Empowerment in a Controlling Place: Youth Program Facilitators and Resistance to School Discipline

The Cultures of Urban Schools

Recent scholarship has shown that there has been a disciplinary turn in schooling, and that the attendant practices have consequences on youth. This literature situates the disciplinary turn in schools within what Garland (2001) referred to as the “culture of control,” a widely accepted way of thinking about social problems that constructs punishment and social control as logical and even necessary (Rios 2011; Simon 2007; Foucault 1977). Within this “culture of control,” schools, particularly urban public schools, have been reshaped by heightened police presence, multiple forms of surveillance, and exclusionary punishment (Bracy 2011; Kupchik 2012; Lyons and Drew 2006; Nolan 2011; Perry and Morris 2014; Rios 2011). This has transformed urban education for youth of color in ways that differ from and outpace the consequences at majority-white schools (Hirschfield 2008; Kupchik and Ward 2014; Morris 2005; Ramey 2015; Welch and Payne 2010).

Scholars have pointed to distinct mechanisms that transmit the cultural logic of control to students within classrooms even while disciplinary practices take place across the school—in hallways, playgrounds, and other contexts—and have ramifications that reach out into communities and homes through suspension, expulsion, and arrest (Nolan 2011). In one mechanism, described as labeling, schools mark students as criminals, troublemakers, and at risk, and those labels shape how others view the person, and in turn, shape how they act as they live up to the label (Becker 1963). Rios argues that, in the era of mass incarceration, labeling is multiplied, as “agencies of social control further stigmatize and mark [individuals] in response to their original label,” creating a “vicious cycle” of punitive treatment and institutional interventions (Ferguson 2001; Rios 2011:45). In a second mechanism, the imposition of harsh disciplinary authority, such as occurs with zero-tolerance policies and ticketing for minor offenses, behavior is normalized and police and school safety officers enter into schools for otherwise noncriminal actions, which can accelerate what would otherwise be small incidents into juvenile justice, or even criminal justice, concerns (Kupchik 2012; Nolan 2011; Perry and Morris 2014).

Existing research has often described youth culture and school culture as oppositional, with adults, often hidden from the analytic view, constructing a culture of control, and cultural resistance bubbling up through students from below (Arum 2005; Nolan 2011). Scholars have explored the multiple consequences of this pervasive culture of control on students. Some have argued that it can prepare students for a life of surveillance, punishment, and discipline (Perry and Morris 2014; Rios 2011). Excluded and punished youth suffer directly in terms of education, grades, and dropout rates (Kang-Brown et al. 2013; Perry and Morris 2014). Even for those students not feeling the direct effects of criminalization, the culture of control promotes “legal cynicism,” the view of law enforcement as illegitimate, and creates a sense of injustice and “shared skepticism of a range of governmental institutions” (Brayne 2014; Hagan, Shedd, and Payne 2005:398; Losen and Gillespie 2012). Students may resist harsh school discipline or avoid it—even while doing so may heighten the consequences—as a means to recuperate autonomy and dignity in the face of structural marginalization (Rios 2011; Sennett and Cobb 1972). Taken together, the existing scholarship on school discipline provides few examples of students engaging with adults who are not directly representing the system of school discipline.

The nearly monolithic image of school discipline that is presented in existing research leaves out much of the cultural dynamics at work in schools, particularly an array of frames carried by adults that could mediate the effects of harsh discipline. While they are rarely the subject of sociological study, many teachers and administrators work from inside the schools to challenge the culture of control using diverse strategies (Nolan 2011). We know, from the scholarly literature on care in schools, that some school-based adults, such as teachers and administrators, seek to cultivate connections and support students, particularly youth marginalized by race and class (Holland 2015; Kirk et al. 2017). For example, Angela Valenzuela (1999) shows how teachers in a Houston school care for youth and in the process instill in them a deeper dedication to schooling.

