Unsettling calm and order: the paradoxical dynamics of a white elementary teacher’s racialized carceral logics

Abstract

Schooling functions as a central institutional facet of the carceral state. For those educators who seek to practice abolition in their classrooms, understanding how policing is enacted systemically and interpersonally in schooling spaces is critical to futures of belonging, safety, and freedom. In this paper, I draw from a larger qualitative case study to explore how one white elementary teacher, Staci, sought to disrupt her instantiations of policing and co-create a humanizing approach to students’ social and emotional safety. Theoretically guided by Shange’s carceral progressivism, I delineate the ways in which Staci both pedagogically centered the social worlds and expansive emotions of students most vulnerable to the structural violence of policing and reinforced racialized carceral logics as white supremacy at the same time. I deeply interrogate these paradoxical instantiations of abolitionist praxis and conclude with an invitation for educators, especially white educators, to work with contradictions.

Keywords:

• Abolition
• K-12 education
• whiteness
• social emotional learning

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Gabriel Rodriguez (who encouraged me to read Shange’s (2019) Progressive Dystopia), Gardner Seawright, Benjamin Blaisdell, and Pete Newlove for their generative feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Riley Drake

Riley Drake is an Assistant Professor of School Counseling in the Department of Counseling, Rehabilitation, and Human Services at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where her research explores how educators honor and struggle alongside young people, families, and community organizers in the movement for abolition.