Scaletta, T. (2022).

“What if, for a moment, we imagine that these kids

are people?”: A collaborative inquiry into reimagining children and schooling
[Master’s thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University].

Rationale
This project is the beginning of a response to a provocative question: What would it look like to reorient
schooling around a vision of children as persons? Children are marginalized in our society–deprived of
meaningful protection, provision, and access to participation in society by adult power structures. In
law, common practice, and popular discourse, children are denied personhood through dominant
moral frameworks which conjure ‘persons’ as idealized autonomous agents. These imaginations of
children as ‘not-quite-persons’ seem likely to only intensify as our culture continues “overheating”
(Eriksen, 2016)–both literally getting hotter and becoming increasingly polarized. Redefining
personhood in response to children (Wall, 2010) and reimagining children as persons are promising
ways for us to both combat children’s marginalization and begin cooling an ‘overheated’ world.
Operating from observations of school’s centrality to children’s lives and to adult discourse about
children (Dumas & Nelson, 2016), this study considers how school’s policies, practices, and discourses
might be reconstructed to better affirm children’s personhood.

Conceptual Framework
Both critical childhood studies (Dumas & Nelson; Templeton, 2021) and childism (Wall, 2010, 2019)
lend concepts and approaches to this study. Personhood, viewed through a childist lens, is redefined
in response to children to emphasize the “creative tension” between persons’ agency and
vulnerability, to shift our conception of persons from autonomous individuals to “responsively
interdependent others” (Wall, 2010). Affirming children’s personhood, then, means above all else
affirming and responding to them as narrative-makers and creators of social relations. A critical
childhood studies approach insists that we regard children as experts in narrating their own lives
(Templeton), and that we view ‘children’ not as a homogenous class but a group of diverse individuals
whose experiences are colored by their multiple subjectivities–particularly race, gender, class, and
ability (Templeton; Dumas & Nelson). Layering on childism requires us to attend to how our current
scholarly and social norms “marginalize the particular marginalization of children” (Wall, 2019). We
must view and respond to children’s experiences as part of a larger effort to recreate our norms and
practices around children rather than trying to squeeze them into existing adult-centered frameworks.

Research Approach
Nearly eighty middle schoolers in Chicago Public Schools were asked, through collaborative
workshops, to reflect on elements of their school experience that they felt were (not) affirming to
their sense of personhood. This study enacted a methodology of “muddling through” alongside
students as “co-explorers” rather than subjects of research (Biswas, 2020), and children’s experiences
and ideas shaped the trajectory of their work. Students were asked not only to share experience for
analysis, but to discuss and synthesize their classmates’ findings, identifying important patterns for
scholarly consideration and suggesting possible avenues for reform. To account for the narrow scope
of this work, students’ findings were put in conversation with existing research and theory.

Findings
Students identified several dehumanizing features of schooling which correlate with suggestions from
prior adult scholarship. They lamented how school talk was narrowly controlled by adults and often
used to demean and punish children. Their findings highlighted the dominance of monologic
discourses, generally, which promote adults’ power, values, and educational objectives rather than
negotiation between teachers and students. Students also identified punitive school policies and
invasive surveillance practices which seek to control and punish children preemptively in order to
dictate students’ behavior. This orientation towards control appears intended to maintain a normal
order which emphasizes compliance and academic achievement above all else. And, importantly,
students highlighted and problematized how all of these dehumanizing features of schooling–
limiting students’ mobility, for example, or dictating their dress and behavior–targeted and impacted
marginalized children disproportionately.

Discussion
Students’ findings reveal dehumanizing imaginations of children pervasive in schooling and society.
Some children, in their reflections, saw themselves positioned as “less important” than adults,
“degraded” or made “subhuman” by virtue of their age and supposed inability (Rollo, 2016, p. 61;
Murris et al., 2020, p. 7). Others conveyed developmentalist understandings of children which reduce
kids to hollow stereotypes based on their supposed progression towards a normative image of a
(specifically “white, rational… male”) adult (Murris et al., p. 8). Students’ observations of punitive school
policies and discourses recalled imaginations of children (and their bodies) as “dangerous” and in need
of careful monitoring, controlling, and shaping by adults anxious to reify and recreate the dominant
moral order in a neoliberal society which suppresses and excludes queerness in favor of normativity
(Lesko, 2012; Taubman, 2009). And lastly, students’ findings (and this study’s design itself) betrayed a
reductive vision of children as passive victims and not also active “agents with voice” (Wall, 2019).

Implications
This article concludes by considering what it would look like to redefine moral education, in response
to children, away from a process of developing ‘adult’ moral capabilities and towards “the initiation of
selves into socially ordered values and character” (Wall, 2010). Schools are prompted to shift the
emphasis in moral education onto the morality of schooling itself, to interrogate and reimagine what
it looks like to orient schools around an imagination of children as full persons with equal moral
standing. Students must be included more meaningfully as deliberators and decision-makers at the
individual, classroom, and school level. School discourse must become more dialogic to position
children as subjects of their schooling rather than objects of adult ontologies. And, students’ work in
this project also suggests that schools should make the critical work of empowering children–and
working alongside them to drive social change (Oyler, 2012; Biswas, 2021)–essential to curriculum and
instruction. However, even these significant reforms will be insufficient unless school adults also make
an ongoing commitment to “ethical self-critique” (Wall, 2010). Building from queer (Halberstam,
2005) and childist concepts of temporality, adults are encouraged to take children seriously (DeLillo,
1985) as present persons in resistance to our current dominfant emphasis on children’s futurity.

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