Related posts
Feature
Troublemakers Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at SchoolDescription
In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young troublemakers, challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable childrenZora, Lucas, Sean, and MarcusTroublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.
From Zoras proud individuality to Marcuss open willfulness, from Seans struggle with authority to Lucass tenacious imagination, comes profound insightfor educators and parents alikeinto how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a childs path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
Shalabys empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demandsdespite good intentionswork to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
From Zoras proud individuality to Marcuss open willfulness, from Seans struggle with authority to Lucass tenacious imagination, comes profound insightfor educators and parents alikeinto how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a childs path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
Shalabys empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demandsdespite good intentionswork to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.