In addition to school-based adults, a range of outside organizations have brought new cultural frames into schools. Some of these programs are run by nonprofits and intend to challenge the culture of control that gives rise to harsh discipline. Others are implemented by law enforcement officials, such as Gang Resistance Education and Training or GREAT, while others are implemented by corporations. A burgeoning area of research, almost entirely outside of sociology, has begun to explore how Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) and restorative justice (RJ) programs can change school cultures. PBIS, which had been implemented in 3,138 high schools by 2016 (J. Freeman, Wilkinson, and Vanlone 2016), advocates changing entire systems at the school or district level, in large part by explicitly teaching behavioral expectations, such as respect and responsibility, in the same way that other curriculum subjects are taught (Flannery et al. 2014). This could include proactively marking positive behaviors and clearly describing expected behaviors in various contexts. RJ takes a different tact, as it seeks to “transform how we think of punishment for wrongful acts” (Menkel-Meadow 2007). In schools, RJ attempts to change how schools respond to rule violations and disputes, emphasizing building community capacity, and repairing and strengthening social ties (Karp and Breslin 2001).

Beginning in the late 1980s, a nascent field of youth programming moved toward the promotion of “positive youth development” (Catalano et al. 2004; Damon 2004; Kwon 2013). Roth and Brooks-Gunn define positive youth development as programs [that]

seek to enhance not only adolescents’ skills, but also their confidence in themselves and their future, their character, and their connections to other people and institutions by creating environments, both at and away from the program, where youth can feel supported and empowered. (2003:180)

The language and framing of these programs posit them as alternatives and opposition to the controlling, punitive, and disciplinary structures of schools in the era of crime control. Positive youth development, alongside “health promotion” and other forms of “asset-based” models, fit Eliasoph’s description of “empowerment projects,” which attempt to “use a complex mix of government, nonprofit, and private funds to transform whole groups of people’s personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills by ‘empowering’ them” (Eliasoph 2011:4). Empowerment, while taking varied forms (Zimmerman 1995), suggests, in sharp contrast to crime control, that young people are inherently capable of “individual determination over one’s own life and democratic participation in the life of one’s community” (Rappaport 1987:12).

Most research on school-based programs, much like research on schools, focuses on the impact on students and rarely examines how facilitators or other adults navigate the school culture. The limited amount of research that does document the experiences of program implementers suggests that facilitators actively navigate the space between school structures and practices in the course of their work, but it does not explore in detail how they do so (Ball et al. 2015; Fields 2008; Kohfeldt et al. 2011; Pearrow and Pollack 2009).

To make sense of the diverse cultural frames deployed by adults in schools, I draw on approaches to understanding cultural heterogeneity, which has been previously used to analyze the myriad cultural frames in marginalized urban neighborhoods (Harding 2007). In this theoretical tradition, scholars of culture suggest that individuals draw on cultural frames—distinct mental schemas for viewing the world—to navigate social life (Harding 2007; Small, Harding, and Lamont 2010; Swidler 1986). Both empowerment and control act as kinds of cultural frames in schools. How is it that facilitators put a cultural frame of empowerment into action within the cultural context of school discipline?

Data and Methods

This manuscript draws on data collected from a larger study of youth programs in Los Angeles. From 2009 to 2013, I conducted extensive fieldwork across the programming implemented by Peace over Violence, an antiviolence nonprofit organization in Los Angeles. A full-time staff of eight, as well as dozens of volunteers, facilitated a range of short-term youth violence prevention programs at schools and community centers across the city, reaching over 3,000 young people, predominantly high school students, each year. During the course of my fieldwork, I conducted participant observation in programming at 20 public schools across Los Angeles. Across programs that dealt with sexuality, bullying, interpersonal violence, sexual assault, healthy masculinity, self-care, mentorship, and oppression, I observed multiweek and semester-long programs that took place during study halls or lunch periods, as well as intensive campus-wide one-time programs that lasted anywhere from a day to a week. While the data discussed here were collected as an observer, I at times facilitated portions of programs myself, so some students were familiar with me in that capacity as well. It was common for volunteers or other facilitators to observe programming, and my doing so was not out of the ordinary. During the course of my fieldwork, I did not record identifiable information regarding students and followed the guidance and standard practices of facilitators in any ethical matter that arose. In the second year of field research, I began conducting interviews with students. To recruit interviews, I informed students at the conclusion of a program that I was interested in conducting interviews for a research project.

