanted us to ask some questions to [the tow truck driver]— pablo: [Peter] ask some questions because he wonders why he had that car— jenn: Yeah, but why should kids ask questions, not just adults? lorene: Because kids want to find out too. elena: Kids want to find out if like, um, like something happens because we ask. pablo: I got a good one. lorene: Because we like [and] want to know why. pablo: Because kids want to find out too. The children in Ms. Bailey’s class had many opportunities each day to talk spontaneously. Sometimes this spontaneous talk was supported with planned time in a lesson or in the schedule. More often, the enthusiasm for questions was contagious and children asked one another questions. So instead of offering commentary or sharing facts, children asked questions to one another that created conversation and discussion. It is possible that these conversations were less about facts and more about questions because of the children’s experiences with rich discussion and participation in their homes with their

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parientes (extended families). Instead of trying to be “correct” or “first,” children were patient listeners and seemed to engage in conversation to keep it going instead of trying to control it. The space and support for questions made intellectual and joyful conversation possible.

c a pa b i l i t y : d e e p l y p u r s u e k n o w l e d g e One morning, as the children were at tables writing the date and the weather in their journals, Ms.  Bailey noticed some of them pausing and looking around instead of writing. Sensing that perhaps the children couldn’t figure out the weather, she asked out loud, “What is the temperature? What is the high today?” Ms. Bailey looked up the weather on her phone and showed the class the page on the doc cam. Nia, an African American avid reader, creative writer, and really good listener, seemed unconvinced. Nia was serious and focused most of the time. She had Black parents and wrote often about her Black family and other people she admired from the Black community. Still, she was not usually the first person to speak up in the large class group. That day, however, she led the short inquiry. Without raising her hand or seeking permission, she got up from her seat and walked outside. She checked the thermometer hanging on the outer wall and then opened the door and walked back into the classroom. “It is 48 degrees,” she declared. Children began to write the weather facts in their journals, speculating about why it was so cold. Even though the moment was small and seemed insignificant, it was the first time Nia had initiated an activity. The class often spent days and weeks trying to understand concepts better. Instead of an hour over three days in a week or thirty minutes for six days over two weeks, they would do two- or three-hour blocks of time at once. Children engaged intellectually with topics for long periods and they got to choose what they did. For example, on the day of the human– animal project, most of the children who visited the nurse stayed for a few minutes to get their blood pressure taken. Some asked questions and lingered to see someone else have theirs done. Marcela, though, stayed for more than thirty minutes, watching many people get their blood pressure taken. She asked the nurse a lot of questions. She took time (even after all of that observation) to recruit twenty other people, take their blood pressure, and capture their numbers on a chart she had made in her notebook. Her knowledge moved from observation to experimentation, to participation, creation, organization, and contribution.

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c a pa b i l i t y : c u r i o u s l y a p p r o a c h n e w t o p i c s Ms. Bailey worried at the beginning of the year because at first the children struggled to come up with ideas about what to study. They didn’t ask curious questions that could become inquiry projects. Developing curiosity and the ability to start inquiries took time. Not knowing things but also being curious and feeling free to pursue their collective interests produced a kind of meaningful urgency among the children. For example, during a long project about the states of matter, the entire class went outside with their notebooks. They had all divided a page into four sections and labeled them “liquid,” “solid,” “gas,” and “both,” a section requested by the children for things that could contain multiple states of matter. The activity was to walk around outside and try to fit different things they saw into the gas, liquid, and solid categories on their sheet. They had a buddy to walk with, and they could go anywhere on school grounds. They were supposed to write or draw examples of each (as many as they could come up with) on their paper. Jason, yelled out to others to come see the leaves— they were solid. Lorene noticed the building’s paint and wondered aloud if it was a solid or a liquid, settling on liquid. Children went from object to object, conflicted about whether some items were a gas or solid. What about a balloon— was that a gas because it had air in it or a solid because of its firm exterior? Susan Engel’s work on curiosity demonstrates both the developmental and the interactional value of children’s being able to act upon their curiosity, which Engel defines simply as “the urge to know more” (2011, 627). This urge to know more is an integral part of being a citizen who engages in causes that are meaningful and connected to communities and justice (Shapiro 2016).

c a pa b i l i t y : l i s t e n Class discussions were long because Ms. Bailey asked lots of follow-up questions when children shared an idea or a detail about their lives. The children had to listen for long periods while this was happening. At the beginning of the human and animals project with Jaime and the horse bones and Marcela’s blood-pressure experimentation, the class met all together in the gym. They sat in a big circle to brainstorm characteristics of humans and other animals. Ms. Bailey told them that they were going to have bones in their classroom. They would get to touch them. “Max,” she asked, “what do you think we will figure out from looking at those bones?” Max answered that perhaps they

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could figure out how long ago the human or animal lived. He made motions to his body that were hard for Ms. Bailey to understand. She nodded, even though there was a lot of noise from children having mini-conversations with one another and the neighboring class having its own discussion on the other side of the gym. Ms. Bailey leaned closer to Max and asked, “Do you mean that if the bones look old or worn out that means they are old?” Max smiled and nodded. Two more hands went up. Lorene said that maybe by seeing the bones they could know when the animal died. Elena agreed and told Ms.  Bailey that the bones could maybe show how the animal died. With no one else raising their hand but almost all of the children talking to one another about why dogs chew bones and how bones might show how animals died, Ms. Bailey looked around the circle and asked if there was “anything else we could learn from looking at bones or a piece of a bone.” Maybe about the brain, the skull, Jason suggested. Ms.  Bailey explained that two experts would be joining them. One of the visitors was a neurosurgeon. The children asked what “neurosurgeon” meant. Ms. Bailey explained that a neurosurgeon was a doctor who works on the brain. The children were all excited to go into the classroom and see the bones and meet the experts. Yet they stayed in a circle discussing what they could learn. Their discussion was at the height of anticipation, and yet there was no pressure nor a rush. Listening was more important in Ms.  Bailey’s space than hurrying to get everything done. Being able to spend time listening allowed children to expand their capabilities of learning from others through observing and pulling out pieces of information that would help them participate.

c a pa b i l i t y : fa i l w i t h o u t g i v i n g u p Ms. Bailey often reminded her class that failing is part of being a scientist. In the early period of the volcano project, Pablo explained that his own attempt to make a model did not work. He had spent a week drawing a volcano model and labeling it. (This was remarkable since Pablo usually resisted writing at all.) He found books and classmates and adults who could help him write what he wanted. He presented his drawn volcano model to the class. Ms. Bailey asked him questions. He paused and nervously asked to get his volcano book. Instead of saying yes and letting him go get the book, Ms. Bailey reminded him that he’d had ideas even before he saw the book. “I’m interested in those ideas,” she said. Pablo then started to explain the problem he had. “Well, we were gonna make a volcano like them”— pointing to some of his

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classmates—“then we could put a water bottle and tie a rubber band on this [the water bottle] and the volcano. So it wouldn’t explode.” Pablo then explained how they were going to put baking soda and red food coloring in a water bottle placed in a hole. They could stop it from exploding with a rubber band. This plan failed, though. With Ms.  Bailey’s prompting, he explained the failure. ms. bailey: So today you changed your plan? pablo: Yeah. ms. bailey: What do you want to do now? pablo: Well, it didn’t work. The thing we did today didn’t work. ms. bailey: Can you explain it to me? pablo: We were gonna put rocks around it, and then we were going to dig a hole, but we saw this rock but we thought it was connected. There was a rock thing and so we thought it had pipes under it. And then we couldn’t build it. ms. bailey: So, you did it outside— pablo (interrupting): Because we put rocks around it and we thought we were going to dig a hole and put baking soda in it. ms. bailey: So now what are we going to do? What’s the next step? It didn’t work outside, so what do we want to do? pablo: Me and Mary are going to look in that book again. To see if we can try to make . . . because it tells us how to make a book up there, in there. Ms. Bailey then asked if he meant a volcano, not a book. Pablo quickly clarified, “It tells us how to make a volcano with clay.” Ms. Bailey responded, “I can’t wait to see what your next step is!” Children in the class seemed to see failure as something to be learned from and explored. Ms. Bailey gave children enough time so that if and when they failed, they knew they could try again. Failure became less risky because there was always time to try again. Jason and the Reflex Hammer During the animal and human project, Jason got interested in reflex hammers. The neurosurgeon (one of the experts that morning) had brought one for children to try out, along with a human skeleton model and some small models of the brain. He invited Jason and his classmates to take turns sitting in an old office chair so he could show them how the hammer worked. Jason was known for being caring and gentle, for not causing problems when

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playing or working in groups. He was Mexican American and spoke mostly English and some Spanish at school and home. He was average height with brown hair and a round face. He wondered out loud to his friends about lots of things and was always willing to contribute to class discussions. Jason was enthusiastic about reading and learning, even when reading was difficult for him. When it was Jason’s turn to sit in the chair, he sat down and lifted up one pant leg so that the neurosurgeon could use the reflex hammer to hit just below his knee. After watching the doctor test reflexes on a couple of children who had turns after him, Jason asked to try the hammer. Brad, a gifted artist who was White and observed more than he spoke, stood next to him. He quickly jumped into the chair to be Jason’s first patient. Over and over Jason tried to land the hammer in the right place, just under the kneecap. With each hit, Brad shook his head as if to say, “Nope, it didn’t work that time.” He sat there for quite a while. He even took the hammer and tried to do it to himself while Jason watched. Then other children gathered around to have a turn. Brad eventually hopped out of the chair. Then Diana squirmed onto the chair, uncharacteristically giggly. Jason hit the hammer below her knee and asked if it tickled. Diana said, “Yes, it tickles,” and laughed some more. Jason tried a couple more times, and when Diana pulled her pant leg down

f i g u r e 4 . Jason experimented with a reflex hammer to try to test classmates’ reflexes.

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signaling she was done, he looked around to see who would sit in the chair next. Lots of children wanted to have a turn using the hammer, but Jason insisted that he needed more time. The children relented and took more turns sitting in the chair as a patient. Samuel, a Mexican American boy who said witty, funny things to make everyone laugh and who cared deeply about his friends, patiently spent a long time in the chair, shaking his head over and over as Jason tried to hit his leg in the right spot. After all the children had gone, Brad, who had been watching almost the entire time, sat again in the chair and pulled up his pant leg. Jason resumed trying to hit the leg in just the right spot. After each attempt, Brad shook his head no. Jason tried again. No. Again. Nope. Again. Nope. This went on and on. Because of Ms. Bailey’s time practices, the children did not panic about getting a turn when Jason was not willing to give his up. Jason was a gentle child and not confrontational. He easily gave in to most children’s ideas and plans if they countered his own. But on this particular day, he was really trying to figure out how the hammer worked and how to get someone’s reflexes to respond the way his had when the doctor tapped him. His classmates were willing to be patient and present as he figured it out. Agency and Vitality Young children in Ms. Bailey’s class enacted their agency for the sake of one another and to be together. They moved, called out, took their time walking out to recess, and formed project groups to be together. They mattered to each other. And the children mattered to Ms. Bailey. They knew this because she listened and moved closer to them. She took their ideas seriously and changed her plans when they got really interested in something. They remembered details and noticed who was absent. This mattering is what Boldt defines as vitality, or the “powerful experience of being vital” (in press, 7). The children’s vitality, their vital mattering, was obvious in the everyday moments of the class because through the enactment of their agency (and their willingness to sometimes not act) they were responding to one another. They noticed one another. They joined in with others’ curiosity about volcanoes, rainbows, ice, and bones. Boldt points out that vitality has as much to do with embodiment and the nonverbal— moving around, checking up on someone, standing next to someone in distress, or joining someone who is enjoying a story—as it has to do with what is said or written. She warns that focusing curricular and pedagogical attention only on verbal communication risks missing the full range of skills, knowledge, and relationships children

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develop and use to matter to one another. Vitality is an energy that flows through spaces and unites or moves people into relationships that are beyond skills or competencies. While feeling as if one matters is important for young children’s development, it is not equally distributed. Most children of color are not consistently given enough freedom at school to show others that they matter or to feel from others that they themselves matter. Boldt (2020) laments, It is no news that the bodies, energies, expressions, and relationships of students from minoritized communities are seen, read negatively, and punished at far greater rates than those of white, middle and upper class, straight, and abled peers. What is most often demanded from minoritized students is the restraint of energy, movement, and affective and embodied connections. In the wish for student and even teacher compliance, what feels alive to participants, their contributions, moments of spontaneity, improvisation, playfulness, and friendship often matter little or are seen as threatening.

Young children in Ms. Bailey’s class mattered. Because they were able to influence and make decisions about their learning, they could demonstrate this mattering, this vitality. Vitality is a flow of energy that is contextual and relational, built in moments when what is happening, felt, and being experienced takes center stage and informs teaching and learning. Young children need to experience vitality because vitality is being able to move, explore, create, participate, collaborate, communicate, and enact agency in what matters to them in order to matter to themselves and one another. Through vitality or la esencia de ser un niño (the essence of being a child) children enact their agency and so can show and expand their capabilities. While much of the discussion of agency in this book focuses on how it impacts academic and social development, we want to emphasize that above all, agency allows children to show their vitality— that they matter to one another.

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How Educators Responded to Ms. Bailey’s Classroom They should have a little bit of liberty but not too much. m s . a n d r a d e , El Naranjo Elementary

During the year we spent with Ms. Bailey’s class, we made a film of a typical day in her classroom. We filmed in December for three days and chose the most representative day with the highest-quality film and audio. We edited that day’s footage down to a twenty-minute film of the school day with key scenes that showed the tone, culture, and environment of the classroom. We focused the film on children who enacted their agency in interesting but ordinary (for Ms. Bailey’s classroom) ways. After Ms. Bailey, the children, and their parents approved the film, we showed it in focus groups at four sites: a rural Mexico– US border school, a suburban school, an urban school, and another first-grade class at Ms. Bailey’s school, El Roble Elementary. El Roble and the three additional focus group sites were all Title I schools that served mostly students of color. El Roble served 68 percent Latinx and 18  percent African American students (86 percent children of color), with 77 percent of families qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Primavera served 94 percent Latinx and 1 percent African American students (95 percent children of color), with 98 percent of families qualifying for free and reduced lunch. El Naranjo served 98 percent Latinx students (no African American students), with 87 percent of families qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Las Rosas was the most removed from El Roble because it served more White students than the other schools combined, as well as 56 percent Latinx and 10  percent African American Students (66 percent children of color), with 71 percent of families qualifying for free and reduced lunch. In addition to the four school sites, we showed the film at three district sites so we could hear the perspectives of district staff and superintendents (see appendix B, table 2). When we showed the film to educators— teachers and administrators— we prefaced it by explaining two things. First, we explained that our

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study was about what kinds of learning experiences young children should have in the early grades. We told them that we wanted to hear from educators and bring their voices, ideas, and perspectives into the way we understand learning in the early grades. The film, we explained, was not meant to be a depiction of best practices. Instead it was meant to demonstrate a variety of practices that we hoped would prompt discussion and opinions from the educators, parents, and young children who watched it. The second point we shared with educators before showing the film was that Ms. Bailey’s classroom was in a school similar to their own. El Roble was public and served immigrant families, children of color, multilingual children and families, and communities trying to overcome economic struggles and historical marginalization just like the other four sites. This second point did not stick. Many educators forgot or because of a range of factors found it difficult to accept. They claimed that what worked in the film would never work in their schools because the children at their schools were different. Educators spent their time in our focus groups distancing themselves and their own students from the children in the film. It was difficult for the teachers to accept that the children at their own schools were deserving or even capable of the sophisticated, agentic learning experiences children received in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Every time we left focus groups with teachers, we were confused by their insistence on separating or distancing the children in their classrooms from those in the film. We were not overly critical of them as educators, because we already knew that they were participating, like all of us, in a historically racist and inequitable educational system. Still, we were stunned. What Educators Appreciated in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom Educators liked many of the practices they saw in the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. They especially liked how much children got to talk to one another. Ms. Zapata at Primavera, like many other teachers, noted that “there was a lot of conversation and the children had a lot of opportunities to talk.” The teachers admired the kinds of discussions, questions, and general oral engagement the children had in the film. The scene that got the most attention from educators was the first one. Mary— the same Mary who started the volcano inquiry— calls out from her seat to ask whether anyone knows how to write the number 21. She is trying to write the date in her journal. Peter notices and walks over. He points to the calendar and says, “It’s over there!” Then he invites her to follow him to the calendar at the front of the room. He counts from 11 to the number 20, pointing to each number as he goes. Before

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he can finish, Mary locates the 21 and shouts it excitedly. Then she runs back to her table and writes the number in her journal. When educators were asked about the film, they often pointed out that Mary had the freedom to call out for help and then move over to see the calendar closely, all without a teacher’s specific permission. Ms. Park, a teacher at El Naranjo Elementary School, responded the way most teachers did when they watched the scene: I think [Ms. Bailey] was trying to create a classroom community type of environment where they all worked kind of like a family in a sense. She did try to let them help each other, and I even saw a lot of freedom . . . , like the one girl who was trying to write the number 21: she couldn’t find it even at the very beginning, and another child felt OK to go grab whatever it was and go up to the calendar. . . . They felt a sense of ownership to where they had the freedom to go over and point it out.

The educators saw Mary’s calling out and Peter’s helping as markers of ownership and freedom. Teachers we interviewed, like those at El Naranjo, often used words like freedom, problem solving, and ownership to describe Ms. Bailey’s classroom. ms. andrade: I felt like she gave them a lot of time to collaborate with their peers and problem-solve on their own, and they had a lot of freedom. ms. alcaide: I think she said choice time when they were reading or working with the letters. I liked that. I like that they have choice and they’re able to sit wherever they want [when] she’s working with a small group. Educators noticed that children were able to choose who they worked with and even where they worked in the room. Children could choose their own writing materials (“children were using a pen!”). Children collaborated and resolved conflicts instead of walking away or having the teacher resolve them. Questions, curiosity, and being able to follow their interests were qualities of Ms. Bailey’s classrooms that most educators noticed and appreciated. They admired how Ms. Bailey supported children’s questions and built upon their interests and curiosity. They noticed that children asked a lot of questions and that their questions guided both whole class and small group conversations. Educators assumed the children were curious, based on all the questions they asked. Ms. Romero at Las Rosas Elementary said, “Questions guided the conversation, right? The questions, the curiosity that the children had. Ms. Bailey followed up, elaborating their questions in order to take advantage of their interests.”

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However, educators fundamentally disagreed with Ms. Bailey about when children should be able to ask questions, act on their curiosity, follow their interests, feel ownership, and experience freedom like what they saw happening in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Teachers in our study felt that children needed to prove themselves first. Children Need to Earn Their Freedom The teachers we interviewed talked a lot about the scene where Max and Peter are told to go away from the group and solve their problem. The teachers validated the two children’s working out their disagreement using words such decision making and problem solving. They agreed it was important to get children to solve their own problems and work without the presence of the teacher. However, children needed to prove themselves worthy of such opportunities first by showing that they would use such freedoms well. A teacher at Las Rosas was representative of many who insisted that children need to prove they are ready for practices the teachers think are important. ms. conrad: I like letting kids choose their own partners; I think it helps promote productivity. If you’re working with someone you like and that you choose, you can get stuff done. But you have to build up independence with your students, so that they are actually productive when they choose their partners. I think that is something that actually takes time and stages to work towards. But I think it’s a great way to let kids learn. Teachers said that being able to choose partners was important but only if the children did what the teacher considered productive. If working with a partner maintained or possibly increased productivity, then children should be able to enact their agency. If productivity was lost, then choosing partners became a privilege that children needed to prepare for and earn. We heard teachers say often that children asking questions, making some decisions, and following their interests was “a great way to let kids learn.” Yet, they explained to us, the children in their classrooms were not ready for such experiences or had not earned them yet. Teachers said that children should not be given control over themselves or their environment before they had proved their ability to be efficient and obedient. Children needed to be trained “so they know how to be obedient enough to learn.” Teachers shared many ideas about training young children toward compliance:

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I always tell them, “Look at me. If I don’t see your eyes, I know you’re not paying attention to me. You’re not looking at me.” I always ask for that eye contact. We try to get them as still as possible. No having stuff with their hands. We usually say, “Cross your legs, hands in your lap, no touching people in front of you or behind you.” We constantly model, “Hands to yourselves!”

Teachers told us that when children did these things consistently and without help, then they could be trusted with more freedom. This logic mirrors the many classroom management programs in which children must prove an ability to “control their bodies” before having any freedom. Along with “selfcontrol,” teachers referenced “self-regulation” as something children needed to develop in order to justify being offered privileges such as choosing an activity, playing outside, or talking with friends at their table. Self-regulation and self-control were terms used in reference to children’s being able to control their own bodies into compliance. Teachers did not talk about self-regulation as children’s learning how to use their bodies in ways that were beneficial to them but only as their ability to do what the teacher asked. This emphasis on training young children so they are ready for their agency was perhaps best seen in an unexpected question teachers asked in the focus groups: “When did you film this— what month?” Not understanding what the month had to do with contextualizing Ms. Bailey’s classroom, we started asking teachers about it. Teachers explained that it made a big difference to understand whether the classroom was the way Ms. Bailey wanted it to be or whether the children were just not yet trained. Ms. Serey at El Naranjo told us it was necessary to hold back practices like those in the film until the children were trained: “If you go into our classrooms right now, it’s very different. We’re still in the training phase.” The beginning of the year was about training children so they knew how to enter the process of learning at school. As a kindergarten teacher at El Naranjo shared, “The first six weeks are pure training. Because they’re kindergarteners and you have kids who don’t know how to put stuff down and move to the next thing.” When we told the teachers in our focus groups that the film was made in the first week of December, they were usually stumped. They had either assumed that the film was made at the beginning of the year (because the children didn’t yet know the rules and routines of the classroom) or that it

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was at the end of the year (because the children knew the rules and routine and had proved themselves). The critique did not seem aimed at the practices themselves but revolved around whether the moving around, talking so much, acting without the permission of the teacher, and problem solving was warranted, earned, appropriate, or deserved yet. After knowing that filming took place in December, teachers told us that the classroom should have been more structured and organized by that time in the school year. Classroom management, for the teachers we interviewed, was about order so that children could catch up and learn what they lacked. They offered Ms. Bailey suggestions like attention-getters or having small groups of students move at a time. Two teachers at Primavera shared: mr. jarpa: I thought there was probably a little bit lacking of classroom management. jenn: What told you that? mr. jarpa (scrunching up his nose uncomfortably): Her transitions were a little . . . mr. noguera: I would say the same thing too. The transitions made me kind of nervous. Like I would do it by table numbers— send them off to the line one at a time as opposed to everybody at once. jenn: So you decide— mr. noguera: Like who goes to the line and what time, as opposed to “OK, time to line up!” mr. jarpa: Or there’s an attention-getter we do. “Class! Class!” At first, when I first started teaching I was like, that’s not my [thing], but then I was like, wait a minute; you also got to let down a little bit of your guard and find a variety of attention-getters to make those transitions. Teachers also pointed out that some children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom moved around to play and “goof off ” and not necessarily to do work. This was proof to many teachers in our study that Ms. Bailey had not trained her students well. The goal of training was to be able to ask children to do something and then trust that they would move specifically to do the task you asked them to complete. Teachers made negative comments, assuming that everyone would see Ms. Bailey’s classroom as less than ideal. “Kids can just get away with playing around in corners and not getting anything done!” “Maybe she still has not set the ground rules, or maybe they’re still in training.” Many teachers we interviewed worried about safety. One pre-K teacher at Primavera explained, “You just don’t want them all over the place bumping heads or whatever.

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Accidents  happen running. I do it that way because it feels secure. I know where they’re at. And they know where they’re expected to be and what they’re supposed to be doing at that center. I think I do it more for me to know that they’re going to be safe in their centers.” What we were hearing from the teachers was that agency was a privilege, not a necessary part of learning. If children’s agency— the ability to influence and make decisions about learning— was cultivated too early, before children had earned or were prepared for such a privilege, they would not learn compliance or the required academic content. As one teacher from El Naranjo put it, “Well, they should have a little bit of liberty but not too much that they’re not going to be able to learn.” “The Practices in the Film Will Not Work” Educators told us the agentic learning experiences in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were good for children generally. And they told us that such practices would not work at their schools with the children they served. Their children were not prepared for such a privileged set of learning experiences. Some teachers and administrators said that the educational system and its unfair emphasis on testing that disproportionately burdened communities of color needed to change before they could offer more agentic learning experiences. Most teachers in our study, however, felt that children and families needed to change because they lacked the skills, knowledge, background, experience, temperament, or “stable” home lives that made agentic learning feasible. We were told over and over that if children were just better trained or prepared for school by their families, then they would be better equipped to handle decision-making, problem-solving, relationship-building practices like those they saw and admired in the film.

some educators said the system needs to change The few teachers and administrators who blamed the larger system of testing and standardization for their inability to offer practices they liked in the film told us that if they had more freedom they could offer more relaxed, engaging, and creative practices than they currently did. kiyomi: So you wish you had more time? ms. zapata: In my classroom, yes. kiyomi: To do things that you would like to do? ms. zapata: That I would [use] to do a little bit more freedom. kiyomi: OK.

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ms. zapata: We don’t have that freedom. kiyomi: OK, and if you have the freedom what kinds of things would you like to do? ms. zapata: Just something more creative than just questions every day and answer them. Teachers like Ms. Zapata expressed regret, sadness, and frustration that there was not enough time to complete the state content requirements and still offer more active learning like what they saw happening in Ms. Bailey’s class. In one focus group at Primavera, with two male bilingual teachers, this envy and frustration manifested as deep sadness. During our interview with them in one of their classrooms, I (Jenn) had to stop the film because they seemed deeply upset. I thought that something in the film had angered them. I had never stopped the film before in an interview. “Is something wrong?” I asked. “Is something in the film making you angry?” Surprised but still visibly upset, they looked at each other and then at the recorder but did not speak. I took this as a sign to turn off both the video camera and the audio recorder. They did give me permission to take notes. One teacher, Mr. Noguera, spoke first. “I wish I could do that.” They were deeply upset watching what Ms. Bailey got to do in her class. Relationships, they told me, were about conversation and learning about one another. And in their classrooms, they didn’t have time. I asked why they couldn’t allow children to talk more in class. This question frustrated them and turned out to be naive. They told me that each classroom at their school had to be on the same fifteenminute increment as the other classrooms of the same grade. They could not be more than fifteen minutes off the schedule of their horizontal team (all the other classrooms of the same grade level). This seemed absurd to me, and I didn’t hide my reaction well. They could see that I did not quite believe them, so they asked me to follow them to the door. When they opened it, they pointed to a printed daily schedule that divided the day into fifteen-minute segments from the time children arrived to the time they left for after-school daycare or home. I had heard about such schedules but had never seen one, and it shocked me to see one so openly displayed outside a classroom door. The film had made them angry because while some children— children who spoke in English at school, as they put it— could share their stories with one another, they could not allow the bilingual children in their own classrooms to do so. These two teachers taught in an “improvement required school,” one that was closely monitored by the district due to its low test scores. To comply with assigned measures for improvement, teachers aligned with and followed strict schedules and curriculum sequencing, and received weekly visits from

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district personnel who carefully analyzed their classroom and school data. In the bilingual classrooms, the control was especially palpable, as teachers were pressured to transition children into English with the hopes for better test scores. Bilingual children were instructed with a rigorous allotment of time for language use. In these schools, teachers’ lack of control over time was passed on reluctantly to young children. Teachers could not control their own time, and so the children in their classrooms could not control theirs. Even among teachers who did not express such strong desires for more time to honor stories and relationships, many wished that they could be as relaxed as Ms. Bailey. It seemed impossible to them to be relaxed because of the time pressure they felt. For example, during one of the teacher focus groups at Primavera, Ms. Mujica and Ms. Rivera appreciated how relaxed Ms. Bailey seemed and said they didn’t think they could be like that. (Note: part of this conversation was in Spanish.) kiyomi: Is there something that you would like to do that you see this teacher doing? ms. mujica: I feel like she is so cool. No, que me desespero. Pero es que tenemos que hacer y tenemos que hacer esto otro [No, it frustrates me. It’s because we have to do [this] and we have to do this other thing]. ms. rivera: She was relaxed. ms. mujica: She was so relaxed. She was teaching and I feel like sometimes I am like “We need to get through this porque tenemos que hacer esto y tenemos que hacer esto otro” [because we have to do this and we have to do that]. ms. rivera: No hay tiempo de estar relajada [there is no time to be relaxed]. When we asked what the teachers wanted to change to be more like Ms. Bailey, their answer was to be more relaxed like her. Even as they told us this, they expressed skepticism. Being relaxed as a teacher seemed impossible to them. How could they be relaxed when they have to rush through one thing to get to another, all determined by those outside of their classroom and often their school? “There is no time to be relaxed!” Teachers pointed out that this pressure to get through so much in the school day and school year was negative for young children too. “They don’t get to play or be with their friends.” ms. mujica: We gotta be doing this. We gotta be doing this. You know you gotta be getting them here. And it’s like sometimes because we don’t have [time] we don’t allow them to be kids sometimes.

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ms. rivera: Yeah and then outside time! Fifteen minutes! That’s what they tell us. Fifteen minutes for them to play outside. . . . Before [kindergarten] had naptime and now nothing. Teachers seemed to feel quite badly about not having a more relaxed atmosphere. Many teachers echoed Ms. Mujica’s desire to give their students more time to just be children. Some administrators shared the teachers’ frustration that young children were not getting the types of learning experiences they saw in the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Ms. Soto, the principal at Primavera Elementary School, was afraid that even when or if teachers liked the practices in the film, the pressure and stress to prepare children to perform on assessments would deter them. jenn: Have you ever seen cases where the teacher would like to do this but they feel like they do not have enough time? principal: Yes. jenn: Like how does that work? principal: Um, well it doesn’t. If I would want this to happen. . . . it just wouldn’t happen, because if the teacher feels like “I don’t have the time,” because the teacher is so over burdened with “I need to get this, this, and this done.” The teachers are feeling stressed, and if you are putting that much pressure on them to get products turned in or certain scores and the teacher is not used to or comfortable in doing, then you are not going to get them to do it. You have to set it up to where you [have] got to take out some of those stressors or pressures. Some teachers felt that the amount of curriculum, the pacing, and the pressure made it impossible for them to feel comfortable letting children talk and tell stories or take their time doing projects. They told us that test-score targets determined the types of learning opportunities that children got to experience rather than the teachers and students themselves.

many educators said children and fa m i l i es n e e d e d to c h a n g e While some educators blamed the larger educational system, the overwhelming majority of educators in our study blamed the conditions, identities, and skill sets of families and children at their schools for their inability to offer the learning practices they saw in the film. Educators did not start out speak-

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ing in deficit ways about the families they served; they began by speaking in strength-based ways about the children in the film. Educators admired how the children in the film communicated with one another, helped one another, and engaged with one another without being directed by Ms. Bailey. And across all of our sites and focus groups, this admiration centered on (what was perceived to be) the impressive vocabulary of the children in the film. You could see how much student talk that the children are actually engaging in. Students [in the film] learn from each other and develop their skills and their vocabulary. These children have such a rich vocabulary! They are using the literacy vocabulary. Their language was very developed.

Educators appreciated the amount of conversation (referred to also as “peer talk” or “dialogue”) they observed in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. They expressed a desire to support such high levels of talking and problem-solving all while insisting that it would not be possible at their schools. Their students needed “higher” or at least “more” vocabulary in order to handle so much interaction, discussion, and peer conversation. Children in their classrooms were “lacking vocabulary” and were too “limited in English.” Approaches seen in the film wouldn’t work with their students, whom they perceived as lagging in vocabulary and life experiences and who came from families with less formally educated parents. One teacher at El Naranjo explained it this way: You see who is up higher, mature-wise and experiences that they’ve gone through and such. They just range. You have your low, it’s not that they’re low, they haven’t had the experiences. They haven’t had the vocabulary with Mom and Dad, and maybe they’re migrant workers and they don’t have the time to sit down and say, “Let’s count here— you know— Cheerios” or whatever. So you have to bring those experiences to them.

