47 pages • 1 hour read
Carla ShalabyTroublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword-PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword Summary
Content Warning: The source material contains discussions of racism, including racialized mass incarceration.
Educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot argues that concepts like freedom and love are too rarely discussed in conversations about education today; classrooms instead focus on testing standards, individual accountability, and quantifiable metrics. Shalaby contends that this promotes uniformity over individuality and management over creativity, rewarding teachers who suppress “troublemaking” students rather than seek to understand them. Lawrence-Lightfoot advocates viewing education as a human enterprise centering imagination and relationships, not test scores. Classrooms should practice freedom by lifting up students’ voices; they should also practice love, cultivating supportive teacher-student relationships.
Lawrence-Lightfoot contends that Troublemakers provides a model for this through its exploration of exclusionary school practices and centering of excluded students’ voices. She praises Shalaby’s methodology, arguing that her approach allowed her to cultivate trust with students and present them holistically to readers: “Combining portraiture, person-centered ethnography, and visual-arts methods […] she is an attentive listener, discerning observer, intensely curious questioner, and occasionally a playful co-conspirator” (xiii). However, she also notes Shalaby’s balanced portrayal of the educators she profiles; Shalaby recognizes the constraints such teachers work under and levels her primary critique at the system, which ultimately harms all children—not just “troublemakers.” Though the changes Shalaby argues for require reimagining the basic role of education in society, Lawrence-Lightfoot maintains that such change is necessary.
Preface Summary: “Canaries in the Mine”
Shalaby dedicates the book to the four children the work will profile, remarking that she cares about children’s welfare and schooling both as an educator and as a person. Shalaby argues that schools should be places that teach students how to insist on their right to be free in preparation for life in a democracy. However, Shalaby asserts that most schools prioritize order and compliance to train students for life in a capitalist society. This failing becomes more glaring in light of the violence students witness in the world surrounding them, which often reinforces harmful power structures—white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. To combat the idea that only certain lives have value, Shalaby asserts that the educational system must embrace love and freedom.
Children’s imaginations can guide this transformation, Shalaby notes, but first, educators must truly listen to all students. She introduces the four six- and seven-year-old “troublemakers” who offer lessons in this respect: Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus. These are children who disrupt classrooms and challenge rules; she identified them by asking educators which students they found most difficult to work with. Teachers as early as kindergarten punish and pathologize such independence and noncompliance via medication, suspension, expulsion, etc. This feeds the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly for youth of color.
Shalaby contends that these loud children can teach us the most about freedom, noting that the US has routinely punished those who challenge the status quo. She compares such children to “miners’ canaries.” Just as caged canaries warned miners of toxins before the fumes affected humans, disruptive children’s behaviors signal that classroom environments are toxic, and Shalaby invites readers to hear their “freedom songs” as cries against poisonous environments that silence them.
Aspiring teachers with good intentions learn in their degree programs to exert authority over such students and to see their behavior as a problem of individual choice. This merely compounds the problem by further silencing students while leaving the root causes of their frustrations unaddressed. Nor are those root causes problems only for the “troublemakers”: Lack of play, community, and self-determination also harm the students that endure them quietly. Quoting from Maya Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird,” Shalaby again urges readers to listen to students “songs” to build freer schools and ultimately a freer society.
Foreword-Preface Analysis
The Foreword and Preface establish the key groundwork Shalaby will use to reexamine traditional responses to defiant students and to consider the meaning of such students’ “troublemaking.”
In the Foreword, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot argues that how teachers manage authority and discipline connects deeply to issues of freedom and power. She advocates moving away from punitive reactions to an ethic of love. She advocates calling out injustice while generously listening and committing to liberation. This view—that troublemaking students can reveal insights about problematic power arrangements in classrooms—is a key idea across the whole text. As Lawrence-Lightfoot developed the portraiture methodology that Shalaby will use, her endorsement of Shalaby’s research and conclusions serves to bolster their credibility.
Shalaby’s Preface builds on the Foreword, introducing the guiding metaphor of defiant students as “canaries in the mine” (xv). The image relates to the theme of Disruption as Communication and Resistance; it implies that students signal invisible harms in school environments through their loud songs of protest. The metaphor also parallels Shalaby’s allusion to Angelou’s “Caged Bird” poem, which famously likens the oppression of Black Americans to the imprisonment of a songbird. Though only two of the four students Shalaby profiles are children of color, the allusion signals that race and racism will inform Shalaby’s discussion of the educational system’s failings.
More broadly, the Preface previews an argument that understanding and even learning from students who defy classroom norms can transform not merely schools but ultimately society. The idea that school should prepare students for “life” recurs throughout the text, and Shalaby does not wholly disagree with it. However, she does identify two problems with this conception of schooling. One critique centers on the fact that childhood is a part of life, not merely a prelude to it. While this idea becomes clearer in the work’s concluding chapters, Shalaby gestures toward it with her reminder that children are human beings—not, that is, human beings in training. The other critique, which the Preface lays out more explicitly, relates to the nature of the society schools are preparing children to enter. Because this society is itself authoritarian in many ways, demanding tractable workers and responding to difference (of race, gender, etc.) with violence, schools become authoritarian as well. The corollary, however, is that schools that instead embrace democracy and equality can pave the way for a society that also practices these values.