All of the observation data on students used in this manuscript were collected in high schools. I did not have access to the ages of students, but programming was more often implemented to first and second year students. The audiences ranged in size from five to 40 students, but most consisted of 15 to 20 students. In addition to the interactions that took place during programming, I observed how programs intersected with the other functions of schools, observing teachers, administrators, and staff as they interacted with facilitators and youth participants. In addition to my time in schools, I participated in trainings, program evaluations, and regular meetings of facilitators and other organizational staff, during which time they discussed challenges and strategies of facilitating. I jotted field notes during programming and dictated verbal field notes into an audio recorder immediately after leaving the field. I typed detailed field notes within 24 hours (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). I coded field notes for emerging themes, which were developed in relation to dominant questions in the scholarship on discipline in schools—labeling, authority, and surveillance. All names given are pseudonyms.

During the third year of participant observation I conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 11 program facilitators. These interviews ran between half an hour and two-and-a-half hours and were conducted in breakout rooms at the organization or in coffee shops. Interview questions regarded facilitators’ strategies for working with youth and the tensions they felt in their work. In total, my interviews with facilitators included six women—three Latina, two black, three white, and one Asian American—and five men—two black, two Latino, and one white. These interviews included all of the facilitators employed at the organization during this time, as well as two volunteer facilitators. These interviews enabled me to make sense of the differences between the way facilitators described empowerment and how they interacted with students.

Most of the schools where youth programs are implemented are the same ones that are marked by disadvantage and crime control approaches, as the grants that fund violence prevention programs largely focus on specific geographic communities or demographic populations seen as at risk. The funding was provided from a mix of multiyear city, state, federal, and private grants. The audience for programming, in line with the population of LAUSD, was almost entirely youth of color. Only two of the 20 school sites I spent time in were populated by a majority of white students.

To understand how facilitators navigate and respond to school discipline and control, it is necessary to distinguish between their formal job requirements and their actions. An ethnographic approach enabled me to document how programs were implemented in practice, data that differ from what is found in evaluation studies based on surveys or interviews. By contrasting the formal curricula with my in-situ observations, I was able to distinguish the informal practices of facilitators from those prescribed in the program being implemented.

The Empowerment Frame

Empowerment, simply put, is a cultural frame that proposes that individuals are the best experts on their own lives (Gengler 2012). Facilitators viewed empowerment as grounded in the organization’s roots as a feminist rape crisis agency, and it was a central component of the mission of Peace over Violence. It was part of the organization’s mission statement and was one of the eight core values listed on their Web site, where it stated, “Empowerment: To give power or authority to; to enable or permit.” The word was included in job advertisements for facilitator positions, and the empowerment frame was built in to the training that all facilitators went through. There were debates over the best way to empower youth, and while some people supported the notion of empowerment through programming, some nonfacilitators wanted a more radical approach. Ella, a seasoned facilitator, explained this tension: “Believe it or not, there have been a few people here in the agency who don’t see the value of the curriculum. They don’t necessarily feel that youth empowerment will come from the [program] implementation.” From the organization’s perspective, empowerment was used to describe a range of practices, from implementing a curriculum, to teaching self-defense, to working on a performance, to providing funding for participating in a summer institute. Empowered youth were described as possessing agency, making choices, and becoming capable of change.

However, when it came time to talk about how to translate empowerment into work in schools, facilitators were more reticent. A couple of sessions into a 50-hour training, Amy, an experienced trainer, stressed to a room full of new facilitators that they should not put too much weight on their work in schools: They were not going to change the system. She explained that they should let go of the idea that we will go in and save everyone: “It’s not Stand and Deliver. It’s not our job.” A woman trainee, clearly bothered by this narrow interpretation of facilitation asked, “If our goal isn’t individual and it isn’t huge, then what should we be going for?” Amy responded that the goal of in-school facilitation is to provide “a sense of agency.” This is, read one way, a powerful endorsement of the capacity for programming to change the way young people see themselves in the world. But, read another perhaps more cynical way, it shows the limits of empowerment—a sense of agency, but not the real thing. This description by Amy is a fitting illustration of the bind that facilitators navigated as they brought an empowerment frame into disciplinary places. The sections that follow show how facilitators constrained and transformed empowerment when faced with the mechanisms of the culture of control, construing empowerment to entail anonymity, positive labels, and symbolic equality.