Another teacher from Las Rosas told us, It’s difficult for [parents] to help their children because they didn’t go to school very much, and they have limitations with language to help [the children], particularly in reading. Some houses where they don’t read a lot and the vocabulary is limited, that type of thing. When the vocabulary is limited or when parents don’t have a high level of education, reading takes longer to develop because everything depends on vocabulary and the exposure to different things.

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In focus group after focus group with educators at Primavera, Las Rosas, and El Naranjo Schools and in Lasso, Central, and South Districts, educators referenced vocabulary as the primary indicator of whether young children were ready for practices that encouraged conversation, decision making, problem solving, agency, and movement. They guessed— based on the children’s high level of interaction and problem solving in the film— that the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were more capable and prepared than the children at their own schools. But why was vocabulary so closely linked with capability and used as a marker of whether children were ready for agentic learning experiences? Why vocabulary? It all seemed arbitrary to us until we started our analysis and realized something.

“thirty-million-word” deficit discourse At the time of our data collection, the “thirty-million-word gap” had become a popular news story as well as part of vocabulary-based interventions and home visiting programs across the country (Lahey 2014; NPR staff 2013; Sanchez 2015). These interventions and programs were and are primarily aimed at families of color (García and Jensen 2007; Olivos, Jiménez-Castellanos, and Ochoa 2011; Takanishi 2016). The idea of the “thirty-million-word gap” is based on a study conducted with forty families in Kansas City in the 1980s that used observations and IQ tests to show that Black children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families heard thirty million fewer words by the age of three than higher-SES White children (Hart and Risley 1995). The study was purported to be a comparison across economic levels, but the small sample size turned out to be racialized and harmful. (See Adair, Colegrove, and McManus 2017, 314 – 15, for an explanation of how Hart and Risely used racial stereotypes conflated with poverty in their original study; see also Avineri and Johnson 2015.) Despite strong critique and refutation of the original study (Sperry, Sperry, and Miller 2019; McCarty 2015; Rosa and Flores 2015), the Hart and Risley study continues to be widely used in child development research as well as in dozens of home visiting programs and national initiatives (see the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative, the state of Georgia’s Talk with Me Baby initiative, the city of Providence’s Providence Talks, and the University of Chicago School of Medicine’s Thirty Million Words Initiative). In all of this work, there is an assumption that the number of words parents say to their children can help overcome racial disparities in standardized testing and in child health and well-being. Government and nonprofit organizations have spent significant resources on programs meant to enhance vo-

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cabulary and increase the number of words spoken in homes— money that could have been used to address institutional and historical poverty stressors that disproportionately ravage communities of color, including police brutality; deportation policies; housing, food, and job discrimination; inequitable resource distribution; low-expectation schools; and inadequate child care. Additionally, the word gap study supports the linguistic tool of speaking directly to a child, which also happens to be the primary communicative process within middle-class White families (García and Otheguy 2017; González 2016). This way of speaking with young children is prioritized over other means of rich communication in families, contributing to false and racist perceptions of languagelessness (Rosa 2016; see also Baugh 2017). As we wrote in our 2017 article “How the Word Gap Argument Negatively Impacts Young Children of Latinx Immigrants’ Conceptualizations of Learning”: “Arguing that poor children of color with immigrant parents, for example, should act and speak like English-dominant upper-class white children in order to be successful without addressing the systemic problems of poverty, immigration policy, and racial discrimination only maintains the two groups— those with natural access to privilege and equality and those who require changes or improvements to receive that access” (Adair, Colegrove, and McManus 2017, 326). Educators in our study drew from discourses related to the thirty-millionword gap concept when they justified denying children certain learning experiences. Educators used vocabulary to justify offering children more tasks and fewer projects. Educators talked about vocabulary assessment as the way to know children’s “readiness” for more agentic learning. The logic seemed to be that a strong vocabulary would be a sign that children at their schools deserved and were ready for more sophisticated learning practices. The promise that if young children had stronger vocabularies or knew more words they would receive the kinds of practices reserved for wealthy young White children is false, even within our own data. We interviewed teachers from prekindergarten to third grade, and they all made the same kind of promise. But even when children caught up or improved, teachers reported that they did not offer agentic learning experiences because still more catching up or improvement was needed. The emphasis on needing to have a certain but unspecified level of vocabulary to handle more agentic and sophisticated learning practices also justified practices that worked to limit vocabulary gain in many ways. Again, we have written extensively about how the word-gap discourse actually prevents young children of color from receiving what they need and deserve at school. “The irony of the word gap and other deficit-oriented arguments be-

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ing used to justify quiet, still, and obedient practices is that dynamic, noisy, agentic spaces would actually help young children of Latinx immigrants learn vocabulary and expand capabilities in a range of related linguistic skills and knowledge” (Adair, Colegrove and McManus 2017, 327). Denying children the very experiences they need to increase their vocabulary and overall literacy skill sets maintains subpersonhood. Making children earn agency (the mechanism by which capabilities are expanded) and insisting that parents fix themselves so they speak more directly to young children at home in ways that White parents do are powerful examples of how the personhood– subpersonhood line works (Mills 2014). Full persons are always normative, and subpersons always need to change, do better, and act more like those in power, all while being denied the very circumstances that could lead to empowerment, safety, and opportunity. Visibility of Deficit Thinking Deficit thinking was visible in both the positive assumptions educators made about the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom and the negative assumptions they made about their own students. Teachers and administrators assumed that the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom had more educated, supportive parents than those at their own school. That makes me think, just looking at the class [in the film] even closer, that some of their vocabulary was a little bit higher. So that told me that some of the kids there have had some more support at home. Maybe some more education at home, because at first grade they wouldn’t have all of that language. (assistant superintendent, South Texas District)

Being successful in an active, agency-supportive classroom was a marker of educated, supportive parents. Educators saw the children in the film as successful and worthy of the practices they carried out. Seeing children do these practices fueled positive assumptions about the families of the children in the film in much the same way that a lack of the practices in their own schools and classrooms— among the children they taught— served to justify teachers and administrators’ belief that children at their schools could not handle the freedom. It did not matter that young children in their schools did not receive many opportunities to learn in ways seen in the film; children and families were to blame for not being ready or capable of them. Most educators we interviewed used a combination of deficit thinking and “at-risk language” (K. Brown 2016) to describe the children at their own schools. There were many references to the children’s Latinx immigrant

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homes in which “the parents could not teach anything” or “there was no time for education.” In El Naranjo one teacher explained that the parents there were different from those in the northern predominantly White suburbs where she used to teach. When I was up [north], my parents were always like, “How can I help my child, what can I do for my child?” And they were always willing to help . . . and I’m thinking parents, you know, told [their kids], “We’re here for this, and this is what we’re here for: to learn.” And then I come over here and I have to call parents, and I have to bring them in, you know, “I need help with your child.” And it’s like the opposite.

Another teacher added, “They don’t value the education.” When we pressed them to explain how they “knew” the parents did not value education, they struggled to answer. Usually they ended up telling us that it was because the parents refused to learn English. A third teacher spoke as if in the voice of a parent from her class: “It’s OK, I don’t have to learn English. This is our culture, and there’s always somebody here that will be able to communicate with me.” In both sets of assumptions, educators we interviewed across Texas positioned parents and families as those who determined the types of learning experiences children were ready for and should have. None of the educators explained or justified early learning experiences based on their own talents, efforts, or shortcomings. They did not credit or blame themselves for denying children the enactment of their agency at school. Teachers, for example, did not credit Ms. Bailey’s professional skills for the types of learning experiences in her classroom. Instead teachers dismissed Ms. Bailey’s classroom style as personal preference or explained it as being possible because of what they assumed to be positive qualities of the families. While there could be many explanations for teachers’ failure to situate Ms. Bailey in a role of influence, two possibilities seem likely given our data. First, Ms. Bailey was a Black immigrant educator. We wonder: if she had been a monolingual White teacher, would participants viewing the film have been more likely to credit her (rather than families) with the practices they thought were tremendous? Ms. Bailey’s multilingualism was not noted in the educators’ responses, nor were her racial and ethnic identities, even though these were evident in the film. There is significant evidence that teacher evaluations and observations routinely dismiss the knowledges and skills of teachers of color, especially Black teachers (Saavedra and Pérez 2012; Brown 2014; Michael-Luna 2016). Comparatively, the parents of color we interviewed almost always praised

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and credited Ms. Bailey for the classroom community and practices they saw in the film. Parents we interviewed saw Ms. Bailey as the primary reason that children shared their stories in class and felt comfortable asking a lot of questions. They also pointed out that Ms. Bailey needed more support or that she wasn’t able to give each child enough individual time. They did not blame or praise families nor situate them as the reason the class looked and behaved the way it did. Another explanation is that teachers did not see themselves as having much influence over what happened day to day in the classroom. Just as the educators did not praise Ms. Bailey or talk about her as a professional with influence in the classroom, they also did not talk about themselves as professionals. The influencers in their classrooms were the families, the children, the policies, and the tests. Viewing themselves as irrelevant in terms of deciding children’s learning experiences is at odds with the intense commitment, dedication, and attention the educators demonstrated in each site we visited. The educators we interviewed put in many hours outside of the school day to communicate with families and put together classroom materials and lessons, and they worked very hard at making Spanish an integral part of the day. They sacrificed time, money, and energy for the students in their classes. And yet they did not position themselves as having an impact on learning experiences. While educators’ deficit thinking revealed that many did not seem to think that children within their schools were capable, smart, or ready to enact their agency, we now think that many educators in our study may have felt this same way about themselves. Educators Focused on Children Earning Agency Children needed to prove themselves before they could or should use their agency at school. Even if educators thought Ms. Bailey’s practices were important and good for young learners, their offering of those practices to children was dependent mostly on whether the children had earned or were ready for them. The assumption was that children arrived undeserving or incapable of handling most (particularly the more sophisticated, complicated) types of agency because they came from homes that did not prepare them properly. Ms. Caroca, like many teachers we interviewed, explained that however important independent thinking and voice may be, the denial of freedom was necessary for the children at their schools. They should be able to be independent thinkers. They should be able to voice their opinion, to voice their own thoughts. . . . But right now, we’ve got stu-

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dents coming in who have never been to school. They’ve never experienced being in a classroom. . . . Once you teach them, then you hold them responsible. But I don’t think I would feel comfortable saying, “Let’s give you this freedom to do whatever you want.” . . . But I do think that they have really good ideas and they have good ways of expressing themselves, but I think even [with] that, you need to kind of take them in and teach them how to do it.

For some teachers like Ms. Baron at Las Rosas, an emphasis on earning agency was rather subtle— it seemed like an easy, natural development as teachers got to know their students. I agree with all of that about the choice, and I think that it’s really important to give them choice when you feel like you can. When you have the feeling you know your kids and you know your class . . . you give them as much choice as you feel they can handle. I personally feel that the more choices you give, the more in control they feel and the better they’ll do. But like she said, you can’t just say, “Yeah.” You can’t choose whatever math center you want, because that might blow up in your face with certain kids.

Many teachers told us that children eventually should be able to have independence, voice, and decision-making opportunities but only when teachers could trust that the children would make the correct ones. For example, Ms. Ponce explained, I still don’t give them a lot of free choices yet because there’s a lot of training. And they still won’t do what they’re supposed to. Most of them will, but later on. I’ll give them more freedom as long as they’re getting everything done.

Children arrive at school without what they need to handle agency in their learning. And children should have agency at school only if they choose to do what they are supposed to do. These ideas— common among the teachers we interviewed— were absent from Ms. Bailey’s explanation of offering agency to the children in her classroom. Ms. Bailey Focused on Children Deserving Agency In Ms. Bailey’s classroom, children were given opportunities to enact their agency from the moment they walked into the classroom. They did not have to earn or prove they were ready for the learning experiences they received. Children’s use of their agency was a part of everyday classroom culture. Ms. Bailey often spoke of difficult days when agency was still a regular part of the day. Describing one such day, Ms. Bailey told us, “Yesterday was a very interesting day. I felt like they were all so tired and so crazy and so wild in the morning. [I was] crabby myself. We were butting heads all morning. And

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in the afternoon, it was beautiful. It was very calm.  .  .  . Brad was reading over there, and Max and Charlie and everyone were just— they were doing what they were supposed to do. They made their choices and they stuck to it.” Ms. Bailey wanted the children in her classroom to be compliant. She was happy and more relaxed when everyone was working on what they were supposed to be doing. Yet noncompliance was not used as a reason to withdraw experiences for children to enact their agency. Instead they just needed to try again. She told us that being able to enact their agency actually helped children settle down and work calmly. “I mean, it’s the same kids and it’s the same day, but because of the nature of what we were doing, things changed.” Ms. Bailey’s approach to children of color was different because she saw the curriculum, environment, or activity as the source of the problem, not the child or the child’s perceived deficits. When the children struggled to engage or follow her directions, she opened up her classroom instead of narrowing it. Ms. Bailey told us that if the classroom got too narrow, then children had a very small window of acceptable behavior, which made it almost impossible to be compliant and peaceful. Instead she changed the activity and offered more choices. She did not deny or withdraw agentic experiences from the children based on their scores or struggles or because she was tired or stressed. Children did not need to be trained in order to enact their agency as part of their learning: agency was a learning mechanism by which children expanded academic and social capabilities as well as cultural capabilities, as we are about to see in chapter 4.

4

Limits and Balance Experimenting is good, but everyone can’t just take ice and walk around the room with it. ms. bailey

It could be tempting to see the agentic, child-centered practices in Ms. Bailey’s classroom and assume that they alone are the best way to combat a racist educational system that typically denies young children of color the kinds of active, dynamic, sophisticated, and deep learning experiences detailed in chapter 2. But Ms. Bailey’s classroom could not be described as simply a childcentered classroom with individualistic goals. There were limits to children’s enacting their agency in her classroom. Instead of always honoring individual agency, Ms. Bailey often prioritized community, family, and neighborhood knowledge in ways that necessitated some sacrificing of individual agency for an adherence to community and family values, such as respecting elders. This chapter details how she limited agency in ways that supported the overall community and helped honor children’s realities and lives. Along the way we share how the mostly Latinx immigrant parents we interviewed responded to Ms. Bailey’s classroom, specifically the ways in which she approached curriculum and teaching. Ms. Bailey’s Limits on Agency Agency was limited in Ms. Bailey’s classroom by the idea that children were not supposed to do anything they wanted. They were supposed to listen to adults because adults were helpful, respectful, and knowledgeable. The idea of obedience was strong in Ms. Bailey’s classroom, even as children were able to enact their agency often and consistently. Obedience to the teacher was about respect and engaging with someone knowledgeable who cares. Ms. Bailey would often explain that a behavior or attitude was problematic based on how it was affecting her or others in the classroom. For example,

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in one of the scenes in the film Ms. Bailey wants to teach a new math game. She starts explaining the game: “In math we are learning . . .” The children interrupt with excitement, “Less to greatest!” She starts again to explain that they are going to have three cards with the words less, same, and more. As she speaks, she notices that Brad and Jason disagree about something. Ms. Bailey looks at them and says, “I’m worried that you guys are not listening to me.” Brad and Jason look back at her and get quiet. So agency did not mean children doing whatever they wanted. Agency in Ms. Bailey’s classroom had a very specific purpose: to expand the capabilities of the children. Ms. Bailey seemed to be trying to maintain values of obedience and respect while ensuring that children could make decisions and influence their own learning. The purpose of children’s agency was to pursue academic and intellectual ideas in ways they initiated. Diana (whose experimentation with ice was discussed in chapter 2) tested this theory often with Ms. Bailey. She had ideas almost every day and would rally classmates to help her. Sometimes Ms. Bailey would shut down her idea or activity. One of the days Diana was wandering over to the ice tray, getting ice, and trying to melt it, Ms. Bailey pointed out something to the class. “Experimenting is good,” she explained, “but everyone can’t just take ice and walk around the room with it— that’s not what scientists do.” Ms. Bailey encouraged initiative when children were pursuing scientific or academic purposes. She tried to help them see the difference between scientific inquiry and a disrespectful waste of time and materials. There were many times that children did not go to their desks exactly as they were supposed to or struggled to be quiet when they were asked to be. When children did not follow instructions, Ms. Bailey often stopped to figure out whether they were engaged in some kind of intellectual inquiry. Sometimes she would get frustrated when children did not calm down or get quiet when she asked. The times when she realized that they were being “disobedient” because they were deeply engaged in an intellectual activity, she observed and asked questions or just kept an eye on them while moving on with the rest of the class. Ms. Bailey did not label these moments or the children involved as “behavior problems.” She wanted them to think for themselves and with one another. She told the children that if they wanted to be a scientist or a person who contributes intellectually to the world, they would need to think for themselves and ask a lot of questions.

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Refusing the Misbehavior Label The day of Ms. Bailey’s car accident, the class—through their interest and endless questions—managed to persuade her through their interest to switch her lesson plan over to talking about car accidents. They wondered together how a car that was totaled or “smashed up” would get off the street to a junkyard. Ms. Bailey told them about tow trucks. The children asked, “How do tow trucks work?” “How did a truck get another car off the ground and on the back of it?” Because of their interest, Ms. Bailey asked them to write down some of their questions about how tow trucks worked. After about fifteen minutes, it was time to go to lunch. While the children were eating, we watched as Ms. Bailey searched for videos that she could show the children about how tow trucks worked. Later that afternoon, when she picked up the children from lunch in the cafeteria, she announced that she had a video about how tow trucks get cars off the street. While the whole class watched attentively, Peter, who was the youngest in the class, looked down at the table as he wrote furiously. Peter had Mexican American parents, curly hair, and a very curious demeanor. He liked to lead and start conversations. Thoughtful and outspoken, he almost always had a question or something he was wondering about. In this particular moment, however, he was completely silent and focused. Ms. Bailey noticed and walked over to him. She sternly took his paper and started to walk away. In what seemed like despair, Peter objected, “I am writing about that. I am writing about that,” while pointing to the screen with a still image of the tow truck. She gave him the paper back and let him finish while they watched the film. Peter looked relieved and continued to write his questions. He spelled out loud the words he was trying to write: “Car! C-A-R.” Ms. Bailey had started out frustrated with Peter and corrected him, taking his paper as a reprimand for not focusing on the video like the rest of the class. Yet when he protested and explained what he was trying to write his action was no longer seen as disobedience and became academic initiative. Ms. Bailey kept him within the larger group even while he was doing something different. She responded to Peter as someone with ideas and ambition, not as someone who was being disobedient. Prioritizing Community Children in Ms. Bailey’s class never spoke directly about their classroom community. They did not agree on rules for their community. We don’t remember Ms. Bailey ever referring to the class as a community. Yet most days the

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class was sociable, warm, and welcoming. Children did not cry often or get into major arguments. Children chose to work together in groups whenever they could and rotated often among groups. It seemed to us that community was embodied by Ms. Bailey and the children rather than discussed directly. When individual children got ideas or started a project, they almost always invited others to join them— making what could have been an individual endeavor a shared one. Children read together during literacy time, sometimes laying heads on one another’s stomachs or sides, sometimes lying on their stomachs on a shared pillow. They spelled one another’s names in the letter area. They announced to Ms. Bailey when someone was missing from class or was sick at home. They argued and debated what materials to use and how to use them. They checked on one another’s work. They offered help to one another. Over the course of the school year, students shared a lot of personal stories, history, and information with one another. They were encouraged early by Ms. Bailey and one another to go deeper than just superficial identity or fact-based information. The children shared many details about their families. Over the first few months of school, children started asking one another questions in the same way that Ms. Bailey asked questions of them— in ways that drew out deeper sets of information. Ms. Bailey told us that she wanted her and the children to know one another well enough that they had relationships. She welcomed who the children were outside of class in many different ways. In late August, a few days into school, the class read aloud Good-bye, Curtis, by Kevin Henkes. This story is about a letter carrier on his last day

f i g u r e 5 . Ms. Bailey engaged children’s ideas, experiences, and questions about car accidents after telling them about her own accident the day before.

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delivering mail. Everyone on his route cares for him and leaves him little presents in their mailbox. At the last house, there is a surprise party for him that the whole community attends. While Ms. Bailey read the story, the children were unusually silent. Afterward Ms. Bailey asked, “Have you ever had to say good-bye to someone?” The children exploded, all talking at once to Ms. Bailey and to one another. Ms. Bailey raised her voice above the noise, in decrescendo as the sentence moved along. “I have had to say good-bye many, many times.” The children got quiet fast. When I was one, I left Burundi to go to France. Then at three I left to Cameroon. Then at six I left to Congo. I moved to France again for one year, and then when I was eleven, I moved to a boarding school in another part of France. I lived at the school without my parents. Then when I was fifteen I moved to another part of France. And then when I was eighteen I moved to Texas. This is the place I have lived for the most years.

Ms. Bailey paused, looking at all of the children. “Now I want you to turn and talk and share who you have had to say good-bye to. Find someone to talk to.” Each of the children turned to someone. Some had to turn in multiple directions to find someone who wasn’t already partnered up. The conversations escalated. Pablo spoke seriously with his partner, Samuel. “My papa lives in Las Vegas, so I only visit him in the summer. I don’t know if that’s good-bye, because I keep seeing him.” Samuel nodded, scooting closer to Pablo to listen. Ms. Bailey asked again, “When have you had to say goodbye?” Many children raised their hands. Ms. Bailey called on Jason. “When my friend moved to California.” She prompted the class to ask Jason some follow-up questions to get more information about what he had said. “Does anyone have a question for Jason?” Someone immediately called out, “I like it, Jason!” Diana and Max critiqued the compliment, arguing, “That’s not a question.” Brad jumped in: “One time . . .” Gus repeated the earlier critique, “That’s not a question!” and then asked Jason, “What was your friend’s name?” Jason told the class that his friend’s name was Samuel. The class erupted in laughter and shock, shouting, “Not this Samuel!” as they pointed to Samuel, who was smiling himself. Pablo raised his hand for Jason to see. Jason looked at Ms. Bailey, who motioned for him to call on Pablo. Jason pointed at Pablo, who then asked, “When did he move?” Jason replied, “He moved on Thursday.” Charlie said, “I have to say good-bye to my mom’s friend since he moved to Houston.” No one critiqued him. Ms. Bailey asked Charlie, “What was his name?” Charlie answered simply, “He wore cowboy boots.” Even though it was the very beginning of the school year, children were

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encouraged to share personal stories with Ms. Bailey and with one another. Ms. Bailey’s authentic transparency about her own good-bye experiences seemed to shock the children into silence and then into sharing their own difficult experiences of having to say good-bye. Pablo told Samuel about having to say good-bye to his dad because his parents did not live in the same state after they divorced. Samuel had the opportunity to listen and take seriously what Pablo was saying. When Jason shared about his friend, Ms. Bailey encouraged the class to show interest and get more information through asking follow-up questions. The discussion about saying good-bye and many others like it were important to the class’s becoming a community as opposed to simply a group of successful students. The children were encouraged to connect their lives to the stories they read, share those stories with one another, and listen carefully to one another. Community in Ms. Bailey’s class was about relationships and the ability to understand one another well enough to learn together. She wanted every child in the class to feel welcomed and important. And she thought a primary way of building community was for the children to share stories of their lives with the class and then see those stories welcomed and taken seriously through acts of demonstrative interest and care that included listening, asking follow-up questions, sharing connected stories, and engaging in conversation. Ms. Bailey saw children as active constructors of knowledge and as a community of learners (Folque and Siraj-Blatchford 2011). Children experienced planning and assessing activities together, which worked to form a community where children took responsibility for their and others’ learning (Folque and Siraj-Blatchford 2011). This active learning and being able to work together created relationships. As Nicole Leggett and Margot Ford explain, “Active participation in whole or large group experiences has the potential to connect children in their relationships with others, thus generating a sense of belonging. Group participation assists children to learn ways of being, reflecting the values, traditions and practices as they become contributing members of their social and cultural communities” (2016, 199). Classroom rituals and practices in which children engage on a daily basis support a sense of togetherness and sustain community (Scully and Howell 2008; Vasconcelos and Walsh 2001). Learning as (and because of ) Participation Learning in Ms. Bailey’s classroom nurtured and required participation rather than isolation and individual work. Participation was constant. Chil-

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dren even tried to participate when they were separated from the group. For example, Pablo and Peter got in trouble one day for arguing and fighting with one another. They were arguing at the carpet area, which was unusual and something that Ms. Bailey did not tolerate. She told them to sit in their chairs back at their tables. From their seats, they both attempted to participate in the group discussion, each yelling out answers. They kept raising their hands, leaning over their chairs to be closer to the group. Ms. Bailey validated the answers they gave, even when they were relegated to their chairs. When a parent brought horse bones to Ms. Bailey’s classroom, learning about them was a shared endeavor that children led. Jaime started off by peppering the dad who brought in the bones with questions about what part of the body each bone came from. Jaime then welcomed lots of other classmates to the shared experience of learning about the bones. The boys who joined him asked new questions, and the experience became a shared endeavor and continued as boys stayed and taught the next group who came to learn about the bones. Jason wanted to figure out how reflexes worked and engaged lots of willing classmates in the process, just as Marcela did with the blood pressure cuff. Charlie and Jason saw the rainbow and went about trying to understand it together, adding Pablo and then various other classmates as they too became curious and wanted to participate. In most of these shared endeavors, Ms. Bailey watched attentively and helped when needed, but she did not control what happened. As children engaged in shared endeavors and shared their academic engagement, they expanded a number of capabilities in the course of the school year. They got better at working in teams. They excelled at welcoming classmates into a shared task or experiment. By the end of the year all of the students were regularly drawing upon the expertise of their classmates. They became more patient as everyone tried to participate. They expanded their ability to listen to and debate different ideas without getting frustrated. They welcomed and included one another much more often by the end of the year. These capabilities were expanded through ongoing shared engagement and a sense of belonging to the classroom community, not through formal “social emotional learning” lessons. Projects and other active learning experiences provided many different ways to participate: as an expert, listener, debater, source of inspiration, reader, artist, mediator. There were multiple ways for children to be successful and to contribute. Rogoff ’s early study of a school centered on participation and learning through shared endeavors showed that community enables children to learn through their own participation and contribution rather than always through following directions. “In communities of learners, stu-

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dents appear to learn how to coordinate with support and lead others, to become responsible and organized in their management of their own learning and to be able to build on their inherent interests to learn in new areas and to sustain motivation to learn” (1994, 225). Children’s interest in learning came through the urgency of their participation in shared endeavors. They were motivated to contribute and so sought out books and people who could read well or used their own skills to bring something valuable to the group. Valuing Family and Community Knowledge The children spoke a lot about their parents and other family members. The children heard stories about grandparents, aunts, cousins, and baby sisters and brothers regularly. First thing on Mondays, children shared about their weekends during group time at the carpet. Children focused on who they were with as much as what they did. For the children in Ms. Bailey’s class, weekends were time spent with extended family and friends. Families were physically present in the classroom as well. Ms. Bailey spoke Spanish and English, so she was able to communicate in the native language of all of the bilingual parents in her class. After signing in at the school office, parents walked freely through her door without needing to make an appointment. When children arrived late, parents brought their children to the classroom and often stayed in the doorway chatting with Ms. Bailey if she wasn’t in front of the class instructing. Even if she was teaching something to the whole class and a child walked in with her parents, she would still stop what she was doing and walk over to greet them. When Ms. Bailey knew that parents, tíos and tías, or grandparents were going to visit the classroom, she would remind the children of how to treat them with respect and attention. She would remind the children to help visitors feel comfortable and welcome in the classroom by greeting them. There was room in the classroom community and curriculum for parents to help their children with what they were working on. Ms. Bailey talked to parents in the first set of parent– teacher conferences in the fall and in the second set in the spring about the academic, emotional, and social lives of their children. She gave them updates on the project topics their children were working on. Ms. Bailey told us that Charlie’s, Max’s, and Mary’s parents asked a lot of questions about the projects. Her conference with Mary’s parents encouraged them to work with Mary on the volcano at home and then bring it to school. Ms. Bailey made a point to ask parents about what

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they did and what kinds of skills they had (see Alvarez 2018). The parent who eventually brought the horse bones to Ms. Bailey did so because he already had a relationship with her and knew she would be responsive to his idea of sharing the bones with the class. She invited an Argentinian father who was an architect, whose child was in the other first-grade class, to come to her classroom sometimes and work with the children on math concepts. Ms. Bailey worked to connect the children to the local community in small but meaningful ways. The school nurse, a doctor who was the father of one of the teachers at the school, and the parent who found the horse bones served as experts for the animal /human project. Ms. Bailey frequented her local library for books that might help the children with their projects. Since she could not predict what kinds of topics the children would choose or get interested in, there was not time to order related books through the school library. Instead she used community resources. The day the children got really interested in recycling; the day the children got really interested in volcanoes; the day that groups started projects on matter; the day Nia, Lorene, and Diana started a project about Malia and Sasha Obama; the day a group tried to make a rainbow— on all of these days Ms. Bailey made trips to the library by her home or the one down the street from the school to find resources to satisfy the children’s curiosity. When the children were interested in how tow trucks worked, Ms. Bailey got the idea to reach out to tow truck drivers to see if they might bring a tow truck to the school. One of the drivers returned her call quickly. He had never been asked by a school to be an expert on something, and he happened to be a new father of a week-old baby. Excited, he came the next morning and brought his tow truck. He spent about an hour with the class out on the school’s circular driveway answering the children’s questions and showing them exactly how the tow truck worked. He was patient. He leaned over to hear and answer their questions and used lots of examples to help make his points. All of the adults present, including us, were surprised by his enthusiasm and his patience in answering so many questions. The children did not seem surprised, though. Each child had a clipboard with a list of questions as if they were journalists ready for an interview. They were captivated, and when it was time for the driver to go, the children jumped up and down begging him for his autograph. He drove away to the sound of children waving good-bye and cheering. Prioritizing community meant allowing time for questions and conversations as a way of building relationships and bringing the community into school spaces.

