UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ AGAINST DISPOSABILITY: ON ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLING, SILENCE, AND ABOLITION A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in EDUCATION with emphases in FEMINIST STUDIES and CRITICAL RACE AND ETHNIC STUDIES by Chrissy Anderson-Zavala June 2019 The dissertation of Chrissy Anderson- Zavala is approved: Professor Cindy Cruz, Chair Professor Ronald D. Glass Professor Gina Dent Professor Felicity Amaya Schaeffer Professor Erica R. Meiners Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Chrissy Anderson-Zavala 2019 Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... v Dedication ................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... viii Prologue ......................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction: Silence and Schooling ............................................................................. 6 Chapter 1: Unstudents: Embodying Difference and Deficit in School ....................... 44 The Slacker .................................................................................................................. 86 Chapter 2: From Citizen-Workers to Juvenile Delinquents ........................................ 97 The Dropout ............................................................................................................... 170 Chapter 3: Suspension and Segregation: Towards A Theory of Nonwork ............... 174 “Blackout”/Found Poem ............................................................................................ 245 Chapter 4: When I Walk Through School Gates I Want to Feel Free: Abolitionist Imagination and Schooling ........................................................................................ 246 Conclusion: Reading To Render (Im)Possible .......................................................... 292 Epilogue: Ecosystems and Silence ............................................................................ 300 Appendix A: Collaboration, Place, and Practice ....................................................... 303 Appendix B: Materials .............................................................................................. 311 Appendix C: About Cityscape ................................................................................... 312 Appendix D: On Writing ........................................................................................... 319 Appendix E: Work: A Song of Triumph—By Angela Morgan ................................ 326 Appendix F: Divergent Youth ................................................................................... 329 Appendix G: True Alternative Schools ..................................................................... 331 Appendix H: Opportunity II High School Philosophy .............................................. 333 iii Appendix I: Cityscape Student Poem ........................................................................ 335 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 336 iv Against Disposability: On Alternative SChooling, SilenCe, and Abolition by Chrissy Anderson-Zavala Abstract Against Disposability: On Alternative Schooling, Silence, and Abolition explores how deficit figures of young people inform the limits and possibilities of schooling. This dissertation utilizes participatory ethnographic and archival methods to engage: (a) the enduring narratives of “trouble” and “troubled” young people; (b) continuation high school students’ experiences of structural violence within schools; and (c) what students’ insights reveal about alternative visions of schooling. Throughout their history, continuation high schools have operated under shifting mandates to work with the young people that mainstream schools struggle or refuse to serve. Informed by education scholarship concerned with deficit narratives about young people who “do not fit” in school, abolitionist critiques that denaturalize the “known” other, and feminist scholarship that traces everyday structural violence, this research asks: what do figures of youth deviance, deficit, and delinquency reveal about how the American school system structures difference? What are the pedagogical implications of the limits of these figures? I argue that hypervisible figures of young people as “trouble/d” foreclose young people’s personhood through historically embedded and persistent racist, sexist, ableist, and ageist notions of deficit. I further v explore how such deficit subject positions require young people to perform immaterial and material forms of labor as “delinquents” or un-value in school spaces. I denaturalize these figures to both mark the limits of schooling in its current form, but also to call for alternative visions of education based in relationality. Therefore, this dissertation explores two sides of how to write young people: 1) the manners in which young people, especially young people of color, have been narrated—or “written” upon—in school spaces; and 2) how we might move toward pedagogies of relationality—or writing and teaching that is an invitation to be with. I call for a pedagogy of relationality that works against eclipsing figures and enables us to imagine toward futures not characterized by punishment, hypervisibility, and differential access to childhood. Against Disposability invites those in the field of education to challenge the persistent, ready-made narratives imposed on young people who “do not fit” in order to move toward more just and liberatory visions and practices of education. vi DediCation For all the young people I’ve worked with and continue to learn from vii ACknowledgements My deepest appreciation to the young people and teachers of “Cityscape” who partnered with me on this journey in the classroom and beyond. Thank you to my incredible committee Cindy Cruz, Ron Glass, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Each of you provided me invaluable guidance and inspiration. Thank you for supporting me to write as a poet-scholar. Thank you to the community colleges—Hartnell and Cabrillo—that enabled me to start this higher education journey and to CCSF whose library became my dissertation writing home. I gratefully acknowledge the financial and institutional support from the UCSC Cota-Robles Fellowship, STARS Reentry Scholarship, and the Chicano Latino Research Center, and UC Berkeley’s McNair Scholars Program. Thank you to my spirit-sister Sheeva Sabati for being a consistent light and love every step of the way. You continue to help me stay grounded in knowing there are birds in the house. Thank you Kyle Beckham for your friendship, scholarship, and sarcasm. Thank you Anne Marie Grace for inviting me so many years ago to be your comrade. Thank you to the fierce women in my writing and reading circles: Chris Schildt, Angelina Dilg, Luisa Leija, Aracely Gonzalez, Carrie Leilam Love, Camille Pannu, Mariah Landers, and Marisa Crawford. Your sisterhood sustains me. Thank you Yvonne Sherwood, Lara Galas, Farima Pour-Khorshid, Emily Borg, and Ethan Chang for your solidarity and love. Thank you to my Poetry for the People and VONA family for your guidance and to Hedgebrook for offering radical hospitality to nourish viii women’s voices. Thank you to my CRES and education students who made me fall in love with teaching college students, to my EAOP students who embraced our abolitionist imaginations, and to my Spoken students who write new worlds. Thank you to Critical Resistance, Education for Liberation Network, and Center for Political Education for your organizing and political education work that have informed this dissertation. And to the many other people not named here that I have been honored to build with, thank you so much. Thank you to the Hernandez and Ghosh families for your support. Thank you to my uncle for showing me writing when everything was darkest. Thank you David Ghosh for being my partner-in-love. Thank you to my mother for showing me nourishing care and to my brother for being my first teacher. ix Prologue I think about the school bus. Vinyl seats with words and symbols cut into them—thick black vinyl paint sweeping across what is written beneath. The stale sun- streaked air seeping through the grooves between glass and window frame. The bus tumbled up and down well-worn country roads—in the mornings we all cool and tired; in the afternoons our bodies seemed to grow against the military green seats, hot and sticky. The younger we were, the further to the front we would sit unless bold and blessed—and I will try to tell you. I will tell it in a way that does not groove it deeper in my memory, does not take away from all the hope of good jobs and stable futures that our mothers packed us up with each day for school—I will tell it like this. The school bus was where we decided who we were and who we were not. I heard the cool guys yell, “hey retard,” and something about my brother’s skin, his clothes, and “fucking retard,” and I gone all rage blind looked back to where he was, my brother, and he met my eyes and shook his head once—no. The words wild on their