Against Marking: Anonymity and Positive Labels

Teachers and administrators would often, unprompted, approach facilitators before class and tell them that certain students were “trouble” or were “going through something.” These informal labels were used by school officials in the presence of youth, often with the stigma of trouble and delinquency attached. During one session with a group of “high-risk” boys, I saw how labeling could disrupt positive interactions. Jose, a stern and funny facilitator, was leading a thoughtful discussion about the uses of the word bitch in popular culture when a school administrator, looking for a particular student who had ditched class, poked their head in, briefly surveyed the students and exclaimed, “You’ve got all the rowdies! Good luck!” with a smirk and then took off down the hall. Even though some students in highly policed areas may not find delinquent labels stigmatizing (Hirschfield 2008b), many students expressed resentment and hurt at interactions like this, and regardless of how it made them feel, labels served as powerful mechanisms for sorting students (Rios 2011).

The students enrolled in youth programs were likely to have been labeled at some point. These labels determined how various institutions engaged with them, such as the probation department, the school administration, campus police, or school psychologist, and often set youth into narrow prescribed tracks that organized their physical movements, educational opportunities, and access to resources. The in-school programs implemented by Peace Over Violence enrolled youth who had been labeled, through a variety of processes, as “at risk.” Administrators and teachers exercised latitude in who was enrolled in programs. Once school administrators requested programming from the organization and the organization determined the source of funding for implementing the program, then probation officers, school counselors, teachers, and administrators drew on their existing perceptions of students to decide which students would participate. This could be an entire grade level or a small, hand-picked group. Jose explained how this process worked for the high-risk program he facilitated. While he would receive a list of students on probation, there were other, less clearly defined paths to being placed in the high-risk program:

They don’t necessarily end up there because they’re on probation. The probation officer could be working with counselors or the principals within those schools and say, “Hey, this kid, or this young woman or man, they might need some type of extracurricular education on violence.” Then they come into his or her caseload, and then my list therefore expands.

Jose’s expanding list is evidence of how school officials not only used formal marking by institutions and officials to enroll youth in programs, such as being on probation, but also informal labeling, such as “needing” education on violence, due to perceptions of aggression, defiance, or trauma.

Drawing on the empowerment frame, facilitators believed that this kind of labeling would not only stigmatize, but constrain students and that challenging labeling practices was central to their work to empower youth. While school officials used informal and formal labels regularly, including as a means to enroll students in youth programming, I never observed facilitators using stigmatizing labels or institutional markings with students. Instead, facilitators used strategies, which they shared and enacted cooperatively, to avoid both formal and informal labels. No matter the size of the implementation, if students asked what the program was about, facilitators would often explain their role as helping young people to become leaders and develop the tools to have healthy relationships. This was rather than describe it as violence prevention, which was their official job and how they described their work to teachers and administrators.

In addition, most facilitators, quite simply, refused to say labels out loud. Take for example, Jose’s explanation of how he views youth differently from the way they are viewed by school officials:

I don’t come there labeling, I don’t come there with my biases, I don’t come there like, “Oh, I need to bring a gun,” or, “I need to protect myself,” or, “Is he going to jump me because he has tattoos?” No, if anything, I see them as young kids. They’re really kids. Maybe they did stuff wrong, but that doesn’t mean that that label should be put on their foreheads, and that’s it. Their label in society is “probation youth” or “high-risk kids.” I don’t even see that. I see them as first-name basis, so I know them as “Oscar,” “Michele.” Whatever their names are, I want to see them as that.

As Jose makes clear, he resisted labeling by ignoring the very labels that framed his work and instead referred to the youth as individuals. However, despite Jose’s description, facilitators rarely knew students’ names. This was due in part to the overwhelming volume of youth they encountered in programming, as well as poor communication from overworked school staff who sometimes failed to provide a list of enrolled students. But, even when they had a list of student names, facilitators rarely took attendance. Many facilitators described feeling resentment for their responsibility to pass around a sign-in sheet, actively downplaying in front of students its importance even though it was central to their evaluations.

Across all of my interviews, even though they were caught up in an extensive system of labeling, most youth had never heard the term at risk and most of those who had heard the term were confused by its meaning. When I asked Hendrix, a Latino student at a small high school, whether he had heard the label before, he responded, “I mean, I haven’t heard it a lot, but I know what it means . . . It means, like, something that’s, like, you’re walking on eggshells pretty much.” To Hendrix, “at risk” meant something like being afraid of what others might do. None of the students I interviewed thought of themselves as at risk. In one representative class of students, when asked why they had been selected to participate in a program, they variously described their enrollment as retribution for a disagreement with a teacher, a therapeutic intervention suggested by a counselor for a personal issue, or a demonstration of their role as a campus leader. While these rationales alluded to various relationships with authority, they all implied that youth participants made some choice to attend and none of them served to attach lasting stigma to youth participants.

