Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change

Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135068417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Youth resistance has become a pressing global phenomenon, to which many educators and researchers have looked for inspiration and/or with chagrin. Although the topic of much discussion and debate, it remains dramatically under-theorized, particularly in terms of theories of change. Resistance has been a prominent concern of educational research for several decades, yet understandings of youth resistance frequently lack complexity, often seize upon convenient examples to confirm entrenched ideas about social change, and overly regulate what "counts" as progress. As this comprehensive volume illustrates, understanding and researching youth resistance requires much more than a one-dimensional theory.

Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change provides readers with new ways to see and engage youth resistance to educational injustices. This volume features interviews with prominent theorists, including Signithia Fordham, James C. Scott, Michelle Fine, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Vizenor, and Pedro Noguera, reflecting on their own work in light of contemporary uprisings, neoliberal crises, and the impact of new technologies globally. Chapters presenting new studies in youth resistance exemplify approaches which move beyond calcified theories of resistance. Essays on needed interventions to youth resistance research provide guidance for further study. As a whole, this rich volume challenges current thinking on resistance, and extends new trajectories for research, collaboration, and justice.

1

Introduction to Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

In 1895, 19 Hopi men were incarcerated in the prison facility on Alcatraz Island, “because,” as reported by a San Francisco newspaper, “they would not let their children go to school.” The U.S. Federal Government had enacted policies in Orayvi and across Hopi lands that were designed to limit Hopi sovereignty and facilitate settler colonialism. The new policies divided shared land into individual tracts, removed Hopi people from mesas, required new agricultural practices, and demanded that Hopi children attend faraway boarding schools (Sakiestewa, 2010). In the lead up to the arrest of the 19 men, white settlers had drawn a false dichotomy between Hopi who were “Friendlies” and “Hostiles”; hostiles were those who refused to give up collective planting of wheat in favor of individualized farming practice, those who refused to adopt Washington ways, and refused to turn over their children. A nearby Mormon/Navajo land dispute involving bloodshed added to settlers’ fearful exasperation over the Hopi refusals.

The 19 men, deemed hostiles, were rounded up, and marched by foot, horse, train, and eventually boat to the San Francisco bay, a journey that took more than a month to complete (Holliday, n.d.). When the captured Hopi men arrived, they were sensationalized by San Francisco newspapers as a “Batch of Apaches [sic]” imprisoned “until they have learned to appreciate the advantage of education” (ibid). They were kept on Alcatraz from January 3 to August 7, 1895.

Hopi refusals to send (or more often agreeing to send but never sending) their children to remote boarding schools became emblematic of Hopi resistance to settler colonialism and the settler colonial state writ large. This stand about schooling, justice, continuity, sovereignty, and the future of Hopi people is one that has continued to frame conversations about schooling there ever since. Ten years after the return of the 19 men, Hopi schooling again became one key site of struggle over the very terms of educational resistance—to what degree to participate in or reject settler schools—but that’s another story (Sakiestewa, 2010).

This book is about youth resistance to educational injustice, research on youth resistance, and the theories of change that undergird youth resistance. Resistance to educational injustice sometimes takes shape as resistance to state schooling in total, as evidenced in the story of the Hopi incarceration, above. At other times that resistance takes form in order to make a claim to schooling and dignity in schooling. Often, resistance to educational injustice is about demanding more from institutions than they were ever designed to do.

For example, Ana Julia Cooper’s (1892) A Voice from the South entreated schools to enable “racial uplift,” challenging them to bring racial discrimination to an end despite being devised to promote stratification. Cooper, writing as a formerly enslaved Black woman, insisted that schools be sites for justice even when the state was aggressively unjust. In The Mis-education of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson (1933), not only identified the reasons to resist schooling but also presented theories of how to change the conditions of anti-Black America through schools and out-of-school education. Cooper received her doctorate at the Sorbonne for examining the complex relationships between organizations in French civil society, American and British antislavery movements, and the Haitian Revolution, the only slave rebellion to found a modern state (see Lemert & Bhan, 1998). Woodson was a teacher, then school director, in the military-run U.S. colonial schools in the Philippines. From these vantage points, Cooper and Woodson could see the simultaneity of U.S. imperialism alongside its internal colonial tactics. Schools, they told us long before we would come to know it for ourselves, are sites of both social reproduction, and possibility.