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Connecting to Real Lives and Diverse Histories Early in the year Ms. Bailey read Patricia Polacco’s book The Keeping Quilt (1988), about a quilt that is passed from a grandmother in Russia to her grandchild. The grandmother shares with her grandchild all the ways the quilt was used in her home country— to wrap babies, for weddings, to comfort. The quilt becomes special to the granddaughter and is used for important moments in her life. The book took over forty minutes to get through because of all of the children’s questions, stories, and ideas. Across the school year, children shared their real lives with the class because time and space was made for their stories. Samuel shared publicly with the whole class that his grandfather had died. Pablo told Samuel that his dad lived in another state and he had to say good-bye to him a lot. Paloma told the class about the car accident she was in with her mother and dog. Max shared the story about his grandfather getting Lyme disease. Real life was an important way to understand one another. Ms. Bailey told the students a lot about her life and asked them deeply personal questions about their own. She connected with the children through her own experience as an immigrant to the US. Each year the school held an Olympics-style track and field day. Each class chose a country to represent, and the children competed in a range of active outdoor competitions. On the morning of Olympics Day, Ms. Bailey shared her personal knowledge about the country they were representing: Burundi. She showed them a map of Burundi and told them about the lakes and animals there. She pointed out Lake Tanganyika on the map. “It is the second oldest, largest, and deepest lake in the world. It is an ancient lake, over ten million years old. There is a restaurant there in Bujumbura,” she said. “I really liked this restaurant. It had a deck, and we could see the hippos from our tables.” The children cried out, “Hippos!” She taught the class some words in Kirundi and played them videos of women dancing to a traditional song. Soon the children seemed restless, so Ms. Bailey acknowledged this: “Since you are so excited, we are going to play a math game.” They found partners and played for about thirty minutes. Then she brought the class together again to see some pictures of Burundi. Ms. Bailey did not come from the same country as any of the children in her classroom, but she wanted them to feel good about their own heritages and to see how important diverse histories were to their community, even if those histories or realities were hard to talk about. A few weeks after the class first learned about some of Ms. Bailey’s experi-

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ences as an immigrant, they watched the kindergarteners put on a play for the entire school in honor of El Dieciséis de Septiembre, or Mexican Independence Day. The play told the story of El Grito de Dolores and showed the local Catholic priest, Miguel Hidalgo, gathering support for a revolt against Spain. In the play, Miguel Hidalgo gives a speech about Mexican land being stolen by Spain and why people needed to be free. The kindergarteners joined in by chanting “¡Viva México!” while a young child rang the bell of Hidalgo to announce independence. The whole school chanted together, “¡Viva México!” When the class came together afterward to talk about the play, Ms. Bailey asked the children why they thought they were watching and learning about Día Dieciséis. They shouted out lots of answers. To celebrate? The flag? The flag and the war? The country? Ms. Bailey steered the class in a slightly different direction to help them think about why they were ringing the bell. “Why are they doing all of this? Because why?” The students shouted almost in unison, “The war!” Gus disagreed, saying, “Because of independence, freedom.” Ms. Bailey agreed with Gus. “We are celebrating independence.” Then she asked what independence meant. Jason responded first, “You do something on your own.” Delighted, Ms. Bailey repeated, “You do something on your own!” Then Ms. Bailey was quiet for a minute. She got up out of her chair and moved to another part of the room. “I want to show you who they were getting independence from.” She pulled down a map of Europe. She explained to the class how the Europeans came to Central and South America and took the resources and land and forced people to speak another language. “Would you like someone to do that to you?” she asked the class. They all yelled out, “No!” Ms. Bailey followed, “Would it be nice?” “No!” the students called out. Ms. Bailey leaned in and asked, “What if I take Lorene’s house and say that it is my house?” Lorene shook her head, “No!” Some might argue that five-, six-, and seven-year-old children are too young to think and talk about colonialization, or that learning about Mexican independence is irrelevant in the United States. However, Ms. Bailey was deeply aware of her own history, recounting many stories and ideas from her experience as a Burundian child living in many different countries around the world. Her positionality as an immigrant teacher helped her think about certain ideas and perspectives. Ms. Bailey turned back to the map, pointing out other countries that were colonized. Paloma volunteered, “My dad is Salvadoran.” Celeste said, “My dad is from Honduras.” Ms. Bailey nodded and asked the class, “What coun-

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try were they trying to get independence from?” Students shouted, “Mexico!” Ms. Bailey corrected them. “Spain. That’s why many countries in Central and South America speak Spanish.” The children started telling one another whether they spoke Spanish at home and whether their grandparents spoke Spanish. The conversation remained animated as children and Ms. Bailey discussed countries that actively resisted colonizing powers. After the children shared which of their families spoke Spanish at home, they quieted down again. Ms. Bailey started eliciting ideas about how people celebrate independence or birthdays, explaining that independence is just like having a birthday because it is the start of a new life. The students did not respond. They looked unsure and confused. Ms. Bailey was very observant and flexible, so she quickly changed her question. “How do we celebrate independence in the US?” The students smiled and excitedly reached their hands high into the air. Party! Flag! Fireworks! Ms. Bailey reminded them that they were not wearing their school uniforms and instead were wearing clothes with green, white, and red. The children looked at their clothes and began shouting again. Clothes! Flag! Agua fresca! Ice cream cones! Ms. Bailey smiled and turned to the white posterboard behind her chair. She started writing down their answers. Dancing! Cake! Mariachis! Music! Decorations! Confetti! Discussions about the children’s personal lives or Ms. Bailey’s childhood, about car accidents and grandparents getting sick and dying, about seeing hippos from a restaurant table and about Mexico trying to be free from Spain are all rooted in people’s varied experiences. They are rooted in the unique ways in which people experience everyday life. The children and Ms. Bailey read books and discussed death, moving homes, pregnancy, discrimination, colonialism, war, and car accidents. They didn’t spend as much time on these topics as they did on addition, subtraction, letter sounds, reading strategies, drawing stories, and scientific concepts, but still enough for children to have a lot to talk to one another about and create relationships through authentic conversations. Ms. Bailey’s attempt to support children’s agency with some limits while also emphasizing community, respectful obedience, and children’s real lives was complicated and involved some failures, as we will explore in chapter 5. Yet the actual intentionality of the practices visible in Ms. Bailey’s classroom aligned closely with the desires and concerns of the parents we interviewed throughout Texas.

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What Parents Liked in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom The parents we interviewed whose children were not part of Ms. Bailey’s classroom all watched the same film as the teachers, administrators, and children. Most parents— sixty-nine— we interviewed were immigrants from Mexico, Central America, or South America. These parents had immigrated from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Parents had different responses from those of the educators. For example, educators watched Peter help Mary with figuring out the number 21 and focused on Mary, praising her for being “independent” and working without a teacher. They talked about the freedom both children had to move around the room, go up to the calendar, and call out for help. The parents, on the other hand, focused much more on Peter. They noticed and appreciated Peter’s willingness to help without being asked. Peter, they said, noticed what was going on around him and made his own decision to go over and help. Parents valued the noticing and the helping (Peter) even more than the being resourceful and free (Mary). A parent from the US– Mexico border clarified: “Ser responsables ellos, hacer lo que ellos creen que está bien como leer o escribir” (for [the children] to be responsible, to do what they think is good like to write or read).

children working together The parents we interviewed preferred communal work to individual work, because it meant social participation and a type of decision making that valued helping and paying attention to others’ needs. They described Ms. Bailey’s classroom as a group that worked together like a family or a community. The parents assumed that children’s attempts to work together and help one another were an extension of their homes. They made positive assumptions about children’s homes as opposed to educators’ deficit views. Parents often commented that the children seemed “at home” in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. They seemed to appreciate that the children were almost always working together, even if it looked a little chaotic. For example, Melody, a parent near the US– Mexico border, told us, “I would call it controlled chaos. I mean, I would so much rather see the kids learning in that way than you know, everybody is quiet at their desk writing. . . . Not as much individual work but a lot of sharing and learning from each other as other things are going on.” Many of the parents we interviewed expressed appreciation for the way the children were able to participate in the group through asking questions.

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There were many parents who liked “que los niños sí participaron.” For example, parents from South Texas shared their appreciation of how children were able to participate in the class. tamara: I like that the children participated. kiyomi: How? tamara: Regarding the questions the teacher asked. kiyomi: OK, then the children were participating. valentina: And they felt comfortable participating and the questions they formulated. Everything was very comfortable. Parents concluded that in Ms. Bailey’s classroom children asked questions just as their children did at home. They explained children’s participation as a sign of being comfortable, just like being at home. Parents told us that participating in family and community relationships was an important part of the children’s lives before the children arrived at school. Education was about more than intellectual pursuit; it included being a good person and a good member of family and community (see Reese et al. 1995). When parents of children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom watched the film, they particularly noticed the community aspects of the classroom. They spoke about children working together even before they brought up academic or intellectual aspects of school. jenn: So what words would you use to describe what you saw [in the film]? max’s grandmother: Collaborative. jacinta: Engagement. cole: Excitement, interaction. jacinta: Communal. Parents noticed the collective effort before they focused on individual actions or agency. They appreciated children working together.

children’s questions and conversation Parents also pointed out that children in the film asked a lot of questions. Spontaneous group participation signaled that the children were comfortable at school. “The way they behave is like as if they were at home. They can express themselves freely, just like the child who was telling a story about his grandfather. It is important!” one parent exclaimed.

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Parents wanted children to ask a lot of questions because they seemed to see questions as evidence of a child’s desire to learn. Questions were a marker of thinking and understanding context. Parents told us they recognized children as learning something when they participated in a discussion by asking questions or by adding ideas to a conversation. A mother from Mexico, who came to the United States as an adolescent, saw children in the film asking questions as a sign of curiosity, a desire to know more or to understand something. “When they ask you something it is because they feel they want to know more about what is happening.” Another mother from Primavera Elementary told us, “Es que ahora están en la edad que lo quieren saber todo [the thing is that now they are at the age where they want to know everything].” Parents told us that when children stop asking questions, that is a major problem: “When you bring the children to school, they are little and they do not ask questions. Now they come home with so many questions, and they want to know. If they were not asking questions and they were coming to school, then I would have to worry, because they are not talking nor asking questions.” Asking questions seemed to be a sign to parents that their children wanted to know more. Not asking questions might mean that children did not want to learn or know new things. The parents we interviewed recognized that responding to children’s curiosity took time that the educators often did not have. Parents praised Ms. Bailey for taking the time to talk one on one with the students in her class: “Aunque son muchos muchachitos pero ella [la maestra] tiene paciencia y trata de ponerle atención a todos, darle su tiempo a cada uno [even though there are many children, she [the teacher] has patience and tries to pay attention to all of them, give each one her time].” Parents across our interviews appreciated teachers who took the time to build relationships with their children by asking them questions or giving one-on-one support. Parents also appreciated Ms. Bailey’s conversational style with the children and her willingness to help them make connections to events in real life, as when Ms. Bailey told the class about her car accident. Parents told us that the children showed care for Ms. Bailey by asking questions and wanting to know more about what happened. They could tell she cared about them because she took time to listen and respond to their concerned questions. As Estela, an immigrant mother from the Texas border, told us, the most important part of being a child is “que sepan tomar decisiones, que sepa con quien juntarse [that they know how to make decisions, know who to be friends with].” Children needed to have social experiences so they could make good decisions about whom they connected with and spent time with. Parents

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seemed to be pointing out the importance of communities and associations to their children’s ultimate academic and life success.

c h i l d r e n l i s t e n i n g a n d pay i n g a t t e n t i o n Like Ms. Bailey, the parents we interviewed preferred that children work together. And like Ms. Bailey, they also wanted children to listen and pay attention. Parents told us that children needed to listen carefully to their teacher and focus together as a group so they didn’t miss anything important. Too much chaos could keep children from focusing. For example, parents were pleased that when Ms. Bailey started talking about her car accident the children were quiet and paying attention. A parent at Primavera observed, “Cuando ella les empezó a hablar del accidente, se quedaron quietos y pusieron atención [when she started to talk about the accident, they all got quiet and paid attention].” But they worried when it seemed that one child, Max, was doing his own thing with some blocks from a shelf. One parent from El Naranjo explained, “If they don’t focus enough and pay attention to the teacher, then when they come home with us we will not know what they did in class, and we will not be able to help them.” If children did not pay attention, parents, grandparents, or sitters might not be able to help them with their schoolwork. Supporting and enhancing learning at home by working on projects or homework with their children while speaking languages unsupported in classrooms or within school communities was and is very difficult for parents (Colegrove and Krause 2017). Parent Concerns Children’s discussion, questions, and interactions were good as long as they supported participation and fueled learning. When noise or movement or decision making got in the way of a child’s ability to participate in the group and know what was going on, then it was problematic. Parents told difficult stories of their own learning experiences related to either not understanding what was going on in English-only classrooms in the US or strict educational contexts in their home countries. They complimented Ms. Bailey for creating a learning space in which children could ask questions, interact, and enjoy school. Many parents who watched the film noticed that the children in her class had time to share their stories and interact with their peers and the teacher. Ángela, a mother from Mexico who lives in Central Texas and who studied through sixth grade, was pleased that “all the children had opportunities to tell their stories, and they felt free to share. And that was good

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because they all have the opportunity to share.” Some parents even hypothesized that in a classroom like Ms. Bailey’s they themselves would have done better in school. Sandro, a father from South America, told us: “I think that I would [have] been a different student, and I would have enjoyed it much more if I would have [had] the freedom that these children have, the method to go and talk and interact. And I love when the children are reading on the floor, just laying on the floor, that is lovely.  .  .  . They are focusing on that because they feel comfortable.” For parents to believe their children were safe and able to do well in school, it was essential that the children feel comfortable and cared for (see also Adair and Barraza 2014; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2009).

pa r e n t s ’ d e s i r e f o r b a l a n c e Parents explained in many focus groups that balancing children’s decision making and group participation with the need for children’s obedience and listening was possible only when there were positive relationships. Parents felt that children in the film were motivated because of their care for Ms. Bailey and for one another. “Ellos llegan motivados porque la maestra sí los escucha, sí, los  .  .  . en conjunto, sí los en conjunto [they arrive motivated because the teacher listens to them, yes, she . . . all together, yes, all together].” They saw the teacher as a leader who cared for the children. The children were motivated to do well because they knew that their teacher valued them. This balance of real life, relationships, obedience, and respect with key elements of child-centered practices that accounted for realities, racism, and the need to think about obedience and respect characterized Ms. Bailey’s classroom and elicited many of the positive comments parents made about the film. Parents we interviewed thought Ms. Bailey valued the children in her classroom and held similar values they had as parents including respect and obedience. Still, they worried that in someone else’s hands the chaos they sometimes saw in the film would be bad for their children. Two mothers from Las Rosas Elementary worried that such noise and chaos without attention to care and respect could affect their children’s learning and concentration. laurent: También toda la bulla, la como que es un poco de caos en la clase, entonces hay niños que no responden bien a eso. A mi hijo le gusta seguir las reglas. Le gusta como . . . como trata de ser el estudiante modelo. Entonces cuando hay mucho caos alrededor y hay niños que no se están portando bien, él se estresa y se enoja con los demás que están inter-

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rumpiendo. [Also all that noise, it is like a bit of chaos in the classroom, so there are children who don’t respond well to that. My son likes to follow the rules. He likes to be a model student. So when there is lots of chaos around him and children who are misbehaving, he gets stressed and upset with the classmates who are interrupting.] ana laura: Sí, cuando dijiste eso dije, ese es el mío. Mi hijo es muy fácil de que se distraiga. [Yes, when you said that I said to myself, that’s mine too. My son is easily distracted.] Parents knew and understood how their children learned and the types of environments that were best for them. They were concerned when teachers did not pay close attention to their children, particularly in chaotic spaces where their learning could be jeopardized.

concerns about efficiency Parents generally worried that their own children did not have enough time and opportunity to form relationships and learn along with others, although they expressed this concern in different ways. Some parents worried that listening to children’s stories could not happen because of large class sizes and not enough adult help. “It is difficult for one teacher to have so many children and to pay attention to all of them at the same time,” Daniela, a mother from Mexico with two years of college in Central Texas, stated. A focus group of immigrant parents from Mexico on the Mexico– US border told us that they wanted more stories and more group lessons and projects but that such a pedagogy was impossible because teachers had a program that takes most of the time. kiyomi: If you could talk to the teacher or to someone at the school and say, “Oh, I would really like it if you taught this or in this way,” how would you? estela: For me, I would say to them that because there are so many children they cannot dedicate so much time. melisa: To just one— estela: To just one child, because they have to follow the program that they are given. Some parents worried that classes would have to rush through subject matter and skills, and then young children would fall behind and not develop the relationships necessary for participation. Some parents worried that children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom did not have enough one-on-one atten-

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tion from the teacher. Immigrant parents in particular assumed that time to work one on one with children in ways that prompt participation was impossible because the teachers had to follow a program and there were too many children. Most parents we interviewed wished that their children had a teacher like Ms. Bailey. They admired her patience and willingness to take the time to listen to young children’s stories. And they wanted teachers to take the same patient, listening approach with them as parents. They appreciated the time leaders took to listen to them. Javiera, a mother of two children from Peru, expressed this. kiyomi: How has the communication been between you and the teacher? javiera: Really good. Because they focus [on us]— all of them, even the principal. They feel bad they don’t speak much Spanish. But still it’s really good. kiyomi: When you all have questions about things at school, who can you talk to? javiera: Well, with the teacher or the assistant principal, they always have time for us. When teachers and leaders used their own time to reach out to parents, the parents we interviewed translated this into care, because of the scarcity of time. If teachers took time to talk with and listen to them and their children, this meant that the teachers valued them and their rushed lives. Several parents worried that they did have enough time to develop necessary relationships with school leaders. Javiera lamented, “Parents don’t [always] have the time, because most of them have to drop their kids and run to work and then pick them up.” Lack of time was stressful for Latinx parents who had to work long hours and multiple jobs. Parents found multiple aspects of Ms. Bailey’s teaching desirable for their children. When they voiced concern, it was not because they thought their children could not handle the practices as the teachers in our story had asserted. Instead they worried that the practices could backfire or make it difficult for their vulnerable children to get what they needed at school. They worried that if their children did not understand well enough, they couldn’t explain their work to the parents and then the parents would not be able to help. The vulnerability of their position as families of color and immigrant families coupled with a desire for children to do well in school while upholding values of working together and developing strong relationships manifested throughout the focus group interviews across sites.

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Ms. Bailey’s solution to balancing agency and the complexity of families’ lives was to insist on respect and obedience even while trying to open up her classroom as much as possible. This attempt was complicated, of course. Ms. Bailey struggled to support a community-oriented learning context within a school and educational system that only tracked individual progress, most often through standardized assessment scores. Ms. Bailey faced tremendous testing pressures. And like the parents we interviewed, Ms. Bailey had her own set of realities to deal with while making decisions at school. Sometimes she had to adapt by adopting practices that veered from her values. Her attempts to offer a balanced approach were complicated and political.

5

Complication and Politics That’s the scary part. That’s why I get really nervous. ms. bailey

Trying to offer child-centered practices that supported children’s agency while maintaining respect and an emphasis on community, children’s real lives, and a connection with families was complicated. This complication intensified for Ms. Bailey in part because of where she was teaching. Ms. Bailey taught in Texas, the birthplace of standardized testing and the petri dish for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation that eventually brought standardized assessments and tied them to merit and accountability at all levels, including the child’s. Because of NCLB, children’s assessment scores are now taken very seriously even at young ages (Genishi and Dyson 2012). Ms. Bailey was required to administer a series of benchmark individualized assessments throughout the year. The school spent a great deal of time preparing children for the standardized tests that dominated school time during March and April each year. This included professional development on test preparation, Saturday and after-school test preparation classes for students, motivating signs posted in the weeks prior to the test, tracking systems to monitor individual students’ achievement on benchmark tests, and custom-made T-shirts worn by teachers that stated the school’s goal of 100  percent passing rates. The school consistently scored higher than the Texas average on third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade state assessments while attempting to offer art classes, mental health counseling, and a robust STEM program. Even though her school offered a broad range of learning experiences to the children, Ms. Bailey sometimes found herself alone trying to navigate many competing voices. Ms. Bailey’s already complicated situation was at times mediated and exacerbated by our presence as researchers. We originally approached Ms. Bailey to participate in our study after we had spent a few hours observing her

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classroom. She knew we were studying the impact of children’s agency on development and what children did when they could enact their agency at school. We told her that she didn’t need to change anything about her classroom because it was a perfect place to see children making decisions about their learning. Still, Ms. Bailey saw our presence as additional pressure. I remember being confused at first about what giving more agency to young children would look like. Agency was never emphasized or even talked about in my teacher preparation program. It’s not that I felt anxiety. I felt tension between the expectation to follow the school curriculum and what we were trying to do in offering more agency to children in the classroom. I also remember feeling that I might be compared to more experienced teachers, and I was a newbie. Also, just the fact that it was being recorded. It felt scarier in my mind than it really was, though.

While Ms. Bailey navigated pressures from her school and her own ideas about empowering children, our study introduced another set of pressures that included being filmed and being a source of data. In some ways our presence made the year unique. Before the year began, for example, we approached the principal and asked if we might be blamed or reprimanded if the test scores in Ms. Bailey’s classroom fell dramatically or if there were major behavior issues. Thankfully, the principal agreed to our plan. Every three months we updated her on the study and she would tell us about any concerns she had with the impact of our study. We offered Ms. Bailey two books (at her request) about project learning: Young Investigators by Judy Helm and Lilian Katz (2011) and Little Kids— Powerful Problem Solvers by Angela Andrews and Paul Trafton (2002). These books proved helpful but also frustrating to Ms. Bailey, because they overwhelmingly featured White children. By the start of the school year, Ms. Bailey seemed determined to open up her classroom and offer more opportunities for children to enact their agency. Our presence, she reflected after the year was over, helped her feel braver about trying. Ms. Bailey’s desire to support empowered learning— as a Black immigrant teacher, as a teacher of children of color, as a teacher of Spanish-speaking children, as a teacher of children of immigrants, as a teacher in a highly visible school with high testing score expectations— proved to be political and complicated. In the end, she made decisions that did not quite fit the school’s expectations nor those outlined in the books she referenced. In this chapter we show how Ms. Bailey felt forced to make political decisions about what she would offer the young children in her classroom. She felt pressure to be efficient and see the young children as individuals rather

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than as a community. We show how she responded to those specific pressures. Our retelling of what happened comes from our field notes, video documentation, and interviews with Ms. Bailey during the school year and in the years that have followed. We have tried to quote her thinking and reflection as much as possible. Sometimes we (as researchers) noticed interactions that were extraordinary to us because they are rarely seen in classrooms serving young children of color. After spending one school year with Ms. Bailey and then revisiting her experiences as a teacher many times over the seven years since, we came to see that offering agentic learning practices led to tension between her and her educator colleagues and forced her to navigate the politics of early childhood education alongside her knowledge of the kinds of learning experiences young children should have at school. Complications and Pressures One day while the class was researching volcanoes, Paloma, Mary, and Diana spent recess building volcano models out of a mound of dirt and rocks. Mary was already the main force behind the class volcano project. Diana had already established herself as the ice scientist. Paloma, with her dark hair usually up in a braided ponytail, spoke Spanish at home and was a child of immigrant parents from Mexico and El Salvador. Children in the class consulted her often and saw her as a leader. She was a strong writer and reader in both languages and was quite happy most of the time; she loved to engage with everyone in the class. She found lots of ways to help and collaborate with her friends. The three girls were playing in the dirt because for the entire year their school had been partially under construction. The school just had a tiny basketball court, a small sandbox, a couple of picnic benches, and some areas with dirt and rocks. Paloma, Mary, and Diana spent recess that day pointing at the “volcano” mound they had made in the dirt. They enthusiastically yelled out ideas that could improve what they were building. “It needs to be higher.” “No, if it is too high then the hole will not work for the lava.” “Wait, use these sticks so it can be stronger!” After a few minutes, a teacher announced that recess was over, but the girls didn’t move. They looked up to see their classmates running to go inside but then kept working on their volcano. One recessduty teacher scolded them: “Leave that there, go inside!” The three girls kept working. The teacher got visibly frustrated. She turned to Ms. Bailey, who had come to meet her class, and demanded that she get the girls to come inside immediately.

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Ms. Bailey walked over to them and asked what they were working on. Paloma explained that they were finally close to completing a volcano model that might work. “We can stack it now,” she explained. Ms. Bailey leaned over to see better. The girls described different parts of their volcano and listed what materials they needed to make a more permanent volcano model. Diana added, “And now we have to put everything away because the pre-K kids have recess after us and we don’t want them to get hurt.” The girls stood and looked at Ms. Bailey, unsure whether Ms. Bailey wanted them to obey the recess-duty teacher or keep cleaning up for the younger children. After a few seconds, Ms. Bailey moved to pick up some rocks. The girls followed until they had put them all away. Over the next few weeks, the girls spent many more recesses using materials from around the school to make volcano environments. Along with other classmates who eventually joined their group, Paloma, Diana, and Mary continued talking about volcanoes. Together, they spent their free time looking up pictures and videos of volcanoes and creating models, designs, and experiments to simulate how volcanoes work. The girls seemed to view their project— their intellectual effort—as important even when another teacher reprimanded them. Their collective response of staying with the volcano building could be read as resistance to school demands for their obedience or, perhaps, resistance to the other teachers’ demand for obedience and adherence to a schedule. Their response could also be read as loyalty to Ms. Bailey’s classroom culture, which prioritized learning over routine or even rules. Paloma and Diana offered different rationales for choosing to ignore the first teacher’s request to go inside— one being civic or collective concern for younger children (“the pre-K kids have recess after us and we don’t want them to get hurt”) and the other being scientific investigation (“we can stack it now”). When the girls refused to come inside, Ms. Bailey received dirty looks from her colleague, who waited and watched disapprovingly as Ms. Bailey interacted with and listened to the girls. This wasn’t the only time educator colleagues reprimanded or judged Ms. Bailey. We saw teachers complain about Ms. Bailey’s class lines or volume levels multiple times. Once while we were filming a project outdoors where children wandered around trying to find examples of different states of matter, a teacher surveyed the children moving all around on their own and then turned to Ms. Bailey, declaring, “Wow, it must be easy to be a teacher in your class!” After recess on that volcano-making day, as Ms. Bailey walked back to the classroom, she told us that seeing how angry the other teacher had been at her and her students enraged her. She wondered aloud to us about how many

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times she had been the one to shut down children who just wanted to learn or practice something interesting. Watching another teacher try to stop such an important intellectual activity prompted some guilt. Tearing up, she reflected, “We tell them to learn things, and then when they learn things and want to practice them in their own way, we tell them to stop. If I hadn’t gone over to see what they were doing, I would have missed seeing how much they had learned.” Seeing the girls persist in their volcano project made her proud. If she hadn’t been willing to kneel down and listen to the girls’ explanations, she speculated, they would not have been able to demonstrate all their new knowledge about volcanoes. Efficiency and Individuality Over the span of our study, Ms. Bailey often spoke of feeling pulled or pressured to devalue children’s agency and community in order to focus on efficiency and individual achievement. At first this pressure was for students to be quiet. During the first week of school, the principal instituted a noise management system that designated noise levels for certain spaces and activities. The school issued posters for each classroom that listed the four noise levels. Level zero was silence, and level four was screaming on the playground. The school expected children to walk in lines in the hallways at “level zero.” Children should be at “zero” while in the carpet area. A “zero-level” voice was a requirement for most transitions. Each classroom had a poster that listed the requirements for walking throughout the school: voice at zero, facing front, moving with the flow, walking feet, hands close to the body. Ms. Bailey put the poster up in her classroom as instructed. And although she disregarded the system after a few weeks (as evidenced by practices in chapters 2 and 4), she did try to use the voice-level system at first. She worried about the children getting in trouble for being loud outside of her classroom because of something that happened on the second day of school. The children in her class were returning from physical education (PE) class in the gym. The PE teacher informed Ms. Bailey in front of the children that he had a bad report for her. “Your class would not stop talking and making noise.” The children, he complained, “walked all over the place” instead of an organized, quiet line. Ms. Bailey was embarrassed and frustrated. When the PE teacher left, Ms. Bailey read each of the line behavior expectations with them. She asked the class, somewhat rhetorically, “Do you think you were a zero? Do you think you were looking in front of you as you walked in line? Do you think that was a marble line?” She had the children line up by the back door to practice being quiet. Much of that day was spent practicing walking in line

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and staying at “level zero.” Ms. Bailey recalled later in an interview that she felt embarrassed when the PE teacher reprimanded her and her class. The pressure on Ms. Bailey to quiet her classroom only got more intense. A few days later she was observed by the principal. The principal made some comments about the high noise levels in her class. Then she sent a more experienced teacher, called an instructional coach, to observe and offer suggestions about managing her classroom. Before the observation, the instructional coach handed Ms. Bailey four large cards that were different from the posters already up in her room. She asked Ms. Bailey to use these instructional cards in her classroom as a new behavioral management system. Each card was an instruction to “get ready” for learning: (1) Silence, (2) Listening, (3) Sit Still, and (4) Eyes on the Teacher. The coach told Ms. Bailey to use the cards and post them by the carpet area so that the children could see them multiple times a day. Dutifully, Ms. Bailey referenced the cards many times over the next week. Yet her efforts were complicated by both the school and our research study. On the one hand, the school was telling her to keep the classroom quiet and under control. On the other hand, she was doing a research study with us about how young children use their agency and make decisions in their learning, and she wanted an active classroom. Along with worrying about noise compliance, she worried about being efficient.

“maximizing” learning Ms. Bailey started realizing in November of our academic year together that the standard schedule the school used, which included many transitions between increments of twenty and ten minutes, was not working well for inquiry. Such a tight and short-increment schedule did not give children enough time to work, think, create, fail, observe, and develop ideas collectively. Her realization parallels Milner and colleagues’ (2019) argument that children’s interests are the best way to manage a classroom. Ms. Bailey rearranged her weekly schedule to offer learning experiences in much bigger chunks of time. In her classroom, young children now spent one to two hours engaged in activities in which they were directing their learning and following their interests. They did this regularly. Still, Ms. Bailey worried all the time about not getting to all the standards and making the most of instructional time. Teachers and administrators in  Texas are told that maximizing instructional time is a factor of high-quality teaching. In sections 3 and 4 of the Texas Teacher Standards, for example, teachers are told multiple times to maximize their work with chil-

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dren. High-quality teachers “maximize instructional time, including managing transitions.” They also “manage and facilitate groupings in order to maximize student collaboration, participation, and achievement” and “organize their classrooms in a safe and accessible manner that maximizes learning.” They “arrange the physical environment to maximize student learning and adjust content delivery in response to student progress through the use of developmentally appropriate strategies that maximize student engagement.” Children are not supposed to be “off-task” (Texas Administrative Code, TEA, chap. 149). Teachers and children are supposed to make use of every minute of every hour in the classroom. Texas Teacher Standards mention routine only in the context of management, not in regard to children’s experience, growth, or development. “Teachers establish, implement, and communicate consistent routines for effective classroom management, including clear expectations for student behavior” (Texas Administrative Code, TEA, chap. 149). Ms. Bailey shared the same concerns about efficiency as the parents we interviewed— that the current system of education made relationships among peers and with teachers difficult. Ms. Bailey’s fear in trying to privilege relationships over efficiency was that she would let the children and their families down. It was a constant worry. My greatest fear is that the system we are in does not allow children to show what they are capable of. I know [they] are learning, I know the benefit of learning the way we do, but does it translate on the STAAR test . . . if they apply to a fine arts or magnet program in one of our public schools? Whether I believe in the STAAR test or not, they have to take it and that’s a fact. That is my greatest fear— will this project-based learning translate into the standardized assessments?

Even though she tried to foster children’s agency and value relationships over quiet, stillness, and efficiency, her efforts posed a risk to her and to the children and caused her a great deal of stress. This stress bubbled up to the surface a few times during the year, usually when she felt forced to throw her values out the window for testing.

assessment pressure Ms. Bailey was required to give benchmark assessments in literacy and math three times a year. These assessments essentially meant having to close down the classroom for a week while she worked with each child away from the class. The first set of benchmark assessments happened in late September.

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Just as children started to develop an aptitude for project learning, she had to stop everything and do assessments. “The children are interested, but now there is no time for projects this week,” she lamented. jenn: Now they have interest, but they don’t have the time? ms. bailey: Exactly! They don’t have the time during the school day, and they think about it. They go home and they think about it and they talk to their friends about it, but they don’t have time to do it. jenn: And the only reason is because it has to be quiet while you do the assessment? ms. bailey: I have twenty-two one-on-one assessments. Three different assessments, TPRI and DIBELS and DRA. . . . It’s not my favorite thing to do. I get frustrated too. It’s so time consuming and draining for students and teachers. But “it’s data” [using air quotes]. Ms. Bailey referred to the assessments as taking away from classroom instruction, one week at a time, three times a year. Still, she knew that being able to transfer knowledge to tests was both a reality and a skill that the children needed for success in the higher grades. And the assessments were supposed to determine reading groups and who would receive intervention from the reading specialist. The pressure to demonstrate reading skills through questions that were not compelling concerned her. She worried that the reading, composing, planning, writing, and using mathematical and literacy concepts that children practiced and deepened while working on their projects might not transfer to benchmarks and testing. Ms. Bailey referred often to the tension between test performance and developing curiosity and knowledge through projects. Some kids are able to transfer knowledge into that test. They make the connection. But first off, that test is a reading test. It’s a comprehension test, so even if you’re very bright and you can experiment, and you can come up with wonderful questions and be very inquisitive and create things, if you don’t know how to read questions that ask about what you’re very good at, it’s not going to capture what you can really do. Like little Mary, who can come up with this great explanation of the volcano, but she can’t read in English fluently just yet. She’s not going to be able to even if the question is about the volcano. That’s the scary part. That’s why I get really nervous.

