Abstract
In Navigating Conflict: How Youth Handle Trouble in a High-Poverty School, Calvin Morrill and Michael Musheno take readers inside the complex world of teen conflict and the ways it unfolds, escalates, and gets diffused, with an eye toward the school’s influence on the “trouble strings” of everyday life among teens in a high-poverty urban school in the southwestern United States. Rather than study youth conflict through a lens of school discipline and youth violence, Morrill and Musheno deliberately take a much broader, child-centered approach. They explore not only conflicts that end in school discipline procedures, but also the numerous conflicts that do not, for a much broader picture of how social trust between students and between students and staff shapes trouble strings in schools.
Morrill and Musheno describe three kinds of responses to troubles in school. First, sometimes kids enact a “workin’ it out” response, in which peer trust and relationships enable a quick de-escalation. Second, sometimes youth enact “puttin’ ‘em in their place,” especially when they imagined peers to have crossed a moral boundary. Finally, sometimes youth conflicts rise to the level of school authority intervention, and youth enact “dealing with the system.”
The research on which Navigating Conflict is based spans a decade. A change in school discipline during the late 1990s enabled the authors to analyze the implementation of “safe schools” policies of strong discipline. They show how, paradoxically, safe school policies led to an increase in troubles escalating into physical fights between students and conflicts between students and school authorities, through the erosion of social trust and youth agency. Morrill and Musheno conclude that “social trust and collective peer dignity” are critical elements of school environments in which conflict most frequently gets defused. As a result, they conclude that heavy-handed discipline policies actually increase discipline problems at school.
The findings in Navigating Conflict contribute to studies of youth culture in urban schools by outlining with great precision just how youth conflict escalates and de-escalates. While others, including myself, have attempted to explain why school-focused kids may nevertheless engage in peer conflicts (Carter 2003; Rendón 2014; Warikoo 2011), this is the first study that systematically details just how conflicts unfold, alongside how teens make sense of those conflicts. Further, the authors detail the role of school policies and how relationships between teens and adults at school shape the ways conflicts unfold. While Victor Rios’s (2017) work emphasizes the damaging role that institutions can play in making youth “human targets,” Morrill and Musheno describe further how youth manage troubles before they make it to authorities and the school conditions that enable more frequent de-escalation. This is an important contribution to studies of school discipline.
The above findings make this book essential reading for scholars of school discipline. The authors take a comprehensive approach, which enables readers to understand the complexity of peer conflicts and the ways they are manifested in high-poverty schools. The argument that harsh discipline, ironically, creates more problematic conflicts is highly convincing and an important finding in the face of “no excuses” schools, especially in the charter-schools movement.
Scholars interested in ethnographic research in schools, especially those embarking on their first ethnographic study or those attempting a team-based ethnography, have much to learn from this study. The authors provide considerable detail about the ways the team collected the data, developed ideas, and communicated as the study progressed, a rare but important peek into team-based ethnography done well. Some readers may find the lengthy field notes excerpts—up to three pages long—refreshing and engaging, while others may find the presentation of data without a narrative guiding those fieldnotes on the longer side. Overall, Navigating Conflict is a welcome addition to our understanding of youth conflict, youth culture, violence, and the role of school discipline policies in high-poverty schools.