Facilitators did not avoid the “at risk” label because they believed that it was incorrect. In fact, in conversations outside of programming, in organizational meetings and interviews, facilitators described most of the youth they worked with were at risk in that they were likely to experience or engage in violence. Ella told me, “in the communities I’ve worked with, every single [youth] is high-risk just because of the environment that we live in.” I asked if she just meant high risk for violence, and she responded, “At risk for anything, drug use, alcohol, pregnancy. It’s overall just high-risk.” Sean, who had worked with homeless veterans before taking this position, explained how he responded to the idea that the students he worked with were at risk:

[My supervisor was] like, “we work with the future victims and the future perpetrators.” For me, when I heard that the first time, I was like, “Damn, that is so harsh,” but it’s very true Because I work in prevention, those labels don’t exist yet and I’m able to see everybody with the same, if you will, naked eye, where everyone’s just pretty much across the board same, even though statistically I know I’m looking at future victims and future perpetrators, but because they’re not labeled, there’s no discrimination that’s happening across the board.

Sean’s perspective echoes what I heard from facilitators and youth alike—while the statistical reality of risk was present due to what one facilitator described as their “disturbed geography” of marginalization and violence, avoiding labels enabled them to avoid constructing difference and thereby denying a group of young people who were already marginalized and criminalized by labeling the ability to determine their own identities.

Rather than use proper names or stigmatizing labels, facilitators attempted to reframe students by attaching positive labels. Similar to the findings described by Eliasoph (2011) concerning community empowerment projects, facilitators not only avoided constraining labels by referring to students as “y’all” and “folks,” but they actively repeated informal positive labels such as “the future,” “leaders,” and “change agents.” John and Arianna, both of whom are Latino, described the positive feeling they got from how they were treated in programming compared with how they were labeled in their daily lives:

As John and Arianna show, facilitators often succeeded in providing alternatives to the discursive mechanisms that typically conferred informal labels on youth. As John stated, students believed that most adults in schools often label them in ways that constrain their choices, but that facilitators do not. In doing so, facilitators temporarily uncoupled the discursive stigma of labels from the institutional mechanisms that used labels to mark and sort youth. That is, while facilitators provided positive alternative labels, they also obscured how school officials had attached labels to specific individuals to sort youth into the program.

Against Authority: Performative Leveling

In most of the schools where violence prevention programs were implemented, the spread of crime control was clear: Police walked the halls, small acts were documented as willful defiance, and school officials threatened detention or expulsion for minor infractions. Rob, a tall, white facilitator with close-cropped hair who was often asked by students whether he was a police officer, described how he saw the impact of crime control policies on the work of facilitation: “We are invited in to classrooms where kids are basically prisoners, so we get to talk to the prisoners.” Rob’s point echoes one made by research that has shown that urban schools are constructed in ways that parallel prisons and deprive students of valuable avenues for “a sense of ownership over the self” (Nolan 2011:16).

Within the strict disciplinary authority of the school, facilitators saw few avenues to increase the power and autonomy of students. They could not, for example, give students power to make institutional or classroom decisions. Students had to complete their assignments, show up for class, and generally follow rules that they had no say in. Instead, the empowerment frame, within the context of school discipline, led facilitators to symbolically lower their own status and authority and curb the interactional mechanisms that often tracked students into disciplinary action.

Facilitators set out to manage the classroom in a way that was dramatically different from disciplinary and rule-driven operation of “regular” classes, often maintained through hand-raising and threats of “being sent down the hall.” Facilitators managed classroom interactions using what they called the empowerment model, which was “based on choice” as Eleanor, a young and compassionate facilitator, explained:

Giving individuals the options and then letting them decide what they want to do . . . We don’t want to further victimize them in a sense, because if we’re making decisions for them or coming up with the solutions then we’re taking that power away from them. They’ve already had this power and control taken away from them so we want to empower them by giving them those options and those resources.