To Ms. Bailey, the scary part about trying to construct an active, agentic classroom where children enacted their agency regularly in their learning was the possibility of failing to address the reality of US schooling. She often asked

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rhetorically, “What if the children became amazing, engaged, and curious learners who lack basic math and literacy skills?” Her fear was that children might not be able to represent their deep knowledge because they could not read enough to answer basic questions. What Happened during Testing Three times a year when children had to be tested, Ms. Bailey’s classroom culture shut down. The children filled in worksheets, colored in pictures of cartoon characters, and did other kinds of busywork while Ms. Bailey tested each child individually. Testing everyone usually took one week. These times were called benchmarks and included DIBELS, DRA, and TPRI (Texas Primary Reading Inventory) as well as a math assessment used by the school. Ms. Bailey called the children one at a time to come to the back table or, if the weather was nice, to a picnic bench just outside the classroom. On one particular day during middle-of-the-year (MOY) benchmarks, Ms. Bailey had to give a math assessment to all of the children at the same time. She announced during circle time, “You will be taking a math test. You need to take everything from the tables and put it away. Put up your secret folders to cover your test so no one at your table can see it.” Ms. Bailey asked the students to go back to their tables and clean them. The children did, and soon Ms. Bailey appreciatively told them, “You guys are awesome.” Meanwhile Charlie, Celeste, Paloma, and Samuel discussed how to make a square by placing their secret folders together. Peter noticed them before Ms. Bailey did. “The teacher is waiting,” he scolded. Ms. Bailey looked over and saw the group constructing something with their secret folders. She scolded them too: “Well, we are not ready. This is a marble.” She walked over to the marble jar (a jar she had not used in months) and took one out. With a serious voice, Ms. Bailey reminded the children, “When we are taking a test, you sit on your chair and your voice is a zero.” (This was the first time in months that Ms. Bailey had used the noise volume system she was asked to implement at the beginning of the year.) She instructed the class to look at table 3 — seemingly to check whether Charlie, Celeste, Paloma, and Samuel had put up their folders like the rest of the class. They had. “This is better, you guys; you are so responsible,” said Ms. Bailey. Then she passed an exam to each student and said, “Are you writing your name on top?” She saw that two girls were talking to each other. She scolded again: “Nia and Lorene, did you remember what I said? You are at a zero!” Paloma read her exam instructions aloud to herself. Charlie angrily told her, “Stop!” “I’m sorry,” Paloma responded quietly.

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Ms. Bailey asked the children to give her a thumbs-up if they had written their name. The children raised their thumbs and then started talking to one another, comparing their thumbs-up gestures and giggling. Frustrated, Ms. Bailey told them sternly, “I am serious. Your voice is a zero during the test.” Ms. Bailey then read the first question. Some students who could read relatively well started reading on their own, murmuring to themselves. Ms. Bailey told them to read very quietly or everyone would get confused. Ms. Bailey showed the class the possible answers and read each one out loud to the class. Jason tried to read them. Pablo looked puzzled and turned to me (Kiyomi), asking, “Is that the one?” pointing to his paper. I told him, “I don’t know; I haven’t counted them.” Ms. Bailey asked the class if they were ready for question 2. She read the first sentence of the problem, and the students started to draw. Peter asked out loud, “How many?” Celeste told the class that she was going to draw the problem with hearts. Gus read the problem out loud. A lot of the students were trying to look at their tablemates’ papers despite their being hidden by the secret folders. Peter was still confused. “Which one is it?” he asked out loud. Jason looked at him and started to help: “It goes . . .” Ms. Bailey stopped him. “Don’t say it.” Jason put his head in his hands and started to cry. Ms. Bailey did not see him though. Jason was hunched down behind his secret folder. Again, Ms. Bailey asked for the children to put their thumbs up if they were done with question 2. She also reminded them that there was no point in going fast. They could take their time. In a minute or two, she asked, “Ready for question 3?” Ms. Bailey read the first sentence of question 3 and drew some objects on the board. Jason started working again. Pablo announced, “OK, I’m done.” Ms. Bailey read the question again and pointed to the idea of greatest to least that they had been working on. She read question 4. Diana asked out loud, “What is the answer?” Children started to stand up. Brad bounced in his chair. Pablo walked over to Kiyomi and told her that he was done. Ms. Bailey turned to Max: “I am taking points away if you are talking to a friend.” Max insisted that he wasn’t. Ms. Bailey heard more talking and turned to Nia and Kevin. “That is cheating,” she told them. Then she snatched their papers and folders away. Ms. Bailey told the whole class that even if they were done, they would have to sit in their chair silently. She told them that the last question on the test was hard because it used numbers instead of objects. She read the question and eventually picked up all the papers from the children. Brad was not answering the final question and said out loud that it was too hard. Pablo and

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Gus looked around for Ms. Bailey, and when she wasn’t looking they leaned over Brad’s paper and whispered the answer. Pablo put his pencil next to the correct bubble, ready to fill it in for him. Just then Gus and Pablo and Brad noticed that we were watching the whole thing. Pablo and Gus both said, “We are helping him.” Brad added, “I don’t know how to read.” Finally Ms. Bailey asked Brad to go to the back table and continue working on the test. He filled in a bubble and turned it in to Ms. Bailey. All of the strategies, characteristics, and cultural norms of the class were turned upside down during these days and weeks of testing. Helping and chatting were labeled as cheating. Kevin and Nia talked to one another and were accused of cheating. Pablo and Gus were compelled to help when they heard Brad struggle, even though they had just seen Kevin and Nia get in trouble for helping. Pablo and Gus had to sneak their helpful behavior. The children had to sit still. They could not move. They had to be quiet. They had to use folders for privacy. They could not help each other. Ms. Bailey used the behaviorist language of the school throughout the experience: “Voices have to be a zero!” Ms. Bailey scolded them as individuals. She asked the class to patrol table 3. Instead of the usual spaces to laugh and chat and discuss, there were constant behavior reminders. A group of students started building something three-dimensional with their secret folders, and they were scolded. The children were not allowed to giggle when she asked them to put their thumbs up. This testing day was also one of the few times we saw Ms. Bailey lose her patience and raise her voice. She was quick to interpret the children’s actions as misbehavior without asking the children a question about it first, as she did with the boys at the fish tank or with the girls making a volcano outside or when Peter was writing when he was supposed to be watching the tow truck movie. Charlie followed Ms. Bailey’s lead and got mad at Paloma, who was reading out loud. His scolding of his peers was validated when Ms. Bailey told the whole class to read quietly. She seemed uncomfortable, almost as if she possessed a new teacher persona that lasted as long as the test. The behaviors that had been praised were recategorized as problematic and distracting during testing weeks. Many teachers and administrators understandably feel so much pressure for certain achievement markers that it feels necessary (or they are forced) to make the classroom individualistic, efficient, and compliant in order to prepare children for the future when those qualities are assumed to be what is expected and necessary for success. This experience in the community-oriented space of Ms. Bailey’s classroom was so jarring that Jason ended up crying. He was devastated that his chance

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to be helpful and knowledgeable was interrupted and reprimanded. Jason was hardly ever in a position to help out because he struggled so much with reading and was often outshined by Pablo’s charisma, Paloma’s reading ability, and Max’s leadership skills. So what could have been a triumph for Jason was met with scolding and serious disappointment. For us as researchers, watching the class go through this testing experience was surreal. It was like we were seeing Ms. Bailey’s class in an alternate universe, one in which children could not be trusted or permitted to help. In the case of Ms. Bailey, the shift to individualism as an operating principle of the classroom was short-lived— lasting only as long as the test-taking process. Still, to us as the researchers, the shift was so dramatic that we kept thinking about what it means for children to be in such individualized classrooms all the time. It was dramatic to the children. Months later, when we showed the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom to children at different schools in different parts of Texas, we saw that their everyday schooling experiences mirrored the testing days in Ms. Bailey’s class. For example, on one of the days we observed classrooms at El Naranjo Elementary, we spent time in multiple first-grade classrooms that all operated the same way. Children sat in chairs perfectly still, quietly circling and coloring on a worksheet. Children looked around from time to time but did not talk or make any noise. The teacher asked the students to greet us as we entered, “Buenos dias.” That was the most we heard from them. We were puzzled as minutes went by and students stayed quiet and still. At some point each child showed their worksheet to a classmate on their left when the teacher so instructed. Then the teacher asked them to get out their large, heavy reader books and turn to a specific page. She called on children to read a sentence. They never attempted to talk to one another. They did not move. Every day was testing day. Resisting Pressures by Building Community Ms. Bailey’s main response to the pressures to be efficient and individualistic was to create classroom community instead. Ms. Bailey prioritized children’s community relationships through sharing and listening because she believed community would result in a greater capacity for intellectual and academic rigor. Ms. Bailey’s classroom was vibrant, full of stories, conversation, and thoughtful observation. Ms. Bailey and the children talked as a class about migration, parents getting sick, moving apartments, and family members dying. Ms. Bailey often shared stories from her own childhood and encouraged children to talk about their own lives. Despite the pressures to move to

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a more predictable, quiet, and still classroom model, Ms. Bailey rooted her pedagogy in relationships that supported and were built from a lot of class discussions. Discussions that built community took time. One day the children gathered with Ms. Bailey after working on their first stories of the year. They prepared for their presentation by documenting their stories on pieces of paper that were divided into a top half with a large box for illustrations and a bottom half with lines spaced for writing. Children presented their stories to the class by showing them— mostly drawings at this point in the year— and then engaging the class in a discussion about their story. It was supposed to work like this: One person would present the story they had written and illustrated. Then three people in the class asked the presenter a question about the story. The presenter was supposed to be quiet after they told their story so that others could ask a question. Ms. Bailey explained that they were going to try out this process for the first time with Charlie, one of the three monolingual White children in the class. He had volunteered to share his story about swimming. Ms. Bailey began this process with some coaching: “When you are sharing, we all look at you as the presenter. Let’s scoot in more.” After Charlie shared his one-sentence story, “I went swimming with my mom,” Ms. Bailey reminded the class to ask three questions about his story. Charlie, with his tall, skinny frame, leaned his body toward the class and widened his eyes in anticipation of the questions that would come. Aware that Charlie was usually quick to offer facts and comments in group discussion, Ms. Bailey instructed him to be quiet while others asked him questions. Ms. Bailey prompted again. ms. bailey: He can take three questions. samuel: Why did you go swimming? charlie: It was hot. samuel: Where is it at? charlie: At her work. She lives close to where she works. ms. bailey: Charlie, now pick a girl. charlie: Mary. Mary said something softly with her head down. Elena, who was sitting close by, repeated what she had said. elena: Your mom lives close to home and the pool, so when do you go? charlie: After work we change clothes and go. [Ms. Bailey claps and the students join her.]

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This rather awkward exchange was one of many early attempts to help children learn how to have a conversation and to express interest in one another’s compositions. Conversations in Ms. Bailey’s class gradually became longer and more spontaneous. A few weeks after Charlie’s swimming story, the volcano project began and Mary brought her volcano model to class. Because children were so excited about volcanoes, they started talking more with one another. The combination of interest in the volcanoes, the freedom to make noise, and Ms. Bailey’s persistence in helping children have a conversation eventually resulted in ten- to fifteen-minute academic discussions among the children as a class. These discussions often featured Ms. Bailey sitting with the children on the carpet rather than leading from her chair. Max’s Grandfather In December, during one of the days we were filming, Ms. Bailey read a book called Sophie, written by Mem Fox, in which a young girl grows up while her grandfather grows smaller and more fragile. He passes away, and Sophie is sad until she brings her own child into the world. While listening to the book, children yelled out questions and made observations. “She’s pregnant!” “That’s Sophie!” At the end, Ms. Bailey asked the children to turn to a neighbor and tell them what the story reminded them of. The students turned and talked to their friends, and then three were selected to share. Max, a biracial son of a White American father and Chicana mother, and grandson of Mexican grandparents who worked in the agricultural fields in California, was part of the first group of three. Max spoke Spanish and English and was curious, playful, and artistic. He was usually singing or talking or moving around the classroom. He was seen as a leader and an idea machine. Many children in the class asked him for help with their projects. When he began to tell the story of his grandfather, who suffered from Lyme disease, the children froze and listened. Max ended up sharing about his grandfather’s Lyme disease for a full twelve minutes. Unlike the discussion Ms. Bailey led with Charlie about swimming, this discussion was led and guided by the students. Classmates— girls as much as boys— pushed for detail and asked follow-up questions. The first issue they tried to establish was who the story was about and how the person was related to Max. max: It’s my mom’s dad. He was a really strong man, and he was really nice. But a long time ago he got bit by a tick and uh . . .

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pablo: What’s a tick? max: It’s a little thing that likes to be on deer or trees sometimes. jack: You mean your dad . . . max: No, not my dad, my mom’s dad. samuel: Your stepdad? max: No. kids: Your grandpa? max: Yeah. elena: OK. First, they were particularly concerned with how the suffering person in the story was related to Max. There was some concern that the person was Max’s dad. Trying to figure this out required a range of follow-up questions. “You mean your dad?” “Your stepdad?” “Your grandpa?” Classmates asked more questions that prompted detailed explanations from Max. “What’s a tick?” children asked. Max replied that “a tick lives on deer and tries to get in your blood.” Then Max offered a metaphor for Lyme disease to help his classmates understand the kind of Lyme he was talking about. max: My mom said that he actually has Lyme disease, not the lime that you eat but a kind of . . . it’s bad— celeste: It’s a disease. max: Yeah, it likes to travel in your blood. At this point Max paused, waiting for the comments and questions that accompanied every new bit of information he had shared so far. But the class was completely silent and still. So Max continued.

f i g u r e 6 . Max shared with the class about how his abuelo got Lyme disease and then answered everyone’s questions while Ms. Bailey sat on the carpet as a member of the audience.

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max: He can’t put his clothes on, he can’t brush his teeth, he can’t walk, he can’t get out of bed, and he can’t . . . charlie: He can’t watch TV? [Many children shout out similar questions about the TV, brushing teeth, getting out of bed.] max: No. But I was going to say, he can’t take a shower or a bath by himself. When Max repeated the list of what his grandfather could not do, children quickly silenced themselves again in order to hear the details. Children’s clarifying questions extended the discussion significantly, as Max and his classmates worked to get the details as accurate as possible. Ms. Bailey and the children in her class spent considerable time communicating with one another about their real stories, feelings, and ideas (see Wohlwend 2015 for more classroom examples). Ms. Bailey made a conscious effort to prioritize relationships through listening and sharing. In Ms. Bailey’s classroom children shared stories and expressed the feelings that naturally went along with those stories in real time as they told them, fielded questions, clarified points of concern, and responded in ways that showed solidarity and care. What Ms. Bailey did in her classroom to create community was the authentic version of what the social-emotional learning (SEL) program adopted by the school pretended to do. Community Building versus Social-Emotional Learning Just days after Max told the class about his grandfather and the class shared their thinking about their own relationships, the school counselor came into the classroom to teach an SEL lesson. The school had implemented a new social-emotional learning curriculum that year. The learning curriculum consisted of scripted lessons for different grade levels that included pictures, stories, keywords, hypothetical situations, and other resources. The school counselor visited Ms. Bailey’s classroom periodically— usually every other week— to lead the class in a lesson about social and emotional skills. The counselor chose the curriculum with the principal and determined (without input from Ms. Bailey) which ideas to focus on during the year. Some of these ideas included showing anger “appropriately” (verbally, not physically), how to calm down, and how to share materials with classmates. Marketed as developmentally appropriate, the social-emotional learning curriculum the school purchased was at the time (and still is) extremely popular and profitable (Hoffman 2009; Stearns 2016.) This particular day, the school counselor came to teach an SEL lesson about feelings that differed dramatically from the community-rich discussion a few days before.

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When the counselor arrived, Ms. Bailey got up from her chair, gathered the children to the carpet, and motioned for the counselor to sit down. Ms. Bailey moved to the table in the back of the room, where she observed the lesson. The counselor began by reminding the children of the rules. “Hands on your lap. Mouth quiet. Ears listening. Eyes on me.” These were the same rules that the counselor had offered to Ms. Bailey at the very beginning of the year. The counselor talked to the children about the very windy weather that was so strong it blew the cover off the basketball court. “How did you feel about that?” No one said anything. She repeated her question and then turned to Mary. “You are quiet,” the counselor said. Mary answered that she felt sad. The counselor asked her, “Where did you feel it? In your stomach? In your heart?” Mary did not answer. She just looked down. Jason agreed. He was sad too. The children turned to one another and agreed with Jason and Mary. Peter said to the counselor, “My mom was going to cry.” The counselor interrupted the children, saying there were too many side conversations. “Let’s start again,” she instructed. “Hands on your lap. Mouth quiet. Ears listening. Eyes on me. These are the four things you need to do.” Peter raised his hand. “I saw a guy got crushed.” The counselor asked Peter, “How did it make you feel?” “Sad,” Peter told her. The counselor questioned Peter’s answer: “Were you scared too?” Peter answered, “Yes.” The counselor then outlined the plan for her lesson. “I am going to read a book called Today I Feel Silly by Jamie Lee Curtis.” Meanwhile Diana was almost convulsing her body trying to get the counselor to notice her raised hand. The counselor did not see her or did not acknowledge her. Peter and another child in the class, Tim, who was a quiet but enthusiastic son of Mexican immigrant parents and spoke English at home except when he spoke with his father, had mechanical pencils in their hands. They took one of the erasers from the end of a pencil and threw it at each other. The counselor’s voice got really low and quiet. The students got quiet too and focused on the story. Kevin, a child of White American parents who spoke English at home and lived near the school, raised his hand after a couple of pages. The counselor told him, “Kevin, please put your hand down for now.” Kevin was talkative and liked to talk about animals to anyone who would listen, especially his dog and goat. He wanted to say something about the cat in the story since the counselor was showing them a page with many illustrations. Brad, a blond, blue-eyed White American child with freckles who spoke English at home and was an obedient, artistic student, leaned forward to say something too. The counselor put her finger on her lips while looking at Kevin and Brad to make sure they did not say anything. At the last page, the counselor asked the class, “How do you feel today?” “Happy,” they responded.

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On the last page, the book had a wheel that moved and showed different emotions. A part of the wheel had been torn away from the book. Pablo, Samuel, Gus, and Max got up from where they were sitting and tried to get close to the counselor and the book. They offered suggestions about how to fix the book and seemed to be reaching out to see if they could get the wheel to turn like it was supposed to. The counselor told them not to worry about it and said they should sit down. The counselor continued, “We will be talking about sad. How does a happy face look? Happy faces are big eyes and a big smile. Kevin, can you come to the front and model a happy face for the class?” Kevin walked to the front and opened his eyes wide, smiling. He then sat back down. “Pablo,” the counselor requested, “can you come to the front and model a mad face for us?” Pablo walked to the front and made a mad face. The counselor pointed out to the children: “See? Small eyes and a small mouth.” She called on Diana and asked her to show the class a sad face. The counselor said that a sad face had small eyes. The children shouted, “And tears!” While children were coming to the front to model different faces, Max, Jason, and Pablo tossed paper coins from the calendar bulletin board in the air, playing heads and tails. Soon, though, the counselor told the children that she had brought a worksheet about feelings for them to color. They went back to their desks and began coloring. While she could have observed Ms. Bailey’s class and quickly recognized the wealth of social, emotional, community-building, and cultural skills of the children, the counselor approached the children savioristically, as though they had no knowledge and she had all of the knowledge. She seemed to assume that young children had little experience with or understanding of complex social relationships. It seemed that the counselor did not know how (or was unwilling) to support authentically child-led discussion about real life. Her lesson denied agency from the beginning. She started the lesson with rules and then her own “sadness” about the basketball court cover— a story that elicited no reaction from the children. She singled out Mary and demanded that she share her feelings about the basketball court cover, a story that Mary neither brought up nor felt connected to in any way. When the children noticed an actual problem with the book (the wheel coming loose from the page), they tried to help by offering solutions, moving closer to the problem, and being supportive of the counselor. She rejected and then reprimanded the children’s sophisticated social offerings and instead went back to insisting that the children perform feelings. The children’s real, authentic recognition of social problems was dismissed,

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and instead they were asked to match their feelings (and the expression of those feelings) to those of the adult White counselor. The counselor, in return, made no space for their stories nor for their emotional, social, and community-oriented capabilities. The stated goal of the SEL program at El Roble Elementary was for children to move from feelings of anger and frustration to calm and peace. But to do this, children had to ignore their real circumstances, feelings, and responses. Instead they were asked to take on a version of social and emotional enactment that was tied to subpersonhood. The children were encouraged to express others’ feelings or interpret situations based on how they affected those in charge. They needed to forget their histories, circumstances, and emotions and instead adhere to sanctioned White ways of controlling expression— to remain orderly so as to talk about feelings and emotions in the abstract. When children resisted or refused these modes of communicating emotion or ideas, the counselor justified denying them the enactment of their agency. Their job, according to the counselor, was to “manage their feelings.” At this time and space of heightened control over young bodies, socialemotional learning curricula have emerged as a mechanism to help children of color work through their feelings in ways that are acceptable to those in power (J. Brown et al. 2012). Some SEL programs, as in the case of El Roble, attempt to replace authentic feelings and stories with manufactured ones centered on the convenience or comfort of those in power. Young children in the SEL lesson offered by the counselor were told to focus on stories that were contrived, written by others, and superficially emotional rather than tapping into the real-life emotional labor brought on by witnessed discrimination, jailed parents, car accidents, divorce, death, or terrifying migration policies. SEL offers an implicit false promise that if children manage their feelings in some acceptable way, they will do better in school. If they do better in school, they will have a better life. Full personhood, if you will. When social-emotional learning joins in the dehumanizing process of subpersonhood, it can no longer be seen as an equitable mechanism. Socialemotional learning was present in all of the schools we visited, as it was in El Roble, and contributed to children of color feeling forced to disassociate themselves from how they might talk or feel about something real in their lives in order to access full personhood. Whether it was over social-emotional learning, noise level, or testing pressures, Ms. Bailey sometimes found herself at odds with the priorities and positions of her school. Privileging community over compliance certainly created tensions and difficulties among colleagues and between her and those

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more powerful than her. Her pedagogy prioritized relationships and engagement with the children. Seeing these priorities set aside during testing was eye opening for us as researchers and helped us understand how much she was fighting the rest of the time. These pressures also shed light on why the young children we interviewed across Texas objected to the practices in the film so confidently.

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Children’s Responses The children are bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. a l o n z o , a first-grader at El Naranjo

As part of our video-cued ethnographic process, we interviewed first-graders (five, six, and seven years old) at each site we visited. We met with groups of three to four young children at a time in Spanish, English, or both, as decided by the children. We showed them four scenes from the film that their parents and teachers had watched. Each scene lasted two to three minutes. The scenes included when Mary called out about the number 21; math time, when children worked in small groups and when Max and Peter worked through their conflict without the teacher; literacy time, when the children read books all over the classroom; and finally, the group reading time when Max shared about his grandfather. We anticipated that the children would respond differently from their educators and parents, but we did not anticipate how confidently and unanimously they would respond across the sites of our study. The children we interviewed who were not at Ms. Bailey’s school (El Roble) did not like the practices in the film. They thought the children behaved badly. They thought that what was happening in the film was terrible for learning. The children in the film could move around! They could help people without asking the teacher first! They could even read on the floor lying down! They could get up out of their chairs when they needed something! All of those things translated to the young children we interviewed as misbehavior. Doing things without specific instruction from the teacher was not OK. During and after the film, the child viewers seemed shocked and would often turn to us and declare, “These kids are bad!” One particular children’s focus group included a young boy, Alonzo, who spoke Spanish at home and attended a bilingual classroom at school, as most of the young children we interviewed did. In the first thirty seconds of watching the films, Alonzo shouted out that the kids were bad. He and his

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classmates watched the scenes with disbelief and disgust, reprimanding the children in the video numerous times for misbehaving and being too loud. They kept yelling out warnings to the children as one might while watching a horror movie. “Don’t go in there!” “Stop doing that!” At one point Alonzo adamantly yelled out, “Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!” He could not believe what children were doing at school. Alonzo’s response may seem harsh. Yet the children we interviewed in different Texas public schools responded with the same general disapproval, confusion, and disgust that Alonzo and his classmates expressed. At first we dismissed children’s strong negative responses to the film as messing around or as resistance to participating in the focus groups. Conducting interviews with young children is very challenging and requires deep interest, respect, and a sense that children have ideas to contribute and teach adults (Clark, Moss, and Kjørholt 2005; Tobin 2000). In our case, the children seemed so dramatic, so critical of what the students in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were doing, that, embarrassingly, we did the researcher equivalent of rolling our eyes. We dismissed them and put off analyzing the focus group transcripts of the children until the end of data analysis. We figured that the children’s groups did not yield anything interesting because all of the children said the same thing, more or less— that the children in Ms. Bailey’s class behaved badly and were not learning. We laughed at first— we are also embarrassed to say— thinking about Alonzo’s determination that the children in the film were bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, because we knew the children in Ms. Bailey’s class were smart, respectful, caring, capable, and inventive. We dismissed Alonzo and the other children as misunderstanding the films. After analyzing and comparing the adult responses, we reluctantly started to analyze the children’s focus groups. We were unsure where to start because they all seemed so similar to one another. So we started with Alonzo’s memorable focus group at El Naranjo. Alonzo and the “Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad” Children We read the transcript of Alonzo’s focus group out loud to one another along with Molly McManus, a graduate assistant helping with data collection and analysis. (Molly would go on to do a dissertation study on children’s ideas about learning and agency in early grade classrooms. See McManus 2019.) When we got to Alonzo yelling, “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad,” we paused and tried to remember what part exactly he was saying was bad. We found the video of his focus group and watched it to find the exact moment he started

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yelling out “Bad.” It turned out that he was yelling at a specific moment in the film, although we could not determine which one exactly. Eventually we pinpointed within a minute the part of the film that provoked Alonzo’s objection, yet nothing in that one minute seemed objectionable. The scene shows children reading together in different areas of the room, children reading books on the teacher’s chair, children working with letters and lying on the floor. We knew that Alonzo and his classmates in the focus group disapproved of the children’s behavior in Ms. Bailey’s class, yet this did not seem to merit Alonzo’s “Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad” exclamation. To find the exact moment Alonzo was responding to, we enlisted the help of video technicians to help us slow down and sync the film of the focus group to Ms. Bailey’s film. When we did this, we actually figured out two things. First, we found the scene Alonzo was objecting to. It turned out that Alonzo had been yelling at two children at a computer listening to a story through headphones, a moment in the film that lasted seven seconds. In our hours and hours of watching, editing, and showing the film, we had never noticed anything extraordinary in that clip. We added it to the film only as a transition clip between scenes of children during literacy time. We also found out that Alonzo had said more than “Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!” He also mumbled, “That’s the button, but that’s only for the teacher.” Then the boy next to Alonzo turned to him and pointed out with concern that the children in the film were “using the computers by themselves” (another utterance we had missed). What the focus group was objecting to was the moment when Brad leaned over and touched the mouse at Elena’s computer station without a teacher’s permission. The actual moment they were objecting to lasted less than three seconds. Alonzo noticed something in the film that we, as researchers, had never noticed even after spending hours logging the footage, editing the film and watching it over and over. A child touching a computer mouse, especially a mouse at someone else’s computer, was on their radar in a way it was not for us. Their strong reaction prompted us to go back to the focus groups with their teachers and see whether their own teachers said anything about technology and children using the mouse. Their teachers, it turned out, did not let children use the mouse unless they were present. And children were not allowed to change something with the computer mouse unless their teacher was present. One of their teachers at El Naranjo explained, “I think a lot of times in the lower grades we need to train them to use the computer and tools and different things like that and teach them how to read. And as they get to where they can use the technology, they can read. Then they have a lot more

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freedom with that independence in order to be able to learn on their own what they choose to learn and what interests them.” This teacher voiced what many educators said across sites: that children earn freedom to choose what they learn and what interests them. Even with district policies to improve access and agency with technology at school starting in pre-K, children were positioned as having to earn it as a privilege rather than have it be a normalized part of their learning. Alonzo and his classmates did not experience technology as an extension of their learning. The computer mouse (the button) was “only for the teacher.” They found it problematic that the children were using computers on their own without the teacher. This restriction on technology and the inability for young children to govern themselves at the computer table or most other places in the classroom was explained as necessary because the children were not ready for such a privilege. Substantial restriction on technology use went against the wishes of the local superintendent, who had been trying to create a learning technologycentered district with bring-your-own-technology programs. The superintendent, Dr. Alvarez, wanted children to do a lot of decision making so they could be prepared for what he called twenty-first-century skills, when jobs would be very different from what existed then (see Adair, Colegrove, and McManus 2018). This superintendent told us that in his district, “we know they’re going to be our future leaders and we know that they are going to change the world.” He assured us that the children in his district were “totally capable” of doing so. Still, the discourse of the children and educators in his district was that agency needed to be earned. Computers were considered a reward for compliance, not a mechanism for learning. Our first round of analysis had focused on the teachers’ and educators’ various responses to the film while generally liking many of the practices. It wasn’t until we went back to the data after the collective negative responses of the children that we could see the deficit orientation many adults had toward the children and their families— and how most educators who worked with the children we interviewed did not think they were ready for or deserving of the learning experiences Ms. Bailey offered in her classroom. We came to realize that when the children watched the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom, they were watching something confusing and unfamiliar. They made sense of or theorized the children’s touching the computer mouse as dangerous, as something that would be bad for them to do. The children’s interpretation of the scene (the computer mouse can only be touched by teachers) and their theorization that the child’s touching the

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mouse was not acceptable pushed our team to consider the ways in which the children interpreted the film and conceptualized how or whether children should influence and make decisions at school. We knew plenty of children who could touch the computer mouse at their school and plenty of classrooms where children worked collaboratively. But they were almost all White and wealthy. The children in our study were Brown and Black, children in immigrant families, and children in families and communities who were fighting against racial and economic oppression. In focus group after focus group, children of color interpreted the film differently from their parents and grandparents. The first-graders (ages 5 – 7) we interviewed understood the process of learning much differently from their parents. Parents hoped for community and wanted their children to notice other’s needs and help out. First-graders we interviewed across Texas told us that helping others was not learning; they should not help their classmates without permission. First-graders had slightly more in common with their teachers when it came to interpreting the film. Children objected to the same practices in the film as their teachers did, but their reasoning differed from that of the teachers, who liked the practices but thought the children were not ready or deserving of them yet. This interpretive turn by the children, challenging our understanding of the adults and the system itself, pushed us to grasp how all of our understandings could be within the same system. This chapter explores how the first-graders we interviewed responded to the film. We detail which practices they objected to, besides touching the mouse and helping someone with a computer. And we share the few practices they liked but did only at home. Children’s responses focused on three characteristics of Ms. Bailey’s classroom: movement, noise, and acting without permission. Their responses were uniformly disapproving and concerned. We explore each set of responses and then unpack the children’s revealed ideas about learning using Mills’s theorization of the personhood– subpersonhood line. The Children in the Film Moved Around Too Much The children we interviewed told us repeatedly that students in the film were moving around too much. When children in the film moved around the classroom to help someone or when they were in a section of the room without the teacher, our first-grade interviewees labeled them as “bad.” They also assigned the label “bad” to children in the film for getting out of their

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chairs or lying down to read. When asked what his teacher would think of this classroom, one first-grader from Primavera said, “They’re going to think they’re crazy!” Many children worried that the students in the film would get in trouble for being out of their seats. Sometimes the children watching the films would cover their faces with one or two hands as if they were scared to watch. They would open their hands to peek through, curious but nervous for the child in the film. For example, while watching Jaime lying on the floor with a book during choice time, one of the first-graders from El Naranjo yelled out, “That boy needs to sit down!” Confused, we repeated his statement as a question. “He needs to sit down?” “Yeah!” he responded, quite concerned. “You need to sit him down!” Other children said the students in the film were walking around a lot and were too spread out across the classroom. We would always ask at this point if they got to move around their own classroom to work. We asked something like “Do you choose where you work?” and “If you need something that is across the room, can you go get it?” All of the children responded that they could not. Bianca from Las Rosas told us, “No, we always sit in our desks, in our group.” Sometimes they told us about specific groups they were in. Estrella from Primavera said (referring to another classmate in the room), “He’s in group 3; we’re both in group 2.” Then she added wistfully, “I wish I was in group 5.” The scene of Peter helping Mary was particularly problematic to the children. Children told us that helping out their classmates like that was not acceptable unless they had permission from the teacher first. We asked the Las Rosas focus group, “Who decides when you can help or when you can’t?” The students responded, “The teacher!” Two first-graders from Las Rosas patiently explained to us, “We always ask the teacher. We need permission.” When we asked the focus group at El Naranjo if helping the girl was an OK thing to do, they asserted that Peter’s helping Mary was not right. Although it was a scene that their parents and teachers and administrators really liked, the children strongly objected. jenn: Do you feel like that that was good learning? gary: No, no. jenn: You don’t think so? javier: No, because the little kid went up to teach the kid. That’s not right. jenn: Do you agree with him? [looking at Ariel] Do you think it’s right to go up there? ariel: No.