As this book explores, youth resist educational injustice in multiple, sometimes simultaneous and contradictory, sometimes self-injuring, sometimes triumphant ways. In many cases, resistance to educational injustices takes aim against testing, curriculum, school rules, police surveillance in schools, homophobic policies, and disrespectful personnel; just as often resistance to educational injustices can diagnose inadequate facilities, resources, funding, teachers—the stuff of schooling. Youth have called into question the white supremacist and settler colonial projects of schooling, the school to prison pipeline, and subjugation of children via compulsory schooling. Still for others, resistance to educational injustice has meant a rejection of schooling in total. This may read as a truism at first, but classic and recent works on school dropout (Fine, 1991; Ruglis, 2009) and school pushout (Tuck, 2012) have asked probing questions not only about who exits school early, but the significant costs for those students who stay in demeaning schools.

In May 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel succeeded in closing 48 elementary schools and one high school in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, an unprecedented wave of closings for any city (Ahmed-Ullah, Chase, & Secter, 2013). The closings overwhelmingly affected students and families of color, leaving white families virtually untouched. An Op-ed issued the same month by Leslie Fenwick, the Dean of the School of Education at Howard University, insists that urban school reform (such as massive school closures) is rarely about children but in most counts, is actually about urban land development (2013). She argues that programs like Teach for America and charter schools run by venture capitalists are not designed to address root issues, but instead, “are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving Black and poor students; displace authentic Black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education” (Fenwick, 2013, n.p.). Pauline Lipman made a closely related argument in 2003 and again in 2011, pointing to the ways in which Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 program was determined to clear Black and brown families from neighborhoods that would be valuable to white professionals.

In the final lines of her Op-ed, Fenwick writes:

As the nation’s inner cities are dotted with coffee shop chains, boutique furniture stores, and the skyline changes from public housing to high-rise condominium buildings, listen to the refrain about school reform sung by some intimidated elected officials and submissive superintendents. That refrain is really about exporting the urban poor, reclaiming inner city land, and using schools to recalculate urban land value. This kind of school reform is not about children, it’s about the business elite gaining access to the nearly $600 billion that supports the nation’s public schools. It’s about money. (Fenwick, 2013, n.p.)

It is crucial to see the critique of education reform as land grabbing alongside the Hopi refusal to send their children to boarding schools in the late nineteenth century. One of the primary reasons for Hopi resistance to settler schools was to thwart the land grabbing of Native territory by the U.S. Federal Government. In this long view, neoliberalism and the corporate invasion of new “frontier” education markets including testing, evaluation, text books, charter schools, remediation programs, and career education “reformers” are just the most recent iterations of settler colonialism.

Images of youth resistance thread through popular media and the public imagination. Many of those images romanticize youth rebels—the bad boys of London punk rock, James Dean or the Fonz at the jukebox—often gendered, raced, and cast(e) as disaffected working-class white males. Other images convey the smallness of youth bodies (and power) in the face of the state, as in the widely circulated image(s) of Palestinian children aiming stones as Israeli tanks—sympathizing portraits of weak, noble, brown and hopelessly overwhelmed victims. (The only time resistance does not appear masculine is when it depicts victimry.) Then there is resistance portrayed as shockingly loud—as black, masked and masculinized—inviting us to re-experience the cinematic audio-confrontations with the Public Enemy or NWA soundtrack. Beyond these iconic images, however, news of youth and student resistance to educational injustice is more available than ever. The StudentNation blog hosted by The Nation distributes bi-weekly reports that catalogue acts of student resistance against unjust policies, racism and austerity across the United States. Student Unions in Philadelphia, Chicago, Providence and in cities all over the country have organized student walkouts. Youth everywhere are opting out of state tests which have narrowed curricula and taken up too much instruction time, most notably the current Seattle city-wide boycott of the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test.

In making this book on youth resistance research, we are aware that the descriptor “youth” is deployed in multiple ways. Usually youth connotes a social location: Youth are those who society regards as underdeveloped people not quite ready for self-determination. However, we are far more interested in youth as a structural (and historical, generational, political) location. Youth is a legally, materially, and always raced/gendered/classed/sexualized category around which social institutions are built, disciplinary sciences created, and legal apparatuses mounted. “Youth” has implications for identity and social life, of course, but its salience as a category is deeply connected to compulsory schooling (in the U.S. and Canada) or other legal apparatuses.