As Eleanor’s description shows, facilitators were critical of the authoritarian rules of the school and believed that it victimized students and stripped them of their autonomy. Facilitators believed that providing options and openness to students created a model of resistance to the school rules, and returned some “power and control” to students.

The daily work of facilitation took place in classrooms, where teachers or other school officials were often present and the threat of punishment loomed over most interactions, even while punitive discipline itself was rarely enacted there. During a presentation on the meaning of consent, Jennifer, a young facilitator, set out to model empowerment to several students who were furiously jotting notes, stating, “you don’t need to take notes, we aren’t going to make you do anything you don’t want to.” The teacher, a man with gray hair who had been grading papers quietly to the side, interjected, undermining Jennifer: “I do want you to take notes, there will be a quiz and you will get points for it.” Jennifer, without any grounds on which to challenge the teacher, relinquished her attempt to put her lesson on consent into action and continued with the unit. Interactions like this revealed how the school, premised on rewards and rules, contrasted with empowerment, which centered on equality and consent. When teachers used their authority in the classroom, as this teacher had, from requiring note taking to threatening expulsion, most youth performed more obediently as “good” students, taking notes and waiting to be called on. Facilitators found raising hands, alongside note taking, to be a particularly frustrating practice, and they often encouraged students to “treat this like a conversation” and “speak up.” For these reasons, facilitators often hoped that teachers would leave the room for their lessons, even though most schools had rules that required them to stay in a supervisory capacity.

The punitive power of the school was most apparent when students, predominantly young men, disrupted programming. This happened on dozens of occasions. I observed students call out “bullshit” during presentations and advocate that sexual assault was justifiable or enjoyable. Others put their heads down on their desks, swung their backpacks at friends, or abruptly walked in and out of the room. Often, if teachers were present, they would threaten students who acted out in class with detention or punishment. I never saw a facilitator send a student to the office or threaten punishment. Facilitators prided themselves on not resorting to disciplinary measures and they worked to de-escalate and redirect these events. Often, they did this by pulling the student in to the center of the discussion. One young man, wiry with long dark hair, was drumming his thumbs loudly against his desk and humming early on in a presentation. The teacher, seemingly hoping to head off other disruptive behavior, said the young man’s name, gave a look, and pointed outside. A few minutes later, he and the teacher came back in, but after a couple of minutes, he stood up and began walking around the room. The facilitator, Jennifer, quickly engaged with him, asking what he thought of what they were talking about, and she followed every answer up with another question. The young man, disarmed by the engagement, settled back into his chair and did not disrupt the class again.

Facilitators described their position as nonauthorities as vital to their ability to connect with young people and avoid feeling the brunt of any oppositional stance. During a segment on warning signs of violence several sessions into a multiweek program, Stephanie, a young and dynamic facilitator asked me to participate. One of the students, overhearing this, said “oh good, an expert.” Reflexively, I responded, “No, I’m not an expert,” and Sarah, another facilitator jumped in to say, “None of us are experts.” The young man, catching on, nodded and said, “We’re all experts.” Sarah responded, “Yes, we’re all experts,” while Stephanie nodded. The young man had picked up on the empowerment frame.

However, because of their position as school-sanctioned outsiders, facilitators came into the classroom with undeniable authority even though they told students that “we are all equal” and “no one here should have more authority than others.” Joe, the youngest facilitator, for example, often began class by clapping his palms together and repeating “Good morning” until every student faced forward and echoed him back. Then he said “stand up,” and with a slow groan the students would rise; “okay, sit down,” he said to more groans. Even though he had not shown a capacity to discipline or punish students, all of the students followed Joe’s command.

It took a delicate balancing act for facilitators to maintain control of the classroom, as their job required, and to create empowerment at the same time. I asked Jose, a facilitator who had spent time in the military, how he managed to create what he called an “open and safe space” for students while making sure that students listened to the required educational content. He told me,

It is tricky . . . I’m there to be a friend, and I’m there to be someone who empowers you, but also I have some authority on what I’m saying, therefore, like, “Hey, let’s listen up, because maybe you can carry this and you might learn something.”

