Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

The concept of hypervisibility, as explored in Troublemakers, aligns closely with the theme of Imposing Conformity Through Exclusion in School Culture. Shalaby argues that students who deviate from mainstream (e.g., white, upper-middle-class, etc.) norms become subject to heightened scrutiny and negative attention in the school setting. Their hypervisibility often then results in a “troublemaker” label, further entrenching the cycle of exclusion and marginalization. Figures like Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus reject their teachers’ erasure of their difference, but their disruptive resistance, counterintuitively to them, engenders greater surveillance and punishment. For Shalaby, the lens of hypervisibility reveals the systemic nature of exclusion in educational settings and the urgent need for more inclusive and understanding approaches to diversity in schools.

By the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Shalaby refers to the system of policies and practices in the US education and criminal justice systems that mutually reinforce marginalized students’ criminalization. “Troublemaking” students face escalating punishments that aim to force compliance: public scoldings, detention, suspension, and finally expulsion. This exclusion, rather than addressing the root causes of students’ behavior, denies students academic instruction time and fuels resentment. Excluded students may not obtain a diploma and consequently may face limited prospects beyond underground economies or even imprisonment. This pipeline disproportionately impacts students of color with fewer means, as differences in identity, from gender to class to race, themselves become suspect in an educational system that values conformity. Troublemakers urges a dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline by reimagining classrooms to focus on healing harm rather than defaulting to punishment.

Core to Shalaby’s argument is the idea that classrooms reflect the ideology of society at large: capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, but also, more broadly, hierarchy as an end in and of itself. Shalaby sharply critiques this dominant social order embedded within school behavioral norms, routines, and codes for conduct. She examines how the classroom’s demands for unquestioning obedience, conformity, and silent complicity actively undermine inclusion, community, and justice. When so-called “troublemakers” like Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus intentionally disrupt the classroom, their disruptions threaten the white, middle-class cultural norm and therefore meet with harsh punishment. Shalaby therefore calls on educators to reimagine classrooms to focus on collaborative critical thinking and problem-solving geared toward collective liberation from oppression. In this, she suggests, children themselves can lead the way. When children like Sean or Lucas ask “why?” or walk out of readings entirely, they are not simply being difficult; they are modeling the creative imagination and civic participation required to contest and remake the public world.