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To the children we interviewed, learning involved following directions, listening to the teacher, and generally working independently. Sometimes the children would scold Ms. Bailey’s classroom with sayings we assume they heard from their teachers, including “Keep your mouth zipped, eyes watching, and ears listening!” Children should not help classmates. Teachers were the primary sources of knowledge. Children were seen as having little to no useful knowledge. Many children told us that they only went to the teacher because she had the answers. At Las Rosas, Leonor and Josefa, two bilingual children in a duallanguage classroom, shared the reason they seek information from a teacher. kiyomi: OK. And you, why do you ask something to the teacher? leonor: It is because the children don’t know. kiyomi: Ah, OK, the children don’t know. josefa: And sometimes the children don’t pay attention in our class, because sometimes they are playing. Leonor’s explanation that “the children don’t know” was common. The children did not seem to see one another as having knowledge to share or skills to contribute. The exception was when they were assigned pairs or tables. Being assigned to someone was the same as receiving permission. They also explained that they should ask others for help if the teacher was busy or had already told them it was a sanctioned time to help others. Josefa at Primavera explained, “A veces la maestra nos dice, ‘Es que si no sabes, primero pregunta, si no sabes pregunta a tu amigo, y si tu amigo no sabe tampoco, que le dices a la maestra’ [sometimes the teacher tells us, ‘If you don’t know something, first ask, if you don’t know ask your friend, and if your friend doesn’t know, then tell the teacher’].” Children told us that helping needed to be sanctioned each time. The Children in the Film Were Loud The first-graders also told us that the children in Ms. Bailey’s class were too loud. “They talk too much!” “They need to be quiet.” Often they would shh the screen and look around at each other incredulously. Conversation, sharing stories with classmates, or any kind of spontaneous discussion was not acceptable. It was not good for learning. alonzo: They are not learning, because they are doing math and they are talking while they are doing their work.

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luisa: And when they were doing math, they were fighting [and saying]: “I’m going to tell it first.” “No, I’m going to tell it first.” They were fighting like that, “me first, then you.” jenn: What do you think about this way of talking between the children? luisa: It’s not good. alonzo: No. The children’s understanding of learning involved using quiet or low voices (voces bajas) and not talking to their classmates while working. They pointed out many times in the film when children talked without permission. When we asked them if they liked anything, they often said, “No, nothing.” jenn: OK, is it OK what the students are doing? carol: No. jenn: No? You don’t think so? Why? What are they doing that is not? nora: Like they are walking around talking. jenn: OK, OK. Is there something that you liked? That you liked in this part? (The children all shake their heads no.) jenn: Nothing? Nothing? Is that right? nora: No. When we asked a group at Primavera why they didn’t like the talking, one child explained that it was because if you are talking with someone, you can’t do your work, and this is not good for the teacher. rodomiro: Because when talking with someone else, when we are working with someone else, it’s not good for our teacher. She tells us not to talk while we are working. When the children were adamant that the noise was bad, we usually asked why. After watching the scene that showed the students using playing cards to add numbers during math time, the following exchange took place with a group at Las Rosas: jenn: So what is math like in your class? I’ve never seen it, so can you kind of tell or describe it for me? pancho: She gives us math, and then we do it quietly in the classroom.

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f i g u r e 7 . The scene from the film when Nia and Lorene (left to right) talk and laugh while figuring out how to make groups of ten using math cards.

jenn: So what were they doing here that was different than that? perico: Talking. jenn: Who were they talking to? perico: Their friends. jenn: So do you get to talk to your friends during math? perico: No. jenn: Do you think it’s OK that they do that? perico: No. jenn: You don’t? Why? Why isn’t it OK? perico: Because they’re not following the rules. Many children referenced agreements or contracts they had signed at the beginning of the year. For example, one group at Primavera explained that they had signed a contract in their folder that stipulated that they needed to use a responsible level of volume in the classroom. yeli: We have a folder. We have a folder, and it says that we need to use our voice responsibly and that we have to leave the class clean. Children also often referenced punishment systems such as a red, yellow, and green light system or other kinds of hierarchical behaviorism mecha-

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nisms in which misbehavior resulted in moving a pin or picture of themselves down to a lower level. Many children said that if they talked too much, they would lose their recess time. rodomiro: If we talk while working, we get our pin down and we don’t get to play in the playground. Children told us about a variety of consequences for children who talked spontaneously. Recess and lunch were the times for talking to friends. Children considered it a privilege to choose who they talked with at school. If you talked in class, then you would lose the privilege of talking to your friends at recess or lunch. You had to sit by the teacher at lunch, or perhaps sit on a bench or in the classroom during recess. Talking was considered by all the children we interviewed a privilege that they earned through their good behavior. Talking was not a necessary part of learning unless it was following the instructions of the teacher. Many children scolded the children in the film for not raising their hands. This response took us by surprise because we saw the children in Ms. Bailey’s class raise their hands regularly in the film. Unbeknownst to the first-graders we interviewed, raising hands was something we had discussed with Ms. Bailey several times during the year. Because Ms. Bailey was worried about children not coming up with project ideas during the beginning weeks of school, we suggested that children might not be coming up with ideas for projects because they could not get their ideas out fast enough to get community input and support. We wondered out loud with Ms. Bailey whether making children raise their hands every time they wanted to talk was slowing down the idea-generation process. Ms. Bailey wanted them to raise their hands so she could keep some kind of order. Raising hands was something she changed her mind about frequently over the first few months. Over time her class raised their hands less as they learned when spontaneous yelling out was fine and expanded their capability to patiently wait for others to talk before jumping into the discussion. The Children in the Film Acted without Permission The first-graders told us that their teacher decided what and when they were going to do something. It was not OK to do things without the teacher’s direct permission. One student at Primavera said, “You need to raise your hand or you will be in trouble.” Another student at Las Rosas noticed that the children in the film got to choose their own books. In her classroom, “the teach-

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ers tell us what book to take out.” They did not think that learning happened if children worked with their friends or did anything without the direction of a teacher. The teacher chose groups: “El maestro pone los grupos separados [the teacher chooses the groups on her own].” The teacher decided who should leave their seat or raise their hand or go to the bathroom. Seeing agency as being terrible for learning did not mean that children did not want or could not appreciate being able to make some learning decisions. Their favorite learning activity was something they called muscle math. In muscle math, they told us, students stand up and move their bodies to depict different math concepts or problems. They excitedly demonstrated to us how to do muscle math and seemed to really like having the opportunity to move their bodies. They also wanted to help their friends or even chose their groups. One group at El Naranjo told us they wanted to choose their partners to do their work at school. They also seemed eager for us to know that if they could choose, they would choose things that were academically beneficial. kiyomi: If you could, would you like to choose your partner? Or would you prefer that your teacher chose for you? carmencita: The teacher would put us with the team that helps us. kiyomi: So if it were your own class and you could choose, would you like to have your own group or not? manuel: Me, yes. franco: Me also. Because for me, I like to write pretty. And I have a group that writes, is learning to write. I have to write with a marker so that others will trace it. I always have to do that. I want to choose my own group that writes well. When children did tell us that they made choices at school, it was always making a choice to do what the teacher wanted. One student said, “[I] choose to listen to the teacher,” and another shared, “I choose to work.” The time when the first-graders said they were allowed to authentically make choices about what they did and what they learned was restricted to something children across districts referred to as “Fun Friday.” “Oh, we get to, we get to have fun Friday, like play ABC bingo,” one first-grader at Primavera said. Another student at Las Rosas told us, “The teacher let us play hopscotch!” It was difficult for the children to think about choices beyond compliance. jenn: What kinds of things do you choose? carolina: I choose to do work and read. jenn: OK, so you choose to work or not work.

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artemio: Work. Yes, work. carolina: Choose to listen to the teacher. Children discussed choices as a singular binary choice between listening to their teachers— defined as obeying the rules of the classroom and following the teacher’s instructions— and not. Challenging the First-Graders First-graders we interviewed rejected our attempts to imagine their school becoming more like the one in the film. In each focus group interview we asked, “Would you change your classroom in any way to be like the classroom in the video?” This question was meant to offer young children another way of telling us what they liked about the film or what kinds of practices they might want to see as they compared the classroom in the film to their own. The students usually replied negatively. They did not want their school to change to be like the one in the film. At first we accepted this answer. Then we started asking them at different times in the interview, mostly to signal that it was OK to imagine their school being different from what it was. When they did answer positively to the question, their answers were about more recess and play. For example, two students at Naranjo kept insisting that they would not change anything about their classroom. Then a less talkative student spoke up. jenn: ¿Nada, nada? ¿Cambiarías algo? [Nothing, nothing? Would you change something?] ariel: Quiero jugar. [I would like to play.] jenn: ¿Jugar? [To play?] ariel: No, porque no puedes jugar. [No, because you can’t play.] jenn: ¿Quieres jugar en la clase? ¿Por qué? [Would you like to play in the classroom? Why?] ariel: No, que no puedes jugar en la clase. [No, you can’t play in the classroom.] Children did not ask for more time reading or using the computer or creating art. They asked for more play and recess. Because children told us repeatedly that children could not move, talk, or do anything without the permission of the teacher, we always asked if there were any times of day when they could. The answer in every instance was no. Time and space were carefully guarded and controlled by the adults. Some

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children resisted this strict yet common version of control through acts of resistance they described as “talking too much” or “being distracting.” Even during focus groups, children would accuse each other of not conforming to the structure adults had set up. Looking at us and pointing to a classmate in the focus group, they would say: “He always gets in trouble for talking.” “The teacher is always telling him to stop.” Children reported that they did not make choices about their learning at school beyond deciding whether to be obedient. Deciding whether to learn— or in other words, to be compliant— was the child’s domain. Deciding how to learn was the teacher’s domain. This response was markedly different from the adults’. The children’s teachers and administrators said that children’s decision making was important. Ideally they would offer learning experiences that included agency, but they could not because the children in their classrooms— including the first-graders we were interviewing— were not ready for it. The first-graders did not agree with their teachers that agency was ideal or important for learning. They did not say that in the future the practices would be good for them as soon as they had earned them. Learning was not about decision making, collaboration, observation, or anything that did not involve specific tasks and direction. They told us that the ways children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom made decisions without the teacher would make learning impossible. The message they received from being denied a range of dynamic, sophisticated experiences was that learning was about compliance, not agency. Compliance as the equivalent of learning did not correspond with what the first-graders’ parents said. The parents wanted children to learn to make decisions, ask questions, and move around to be helpful to their peers without direction from the teacher. They classified the practices of asking questions, collaboration, moving around, making decisions, and helping classmates as important for learning. Parents liked it that Peter helped Mary without being asked. They thought it showed that he was aware of those around him and was paying attention. The children thought that children’s helping people without permission showed that they were not paying attention to what they should be doing, which was following the direction and input of the teacher. Teachers of the first-graders we interviewed, along with their pre-K– third colleagues, were generally reluctant to give children opportunities to make decisions, choose their partners, or follow their interests unless they had earned them through their obedience. If this were the case, we would expect teachers to describe offering more dynamic practices as children moved through the grades. But we saw little evidence of this. At El Naranjo, there was one third-grade teacher who had been trained at an international bacca-

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laureate project-based learning school. She allowed the children in her classroom some types of agency including moving around, completing tasks with chosen groups, and choosing project topics. She was, however, the exception. All the other second- and third-grade teachers made the same argument: they liked the practices, but children needed to earn them. They were not ready. The children they taught came from homes that “did not prepare them” for such freedom. It seemed to us that even when children were compliant, they would not or could not prove themselves worthy of the learning experiences that supported agency. Children Wanting to Help Once in a while as focus groups responded to the scene of Mary and Peter and explained how it was not right for Peter to get up and move without asking the teacher first, a child would whisper to someone next to them or quietly point out to us that they did help at home. While they could not and did not help at school, a handful of students across the focus groups seemed to want us to know that they knew helping was important and that they did help at home. It was as if they wanted to reassure us that they were not terrible people. For example, Cris from El Naranjo Elementary School told us that he helped at home. Then Jacinto and Cris agreed that helping at home was important and should “count.” kiyomi: You guys get opportunities to help your friends in the classroom? Do you get to help people in your classroom? cris: Yes . . . I helped someone, someone didn’t know how to do math. kiyomi: Oh, OK, something similar to that, right? What about you, Jacinto— have you ever helped people in your class? jacinto: I helped people in my house. kiyomi: In your house? OK, that counts too, right? You’re helping somebody. cris: I’ve done very good. It was as if they were trying to tell us, “Yes, we know that we are not supposed to help at school, but we still know that helping is important and we do it at home.” This desire to help despite institutional messages that helping is not a part of learning or contributing to classroom life supports important work that Barbara Rogoff, Audun Dahl, and Maureen Callahan (2018) have done comparing how young children from different cultural heritages approach helping. They have found that in indigenous Mexican and Central American

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communities, young children develop “wide keen attention” that includes an ability to be aware and notice what is going on around them (Correa-Chávez, Roberts, and Martínez Pérez 2011). Alcalá and colleagues found that the longer parents have been in the US and the more schooling they receive in the US, the less wide keen attention their children use to learn and observe the world around them (Alcalá et al. 2017). Wide attention is a skill that helps young children observe a task and contribute as soon as they feel ready (Rogoff, Correa-Chávez, and Silva 2011). They do not need specific invitations or direction to observe; they simply are paying attention to what is going on around them instead of narrowly on one task or person at a time. Andrew Coppens and Lucía Alcalá (2015) found that European-heritage children most often learn to help through a list of chores or specifically assigned tasks, while Mexican-heritage children most often learn to help by participating in collective work effort. Ms. Bailey’s classroom shows that young children can and do learn to help in different ways if the environment and conditions allow them to do so. The children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom routinely observed and helped out their peers because they were allowed to move around and attend to one another’s needs without requesting permission. The only time we heard the first-graders in our interviews talk openly about spontaneously helping their peers at school without specific permission from the teacher was when we interviewed children in a dual-language program at Las Rosas. In this program, children paired each day with someone who spoke a different dominant language than they did. Spanish-dominant speakers were paired with English-dominant speakers. Each child was called a partner, the English partner and the Spanish partner. kiyomi: OK, then you can help your friends how? How do you help them? Bruno, how do you help your friends in school? josefa: Like if they don’t know how to write, you can help them how to write. You can tell them to copy or you can tell them a different sentence. kiyomi: OK, and what do you do to help your partners? josefa: I help Lynn because Lynn doesn’t understand much Spanish and also with Bruno. Lynn helps us because [along] with Bruno, we don’t know much English. Helping was a part of their sanctioned program, as a pedagogical tool. Helping was not embedded in the classroom as a way to care and build community; it was allowed within a relationship that was assigned by the teacher. The children in this class told us about the assigned times to help and the

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times they were not supposed to help. The help they described was with writing or other forms of literacy, all within the content of assigned tasks or assignments. If they noticed someone needing help outside of sanctioned time or someone needing help who was not their partner, they could not respond. Pushing Back on Children’s Responses Halfway through collecting data, we started pushing back in the focus groups with first-graders because their answers seemed eerily similar. The first time we tried challenging children’s answers was at Primavera. Instead of just nodding when they disapproved of children not raising their hands in the film, we asked, “Didn’t the children in the film raise their hands?” The children told us that they used to raise their hands like the children in the film but had learned a better way with the help of their teacher. rio: Before we were “Teacher! Teacher!” [raising hands in the air], but he complained and told us to stop doing that. And then we stopped. And we put it like this with our hand quiet [raising hand gently and silently]. jenn: OK. fernando: And our teacher told us that he is happy with us because we are no longer “Me! Me!” jenn: OK, and do you agree? Would you like to have math class like they did? fernando: No. jenn: Why? fernando: Because, because— rio: Because the children are not behaving right. jenn: Oh, OK. The children are not behaving? How? What were they doing that was so bad? fernando: Because they were fighting over the cards and they were saying “Me! Me!” Instead of being deterred by our skepticism, the children got more confident in their responses. They explained that actually it was not enough to raise your hand; you must do it quietly. We assumed children would be too intimidated to tell us their thoughts or to tell us what they didn’t like about the film, especially when we were pushing back. But the opposite happened. Children were so sure of their stance, of how to evaluate good learning, that they argued back to us that the children in the film were terrible, even when we defended them in a sense with our pushback questions. As focus groups continued, we pushed harder to

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understand what children meant when they said the children in the film were “bad,” “not learning,” or “not listening.” We asked focus groups, “What are the children doing in the film that was so bad?” “Why was it so bad— doesn’t it look fun?” “Do you wish you could do some of the things in the film?” While some could rightfully critique our “pushback” ethnographic questions as biased or simply pushy, they did reveal how strongly children felt about their answers. Children in the film yelling out, interjecting, and talking without permission infringed upon the established rules of the first-grader interviewees’ classrooms. The children we interviewed seemed to want to please their teachers, and the way to please their teacher was to be obedient. Fernando and Rio were proud that their teacher praised them for their improved behavior. Over the course of the year, they had learned the “appropriate” way to communicate, which involved orderly, quiet hand raising and waiting for permission to speak. It may be fair to recognize the important repertoire of practice (Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003) in the deference and respect to teachers that seemed to be operating in the schooling lives of the children we were interviewing. And yet other cultural skills of working collectively and sharing stories were not equally valued at school nor considered important for learning. It was as if the children’s funds of knowledge (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005) were being used only when they served the purpose of maintaining order and control, not for the broader activity of learning or being culturally sustaining. For us as researchers, it was hard to hear children of color responding so negatively to the film. After all, the film showed children of color having fun, laughing, playing, talking, moving around, and enjoying learning. Didn’t they want that? To them, the behavior in the film went against how they experienced and understood how learning worked. Some children may be allowed to yell out while raising their hands in their kindergarten, but they had learned better. They told us that discussing, trying things out, moving around, and initiating activities was not the way a first-grader becomes a good learner. The children had internalized the expectations of their teachers. Children’s responses correlated with what we saw in their classrooms. We spent anywhere from two to six hours in each classroom. Children were quiet and still. They raised their hands silently. They read from books their teachers chose for them. They sat at table seats their teachers had chosen. They raised their hand to get paper or a folder or to use the bathroom. Each classroom we visited outside of El Roble resembled the testing days in Ms. Bailey’s classroom even though we never observed during an assessment. In each of our classroom visits, we got permission to engage the children in a drawing activity where they drew their perfect classroom space.

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What would a really exciting school look like? These moments of drawing and creating were also silent, so different from Ms. Bailey’s classroom. During one visit to a first-grade classroom, we walked close to a boy seated at his desk facing the wall working on a drawing. He had been especially talkative in the focus group. We asked him quietly why the class was so quiet. He looked at us and replied, “Si hablamos, nuestros pensamientos dejan la cabeza [if we talk, our thoughts will leave our heads].” Faulty Cultural Explanations Some might argue that the children’s answers were simply “cultural.” Occasionally people hear us share this data at conferences and workshops and argue that young children are just repeating what they hear from their parents— that they need to respect authority and be obedient. In almost every case, these speculators have been White educators or policymakers who say that children think they should be quiet because of cultural expectations. From our point of view, this is an operational stereotype that lets White supremacy off the hook. Insisting that quietness and rigidity are “cultural” dismisses the rich repertoires of practices happening in homes and within communities. Movement and engagement with the world is a learning practice familiar to many communities. For example, Marin and Bang (2018) conducted a study of Native and non-Native child– parent dyads going for multiple walks in the same locations. One Native American (Odawa) pair— mom Jackie and her six-year-old Jason— came across a flooded river during the first walk that had receded by the second walk. Walking along the same path with the land changing shape provided opportunities for different movements and a range of different conversations, thinking, and knowledge demonstration because “the joint activity of walking, reading, and storying land requires an assemblage of micro-practices (questioning, directing, narrating) that are verbal, embodied, and ambulatory” (112). Moving, thinking, and interacting with the semiotic resources around young children engage them in a more complex and sophisticated learning experience than a compliant task or silent rote learning isolated from the world around them. Yosso found that while schooling may cite cultural differences as justification for denying high-quality learning experiences, “this disproportionate access corresponds with discriminatory school-based structures and practices as opposed to a lack of student or parent interest” (2006, 22). Quiet, still, rigid classrooms with little decision making or problem solving are not “culturally desirable” (Arzubiaga, Noguerón, and Sullivan 2009;

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Valdés 2005; Valenzuela 1999; Urrieta 2015). Parents in our study expressed a strong collective desire for their children to ask questions, engage with their peers, help classmates, and learn in many ways. Over the past couple of decades, educational ethnographers who work with Latinx families across generations have found that families engage in learning in active, engaged, participatory ways that vary by family, community, and place (Villenas 2009; Delgado-Gaitan 1994; González 2001; Orellana 2001). González’s study with Latina immigrant mothers gives the example of Ms. Ortiz, whose self-constructed sewing knowledge helped her design folklórico dresses for her community with elaborate geometric designs (2001, 127). The work of Delgado-Gaitan in Carpinteria highlights the Bilingual Preschool Program, a program in which parents and teachers collaborated and planned curriculum and activities for their children, and then parents created COPLA (Comité de Padres Latinos), an organization that helped the parents understand the school system as well as their rights and responsibilities (2001). González and Delgado-Gaitan’s research shows that parents contribute, engage, and participate in activities especially when their expertise and knowledge is valued. And yet there is a strong operational stereotype among preservice and in-service teachers that immigrant parents want “strict” rote learning for their children, which becomes the rationale for offering children of color immobile, individualistic, heavily controlled learning conditions (Colegrove 2015). What the Children’s Responses to the Film Reveal Young children we interviewed noticed that children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom got to do things in their classroom that they did not. They were loud (they got to talk to their friends), they got to move around (to help their friends or work on something), and they got to make decisions (they got up without the teacher’s permission) without reprimand. Because of the videocued process, young viewers were able to point out what was surprising and unfamiliar to them. Children we interviewed compared the classroom in the film to their own daily learning experiences. They articulated the differences between what they did at school and what Ms. Bailey’s class did at school. They interpreted those differences in ways that positioned them as the better learners. They had internalized learning as being what they experienced. Children we interviewed pointed out three types of practices they were routinely denied. First, children noticed that the students in Ms. Bailey’s classroom moved around often, and they told us that they could not move like that in their classroom. Being denied movement is problematic, because

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movement is strongly correlated with strong math conceptual knowledge in young children (Goldin-Meadow and Beilock 2010; Martin and Murtagh 2017; Shoval 2011), academic focus and achievement (Greeff et al. 2016; Donnelly et al. 2009; Donnelly and Lambourne 2011; Mullender-Wijnsma et al. 2015; Norris et al. 2015; Reed et al. 2010), and executive function (Have et al. 2016; Vazou and Smiley-Oyen 2014). When bodies are integrated into the learning experience, young children do better cognitively (Enyedy 2005; see also Ma 2017). Additionally, controlling children’s movement as a primary disciplinary approach continues the racial trauma imposed by enslavement, school segregation, and Jim Crow laws as well as ongoing discrimination, economic marginalization, and disproportionate incarceration (K. Brown 2016; Ferguson 2000; Robinson 2013). Second, child viewers noticed that children in Ms. Bailey’s class were able to talk to their classmates throughout the day. The children we interviewed were denied the ability to talk and share with their classmates about their lives. This denial was and continues to be problematic, because engaging in a wide range of oral literacy based on real-life experiences early in school positively impacts academic literacy development as well as multilingual capabilities that foster healthy identity construction (Martínez 2018; Flores, Lewis, and Phuong 2018; Rosa and Flores 2017), cultural connection (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Rodriguez 2013), as well as relationships, community, and a sense of belonging within the classroom and at school (Bernal, Alemán, and Carmona 2008). It is certainly true that quiet and stillness are also part of learning, and there is cultural variance in the role of noise and talking in learning. Yet when children of color experiencing poverty in our study are being told to be quiet and still by White-centric institutions such as schools (see Apple 2012; De Lissovoy 2010), the goal does not seem to be learning. It seems to be control (Milner et al. 2018; Casey, Lozenski, and McManimon 2013). Being loud or expressive is not safe in such a space, even though oral literacy is imperative for achievement and advocacy, just as written literacy is (Souto-Manning and Yoon 2018; Kuby, Rucker, and Kirchhofer 2015). Third, children we interviewed noticed that students in the film acted without the teacher’s permission. They were denied such opportunities. They spent the majority of each school day focused on following directions, being obedient, and listening to the teacher even though leadership and thinking skills developed in early childhood are important for social relationships (Fox, Flynn, and Austin 2015), high school and college academic success (Kilgo, Sheets, and Pascarella 2015), career advancement (Weinberger 2014), and community advocacy (Sampson and Horsford 2017; V. Johnson, Ben-

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ham, and VanAlstine 2003). We agree with Yosso that denying such highquality experiences maintains inequity. Because elementary school serves as an important prerequisite to later educational attainment, one would expect to find a high-quality academic curriculum available to all students. This is not the case. Compared to white schools, elementary schools comprised of low-income students of color rarely offer high-quality programs. Most often, the elementary schools Chicanas/os attend stress academic remediation and a slowing down of instruction, rather than academic enrichment or an acceleration of the curriculum. (2006, 22)

The problem is that what is considered high-quality education for students of color experiencing economic oppression is too often a classroom that pushes stillness, silence, and obedience and denies agency. For the children we interviewed, being able to move, talk, or make decisions was not a given, nor was it seen as an element of learning. Segregation from Agency The children’s revelations about the control they experienced through silence, stillness, and compliance offers a much different version of learning from the one offered by Ms. Bailey’s classroom. Alonzo’s revelation that he and his classmates did not have ownership over their intellectual efforts or their bodies is far from the ownership embodied by the children working on their dirt volcanoes or those trying to learn about horse bones. The girls who worked on the volcano outside and resisted one adult’s insistence that they come in and abandon their scientific exploration as well as their care for younger children in their community offered a safe resistance. They knew that Ms. Bailey would support their collective agency. They made the decision to stay outside in pursuit of academic and intellectual knowledge. They decided that they were not done yet and refused to heed an adult saying otherwise. They put their bodies in a space without the direction of an adult and refused to move away from the intellectual activity. Alonzo was not able to influence or make decisions about his learning. He could not determine when he would pursue something, nor could he control at all when something happened or didn’t happen except through his resistance. He did not have ownership over the computer mouse in his classroom or where his body should be. He and the other children we interviewed were not free to help their friends or work collectively in any significant way. We believe that it was the rarity of the learning experience children saw

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in the film that produced the alarming, unified, and confident assertion that learning could not happen if children moved around, talked, or acted without permission. We believe that their insistence (even when we pushed back) came from daily experiences in classroom environments and a larger school system that did not (and does not) value young children’s agency and ideas, especially those from children of color experiencing poverty. Keeping children of color focused on obedience, stillness, and quiet rather than on the range of capabilities made possible through the enactment of their agency is a tool of racial oppression that maintains inequity. Being segregated from learning that requires or invites the enactment of agency is a segregation by experience. When young children begin school already segregated from any experience that supports their agency, the lack of agency negatively affects how children understand the process of learning and what it means to be a learner. Learner Identities Formed in Segregation by Experience Since we took the children’s responses to the film seriously and reanalyzed the data from the adults in our study, our deepest concern has been the messaging children receive from being segregated away from dynamic, active, and sophisticated learning experiences. They experience school as an educational space in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits” (Freire 2005, 72). Young children in our study were seen and starting to see themselves as receivers of deposits, as those who must earn the privilege of their agency. Freire writes that seeing oneself (and one’s community) as devoid of agency is a strategy of the oppressor, because “the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of their world” (2005, 73). Prioritizing stillness, silence, and compliance makes improbable what Ms. Bailey’s class proves is beneficial for young children of color to experience at school. How children experience school teaches them about the process of learning and about being a learner. There is increasing evidence that when schools prioritize compliance and rigidity, children formulate a theory of school learning that demotes them to a passive role in which the main objective is to obey (Love 2019). School learning is constructed as compliance rather than a cognitive, agentic, or dynamic process when children are segregated by experience. Maxine McKinney de Royston and Tia Madkins (2019) found that schooling initiatives aimed at shifting everyday school experiences for Black

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youth toward agency and voice produced a significantly different understanding of the self and the process of learning. Tia Madkins and Na’ilah Nasir (2019) also argue that children’s cultural repertoires of learning can afford a wider range of possibilities for students to connect with and understand the process of learning. Limiting pedagogy is how “certain identities are made available, imposed or closed down” (Snyder, Shah, and Ross 2013, 286). What children experience in early schooling environments have the power to limit their views of learning. For example, McManus (a graduate researcher on the Agency and Young Children Study) expanded the work we did with young children. In her dissertation investigation, she showed the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom to three classrooms serving young bilingual children of Latinx immigrants. Each classroom was a different learning environment and offered varying opportunities for young children to enact their agency regularly as part of their learning. In the first school— the kind that is most common for Latinx children of immigrants— children had structured seat assignments, learned through teacher-led tasks and lessons, moved in single prisonlike lines the hallway, and could not move or talk without raising their hand and getting permission. They watched Ms. Bailey’s classroom and lamented to McManus that the children were likely not learning very much because they were moving and talking to each other. In the second school— a much less common type of classroom— children moved freely throughout the room without assigned desks or tables and completed most of their work independently on laptops. They thought that the amount of talking in Ms. Bailey’s class could keep the children from learning, but they said that children’s helping one another is good for learning. The third school’s approach was even less common, though closest to Ms. Bailey’s environment. Children worked and talked together throughout the day yet helped and respected the teacher and one another. They watched the film and thought that the practices they saw— talking, helping, working together— were important for learning. Children learn through and about their identity by what they experience in school and how they engage their identity, not just through what adults tell them about their identity (Nasir 2011). As Cyndy Snyder, Niral Shaw, and Kihana Miraya Ross thoughtfully explain, support for (or dismissal of ) children’s identities is enacted and embodied in schools, not just spoken. “Identity is an important mediator in one’s access to learning in that learning requires engagement which is facilitated by students’ identities within learning settings. We highlight racial stereotypes or ‘storylines’ as being central. . . . Storylines are not just what people carry around in their heads; they get enacted in social interactions in schools and classrooms as students are

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positioned (and position themselves) as learners or as certain kinds of learners” (2012, 286). Because children learn most deeply through what they do and embody, the presence of racial storylines that foster deficit thinking is damaging to children’s identities, including that of being a learner. Racism limits agency at school. Little to no agency at school normalizes learning as a rote, outsiderdriven process of tasks rather than a complicated, sophisticated, dynamic process that requires intellect, collective work, and developing capabilities that lead to greater agency and freedoms. Denying agency forms a cycle: Justified by racism and deficit thinking, children are denied agentic learning experiences and cannot expand certain kinds of capabilities and identities. Then, because they do not have the opportunities to practice or prove otherwise, nor the capabilities that come from agency, children are deemed unable to handle (or otherwise undeserving of ) agentic learning experiences. The racist justifications for denying agency are then reiterated and maintained. Racist justifications for the denial of agency become the racist foundations for SEL, behavior modification systems, discipline programs, and rote, taskoriented pedagogies that schools and systems use to control. This is, as chapter 7 will explore, how the personhood–subpersonhood line begins in early childhood education.