“Youth” became a category of concern warranting academic study during the Progressive Era in the United States (1890–1920s), coinciding with the rise of social science, the development of eugenics policies, compulsory schooling, the universalizing of high school in particular, and the extension of the U.S. settler nation into global empire. Kwon notes: “Developments in social and life sciences that focused on adolescence as a topic of inquiry and object of research converged to cement adolescence as a distinct life stage in need of intervention and social control” (Kwon, 2013, p. 29). The desire to mark some youth as “at-risk” gained prominence in the late 1980s, and a 1992 Carnegie report titled, A Matter of Time, shifted the nonprofit and academic fields by asserting that “at-risk” youth of color, when supplied with non-school programs in youth development, could become proper neoliberal subjects, escaping the residuum of “those populations designated as irredeemable and unworthy under neoliberal governance and positioned as, to use Katharyne Mitchell’s words, resting ‘outside of risks’” (Kwon, 2013, p. 48).

Because youth as a structural location is conflated with youth as a developmental category, youth resistance often gets special treatment, gets made precious. When youth resistance is treated like a precious thing, the real theories of change being theorized through youth resistance get trumped by a larger theory of change around youth as pre-adults. We maintain that there is nothing un-ordinary about youth resistance or resistance. Resistance is happening all the time, and anyone can be called to resistance at any time. Indeed, in the examples of Hopi incarceration, mass-closures of Chicago schools, and boycotts of the MAP tests, youth resist, their families resist, their communities resist, and the powerful resist too. Resistance, “doesn’t go in the directions that we anticipate it will go. Resistance is not just something that low-power youth do toward justice, but also is what high-power youth do to secure the longevity of their privilege” (Tuck & Yang, 2011, p. 526). To understand youth resistance we cannot hold it apart from the particular conditions under which it occurs, conditions which include the actions of other “youth” and “non-youth” actors.

Unlearning Youth Resistance Theory

As we have learned in talking to foundational authors in youth resistance research, most if not all roads in the field lead to Paul Willis’ groundbreaking and paradigmatic ethnography. Learning to Labor, released in 1977 and reprinted in 1981, followed 12 working-class boys in a working-class town of 60,000 (only 8% of the town were professional middle class) who attended the local Hammertown school. Willis’ study details the ways in which “the lads’” resistance to schooling, especially to their classroom teachers (who were mostly women), was an assertion of oppositional working-class culture they inherited from their families and neighborhoods, but also an assertion of their masculinity against the distinctly feminine connotation of intellectual labor (Aronowitz, 2004, p. ix). “Ironically,” Willis observes, “as the shopfloor becomes a prison, education is seen retrospectively, and hopelessly, as the only escape” (1977, p. 107). Twenty-five years later, Willis posited:

It is perfectly possible that I caught “the lads” at the last gasp of a certain kind of real, if always subordinated working-class power and celebration in England; almost from the moment the book was published the conditions got worse. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the United Kingdom became the first industrialized country to experience massive losses of the manual industrial work that had previously been available to the working classes. This trend is now firmly established across the old industrialized world. In the United Kingdom over half of the manufacturing jobs that existed in the 1970s have been destroyed, with a slightly larger reduction in related trade union membership. At the same time, there has been a virtually epochal restructuring of the kinds of work available. Taken together, the new customer service call centers and the hotel and catering industries now employ more than double the number of workers as the old “smokestack” industries—cars, shipbuilding, steel, engineering, and coal mining. (2004, p. 182)

We take Willis’ own re/thinking about the specificity of the lads’ working-class resistance within the context of now-disappeared factory work, as critical in understanding what we need to re/think and what we need to remember about theorizing of resistance to education(al injustice) for a neoliberal context. Quoting Willis again:

For many working-class youth [in the UK and in the US], the choice is now workfare, being forced into low-wage labor, or street survival with jail as the likely terminus. This is a state mandated attempt to regulate and reform the labor power of the working class wholesale, attempting to make “idleness” impossible just as work disappears. (ibid, insertion ours)

In some ways, an older cousin to this book is Learning to Labor in New Times (2004), edited by Nadine Dolby and Greg Dimitriadis. The volume marked the 25th anniversary of the release of Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. In Learning to Labor in New Times, Michael Apple employs Ian Ramsey’s (1964) distinction between “pictorial models” which might show the world as it really is, but in ways that are reified, and the far more rare “disclosure models” which “enable us to see the people and processes in wholly new and considerably more dynamic ways” (2004, p. 61). Willis’ book, Apple insists, is one of those rare works of disclosure.

We believe that Willis’ book made (at least) three invaluable moves that build upon one another, and disclose insights for how resistance is punished (especially by the state), insights for thinking about agency within poststructural analyses, and admonitions against analyses that foreclose responsibility. These moves, along with informing the work of practically all of the participants in this volume, inform the commitments of this book:

1) Attending to the Pyrrhic Victories of (Youth) Resistance

The lads in Learni...