7

Justifying a Segregation by Experience

Educators in our study justified segregating young children of color from the enactment of their agency in one of two ways. Some justified children’s earning agency through compliance and order because of the pressure they felt from the system to have their children perform well on tests. Far more educators, however, argued that they had to rigidly control young children’s learning experiences and make children prove themselves capable of handling their freedom because of what families, communities, or children lacked— or in other words, an appeal to deficit thinking. It is true that educators in our study faced tremendous pressure to ensure that young children did well on benchmark tests, even those who taught three- and four-year-olds. But the more significant problem arose when this tremendous pressure combined with deficit thinking— the belief that young children of color arrive at school with little more than their compliance to offer. In this final chapter, we argue that keeping young children of color from enacting their agency at school is an act of segregation and ultimately an operationalization of White supremacy and a means of controlling communities of color through the normalization of agency as something earned or deserved. Systemic Segregation by Experience It may be easy and convenient to blame educators for the segregation by experience that we witnessed. However, as Sen explains, development that results in greater agency “requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states” (Sen 1999, 1). Teachers cannot be expected

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to solve what are systemic sources of oppression. Sen continues: “Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers— perhaps even the majority— of people” (Sen 1999, 2). Everyone we interviewed was and is, along with us as researchers, part of a much larger system of making some earn what others receive relatively freely. Children of color typically have to earn the privilege of learning in culturally relevant ways as well as in ways that lead to increased freedom and self-rule. And so do their teachers. Instead of being opened up to creativity and critical thinking along with core skills and knowledge, early childhood classrooms have become basic training for the higher testing grades, with little to no creative activity or even inquiry. Classroom spaces in the early grades, especially those that serve children of color experiencing economic marginalization, do not typically support a wide range of talk, authentic discussion, movement, or any learning activity that is not authorized or directed by educator adults (Genishi and Dyson 2009). Teachers, schools, and policies have long failed children of color in this way— denying them the opportunity to share their authentic stories and intellectual ideas or the official space to think and talk from their actual experiences (Gutiérrez, Rymes, and Larson 1995). And although a shrinking tolerance for open, noisy classroom environments like Ms. Bailey’s restricts options for many children in public and private schools, contemporary appeals for classroom order have become even more draconian for children of color with prisonlike rules, constant cuing, and an insistence on silence and stillness (Milner 2015; see also Henward and Grace 2016). Children of color are often kept from speaking loudly, or from speaking up spontaneously regardless of the volume level (Milner, Cunningham, Delale-O’Connor, and Kestenberg 2019). Schools and teachers control the language children are able to speak in classrooms and on school campuses and are not penalized for exercising this level of control (Rosa and Flores 2017; Callahan and Gándara 2014). Children of color are often denied spaces for using their home languages. If other than standard English, their home language is too often seen as a limitation, a deficit, or an aspect of the child that needs to be fixed (Delpit 2006; Zuñiga, Henderson, and Palmer 2017). In many classrooms with a majority of children of color, children’s initiative and spontaneous participation are equated with disobedience, distraction, and disrespect. Noise is seen as something that needs to stop in order for learning to begin. Children like Mary are supposed to wait patiently or raise their hands, not yell out something that is compelling or urgent. They are supposed to be quiet during transitions from center time to the carpet area

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or from the lunchroom to the playground. They are supposed to be quiet walking in the hallways, going to the bathroom, and lining up in their classroom to go to the gym. Children are expected to be relatively quiet even in lunchrooms. Teachers sit patiently and wait for children to be quiet before they read a book, start a lesson, or give directions. Children are described as problems if they are loud. When we visit classrooms and schools, we are often struck by how noisy cafeterias and halls are where wealthy White children attend and how quiet and controlled these spaces are when children of color make up the majority of the students. In “Learning and Not Learning English,” Guadalupe Valdés describes the school she studied as a “tight ship” where hearing silence was valued highly. She writes: [The teacher] did not tolerate the volunteering of answers when she asked a question of the entire class. Each student was expected to respond only when called on. Talking was also discouraged between activities when students moved from their seats to work with [the instructional aide]. . . . Interaction was also discouraged among students who remained at their seats. Even though the desks were set up to form working tables of four to six students, no group activities involving collaboration were assigned. Students were expected to work silently on their own. (2001, 48)

The expectation of quiet, still, compliant bodies continues to confront many children of color as they negotiate the ways in which schools mirror the inequities of society (Crosnoe 2006; Takanishi 2004; Yosso 2006). Even in prekindergarten and kindergarten, classrooms with mostly children of color are often controlled through silence just as Valdés describes. Quiet bodies seem to be requisite for children of color to be offered learning experiences (Delpit 2012). Being quiet does have its advantages, because being loud in institutional spaces governed by Whiteness and White supremacy is especially tricky for young children of color. If children of color are not quiet, they risk being disciplined harshly with suspension or even just excessive out-of-school time (US Department of Education 2014). Children from nondominant communities are often scolded for their loudness, abruptness, attitude, or other complications of noise— the same kinds of noise and engagement that are often praised when coming from wealthy White children (Anyon et al. 2018; Wright and Counsell 2018). This segregation by experience—denying or making one earn what others receive freely— is a manifestation of Whiteness (Dixson and Rousseau 2005) and a way to maintain power within Whiteness and Whitecentric institutions. The attitudes, practices, and patterns that keep children of color from having the ability to influence and make decisions about their

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learning are racist because “they are bound up in the perpetuation of historical policies rooted in more explicit racism” (Ewing 2018, 13). Segregation by Experience as a Form of Dehumanization Sylvia Wynter (2006) argues that the racialized global system of making some earn what others receive without effort is not the fault of one person, one group, or one era. Such a system precedes current realities and is a product of decades and centuries of preparation. The system is not merely a conservative, disenfranchised one because maintaining a system of other– human where being fully human is the equivalent of White and wealthy requires a system that continuously dehumanizes nondominant (non-White) communities. Keffrelyn Brown (2013) connects Wynter’s theorization of dehumanization to how education often supports dehumanizing approaches to sociocultural knowledge. One of these dehumanizing practices is to get those who are not seen as fully human by the dominant group to deny their own agency or their own sense of agency. Then the processes of dehumanization can seem normal or natural but also uncontrollable and inevitable. These dehumanizing practices that set limits or borders on what it means to be human always seem to benefit White people. Brown quotes Wynter, who explains that these dehumanizing practices are often missing from our view. They are powerful because the routine denial of agency to young children of color at school goes unnoticed and the constant reprimands, harsh controls, and prisonlike lines are normalized. “While it is we ourselves who are the individuals and collective agents and authors of all such societies, from our origin as human beings, we have consistently and systemically made this fact opaque to ourselves by means of a central mechanism” (Wynter 2005, 134; cited in K. Brown 2013, 322). Brown agrees that the process of dehumanization is opaque to most of us individually and systemically. Our ignorance of these intricate and purposeful othering processes doesn’t mean they are less powerful or harmful. They are still powerful for us and the students we teach even if we don’t recognize or acknowledge them, because they keep us from noticing and therefore changing the practices that perpetuate the process of othering. Brown writes, “That these processes remain ‘opaque to ourselves’ does not change their power in our lives. However, what this veiling does make possible is the adoption of an ideological blindness that disavows both the existence and power of limit frames on thought and action, as well as the acknowledgment of how these frames are constituted (and by default, can be transformed) through everyday practices” (2013, 323).

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Our participation without consciousness or remaining “opaque to ourselves” denies our positionality as agents and also makes it difficult for us to see and recognize the othering process taking place in schools. Wynter’s explanation of the opacity of the othering process helps us understand why teachers who put so much effort into the children’s academic progress could see themselves as not having a strong influence over the kinds of learning experiences children receive. Teachers’ role seems more like doing the “inevitable” or “natural” thing, which is to make children of color earn agency rather than receive it freely, because this is “good” practice. In reality, inequity in school practices is not natural nor inevitable but requires the constant belief that children from communities of color must earn their passage to personhood. Mills’s Racial Contract Charles Mills argues that there is a racial contract in place that reinforces and normalizes Whiteness as the means toward power and success through what he terms the personhood– subpersonhood line. Those positioned on the side of personhood are seen as fully human with access to full rights and privileges without having to earn them. When young children arrive at school and are given space and time to share their family stories, talk with one another, help determine topics of study for the year, or engage in authentic problem solving with each other, they are engaging in full rights and privileges afforded most people considered persons. Many children like those in our study arrive at school and find themselves in a position where those opportunities are earned through certain kinds of behavior. This behavior suspiciously includes ways of talking, vocabulary, interactional styles, and knowledges that (mimic or come close enough to) White ways of being or, in some cases, White expectations for how children of color should behave. A system in which children of color routinely must prove they are deserving of self-rule or the enactment of their agency at school has become normalized and justified. Mills argues that accepting that some deserve and are ready for self-rule while “others” are not supports an ongoing internalization. This internalization is made possible when persons and subpersons buy into the idea of the line’s inevitability. Mills considers this process actual (rather than metaphorical) as well as violent. White people and those considered subpersons must buy into the racial contract for it to work. Mills explains, The other dimension of this coercion is ideological. If the Racial Contract creates for its signatories, those party to the Contract, by constructing them as

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“white persons,” it also tries to make its victims, the objects of the Contract, into the “nonwhite sub persons” it specifies. This project requires labor at both ends, involving the development of a depersonizing conceptual apparatus through which whites must learn to see nonwhites and also, crucially, through which nonwhites must learn to see themselves. (1997, 87– 88)

The racial contract is maintained when non-Whites learn to see themselves through what Mills refers to as “the depersonizing conceptual apparatus.” The project of maintaining the line between personhood and subpersonhood relies on non-Whites seeing themselves as depersoned. Whites’ seeing non-Whites this way is important for the contract but not as crucial as trying to get non-Whites to see themselves as subpersons. The “Depersonizing Conceptual Apparatus” in Early Childhood Education Some may argue that connecting the denial of agency to children of color in the early grades to a global depersonizing conceptual apparatus is extreme. However, there are many programs, curriculum, professional development, and systems designed to keep children of color “in their place.” To discipline them. To make sure they receive a rigid, narrow, strict, task-oriented curriculum. To ensure that they are so busy with tasks that they cannot create or connect with the larger community. To ensure that their home languages are devalued or erased. To help children of color see reading, writing, and literacy as a learned, assessed skill rather than an act of empowerment. To ensure children of color are surveilled and restrained. To criminalize typical behavior if it comes from a child of color. In the world of early childhood education, the depersonizing conceptual apparatus operates as a false promise that if children or parents just do certain things, they will have access to the rights and privileges that wealthier White children enjoy in school. Schools do not teach children or parents to question this setup. Instead they provide programs that reinforce the racial contract. Companies that create narrow, scripted curricula make millions of dollars from taking agency away from children and teachers, the argument being that children of color need a simplistic curriculum, clear tasks, and highly structured environments to be successful in school. Many home visiting programs for families with young children are built on the idea that if parents talk more to their children in the way that White parents do, their child will know more words and do better in school. Districts purchase programs and curricula and hire consultants who carry deficit ideas about children and families into their work. This makes it possible for the racial contract to be

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characterized, as Mills writes, “as ‘consensual’ and ‘voluntaristic’ even for nonwhites” (1997, 89). The racial contract requires a colonization of the mind. Mills argues that just as lands were not considered societies (nor made subjects of social studies curriculum) until settled by White Europeans, minds are not considered fully functional until “settled” by White understandings of the world. Applying Mills’s theory of the racial contract to schooling, Zeus Leonardo writes, The mind also represents a territory, a cognitive space that is full for Whites and empty for people of color. It is part of the overall conceptual territory discovered by the Europeans. . . . It did not stop at the shores of the Pacific Ocean. They pushed to the last frontier of indigenous cognitive space. It became a policy of colonizing the mind of others, usually through the violence of education or its euphemism of reculturation: eradication.  .  .  . People of color’s cognitive space is discovered by Whites in order to be populated by white habits of mind. (2015, 90)

Seeing people of color’s cognitive space as needing to be populated by “white habits of mind” is not much different from insisting that children learn the historical educational habits of White children who can afford to be quiet and still, knowing that their general safety and protections are being taken care of by the larger society. In our study, most teachers and administrators told us that if children were better behaved, had strong vocabulary, were older, had better-educated parents, came from different neighborhoods, or had parents who were not immigrants, then they too could have active learning experiences and the enactment of their agency. Yet the children did not receive such experiences even when they were obedient, still, and silent.

developmental importance Just at the age when young children are learning about their role in society and their connection to the larger world, it is oppressive to teach them that learning happens through obedience or that strict adherence to a system created by and for White people is needed for learning, development, or academic success. The young children we interviewed learned to believe that the denial of their agency was the pathway to learning and that their segregation from the experiences Ms. Bailey’s class enjoyed was somehow deserved. Zeus Leonardo conceptualizes school as a place of specific cognitive contexts that enact the racial contract through the practices, orders, policies, and experiences offered to students. The racial contract, he writes, “is not defined

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solely by its power to exclude but through its ability to include or write into the contract how people of color are to be constituted as subjects of the agreement” (2015, 89). The violence of the racial contract lies in how schools work to get children, families, and communities to discount their power. Young children in our study understood learning as a process that required them to disassociate from their agency because learning with agency was deemed impossible. And yet we saw children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom expand their academic, social, cultural, and intellectual capabilities through the consistent enactment of their individual and collective agency. Freire believed that the purpose or end of education was to give people the space to engage in dialogue to reflect on their current situation and be able to act, improve, and change the oppressive situation in which they find themselves. Freire called this process of liberation concentização, the process in which individuals through dialogue realize how their lives are dehumanized and oppressed (Freire 2009, 67). Students should inform and participate in how and what they learn. Teaching is a mechanism to increase agency in order to increase capabilities. The learner is meant to acquire not just reading skills but the capability of reading, comprehending, and communicating meaningful ideas (to the learner) that will bring further agency and expanded capabilities. Freire explained this educational imperative multiple times in his writings. “I hope any readers will forgive my insistence, but I have to say it again: to teach is not to transfer the comprehension of the object to a student but to instigate the student, who is a knowing subject, to become capable of comprehending and of communicating what has been comprehended” (1998, 106). Just like in the racial contract, children and families who have faced and still face economic, racial, and linguistic injustices are blamed and burdened with changing in order to be seen as deserving of the privileges given to native-born monolingual English-speaking White children. In other words, “subpersons” are blamed for their lack of privilege and are tasked with changing to become more like persons so they can access that privilege. What makes this personhood– subpersonhood line palatable to well-intentioned people such as the educators in our study is a promise that with hard work, subpersons can move across the line into personhood. Lacking agency has to seem both acceptable and fixable through changing oneself. In the case of the young children we interviewed, teachers told us that if they made certain changes and improvements (being quiet, still, and compliant) they might have access to the privilege of dynamic and agentic learning. This promise of being able to cross over to personhood from subpersonhood by making specific changes turns out to always be false. When too many

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subpersons start crossing over to personhood, the line shifts and there is a new requirement for crossing over. Lighter skin. Learning English. Kindergarten. English-language classes. Less accent. Flashcards and educational videos. Reading programs for toddlers. Parent education classes. Going to a magnet school. Saying more words to one’s child. Technical degree. Bachelor’s degree. Graduate school. Haircuts and dress codes. Graduate study at a top school. Living in the suburbs. Pulling your pants up. Getting a tenuretrack position. None of these promises actually end up protecting people or allow them to cross over so as to enjoy full and unquestionable access to privilege. Even when former “subpersons” come to be considered persons, are they considered full persons with full privileges by the systems that created such a line in the first place?

an epistemology of ignorance Even though false promises and the personhood– subpersonhood line keep shifting, people (regardless of positionality on either side) are conditioned to see the Line as natural, logical, and expected. The naturalness of the Line is part of what Cheryl Harris calls “settled expectations” (1993, 1713): takenfor-granted disparities in who controls lives. Over time, these unjust and violent expectations become policy, which further embeds them in normalcy. “Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privilege, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated” (Harris 1993, 1713 – 14). Whiteness is a property made up of privileges and rights that “others” or non-Whites must earn and strive for, in order to get what most White people receive with no effort. Mills warns that the more someone notices and acts counter to the Line, the less successful they will be, because success and access to rights and privileges can be and often are centered on accepting the rules of the personhood– subpersonhood line and the contract that must be signed to cross. “Thus on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology; an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (Mills 1997, 18; see also Mills 2007).

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Cognitive dissonance makes discriminatory action more powerful and harder to trace because it seems natural and universal instead of something that controls one group more than another. This is especially true for those already positioned as persons. A simple logic such as “young children need to read to be successful, so they should read before we can let them enact their agency” seems harmless. Unless the logic is unraveled. The more people can be kept from thinking about whether this logic applies to all children or just some, the more undetected the line. Mills refers to this dissonance as an epistemology of ignorance, a form of morally false knowledge that parades as knowingness. Mills warns all those who want to untangle institutions and systems from the racial contract (the agreement to maintain White supremacy) or what he has also referred to as the “domination contract” (Mills 2015) that the epistemology of ignorance must be undone if we are to have any hope. This means that people need to see their own cognitive dysfunction or the ways in which they accept a logic of some people earning what others receive freely. In the case of very young children who learn through their experiences, this epistemology is primarily experiential. Having a certain kind of experience with learning that is rigid and narrow while others are granted an experience that includes noise, movement, time, agency, and community sustains the opaqueness of an epistemology of ignorance. There are also curricular aspects in terms of representation in materials and content (Yosso 2005) as well as in the hidden curriculum that even in the early schooling years values White contributions over those made by people of color (Apple 2004 and 2012). The hidden curriculum, as Noah De Lissovoy (2012) points out, is a violation, a violent act of power. “Power,” he writes, “ceaselessly raises up and tears down, alternately developing economies, identities, and social meanings and then laying them low through abandonment or active destruction” (2012, 464). The hidden curriculum impacts subject formation within the personhood– subpersonhood construction as some receive experiences toward formation of an agentic being while others are denied them. Undoing the Epistemology of Ignorance Undoing the epistemology of ignorance for young children means offering them active kinds of learning experiences with no requirement that they earn or “deserve” the experience. It means asserting that agency is an important part of learning even if this goes against the drive for efficiency and trained human capital. Learning activities at school should sustain agency in culturally relevant forms that make sense in different contexts, whether that is asking

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questions without raising a hand or observing peers or participating or helping a classmate without being asked. How we treat children has a significant imprint on how they will think about themselves as capable or dependent, as followers or leaders. Can children enact their agency to move around, make noise, influence their learning, have time to act, and build community in ways that make sense to them and honor the communities they care about? We have found that teachers, administrators, and researchers most successfully work toward undoing our epistemologies of ignorance through our own experience, just as it is with children. Professional development alone aimed at changing practice or altering discriminatory attitudes is not strong enough to locate the line and undo the influence of White supremacy in our teaching and learning. We have found that teachers learn and trust what children are able to do with their agency only when they see it in action. Finding ways to increase agency for young children helps educators see the range of skills and knowledge children have and expand through such an allowance. Consciously and committedly making space and time, as administrators and teachers, for young children to counter racist low expectations requires action and understanding of pedagogy, learning, and the ways of White supremacy. Teachers are often surprised by what children can do when actions are not prescribed and bodies are not so strictly patrolled and controlled. They get to observe learning unfold as children work with one another. They usually find joy in seeing children form a group to study rocks when they had no idea the children cared about rocks. Increasing student agency has helped teachers address sexist or racist or ableist attitudes they did not know they had when they realize they were surprised (as happened in one workshop where we showed the girls working on the volcano outside) that girls are fascinated by constructing volcanoes or want to classify all of the plants on the school grounds. Teachers are surprised to see parents sending in ideas and offering expertise when they communicate the kinds of projects children are working on in their classrooms. Teachers are surprised to see children with Down syndrome or autism find ways to intellectually and socially contribute to the group. These surprises and becoming acquainted or reacquainted with the many capabilities of children and families can bring joy back to teaching and increase the sense of community in classrooms and schools. It may be easy and convenient to blame educators for the segregation by experience that we witnessed. And yet everyone we interviewed was and is, along with us as researchers, part of a much larger system of making some earn what others receive relatively freely. Children of color typically have to earn the privilege of learning in culturally relevant ways and in ways that lead to increased freedom and self-rule. And so do their teachers.

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As researchers, we have had to (and continue to) undo our ignorance. We were very surprised at the depth of knowledge and care young children gave one another when they could enact their agency. We knew that agency was important, but we were ignorant of the sophistication and creativity children would demonstrate when they could enact their agency. We greatly underestimated their ability to form communities when given time and space to call out and move around. Ms. Bailey’s classroom helped us locate and take notice of children’s capabilities as well as better understand how contexts can deny or support the demonstration of those capabilities. We have tried our best to communicate what we have learned from Ms. Bailey’s classroom in this book. We have also learned that this process of undoing is never complete. Unsigning the Racial Contract When making decisions about curriculum, research, programming, and consulting at leadership levels (classroom, school, district, state), it is imperative to know where people stand in their knowledge and respect for families and communities. It is critical to know whether their work (programs, curriculum, consulting) maintains the personhood–subpersonhood line. Do they or do we limit agency? Do we make people earn the right to what privileged people already have in their schooling? Can our work be used to erase or fight against the personhood– subpersonhood line? This does not necessarily mean being resistant and forceful at every turn. It could mean thinking about whether our actions bring children of color closer to agency or farther from it in the short and long term. Any justifications for the denial of agency maintains the personhood– subpersonhood line. The process of fighting against deficit ideas that are portrayed as truth requires what Yosso terms resistant capital. Resistant capital is the accumulation of the “knowledge and skills cultivated through behavior that challenges inequality” (2006, 49). Yosso’s understanding of resistant capital came from a group of Chicana mothers who met at an elementary school. They acknowledged that it was difficult to fight against “society’s distorted messages” and teach their daughters to value themselves. Resistant capital was a way to think about what they could pass on to their daughters to help them not give into what society was saying they were worth. Fabienne Doucet’s work with immigrant parents offers strong examples of families using resistance as agency to put distance between individualization at school and the cultural, collective sensibilities in their homes (2011, 2710). Many parents in our study reported never having seen the inside of their children’s classrooms. At one school,

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parents told of classrooms that were locked from the inside so they could not enter (see Colegrove 2019). Communities Fighting against the Depersonizing Apparatus in Early Schooling Many communities have a long history of helping young children counter racist, limiting, and “othering” educational experiences (A. Brown 2010). Much of this work has attempted to change the experience of the child by offering challenging supplemental learning experiences or helping young children stand up for their knowledge and abilities so they can be seen as deserving and ready for more sophisticated learning practices. During the Chicano/a rights movement of the 1960s, community leaders in a deeply segregated and racist Texas worried that young children were being dismissed or turned away from school because they did not know any English words. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) created an early childhood education program referred to as “The Little School of 400” whose mission was to offer young children four hundred English words that could help them navigate everyday life and help their families. This program would go on to inspire the bilingual education act, Title I, Head Start, and the Texas Child Migrant Program (Barrera 2006; Quintanilla 1976; Wisneski 2012). A few years later, movement leaders in Los Angeles gathered Mexican American high school students to think against and counter dominant infrastructures that contributed to educational disparity (Bernal 2013). This reeducation process led to the LA walkouts of 1968 that protested educational disparities across Los Angeles public schools. As a more contemporary example, Academia Cuauhtli in Austin, Texas, is a language and culture revitalization Saturday school for bilingual Mexicanorigin fourth-graders (aged 9 – 11) that is rooted in southwestern borderland Tejano history and created in partnership with community elders, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, and the local school district and university. Angela Valenzuela (2017), the noted scholar activist and a founding organizer of Academia Cuauhtli, explains that the program’s vision is to “honor our community’s cultural heritage, foster a social justice consciousness, and reclaim our collective identities in pursuit of educational freedom” (Texas Center for Education Policy 2019). The program was designed to target a specific and serious moment of oppression in the learning lives of young children. Teachers felt that fourth grade was an important grade to target because it is when too many children stop speaking Spanish

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and start disconnecting from their Latinx histories and communities. This dismayed the teachers who had instructed them bilingually throughout their early years (Valenzuela 2017, 910). Just as Academia Cuauhtli aims to strengthen children’s ties to their heritage to counter what they will be told at school, many communities continuously work to reeducate children out of the racist ways in which their histories, languages, and contributions have been dismissed or ignored. Post Brown v. Board of Education, the Black Panthers created school programs to offer African American communities (and oppressed peoples) food, health care, and education (Portoti 2017). The Black Panthers’ free breakfast program started because some of the leaders read that young children who ate a good breakfast would do better in school (Portoti 2014). They founded the Oakland Community Learning Center (later renamed the Oakland Community School), where children learned math, reading, writing, and social studies rooted in Black history and an empowered, community-oriented pedagogy (Murch 2010). In archived footage of the school, children interview Black Panther Leaders, talk noisily in the halls and cafeteria, and ask lots of questions (Oakland Community Learning Center 2015). In the 1960s John Churchville, then with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created a preschool in Philadelphia focused on reading and math in which teachers helped children as young as three stand up to their White teachers who tried to tell them that their answers or ideas were wrong. Churchville’s idea (which would eventually become the Freedom Library Day School) was to offer academic content in a straightforward way while giving children the emotional armor they would need to survive the racist educational experiences they would eventually receive (Churchville 1973). In an oral history interview many years later, Churchville explained that he first started to teach math to older kids, but they were already starting to believe what their White teachers told them. And so he thought, “Let me start with some preschool kids who haven’t been to school yet and haven’t been corrupted by the terrible and egregious education system” (Churchville 2011). Likewise, the Freedom Schools created in Mississippi educated and reeducated still segregated Black youth in ways that countered their experience in public schools. The curriculum centered on questions and critical thinking in order to move away from the rote memorization lessons children were offered at school (Cobb 1991). Robert Moses’s Algebra Project continues to teach math within Black communities in ways that are challenging, critical, and preparatory for college (Moses and Cobb 2002). In each of these cases, young children’s educational experiences were taken

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seriously and reconceptualized as being important for forming critically conscious, capable advocates for their communities and people who could be better positioned for jobs, careers, and influence. And in each case, the curriculum and pedagogy that was offered was not narrow nor compliance-oriented. Children learned to question White supremacy and their positionality in society as well as to be proactive in their own learning. These opportunities to question, initiate, use real-world experiences, and be proactive are still limited for students of color, just as the children in our study demonstrated. Rethinking Children’s Capabilities and Deficit Thinking In these examples of community-led educational experiences meant to counter real-life racism and oppression, children had a variety of pedagogies, materials, and activities. In other words, agency looked different depending on the context, cultural values, community needs, etc. In all of the examples, the operating principle was the children’s ability to think and act in empowered ways outside the heavy influence of a White supremacist ideology that treated them and thought of them as inferior. Children we interviewed went to school in a variety of schooling environments, most of which considered themselves relatively progressive— if not pedagogically, then politically. And yet deficit thinking deeply informed decision making and distracted from the harm that came from “an educational system that only values high-stakes tests as a barometer of school and student achievement” (Valente and Collins 2016, 10). Deficit discourses surround the learning experiences of children of color and then “blame the victim rather than holding oppressive and inequitable schooling arrangements culpable” (Valencia and Black 2002, 81). Thea Abu El-Haj, Anne Ríos-Rojas, and Reva Jaffe-Walter (2017) point out that progressivist spaces struggle the most to see how racist deficit discourses are a part of their institutions (see also Jaffe-Walter 2016). Learner identity that is offered without community-rooted concerns and objectives continues a White-dominant enterprise. We agree with De Lissovoy (2015) that “radical senses of agency and equality in education” are needed and that they start with “a recognition of the presence and integrity of human beings against their violation of power” (2015, 6). Offerings of active, engaged, agentic pedagogy have to be rooted in both a belief that children and their communities are smart and capable and a well-connected insider view of the challenges communities are facing at the moment. If work engages in deficit discourses at any level, then it cannot reverse disparity. Any program, curriculum, policy, or strategy that begins with or is rooted in deficit ideas about families and communities cannot remove the personhood–

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subpersonhood line. Fixing children or families, even when intended to be helpful, fails to remove the line, because deficit logic sustains it. The only way to remove the line is to build educational experiences that begin with full privileges and the idea that all children deserve such learning experiences. How can we offer young children high expectations and sophisticated learning practices without the racialized burden of having to change who they are? Self-Rule and Pedagogy Pedagogy should be embedded within the realities of marginalized peoples. Communities must play a role in determining what they need and want from education. Agency as an offering or tool of pedagogy is not prescriptive nor an opportunity to speak for or control others, even if with a progressive agenda, because as Freire insists, “it is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world” (2009, 96). Bell hooks (2014) argues that trying to find out what children and families need and want from education is necessary to actual learning and requires a dialogue. Teaching and learning in ways that move toward agency, then, require agency. For dialogue to be productive, those with power as educators, researchers, policymakers, or the public pushing against the status quo would have to see students as having and deserving agency. Pedagogy is best when it reflects students’ views and their situations. Even at young ages we saw this work effectively in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. There was both agency and obedience; progressivism and dialogue about real-life experiences; respect and questioning. Children did not do what they wanted all the time. Ms. Bailey did not try to control them all the time. There was a balance built upon Ms. Bailey’s desire to understand the children and offer them (as much as she could) the curriculum, experiences, and skills that were meaningful to them. And she was constantly trying to figure out what those might be by observing, listening, discussing, and trying things out herself. When both students and educators root the learning process in the students’ views and desires, the result is coinvestigation. In educational spaces operating as coinvestigation, Freire explains, “the students— no longer docile listeners— are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and

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re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own” (2009, 81). As Freire (2009) explains, the co-investigator relationship produces culturally relevant agency rooted in the actual view from and situation of the community, as the students are considered not from a deficit view but from the view of their lives and what they are interested in as intellectual beings. Being able to develop with a sense of agency makes us “fuller social persons” (Sen 1999, 41) and expands the capabilities we can use toward living the life that we want and value. “Expanding freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with— and influencing— the world in which we live” (Sen 1999, 14 – 15). Affirming the agency of young children at school also affirms that they deserve to develop what they need to influence our world, to improve it for the sake of their own communities and for all of us. Removing the Personhood– Subpersonhood Line with Agency Our work suggests that there are ways to remove the personhood– subpersonhood and student– substudent line from early schooling. Removing the line means seeing all children as deserving sophisticated, active learning practices and then offering culturally sustaining versions of such practices without making children earn them. Agency in a variety of forms is a requirement for pedagogy that removes the personhood– subpersonhood line. When agency is used for development (that is, to expand capabilities), children do not just learn literacy and math skills, historical facts, or how to sit quietly. They also learn how to design, problem-solve, experiment, organize, and defend. What would early schooling be like in the US if the system was built upon the expansion of capabilities rather than on the personhood– subpersonhood line? Ensuring that agency is a part of children’s everyday learning experience at school requires different changes depending on the context. Agency looks different depending on politics, cultural strengths, desires, and available resources. Centering Ms. Bailey’s classroom on children’s enactment of agency in ways that were respectful and culturally sustaining to the communities she served and belonged to herself led to an expansion of capabilities for the children and for her, as a teacher. Over the course of this book, we have detailed a number of capabilities expanded by the children in Ms. Bailey’s class because they could regularly enact their agency. These capabilities included being able to

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• ask questions that deepen knowledge • engage in intellectual discussions • observe • listen • clarify information • lead • respond to other’s needs • share knowledge • act on curiosity • collaborate

• create models • tell stories • welcome new participants • share knowledge • teach • pursue an interest deeply • fail without giving up • initiate • adapt • follow interests • utilize others’ strengths • share endeavors

• • • • • • • • •

offer feedback take charge of learning work with diverse group learn from families and community members connect to diverse histories resolve conflicts translate between two languages respond to others’ questions build community

In Ms. Bailey’s classroom, this was how children used their agency. Agency was the mechanism to expand the capabilities of young children. Increasing or supporting children’s agency in order to begin removing the personhood– subpersonhood line from classrooms begins with looking for ways in which children can enact their agency in various aspects of daily schooling life including curriculum and content, environment, pedagogy, and identity.

agency within curriculum/content If children enact their agency with the content and curriculum, they will be able to influence what they are being taught and direct the process, at least partially. Ms. Bailey’s views of and about children and families manifested through her pedagogy. Jurow and Creighton argue that we need more work that shows teachers’ use of children’s ideas for learning, not just teachers who value or validate. “If we want students to learn to think in flexible, creative, and disciplined ways, it is important to study teaching that not only acknowledges the value of students’ ideas, but also uses them as a resource for furthering their learning” (2005, 276). Children have ideas, and they can use these ideas to learn. They can formulate inquiries, plan out how to answer questions, create a model, or choose how to demonstrate their knowledge. They can have freedom to try out different ways to figure out their question. They can determine what questions they want to answer and how. Children can choose the books they read— even if those decisions are within specific reading levels or genres. Children could have open access to books that help them find content even if above or below their “reading level.” Children can choose the materials

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they use to demonstrate their knowledge. They can choose topics to study and have consistent time to pursue their knowledge on their own terms in the ways that make sense and are exciting to them. When young children in early childhood settings are presented with a curriculum that is engaging and centers on their experiences, they can develop freedom, social responsibility, and problem solving (Genishi et al. 2001). Teachers like Ms. Bailey, who tend to focus on the group and not the individual, emphasize cooperation and the importance of collective talking. In this way they create a curriculum in which learning is understood as a social event (Foster 1993). Ms. Bailey valued her students’ voices and experiences and so included them as part of the curriculum (Milner et al. 2019). She welcomed children to share their stories, cultural values, and traditions and use their language (Kaomea 2005).

agency within environment Environments provide the relationships and the context for children enacting their agency. An environment in which children can engage and connect is an opportunity for capability expansion as children have a variety of experiences and entry points into learning and many opportunities for relationships with people and the living world around them. Children may be able to choose where they are during certain activities, who they want to work with, and what kinds of knowledge they will seek. Walls may display children’s creations and versions of content knowledge instead of manufactured outsider knowledge purchased through boxed curriculum or teacher supply stores. Children may organize themselves and their materials in ways that feel good. They can negotiate conflict that arises from such freedom in a collective space. They can work and help one another through their own initiative as appropriate to the cultural values and power realities of the space. Ms. Bailey resisted the traditional ideologies of restraining children of color or controlling them within their environments with materials and space. She refigured (Nxumalo 2015) the classroom environment by allowing children to move around, to seek and give help, look for information, and ask questions of her and of objects and materials around them. In her classroom, children chose where to work and how to use the spaces and materials. Children developed ongoing relationships with the classroom space, finding favorite materials and spaces and then caring for them without specific jobs or assigned roles. Bang et al. (2015) argue that children gain a cognitive benefit from having a variety of experiences and relationships with the environment, espe-

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cially the natural world. Rather than center research and learning on what can be done in or to nature or what can be taught about nature, Bang and colleagues offer a model of collaboration and caring centered in indigenous communities’ relationship to the land, including urban and inside spaces. These relationships can be (and are for many) foundational to how learning works. Bang et al. illuminate the many “interactional partners” (2015, 303) that children potentially have in their educational worlds if the partners are seen inclusively and relationally (instead of as a dominant or all-knowing force) to the world around them. Taking young children outside or spending time looking at turtle shells or dead fish is learning about the natural world. Holding ladybugs to observe and protect them from adults or children who might try to squish them is learning through relationships and agency to pursue a life of caring and interaction. Nxumalo (2019) argues that early childhood education too often creates experiences that are reminiscent of colonial relationships to people and land, rather than reciprocal and caring relationships through which much is learned, taught, and experienced collectively. Medin and Bang (2014) refer to learning within such relationships as “relational epistemologies” and suggest that families, communities, and routines outside of school may offer many more examples of forming relationships with the environment as a means of learning.

agency within pedagogy If children can enact their agency, they will have many conversations with their neighbors. They can ask questions of their peers and their teachers. They have time and space to observe others and think through topics and tests. There are ways for children to work together spontaneously or share new ideas with the whole class. Children are encouraged to listen to one another, and teachers are willing to change their plans if student interest in something different is high. Teachers can share their own stories and encourage the class to share theirs orally among peers in informal conversation and as a class in more formal lesson activities. They can be encouraged to share their stories in writing with and without models, depending on the needs and variety desired in any given lesson or standard. Ms. Bailey thought carefully about how much agency to offer the children in her classroom. While there was some agency in regard to content (Ms. Bailey nor the children could enact their agency fully to choose content), there was also a variety of options for how children learned content. They used books, online resources, one another, trusted adults, family members, the

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land and living things around the school, materials inside the classroom, materials from home, experts from the community, and Ms. Bailey to learn. The relational element of pedagogy reflected their own ideas about collective, collaborative learning. When children could enact their agency to learn, they almost always chose to learn with others. Pedagogy can reflect children’s ideas about how to relate to others. Pedagogy can also reflect a desire for children to have multiple entry points into their learning. The variety of learning mechanisms include listening, writing, speaking, storytelling, memorizing, experimenting, observing, trying something out, and reading. In Ms. Bailey’s experiences, the lessons and school curriculum plans she used or was required to use often called for one particular pedagogical mechanism, and then she did the work to come up with more ways the children might learn or direct some part of the experience. Funds of knowledge work (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005) demonstrates the need to broaden content as well as pedagogical variety so that cultural variability can be accounted for in children’s daily learning lives at school. What content is taught and how that content is taught are linked, particularly in schooling worlds that threaten language and identity. YazzieMintz’s 2011 study of Native American early childhood teachers exemplifies teachers’ difficult task of managing pedagogical expectations with the need for community and language strength through relationships and talk. She writes of one teacher’s willingness to adhere to standardized content specifications but not the pedagogical ones. “Teacher conversations almost always center on the status of their Native language and the fear that if they fail at their work, their entire nation’s identity and culture is at stake” (323). She goes on to quote one of the teachers who privilege this kind of pedagogical decision making for children’s agency in the name of cultural preservation. You know, it’s not like a typical public school, you know how in public school you have to be quiet. We try not to make them be quiet as much. If they’re gettin’ real loud, yes we do. We want them to be talking because that’s the only way that they’re going to get use [sic] to talking. So we let them help each other, let them converse with each other with their work. And when we have a test we usually sit them by themselves, but they’re still allowed to ask us questions. But that is our main thing is to let them converse with each other. (323)

Agency as a pedagogical stance allows children to talk, work together, and learn in ways that are more natural than ones written by and for outsiders. When children have a role to play in how they learn, even if it simply means talking to one another and working together when they want to, educators

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and other children learn about them and their interests and skills, as well as the cultural variability and resources they bring from their homes and communities.

agency within identity In a classroom that supports agency, children may be able to express who they are in multiple ways and consciously reject negative or stereotypical views offered by White supremacy (Urrieta and Noblit 2018). Children are expected and encouraged to be many things at once, a combination and celebration of their gender, race, nationality, interests, hobbies, characteristics, languages, family backgrounds, community traditions, and personality. Children and teachers notice and speak openly about the value of difference and diversity. Children’s families and communities can bring strengths to the classroom through stories, materials, presence, and ideas. Ms. Bailey’s ideas of identity fueled her desire to create a classroom where children felt respected and part of a broader community. In one of our formal interviews, she said, “I think I have always wanted to have children bring who they are and their culture to the classroom.” She listened to children’s stories, ideas, and perspectives. She valued the experiential knowledge (Solorzano 1997) they brought from home. Even though the school was an Englishinstruction campus, bilingual students in her class were welcome to use their home language, and she embraced and celebrated those moments. Ms. Bailey’s cultural and linguistic practices supported a strong sense of identity and enhanced relationships among the students, teachers, and parents (Alvarez 2018; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005). Her approach to teaching was, as Flores and Rosa write, “a powerful shift from teaching students to follow rules of appropriateness to working with them as they struggle to imagine and enact alternative, more inclusive realities” (2015, 168). Children’s multiple identities are a source of knowledge and skills (Martínez 2018). If children can bring a variety of identities into their classrooms and schools, they offer classroom and school communities multiple ways to think about learning. Ramón Martínez (2018) argues that this allowance calls on children to draw upon their “linguistic repertoires” to focus on their strengths and what they can do, rather than what they cannot do (see also Orellana, Martínez, and Martínez 2014 ). It is difficult sometimes to know how to support young children’s identities when they come from difficult circumstances that overlap with immigration, racism, homelessness, incarceration, or toxic stress. And yet these

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realities— even when they emerge as trauma—must be taken seriously. Travis Wright’s (2013; also Wright et al. 2019) work with communities experiencing homelessness makes the case that curriculum and pedagogy benefit children when they build on children’s resilience and educators are open to listening and not dismissing children’s “messy lives” (2013, 40). Their identities and lives are valued, normalized, and positioned as sources of knowledge and strength in ways that children choose and control. Teacher Agency and the Personhood– Subpersonhood Line To a great extent Ms. Bailey could enact her agency to influence and make decisions about her classroom toward the expansion of capabilities for herself and for the children and families she worked with. Ms. Bailey and her principal collectively could and did make decisions that led to the working conditions that supported children’s agency. Ms. Bailey decided to observe the boys at the fish tank before correcting them. She decided to ask Pablo a question rather than tell him to stop. She decided to let them research on the computer. She decided to agree with Pablo’s question. She decided to ask them about materials and bring in a cup for them. She decided not to get upset when they emptied the marble jar. She decided to give them consistent time to work on the rainbow project and let them go all around the classroom during project time and even outside to figure out the sunlight. She decided not to give them specific instructions about the experiment or show them a video or tell them how to control the sunlight. The principal supported Ms. Bailey’s agency to an extent. She decided to let us do research in Ms. Bailey’s class. She decided to grant Ms. Bailey and her partner teacher, Ms. Leslie, a one-year reprieve on their students’ academic performance so that Ms. Bailey could not be penalized if, because of the research with us, her benchmark scores were low. We would take the blame if that happened. The school offered Ms. Bailey autonomy in developing her eight-week and year-long curriculum plans. She also could determine her own daily schedule, with the exception of when her lunch, physical education, music, and art times would be scheduled. So Ms. Bailey could take her time getting to the carpet area or transitioning from one subject to another. Although she felt pressure to be efficient, Ms. Bailey was able to enact her agency and support children’s agency in large part because her school generally supported her efforts (even if teachers and administrators disagreed with them). While the focus of this book has been on children, teacher agency is also

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important to understand the segregation by experience in early childhood education (Palmer and Martínez 2013). Professionalization and standardization have made it difficult for teachers— particularly newer teachers, teachers of color, and immigrant teachers— to lead classrooms in ways they believe are best for children and families (see Adair, Tobin, and Arzubiaga 2012). Recent studies suggest that the testing pressures may not be the only cause of teachers’ leaving the profession— workplace conditions, control, negativity, disengagement, and lack of autonomy that teachers experience as a result of such pressures are other culprits (Priestley et al. 2012; Simon and Johnson 2015; Zinsser et al. 2019). Working conditions have also been found to be the primary reason for Head Start and Early Head Start teachers’ leaving the profession (Jeon and Wells 2018). It seems that in schools with higher test scores, the working conditions are better and include more teacher agency. Complicating teacher and student agency is that many teachers leave the profession before their experience would help them offer agentic learning experiences to children and care less about compliance (Borman and Dowling 2008). In a study by Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin (2015), experienced teachers in three countries were asked to watch films of their teaching from twenty years in the past. The participants had similar responses to seeing early representations of their teaching. Even though they were in different cultural contexts with varying political and pedagogical autonomy, they all thought that they spoke too much, controlled too much, and intervened too much. They all accused their young teacher selves of not thinking enough about children’s progress or children’s abilities to make decisions for themselves. With greater experience, the teachers gave children more agency. Agency manifested in many culturally distinct forms, but children were able to influence and make more decisions about conflict, work, play, and interactions because their teachers knew from their own experiences over time that the children could do it (Hayashi and Tobin 2015; Tobin and Hayashi 2017). The teachers we interviewed as well as many we have observed and worked with over the past ten years have had to “earn” the enactment of their agency, just like the children we interviewed. Earning agency typically happens if and when children in their classrooms do well on tests. The drive for teachers to “earn” positive working conditions— including the use of their agency— may seem logical. We don’t want terrible teachers on the loose with full autonomy to do what they want. And yet the control and patrol of teachers has meant that teachers are not expanding their own capabilities in any way consistent with self-rule, agency, or their own real lives.

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Implications for Teacher Education Teacher education is a place of possibility where novice teachers can develop the essential dispositions and skills to support children’s agency. The first and most immediate space that teacher educators can impact is program coursework and experiences. Teacher education programs that prepare teachers for early childhood and elementary settings need to have specific coursework focused on young learners, and, within those, an analysis of pedagogies that create or shut down opportunities for children’s agency. Understanding the impact of pedagogy on children’s agency is critical for new teachers as well as experienced teachers who would like to increase children’s enactment of their agency at school. One possibility would be to take the often assigned “child-study” project and ask students to document how and when children influenced and made decisions about their learning and what kinds of capabilities they demonstrated or expanded in those moments. Practicing deep observation of children with agency in mind shifts the novice teachers’ gaze toward the children’s capabilities and a strengths-based approach instead of only paying pedagogical attention to teachers. Further, observing children in real time can illuminate how the classroom environment— physical and social— affects children’s agency. Teacher education programs need to consider the dimension of children’s agency when they are selecting clinical field placements (NCATE 2010), at both the individual classroom and school levels. At the individual classroom level, we advocate working with teachers who provide agentic learning experiences for children— in other words, we advocate for teacher education to seek out classrooms and schools that are consistent (e.g., Cochran-Smith 1991) with agency-promoting practices. Knowing that clinical placements can be difficult, we also advocate for other ways to learn about agentic practices in early childhood settings. Deborah Loewenberg Ball and David Cohen (1999) argue that novice teachers learn in and from classroom praxis, which is less about passively watching teaching in classrooms in real time than about the documentation and analysis of practice. One way to do this is through film examples that highlight children’s agency. By showing examples of agentic learning environments and engaging novice teachers in an analysis of these practices, the possibilities of reflective praxis are more likely. Learning through film helps novice teachers not just to deconstruct the practices in the film but to imagine possibilities for enacting agentic practices in their own classrooms. If preservice teachers consistently see and experience schools in which children have to earn the use of their agency, they will find it difficult to cre-

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ate spaces in which children enact agency as part of their everyday learning. If they see only prisonlike lines in the hallways, silent communal spaces, assigned seats in the cafeteria, noise level systems, and strict behavior expectations, this will be what keeps happening even if instructors in teacher education programs spend considerable time decrying such practices. Teachers cannot create, build, or do what they do not know (Howard 2016). We believe that normalizing children’s having to earn the ability to influence and make decisions about their learning has significantly contributed to the ongoing segregation by experience for many children of color. Classrooms and schools that do not regularly support young children’s ability to influence and make decisions about their learning should not be considered high quality even if they have strong test scores. Education as an institution concerned with development plays a significant role in supporting agency and, Sen argues, should be evaluated accordingly. “Not only do institutions contribute to our freedoms, their roles can be sensibly evaluated in the light of their contributions to our freedom” (Sen 1999, 142). If classrooms, teachers, administrators, and schools work hard to control children’s bodies and minds and that is how they get good test scores, it should not count. Like Sen, we believe that institutions should be evaluated based on their contributions to freedom and agency. Finally, we join scholars advocating for greater presence of community knowledge and voice in teacher education (e.g., Guillen and Zeichner 2018; Zeichner, Payne, and Brayko 2015). When novice teachers learn to work in solidarity with families and communities (Zeichner et al. 2016), they learn to center communities’ capabilities and then have more positive assumptions about the potential of the children they are teaching. As we have learned the hard way in this study, how teachers and administrators think about families and communities impacts their willingness to let children enact their agency at school. Revisiting Mary and the Volcano Throughout the past seven years of participation observation, filming, focus group interviews, data analysis, and writing, we have returned over and over to Mary and how excited she was about volcanoes. We are still amazed thinking about how Ms. Bailey stopped what she was doing and opened up the inquiry to the whole class. The children’s enthusiasm combined with Ms. Bailey’s willingness to set aside her lesson plan fundamentally changed the year for Mary, for her classmates, for Ms. Bailey, and for us as researchers. Up until that point, the idea of agency seemed important yet abstract and dif-

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ficult to envision in practice. We could not figure out ways to think about agency as a collective force or as a teaching and learning process. Watching the volcano project unfold made agency less abstract and more practical for equitable learning in the early grades. And we learned that agency for young children brings joy, challenge, and community. This should not be reserved for children who can afford it or children who are seen to be “ready for it.” After the year was over and we were showing the film to parents, we spent time alone with Mary’s parents. They had a lot to say about the day Mary came home excited about volcanoes. Mary’s mother, Gloria, told us that Mary had come home thrilled and talkative, explaining to her and her other children the project they were going to start in class. “They were going to do a project of a volcano at school, and she told me all of the children’s names and everyone was going to bring something.” Gloria asked her daughter, “¿Tú quieres hacerlo? [Do you want to do it?]” and then “¿Cómo lo quieres hacer? [How are you going to do it?]” As Gloria explained, Agarró un papel, o sea no escribe tampoco así bien y puso que Play-Doh y que cartón y ella puso todo. “También necesito de ese color rosa,” y ella estaba diciendo todo. Y dice, “¿Tienes de ese polvito que una vez tomaste cuando te sentías mal del estómago, ‘sal de uvas’?” [She grabbed a piece of paper even though she doesn’t even write well. She wrote Play-Doh and cardboard and she wrote everything. [imitating Mary’s voice] “Also I need this pink color.” She was telling us everything. And then she says, “Do you have the powder that you took one time when your stomach hurt, ‘sal de uvas’?”]

Surprised by and proud of what they were seeing in Mary, Gloria and her husband took her to the dollar store. Being so excited about academic content that she wanted to research and create something on her own changed Mary. Her mother told us, “Entonces ella fue como, casi fue más de ella, disposición de ella, que dijo, ‘Yo lo quiero llevar,’ y nosotros le dijimos, ‘Vamos a comprar lo que necesitas.’ [Then she was like, almost was more like herself, her disposition, as she said, ‘I want to take it (the model volcano),’ and we said, ‘Let’s go buy what you need.’]” Mary’s mother and father both expressed gratitude for what Mary had learned in the class. They thought that such an engaged and relationship-oriented class helped Ms. Bailey recognize Mary’s strengths and interests and made it possible for Mary to pursue inquiry that was meaningful to her. A ella le gusta mucho estar investigando piedras, animales, de todo. Llega a la casa bien emocionada de “qué vamos a hacer.” Dice que quiere hacer algo del cuerpo humano y que quiere investigar de cómo se forman las piedras.

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Me estaba preguntando “¿Y cómo se forman las piedras? ¿y hay de colores?” Y ella tiene una colección de piedritas en la casa y sí me gusta. Me gusta como lo están haciendo, porque pienso que de esa forma ella va a aprender, eso le va a ayudar a ella para que pueda tener una mejor comprensión para cuando vaya creciendo no va a ser tan difícil. [She really likes to investigate rocks, animals, everything. She arrives home really excited about “what we are going to do” [at school]. She told me that she wants to do something about the human body and that she wants to research how rocks form. She was asking me, “How do rocks form? And are there colors in the rocks?” And she has a collection of little rocks in the house. I like this. I like how they are doing it, because I think that she is going to learn. This is going to help her so that she can have a better comprehension so that when she is growing up, it will not be so difficult for her.]

Inquiry, made possible through Mary’s agency to choose a topic of interest, appealed to Mary’s parents. The possibility of agency and the expansion of capabilities are routinely denied to young children of color going to school in the US. All children deserve and are ready for such experiences. Mary’s mother agreed: “I think that many people start with their dreams when they are little: ‘I want to be an astronaut.’ ‘I want to be a scientist.’ They are growing up, and as parents, we should support them in any way possible. Because they depend on us so that they can be good people in the future.” Children deserve and are ready for learning experiences that make dreams a reality— that remove the personhood– subpersonhood line. We need a system that recognizes strengths and capabilities and that is focused on expansion, not compliance and control. We stand behind Genishi and Dyson’s (2009) argument that “providing a diversity of activities, joining in and helping children accomplish their intentions, and also providing space and time for children to collaborate, converse, and otherwise control the medium— in these ways we are more apt to learn what our children know and can do” (2009, 108). Learning what our children know and can do is the joyful result of watching children enact their agency at school when it is supported and sustainable. Opportunities for such learning experiences should not be limited to a select few. All young children deserve and are capable of handling agency that leads to capability expansion for individuals and communities. The segregation by experience that continues in much of the schooling system in the US requires committed attention to the types of experiences young children have at school in the early years. Agency is personhood. Attempts to severely limit agency at school operationalize the racial contract. For something to be truly educational, the “processes and outcomes ought to enhance freedom, agency and well-being”

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(Walker and Unterhalter 2007, 15). Education as a process of development “requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom” (Sen 1999, 3). Insisting that children earn or prove they deserve the enactment of their agency is a major source of unfreedom and a continuation of historic oppression along racial lines. Mills writes that in the racial contract “it is possible to get away with doing things to subpersons that one could not do to persons” (1997, 56). We believe that young children’s enacting their agency at school is about “fighting for recognition as human beings” (Malcolm X 1990, 50). The children in Ms. Bailey’s class collectively show what is possible when the personhood– subpersonhood line is removed from early-grade classrooms and all children are engaged as full persons. Seeing what is possible as opposed to what actually ends up happening to most young children of color during the early years of schooling should give us pause— and, hopefully, some fire in our bellies.

Epilogue

The Children in Ms. Bailey’s Class Six Years Later

In the spring of 2018, we gathered some of the students from Ms. Bailey’s class: Mary, Max, Diana, Lorene, Celeste, Robert, and Charlie. A couple of them we had seen over the years, but most we had not seen in six years. All seven of them were in public middle schools in different parts of the city. Max was still gregarious, talkative, and full of stories. Lorene and Robert were still quiet, introspective, and smart. Diana was still a leader and quick with opinions and ideas. Celeste was still happy, observant, and curious, though she had many health problems and was completing school at home. Mary was happy, social, friendly, and sure of herself. We met together, shared a pizza dinner, and talked. Our plan was to show them the film we had made in their classroom years before. (We showed the film to their parents in another room.) By that point, thousands of people in our research study, conference presentations, webinars, and talks around the world had seen their film. We wanted to see how the children— now finishing up seventh grade—would respond to seeing their first-grade classroom. How did they conceptualize learning all these years later? Did they now think, like the children we interviewed, that real learning requires their silence, stillness, and obedience? Had they been able to enact their agency between second grade and seventh grade? We showed the film and chatted with them all of the way through. We asked everyone if they had other elementary school years like Ms. Bailey’s year. “Not at all,” they told us. The major difference, they reported, was that after first grade they had to be quiet and not engage with one another. Diana explained, “Classes now are like ‘OK, when’s the bell?’ ‘Oh, there’s the bell.’” Classes were so hurried and busy that they did not get to read or have interesting conversations with people in their classes. Max remembered that in

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Ms. Bailey’s class “you got to talk to people.” Diana said correctively to Max, “We talk to people now.” Max argued back that the difference was that in Ms. Bailey’s class “you were allowed to talk to people. You talk to people now and you get in trouble for it. But then if you talked to people then you’d get encouraged for it.” Diana saw his point and agreed: “Yeah, then they would be like ‘OK, continue this conversation,’ and now it’s like ‘If you don’t hush your mouth . . .’” Max completed her sentence, “Yeah, go to the principal’s office.” They told us that none of the years before or since had been like Ms. Bailey’s class. Curious, we asked them the same major question we had asked all of the participants in our study, “In what way do you think little kids learn best?” mary: Being able to talk to each other and do activities. kevin: Well, the young brain is a lot more susceptible to learning. lorene: I wish there was like a boring buzzer. For when you start in. kevin: Because when you’re younger you can learn languages, because the brain is developing. jenn: OK, all right. mary: Reading. diana: Science. jenn: Science? So, like, how do you think the best way for little kids to learn science is? diana: Yeah, getting to feel it. max: Like in first grade when we got to make the volcano. all: Yeah, the volcano! celeste: I remember when Mary made it! jenn: I have a video of that— do you want to see it? They did want to see the video of Mary presenting her volcano to the class. In the video, all of the children huddle around Mary and her volcano, listening carefully to her. As soon as I (Jenn) found it and showed the group, Mary was overjoyed. Then she got quiet and leaned in closer. To herself quietly she said, “I felt so smart.” I asked her what she had said. mary: I felt so smart. jenn: When you did the volcano? mary: It felt really nice. I had a— it was really fun making it. jenn: Who made it with you? mary: Me. jenn: You made it by yourself ?

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mary: My mom just told me to put water in it. She just gave me some help. diana [gestures to Celeste]: Do you wanna come over here? diana: Didn’t it stain the table? mary: Yeah. max: We should go find the table and see if it’s still there. jenn: So lots of people have seen that movie too, Mary. Did you know that? mary: Really? jenn: A lot of people. In fact, I should send your parents this. I wrote a whole article about this clip, about you bringing the volcano in. mary: Really? [She grins.] Being a Good Learner Mary’s response and pride in how she learned about volcanoes prompted us to ask about what it means to be a good learner. They told us: max: I feel like being a good learner is if you are able to comprehend what you’re learning with ease. mary: Being a good learner was like being a good listener that you can learn easily and understand different methods of learning. celeste: Patience, ’cause if you’re a pre-K teacher you have to be patient with the kids. ’Cause obviously they’re not gonna focus on the first thing. diana: Also, somebody who’s open to learn. Like otherwise there’s no point. Like there’s no point in learning something if you’re not gonna try. jenn: Try what? diana: Try to learn, like, try to listen and try to take in what they’re saying. jenn: What else do you think is a good— like, how do you know someone is a pretty good learner? mary: Like if they concentrate on topic and if they can understand different ways someone’s teaching them. lorene: Little kids learn by other kids. Like they see someone doing something and they copy them. robert: Um, I thought it was a good thought, I’ve always visualized that people do what their parents or their other siblings do; when they improve then they can do something really cool. mary: They’re like a sponge— they absorb everything that other people are doing. Their answers about young children’s learning reflected the kinds of sophisticated ideas about learning that perhaps come with time and experience

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f i g u r e 8 . Max, Robert, Mary, Diana, and Lorene (left to right) watching the film seven years later.

but also, to us, seemed linked to the kinds of experiences they had as young children in school. They seemed to believe that learning is a complicated act, one that requires much more than silence, stillness, and obedience. They did not think they were misbehaving in Ms. Bailey’s classroom. They thought they were learning.

responses to their critics Next we told them about our findings. (And we promise that they had not read our book when they said what you are about to read.) jenn: So I want to tell you something crazy that happened, and this was the craziest thing ever for our research. I’m telling you this because I’m curious what you think about this. When adults watched this movie— we showed it to 150 adults, probably, maybe more than that— max: Is it considered a movie? Or more like a clip or a short film? jenn: A research movie. How about that? Celeste, Lorene, and Diana yelled out excitedly. Everyone got their phone back out and made jokes about their film being on YouTube. They took a number of pictures of the stilled screen of each other and of the camera filming the interview.

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jenn: Okay, so when we showed it to adults they were like, “Oh, these kids are so smart, they’re so amazing, they have such good conversation with each other, their vocabulary is amazing.” They said that all the time. They talked about your very large and sophisticated vocabulary all the time. max: So when you were editing you put in all the good stuff. jenn: No, I didn’t, actually; I just put in all the normal stuff. max: Huh. jenn: But now I gotta tell you the crazy part. The crazy part is we showed it to a hundred first-graders. So you guys were in first grade, right? So we showed it to 100 first-graders in lots of different cities in Texas, and they all said the same thing. Are you ready for what they said? Can you guess what they said? mary: “Oh, that’s cool”? kevin: Is it negative? max: The people kept asking for hints. kevin: “Wow, they’re smart”? jenn: Listen to this. They said that you were very loud and that you were all misbehaving and that you weren’t learning anything because you weren’t listening to your teacher. . . . Like the part where you get up [looking at Mary], Peter helped you figure out where the 21 is? They said that Peter needed to sit down and you needed to raise your hand. max: I don’t feel like it’s, like it’s not like . . . That’s messed up. Not their response but also their response. The fact that they think because we were acting the way we were acting we’re misbehaving and not smart, because it’s a more efficient way of learning. It’s sad to see that they’re trained pretty much to do whatever the teacher says and not do it any other kind of way. Not like, exploring. celeste: ’Cause I’m pretty sure, like, we did learn. They had patience with us and told us “Yes, you can do this,” “yes, you can do that.” [They] gave us more options instead of “Sit down and learn.” At this point in the discussion, everyone was talking at once. Celeste, who was relatively quiet in the interview, at this point seemed hurt by the implication that they were not learning. She described Ms. Bailey as someone who was patient and believed in them. They learned, she argued, because there were more options than “sit down and learn.” As Celeste defended her own ability to learn with educators’ patience, positivity, and pedagogical variety, all of the other teens shifted around in their chairs and argued back against what I was saying. They got close to one another and role-played as if talking to the people who had responded critically. Trying to slow the conversa-

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tion down to hear what everyone was saying, we asked them how they might have answered the children and educators we interviewed if they had been in the room. jenn: I think you’re right. But, like, if they were here what would you say to them back? diana: I would say, “It sounds like we got the opportunity to learn in more ways than one.” celeste: We had more freedom to learn, not do whatever we wanted. diana: ’Cause it’s good to have a variety of ways of learning. jenn: Yeah. diana: ’Cause if you just learn one way then you’re not really getting the full spectrum of ways that you can learn. max: I would just counter whatever they said. They’re like, “You’re too misbehaved”? [I’d say,] “You’re too behaved.”

advice for educators Finally, after lots of conversation and more picture taking (this would happen randomly throughout the interview), we asked a final question, “If and when teachers watch this movie, what do you want them to learn from it?” mary: To teach new generations in more interactive and hands-on ways so that instead of sitting down, like sitting all the time— jenn: Instead of what? mary: Instead of sitting down and listening. Because I feel like if kids— like me personally— I learn more whenever I have something to do with my hands. Just like a fun activity or talking than just sitting down and writing. diana: Yeah. mary: It’s better, it’s better to learn from people, ’cause then you get to know what other people’s point of views are, so then you get a new perspective. jenn: Awesome. What else would you tell teachers after they watch this movie? What would you want them to know or pay attention to? robert: At my school the teachers, whenever we’re doing something really good they throw us answers and then they teach us about it. So you can get, like, a hands-on at first so when we do actually do the learning about it, we get like more positive process. jenn: OK. What else would you tell teachers who watch this? diana: Like, if you’re scared to let your kids have some choices ’cause you’re afraid they’re gonna talk and do things like that, you just need to know

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how to bring ’em back together. And also, teachers need to know how to reward their kids. Finally, we asked each person in the group what they wanted to do for a career. They had diverse yet quick answers in this order. Kevin wanted to be a thoracic surgeon. Mary wanted to be an engineer for Google. Lorene wanted to be a modern dancer. Diana wanted to be an obstetrician-gynecologist, with a double major in economics, to learn how the stock market works. Celeste wanted to be a forensics detective. Max wanted to be an artist. Robert wanted to be an engineer and serve in the military.

ms. bailey’s still got it After we finished with the film, Ms. Bailey came in to visit with the group. Within two minutes, she managed to get the group to share personal things with her as if no time had passed. And the children continued to be interested in one another. ms. bailey: I don’t know if you guys remember that you could do all these things when you were that little, but I was watching the video because I don’t remember watching all of it before today. I saw a lot of problem solving, I saw working together, and so much learning that had nothing to do with me. It was just you guys. [The students burst out, all talking at once.] diana: I wish we could do that now. Nowadays it’s like, it’s like, when you try and talk you end up fighting with each other. ms. bailey: Robert, do you still like to read? Do you remember there’s that scene where you want to read? robert: Kinda. It’s kinda hard, like, I found out that I’m dyslexic so it’s kind of hard for me to read. max: How does it get harder once you find out you’re dyslexic? robert: It was harder when I was little, like back then, but I didn’t really, like— max: Understand why? robert: Yeah, understand why. jenn: How is it now, to read? robert: It’s— I learned different ways to make it better.

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f i g u r e 9 . Celeste, Lorene, Diana, Ms. Bailey, Robert, Kevin, Mary, and Max seven years later after watching and responding to their film and their critics, and sharing what happened after they left Ms. Bailey’s class.

Then Lorene and Diana started talking about getting into fights at their school, something they had brought up a few times during the interview. With Ms. Bailey there, Lorene looked up at the screen where the film had been playing and said, “I used to be so good.” Ms. Bailey asked her what she meant. She shared with Ms. Bailey that her dad had died at the beginning of the school year and ever since she had been getting in fights with other girls at school. She had been suspended and sent to the principal’s office numerous times. “When I watched this, though, I was so smart and good. I forgot.” Agency and the ability to create community, share personal stories, move around, talk, get to know classmates, and learn in a variety of active ways from caring, positive, patient teachers are not things to be earned. Changing our course toward agency and away from deficit and racist justifications for making children “earn” the enactment of their agency requires our consciousness and our hard work. We hope you can see that they are worth it.

Acknowledgments

This book has been an act of love and one that took careful collective effort and unbelievable support from many people. This is our opportunity to thank those who gave their love, intellect, and humor to this cause, as well as those who continue to inspire our passion for young children’s agency and racial justice. First, we want to thank the incredible community of children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom and Ms. Bailey herself for welcoming us into their world and teaching us more than we could have imagined. Thank to all of the teachers, administrators, parents, and young children at El Roble, El Naranjo, Las Rosas, Las Nueces, and Primavera Schools who generously shared their expertise with us in Spanish and English. Nos disculpamos ya que muchas transcripciones que eran en español las tuvimos que traducir al inglés; sabemos que no es lo mismo, pero esperamos que efectivamente capturen la esencia del mensaje. Estamos muy agradecidas con los y las madres, padres, niños, niñas, educadores y educadoras que compartieron con nostrotras sus conocimientos y experiencias tan generosamente para contribuir a nuestro estudio. Thank you to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, our editor, who believed in this book and its core argument enough to see it through. Thank you to everyone at the University of the Chicago Press and to all of the past authors, particularly authors of color, who did the hard emotional labor to shape an environment that could welcome a book about White supremacy in early childhood education. Thank you to the reviewers who graciously and generously provided feedback that in many ways improved this book. Of course, any points that remain unpolished or problematic are our fault alone.

180

acknowledgments

Jennifer’s Acknowledgments This book started one day in 2004. I was pregnant and hot in the Arizona sun waiting outside a parent education class for Latinx immigrant mothers. My job as a young bilingual White graduate student was to find a good preschool site to film and conduct interviews with parents and teachers. The school I was visiting that day had a preschool parenting program that enrolled mothers from Mexico, and I was waiting for it to end so I could talk to them. While I waited for a signal to meet the mothers, a class of Black and Brown children were trying to line up after recess. Repeatedly, the White teachers yelled at the six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds to line up and walk straight. “Excuse me— did you hear me? You need to get in line right now!” “Do NOT talk at all right now.” “You are not listening.” “You are not behaving.” “You stand right here.” The parenting class was only a slightly better version of what was happening outside. Inside parents were being reminded to read to their children, practice their English, and return the forms that were due the next day. All I kept thinking about was that the mothers were in a parenting class run by a school that was yelling at their children. This experience was powerful for me and continues to push me when I am tired or frustrated, or feel embarrassed by White-people mistakes I make in my attempt to fight for racial justice. First I want to thank Ms. Bailey and her colleague Ms. Leslie (who taught the first-grade class next door) for welcoming us into their classrooms. You are such hard workers, and much of what I do now in my professional life has to do with what I learned in your classrooms. Thank you to all of the families and the school community for teaching me so much about agency. Most of all, I am indebted personally and professionally to the children whose energy, vitality, intelligence, and curiosity inspire me to this day. I hope if any of you read this book, you will be able to see how much I admire you all. I want to thank my colleagues and friends in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UT Austin who have challenged me and generously supported my work in many ways— Luis Urrieta, Noah De Lissovoy, Katie Payne, Michelle Pérez, Keffrelyn Brown, Anthony Brown, Cinthia Salinas, Louis Harrison, Allison Skerrett, Melissa Wetzel, Victor Sampson, Jo Worthy, Eliane Horowitz, Nancy Roser, Beth Maloch, Sherry Field, Tracey Flores, Paty Abril-Gonzalez, Tia Matkins, Denise Davila, Grace Kim, María González Howard, Catherine Reigel Crumb, Rebecca Callahan, Haydee Rodríguez, Joan Hughes, and María Franquiz. I also want to thank past colleagues whom I miss very much but continue to learn from— Fikile Nxumalo, Sepher Vakil, Ramón Martínez, Deb Palmer, Adriana Alvarez, Claudia Cervantes-Soon, and Stuart Reifel. I offer special gratitude to exemplary scholars at UT Austin

acknowledgments

181

who have been good friends and patiently engaged with my attempt to connect agency and racial justice to education— Daina Ramey Berry, Cherise Smith, Lisa Thompson, Christen Smith, Lisa Moore, Liliana Garces, Angela Valenzuela, Gigi Awad, Tasha Beretvas, and Kevin Cokley. Thanks to Dean Martínez, former interim dean Sherry Field, and my department chair, Cinthia Salinas, for believing in me and supporting the writing of this book. Thank you to Ruby Takanishi and the Foundation for Child Development, who took a chance on me as a qualitative researcher— an ethnographer no less! Their Young Scholars Fellowship program funded the study that became this book. Being a young scholar funded by the Foundation for Child Development has been one of the great privileges of my career. Thank you especially to whoever decided to not fully reject me the first year I applied and instead offered me a mentor— the mighty Catherine Cooper, who helped me translate my passion into a fundable proposal. I don’t know where I would be without such an opportunity. I also want to thank my academic family— Julie Kaomea, Fiko Kurban, Gail Boldt, Hong Ju Jun, Akiko Hayashi, Joe Valente, Allison Henward, and especially Joe Tobin, who has been my mentor, advisor, and example of scholarship and community building since 2003. I love all of you so much and am grateful for our enduring relationships. Thank you, Joe, for teaching me video-cued ethnography and patiently enduring hours of editing, discussion, and advice. You have always been there for me, and it means more than you could ever know. Thank you also to colleagues in the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education community, the Critical Perspectives in Early Childhood Education AERA SIG, and the Council on Anthropology and Education. My sincere gratitude to Norma González, whom I have learned from and treasured as a friend and mentor for over twenty years. Thanks also to Barbara Rogoff, who has worked hard behind the scenes on my behalf and inspired so much of my work. Thank you for welcoming my students and me into the LOPI community so generously. Special thanks to Zeus Leonardo for meeting with me and introducing me to Charles Mills’s work. Obviously, that was life changing. Thank you to Thea Abu El-Haj, who read an early draft of this work and cheered me on throughout the process of writing. Thank you to Marjorie Orellana for your support on this manuscript. Thanks to Kyunghwa Lee and Travis Wright, who have both endured endless conversations about agency and are still my friends. Thank you, Michelle Salazar Pérez and Cinthya Saavedra, for pushing me and my work. Thank you to Fabienne Doucet for being the kind of colleague-friend I can talk to about writing, parenting, and faith.

182

acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the dedication of graduate students who care about young children as much as I do. Kiyomi, my coauthor, was my first graduate student when I became an assistant professor. She is passionate, patient, and unwavering in her desire to improve education for children and families. I will always be grateful that she chose me to be her advisor and that she has seen me through the last ten years. I would also like to thank Nathan Weber, Ale Barraza, and Molly McManus, who also collected data as part of the Agency and Young Children study. Nathan— thank you for your tremendous efforts to organize and edit the film and collect data early on in the project. Molly— I am so grateful for your contribution to every aspect of this study, including the writing and analysis. Thank you for coming to my office and volunteering years ago. I cannot wait to see all that you will do as a professor, although I will miss you terribly. Ale— you are an inspiration as a principal, PhD, and mother. Thank you for being the embodiment of transformation and children’s agency. Thank you for staying connected despite your important and time-consuming positions. You make such a difference in my life and in the lives of many, many children and teachers. Thank you also to what has become a very strong, diverse collective of graduate researchers helping us think and research children’s agency as part of the Agency and Young Children Research Collective, including Sunmin Lee, Shubhi Sachdeva, Natacha Jones, Molly McManus, Nnenna Odim, Anna Falkner, Monica Alonzo, and María José Ruíz Gonzalez. Thank you, Katie Payne, for mentoring all of these lucky students with me and for generously offering your expertise, baking skills, and strength to our group. Thank you to Superintendent Martínez and San Antonio ISD, who two years ago invited my team and me to create an early childhood program centered on children’s agency— now called Dynamic Innovation for Young Children (DIFYC). It was a bold, brave move, and it continues to be something I am very proud of. Thank you to Pauline Dow for working so hard with me to get DIFYC up and moving. Your leadership style and approach to obstacles continue to inspire me. Finally, thank you to friends in Austin and Santa Cruz who over the past three years have picked up my slack and supported my family and me— the Boams, Bermiss, Bakers, Johnsons, Bartons, Johns, and Sobel-Kleins. Special love to the Berry family, the Wright family, the Remmington-Claro family, and the Thornhill family for being there for us in so many ways. Thank you to my mother, Diane Keys, who taught me early in life about race and racism, and to my parents-in-law, Jim and Kathy Adair, for offering encouragement all along the way. Finally, I want to thank my three children and husband. I

183

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love you. You are the most important people to me and who I most like hanging out with. Thank you for believing in me and helping me achieve one of my dreams. I promise to return the favor. Sam— thanks for being amazing and hanging in there. Today is the best it will ever be. Kiyomi’s Acknowledgments Este libro se trata de las experiencias de familias, niñas y niños inmigrantes latinos, y me gustaría antes que nada darles las gracias a los padres y madres que participaron en este proyecto y compartieron con nosotras sus vidas en los Estados Unidos y los sueños y anhelos para sus hijos e hijas de una manera tan generosa y desinteresada. Estas familias son las que me motivan a ser una mejor profesora cada día y trabajar en la preparación de maestrxs comprometidos con la justicia social, que resistan la discriminación y desenmascaren el racismo. Les dedico este libro a mis padres Rosa y Fernando, mi hermana, mi abuelo y mis abuelas, ya que ellos fueron los primeros en enseñarme a amar, a escuchar, a desarrollar el amor por aprender cosas nuevas, y a aprender a respetar a los demás. Le agradezco a mi hermana, Haruko, que fue la primera persona que cuidé, de la cual fui responsable, a la cual ayudé, a la que protegí, le enseñé lo (poco) que sabía, y a quien quiero inmensamente. También le doy gracias infinitas a mi hijo, Nicolás, quien me ha enseñado que se puede amar aún más, por permitirme ser su mamá y por recordarme diariamente que hay que vivir cada día en el momento. Gracias a Kevin por amarme como soy, dejarme ser y apoyarme siempre. Sin el apoyo y amor de mi familia, mi trabajo no sería posible; ellos alimentan mi alma. Estoy muy agradecida por mi mentora, colega y amiga Jennifer Adair, quien me invitó a participar en este proyecto en el segundo año de mi doctorado. Siempre recuerdo el día en que ella me invitó a ser su asistente de investigación. Ella estaba muy contenta, me citó a su oficina y después de explicarme el proyecto con lujos de detalles, con una gran sonrisa me preguntó, “Do you love research?” No le pude mentir, siempre supe lo que quería investigar para mi tesis, pero no tenía experiencia alguna en investigación, así que le dije la verdad, que no sabía si me gustaba la investigación. Me miró un poco sorprendida y me dijo en español, “¿Quieres trabajar conmigo?” Accedí con mucho entusiasmo y comenzamos este proyecto juntas. Después de unos meses trabajando con Ms. Bailey y de encariñarme con ella y sus estudiantes, volví a la oficina de Jenn y pude contestar su pregunta. Ella estaba un poco sorprendida — pienso que ni se acordaba de nuestra conversación— pero le dije que sí, si me gusta mucho la investigación. En

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acknowledgments

ese momento no sabía que este trabajo se convertiría en una parte tan importante de mi vida personal y profesional. Gracias, Jenn, por confiar en mí, incluso cuando no era la típica estudiante de doctorado. Gracias a tí he aprendido lecciones de vida que siempre me acompañan. Tú eres un ejemplo de humildad, cariño, generosidad y dedicación. Jenn, siempre eres una gran inspiración para todos los que te rodeamos. Me gustaría agradecer a Ms. Bailey por ser una persona y maestra excepcional, por recibirme en su salón de clase y permitirme aprender y compartir con ella y los estudiantes. Estuve casi dos años en su salón, y en cada visita pude aprender lecciones que espero hayan sido rescatadas en este libro porque su pasión y vocación son palpables. Este trabajo no sería posible sin la metodología creada por el profesor Joe Tobin: muchas gracias por los consejos y conversaciones que fueron fundamentales en este proyecto y en mi vida académica. Además quiero agradecer la influencia teórica de la profesora Barbara Rogoff. Solo puedo decir que es una mujer y académica brillante. Desde que leí su libro en postgrado ha influido en mi trabajo con familias, en la manera que enseño y en mi manera de ver el mundo. Le estoy eternamente agradecida por los saberes que ha compartido y por invitarme tan generosamente a participar con el Grupo de LOPI. Quiero también agradecer el apoyo de mis colegas en Texas State, en especial al departamento de educación bilingüe, a Charise Pimentel, Patrick Smith, Luz Murillo, Luz Angélica Maldonado, Roxane Cuellar y a mi mentora Mary Esther Huerta por apoyarme y protegerme y con eso dejar tiempo valioso para este proyecto. También a mis colegas Maneka Brooks, Tim Kinard, Jesse Gainer, Chris Milk y Chris Busey. Y finalmente agradecer a mi chair, Jodi Holschuh, y a Dean Michael O’Malley por creer en mí y apoyarme en todo lo que ha estado a su alcance. Gracias a la dra. Haydee Rodríguez por ser una increíble amiga/mentora y compartir tus consejos y sabiduría. Gracias a Christian Zuñiga, por ser mi hermana académica, leer nuestros borradores, compartir este camino juntas y escucharme por años transmitir del estudio con la paciencia que te caracteriza. Gracias infinitas a mi amiga la dra. Alejandra Barraza, que con su energía y entusiasmo y mil porras nos animó incansablemente. La dra. Barraza no solo es la mejor directora en este mundo sino que también practica lo que predica y es una incansable guerrera de la educación pública. Gracias a mi amiga la dra. Molly McManus, a quien conocí en nuestro primer viaje de recolección de datos en la frontera con México. Desde ese momento hemos trabajado juntas, y como dicen, realmente ella cayó del cielo como un regalo divino. Gracias, Molly, por compartir con nosotras tus experiencias,

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185

tus conocimientos y tu sabiduría; sin tí este proyecto no sería posible. Me gustaría agradecer a mi amiga Katie Payne por animarme y apoyarme en los momentos que necesitaba palabras de aliento. Además me gustaría agradecer el apoyo de Michelle Salazar Pérez y Cinthya Saavedra, quienes son una inspiración para mí y muchas profes latinas que tienen la suerte de conocerlas. Gracias a Sunmin Lee, Shubhi Sachdeva, Natacha Jones, Nnenna Odim, Anna Falkner, Monica Alonzo and María José Ruíz Gonzalez por su apoyo y cariño incondicional. Gracias a mis amigas Carla, Raquel, Kata, Ángela, Viki, Magally y Priscilla, quienes aunque estén lejos siempre me apoyan, me ayudan y me brindan mucho cariño. Y a mis amigos y familia que siempre me cuidan y apoyan, gracias.

Appendix

ta b l e 2 . Districts and schools: information and demographics District / School

Region

School Type % Latinx

Central Independent School District  Central Texas

% African % free & American reduced lunch

60

10

64

18

77

El Roble

Public

68

Primavera

Public

94

1

98

Las Rosas

Public

56

10

71

91

6

93

99

0 

96

98

0

86

98

0

87

South Independent School District

South Texas 

Las Nueces Lasso Independent School District

Public US– Mexico Border

El Naranjo Bay Area Community

Public Northern California

Public & private

 

ta b l e 3 . All participants

District /School

District administrators

School administrators

Teachers

Firstgraders

Parents

2 

 

El Roble

0

2

43

30

Primavera

1

7

15

13

Las Rosas

1

9

17

13

Central Independent School District 

South Independent School District

4

1

 

 

 

Las Nueces Lasso Independent School District

 

153

15

10 3

El Naranjo

  2

9

 

Bay Area Community Total

 

Total

7

7

  24

  27

58

16 

16

102

242

20  

99

 

ta b l e 4 . Educator participants

District /school

# of focus groups/ # of district # of school interviews administrators administrators # of teachers Country of origin 2

Central Independent School District 

US, Latinx (2)

El Roble, Ms. Bailey

3

1*

Burundi (1)

El Roble, Ms. Leslie

3

1*

US, White (1)

Primavera

4

1*

7

Mexico (4) US, Latinx (4)

Las Rosas

4

1*

9

US, White (8) Mexico (1) Cuba (1)

Lasso Independent School District

4

3

El Naranjo

South Independent School District

Total * Participant was interviewed individually.

US, Latinx (2) Mexico (1) 2

5

4*

1*

23

7

7

9

US, Latinx (9) US, White (2) US, Latinx (3) US, White (1) Mexico (1)

27

41

ta b l e 5 . Parent Participants District /school

# of focus groups

# of parents

country of origin 

Central Independent School District  El Roble, Ms. Bailey

3

14

Mexico (6) US, White (5) US, African American (2) El Salvador (1)

El Roble, Ms. Leslie

5

16

US, Latinx (9) US, White (4) US, African American (2) Japan (1)

Primavera

3

13

Mexico (7) US, Latinx (6)

Las Rosas

4

13

Mexico (8) Guatemala (1) Honduras (1) US, White (3)

2

10

Mexico (10)

4

20

Mexico (14) US, Latinx (6)

4

16

Chile (2) Venezuela (1) Peru (10) Mexico (2) Guatemala (1)

25

102

South Independent School District Las Nueces Lasso Independent School District El Naranjo Bay Area Community Bay Area 

Total

102

ta b l e 6 . First-grade participants

District /school

# of focus groups/ interviews*

# of children

Country of origin 

Classroom type

English as a Second Language

Central Independent School District  El Roble, Ms. Bailey

4

21

African American (3) US, White (4) US, Latinx (14)

El Roble, Ms. Leslie

4

22

English as a African American (2) Second Language US, Latinx (10) US, White (4) Arabic (1) US, Asian & White (2) US, African American & White (2) US, African American & Latinx (1)

Primavera

5

15

US, Latinx (15)

One-Way Dual Language Spanish

Las Rosas

6

17

US, Latinx (14) US, White (3)

Two-Way Dual Language Spanish

8

24

Mexico (14) US, Latinx (10)

One-Way Dual Language Spanish

27

99

99

Lasso Independent School District El Naranjo

Total

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Index

Abu El-Haj, Thea, 155 adult-centered, 12, 38 agency: of administrators, 68, 163; administrators’ beliefs about, 72, 120; as antiracism, 152 – 63; of children, 10 – 12, 61– 62, 108, 126 – 30, 173 – 75; children having to earn, 62 – 65, 70, 74 – 75, 120, 164, 177; vs. choices, 127, 129; conditions for, 163 – 64; culturally relative, 155; culturally responsive limits on, 37, 41, 77– 78; within curriculum, 158 – 59; definition of, 8, 9, 26, 44, 76, 78, 167, 169, 177; the denial of, 68 – 75, 120, 129, 133, 140, 141; within environment, 159 – 60; within identity, 162 – 63; negative consequences of, 125 – 26, 128; as pedagogy, 160 – 62; to remove the personhood– subpersonhood line, 157– 63; of teachers, 65 – 68, 98, 142, 151– 52, 160, 163; teachers’ beliefs about, 62 – 65, 129 Agency and Young Children Study: analysis of children’s focus groups, 118 – 19; descriptions of individual children, 13 – 15, 48, 87– 88, 170; focus groups, 17– 18, 59 – 60, 117– 18, 132 – 33; methodology, 12 – 20, 165, 170; offering resources to Ms. Bailey, 98; participant demographics, 59; pressure on Ms. Bailey, 97– 99; reflection on, 1, 12, 152, 173 – 75; sites, 13, 59 assessment: benchmarks, 103 – 5; impact on Ms. Bailey’s classroom, 105 – 8; make relationships difficult, 103; pressures, 66 – 68, 97, 105 – 6, 141, 164; teacher and administrators critique of, 66 – 68, 103 – 8 Bailey, Ms.: approach to teaching and learning, 23, 26 – 28, 35 – 41, 49, 101, 108 – 12; childhood, 13, 46 – 47, 81, 86 – 87; classroom environment, 13; critique to assessment, 103 – 5; dismissal by

other educators, 73 – 74; emphasis on classroom community, 79 – 80, 82, 103, 176 – 77; helping children to have discussions, 81– 82, 108 – 10; justification for agency, 75 – 76; pressure from colleagues and administrators, 99 – 101; view of children, 82 balance of agency and respect, 93 – 94, 156 Bang, Megan, 6 – 7, 34, 50, 134, 159 – 60 behavioralism, 36, 101– 2, 113, 125 – 26, 132 bilingualism/multilingualism: of children, 117, 131– 32; as a deficit, 142, 148; and identity, 88, 153 – 54; ineffective tests, 104; language maintenance, 25, 161; oral literacy, 136; testing pressures, 66 – 67; valuing home language, 36 – 37 Black Panthers, 154 Black teachers, 73, 98 Blaise, Mindy, 159 blame: of children’s cultures for quietness, 134 – 35, 148; of families for inability to provide learning practices, 65, 68 – 69, 71– 74, 148 Boldt, Gail, 38; vitality, 57– 58 Brown, Keffrelyn, 4 – 5, 72 – 73, 136, 144 care for children, 95 children: advice for educators, 175 – 76; being a “good” learner, 135 – 37, 172 – 73; as capable, 20, 158; conceptualizing learning, 121– 24, 129, 133, 138 – 40, 148, 171; desire to please teacher, 133; experience with agency, lack of, 128 – 29; informing data analysis of adults, 120; need to be obedient, 126 – 29; need to be quiet, 123 – 26; need to be still, 121– 23; research with, 118, 128; responses to the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom, 117– 34; struggle to reimagine education, 128, 134

212 children’s capabilities, 47– 57, 83, 157– 58, 170, 176 – 77; ask questions, 35, 50 – 51, 61– 62, 79 – 80, 90 – 91, 111– 12; bilingualism, 35; build community, 48 – 49, 61; care for younger children, 100; collaboration, 61; curiously approach new topics, 53; deeply pursue knowledge, 52; engage in intellectual discussion, 50 – 52, 108 – 10; experimentation, 41– 45, 99; fail without giving up, 54 – 57; gather and call out to each other, 35; generating ideas, 35, 78; help the classroom community, 106 – 7, 114, 123; initiative, 42 – 43, 79; listen, 53 – 54, 82, 110 – 12; object, debate, and argue, 35; observe, 49 – 50, 118 – 19, 131; participation, 36; persistence, 55 – 56, 100; resistance, 99 – 100; share personal stories, 81, 86 – 88, 110 – 12; solve problems, 61– 62 children’s real lives, 81– 82, 86, 162 – 63, 176 – 77 civic action, 31– 35, 48 – 49, 100 cognition, 50 – 52 collective (communal) agency, 28 – 29, 31– 33, 44 – 45, 48 – 49, 57, 80, 83, 90, 100 colonialism, 87– 88 community: as diversity, 86; as participants in the classroom, 79, 85; resisting White supremacy, 4 – 5; as a resource, 77, 84 – 85, 153 – 56, 162, 166 compliance, obedience, permission, 123, 126 – 29, 133, 136 – 37 control: Ms. Bailey’s ideas about, 77– 78; of bodies, 39, 62 – 64, 101– 2, 115, 126, 142 – 43; classroom management, critique of, 62 – 64, 101– 2, 107; discipline, 4, 99 – 100, 143; management systems, 125 – 26; raising hands, 126, 132; rigid and narrow learning experiences, 3 – 4, 108, 142, 146; self-control, self-regulation, 38, 63 Cox, Aimee, 10 cultural and community connection, 136 cultural anthropology, 10 – 11 culturally sustaining pedagogy, 3 curiosity, 53, 61, 85, 91 curriculum, 158 – 59 deficit thinking, 68 – 70, 72 – 76, 120, 155 – 56 dehumanization, 144 – 45; normalization of, 144 Delgado-Gaitan, Concha, 135 De Lissovoy, Noah, 136, 150, 155 Día Dieciséis, 87 Doucet, Fabienne, 152 – 53 Dyson, Anne Haas, 10, 12, 36, 97, 142, 168 educational ethnography, 12, 135 efficiency, 94 – 96, 101– 3 embodied learning, 29 – 31 Engel, Susan, 53 environment: of classroom, 33 – 34, 61– 62; materials, 159 – 60

index expanded capabilities, 83 experiential knowledge, 162 failure, 54 – 57 family as a strength, 84 – 85 Ferguson, Ann Arnett, 4, 39, 136 Foundation for Child Development, 1 Freedom Schools, 154 – 55 Freire, Paulo, 138, 148, 156 – 57 Funds of Knowledge, 133, 161 Genishi, Celia, 10, 12, 36, 97, 142, 159, 168 González, Norma, 19, 71, 133, 135 – 36, 161– 62 Gutiérrez, Kris, 10 – 11, 36, 133, 142 Harris, Cheryl, 7– 8, 149 Hayashi, Akiko, and Joseph Tobin, 164 hidden curriculum, 150 hooks, bell, 148, 156 identity, 87– 88, 139 – 40, 162 – 63; learner identity, 155 immigration, 86 – 88 indigenous knowledges, 5, 159 – 61 individualism, 107– 8 intersectionality, 18 – 20 Jaffe-Walter, Reva, 155 Jurow, Susan, 45, 158 La Raza, 4 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 153 Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI), 49 – 50, 82 – 84, 130 – 31 Leavitt, Robin Lynn, 36 Lee, Kyunghwa, 38 Leonardo, Zeus, 6, 147– 48 lines, in schools, 1, 101– 2 listening, 53 – 54, 92 literacy: absence of discussion, 113 – 14; dialogue, 156 – 57; oral, 136, 159; peer conversation, 36 – 37, 136; read-alouds with Ms. Bailey, 80, 86, 110, 113; stories and discussions, 81– 82, 84, 108 – 10; talk as a privilege, 126 Madkins, Tia, 138 – 39 Marin, Ananda, and Megan Bang, 34, 50, 134 Martínez, Ramón, 162 – 64 materials: children’s relationship with, 33 – 35, 55, 100; as semiotic resources, 34, 134 mattering, 57– 58 maximize learning, 102 – 3 McManus, Molly, 70 – 72, 118, 139 meritocracy, 6, 148

213

index Milner, Richard, 4, 38, 102, 136, 142, 159 Mills, Charles: connection to video-cued ethnography, 12; depersonizing conceptual apparatus, 133, 146 – 49, 153 – 55; epistemology of ignorance, 149 – 50; false promises, 7– 8, 71– 72, 115, 130, 146 – 49; personhood– subpersonhood line, 6, 72, 115, 121, 145; the racial contract, 5 – 7, 145 – 47, 169; undoing epistemology of ignorance, 150 – 56 misbehavior, vs. agency, 117, 142 movement, 31– 32, 37– 39; importance of, 136; limits on, 121– 23, 135 – 36 noise: community-building and relationships, 36 – 37, 79 – 82, 108 – 12; consequences for, 125, 134; control over/management systems, 101– 2, 142 – 43; literacy development, 35 – 36; multilingualism, 35 – 37; as problematic, 92 – 93, 124 – 26 Nxumalo, Fikile, 5, 35, 159 – 60; refiguring, 159 observing children, 165 Orellana, Marjorie, 135, 162; language brokering, 20, 37 parents of color: blaming of, 68 – 75; commonalities with Ms. Bailey, 92 – 93; concerns about agency in real world, 93, 94 – 96; knowledges, 84 – 85; perspectives on agency, 91; perspectives on teaching and learning, 73 – 74, 90 – 93, 121; responding to capabilities, 167– 68; responses to film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom, 89 – 96; views on classroom environment, 90 – 92; welcoming into the classroom, 84 – 85 participant observation, 13 – 14 pedagogy, 156, 160 – 62; co-investigation through dialogue, 156 – 57 play, 128 prisonlike school environments, 1, 4, 39, 46, 166 professional development, 98, 151, 165 – 66 project-based learning: animal bones, 32 – 33, 34, 53 – 54, 83, 85; blood pressure, 30 – 31, 24, 40, 45, 52; car accident, 79, 85, 91; concerns about, 103; how Ms. Bailey prompted, 43; ice, 49 – 50, 78; Obama’s children, 42 – 43; rainbow, 41– 44, 45; reflexes, 55 – 57; using books for, 85; volcano, 23 – 29, 41, 45, 48, 50 – 51, 54 – 55, 84, 99, 166 – 68, 171

relationships: emphasis on, 66 – 67, 80 – 82, 85, 91; with parents, 84 – 85; parents’ ideas about teacher/child, 94 – 95; with peers, 82, 161; through conversation, 88, 91, 136, 142, 161 respect, 77– 78 Ríos-Rojas, Anne, 155 Robinson, Courtney, 4, 39, 136 Rogoff, Barbara, 5, 10 – 11, 25, 44 – 45, 50, 83 – 84, 130 – 31, 133 routine and schedules, 39 – 40, 66 – 67, 102 – 3 Ryan, Sharon, 159 school-to-prison pipeline, 4, 38 – 39 segregation by experience: connected to Mill’s racial contract, 145, 169; connected to Sen, 141– 42; connection to agency, 137– 39, 141– 44; as dehumanization, 144 – 45; and learner identities, 138 – 40 self-rule / ownership over learning, 28 – 29, 142 semiotic resources, 34, 134 Sen, Amartya, 8 – 10, 48; agency, 9, 141– 42, 166; capabilities approach, 9, 157, 169 settler-colonialism, 7, 147 social-emotional learning: vs. community building, 112 – 16; critique of, 40, 83, 112 – 13, 115 – 16; as inauthentic, 115 – 16 standardized tests, 66, 68, 97, 103, 164 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 153 teacher education, 165 – 66 teachers: as denying children’s agency, 128 – 29; emphasis on vocabulary, 68 – 72; exception in study, 129 – 30; mental health of, 67, 151; as reflecting larger social issues, 60, 74, 104; responses to film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom, 60 – 66, 72 – 73, 89, 121; as source of knowledge, 123, 161; transformation of, 151, 164 teaching as political, 87, 98 – 99 technology and agency, 119 – 20 testing day, 105 – 8, 133 time: for children, 39 – 41, 91; outside, 68; pacing for teachers, 66 – 68, 94 – 95, 104 Tobin, Joseph, 10 – 12, 36, 118, 164 trauma, 163; racial trauma, 4, 136 Turkanis, Carolyn Goodman, 44 – 45

quiet, pressure to be, 101– 2, 143

ul Haq, Mahbab, 8 – 9; Human Development Index, 8 Urrieta, Luis, Jr., 5, 9 – 10, 50, 135, 162

racism: and agency, 138, 143 – 44; in early childhood education, 38 – 39, 136, 145 – 50, 169; and identity, 139 – 40; impact on early schooling, 140, 144; toward teachers, 73 – 74 reconceptualize readiness, 36

Valdés, Guadalupe, 135, 143 Valenzuela, Angela, 135; Academia Cuauhtli, 153 – 54 video-cued ethnography, 16 – 20, 59; children, family, and teacher consent, 16; description of

214 video-cued ethnography (continued) film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom, 16 – 17, 60 – 61, 62, 78, 117, 119; multivocal comparisons, 135; with young children, 117– 18, 170 voice levels, 124, 142 vulnerability, 95, 143 White supremacy, 39, 141, 143, 145 – 50, 162 wide attention, 131

index word gap argument: as deficit, racist, 70 – 72; used to justify agency-denial, 69, 72 – 74 Wright, Travis, 143, 163 Wynter, Sylvia, 144 Yarnall, Mary Malter, 159 Yazzie-Mintz, Tarajean, 5, 161 Yosso, Tara J., 12, 134, 137, 143, 150, 152