For facilitators, unlike many teachers, their class management techniques were just as important as the material. They saw their interactions with students as opportunities to provide a model of empowerment that countered the hierarchical authority of the school. For this reason, facilitators spent considerable time and effort honing their classroom management. Take for example this excerpt from my field notes on a training session for volunteers in which Ida, a seasoned facilitator, described she would “shift the focus” of interactions in the classroom to “guide the audience towards the answers” without taking away their power and choice:

Ida explains that an answer that is technically correct, but doesn’t contribute to the lesson is written and validated—you say “that is a really good one” and don’t return to it. When someone calls out an answer that she wants to hear, Ida says “good, say more about that.” She describes this as “putting it back on them.” She explains, “one of my strategies is to say ‘what else?’ and then pause and then I say it [the answer], I know I’m going to say it. It is a way of controlling the audience.” Then, Ida explains how to “work them around” a disruptive or “tricky” response. For example, in response to the question “what is a healthy relationship?” students might say “being protective.” Ida though, concerned that protection is aligned with control suggests a response “Those can be good things: protection, safety, but jealousy means that there isn’t respect.”

Ida’s advice reveals the practice of “controlling the audience” by validating answers and opening up conversation and discussion around disruptive remarks. That facilitators viewed these strategies as a form of empowerment shows how the larger culture of control served to constrain their options.

Facilitators felt that students should always be encouraged to answer and feel that their contribution was appreciated. Facilitators saw this validation as a vital antidote to the way youth were often invalidated by adult authorities in school and beyond. Rob explained that young men “say stupid things and if you react to that, you are going to put them on shut down.” Rob referred to the strategies that he used in response to these comments as “management styles.” He explained that students

can talk for four minutes. Three minutes and twenty-five seconds of what they say is complete bullshit and stupid. Then they can say twenty-five seconds of something that is smart, and I’m not going to say oh man, you crazy. I’m going to zero in on that twenty-five seconds and say I really appreciate that.

“Sitting in the ignorance,” as Rob called his 25-second strategy, was easy to do when students gave incorrect, albeit apparently well-intentioned answers, but it was more difficult when they gave responses that challenged the program’s empowerment goals. This included bizarre responses that may or may not have been jokes at the presenters’ expense, and racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise troubling responses. In those cases, facilitators, rather than challenge students, actively and knowingly reframed what students said to represent a positive message. In one class, a student suggested going to TGIFridays with a survivor of domestic violence to cheer them up. As most of the students chuckled, the facilitator responded by saying, “Yes, you could spend time with them and support your friend.” Validation, as this facilitator showed, avoided proclaiming answers right or wrong while not allowing a potentially tense interaction to sidetrack the lesson.

Facilitators also leveled authority in the classroom by creating class “ground rules” on the first day of a series of lessons. The facilitator would ask the class “do we have any ideas for ground rules?” and write the answers on a ream of newsprint. Facilitators would also offer their own additions, as though they were part of the group: “What about ‘don’t interrupt,’ do we think that’s a good idea?” The specifics varied by class, but many rules came up consistently: step up, no violence, be respectful, be honest, and let others finish. Facilitators and youth did not pick these rules at random; they chose them out of a shared interest in discouraging aspects of the larger culture of control, marked from their perspective by blame, aggression, dishonesty, and competition. For example, when asked why he had suggested “be respectful,” one student replied that his teacher had been disrespectful of him. The ground-rules process worked through a performance of consensus. Facilitators could ask for ideas and then wrote only the ones they wanted on the board and excluded or asked for ways to revise ones they did not like. If a student acted out later in the program, implementers would point to the “ground rules” and say, “We all agreed.” Ground rules, along with selectively emphasizing and downplaying student involvement, was used by facilitators to frame the classroom as a site of empowerment, at the same time that they used those strategies to manage disruptions and dissent without involving the disciplinary apparatus of the school.

Discussion and Conclusion

Existing literature emphasizes the broad culture of control in schools and portrays schools, at times, as nearly indistinguishable from prisons (Hirschfield 2008). However, culture operates at various levels and previous research has overlooked the heterogeneous, often conflicting, cultural frames carried by adults in schools (Harding 2007). This article has shown how facilitators of youth programs modified the cultural frame of empowerment in response to the culture of control in disciplinary schools (Eliasoph 2011).

Cultural frames are not applied in a vacuum (Harding 2007). While empowerment functioned as an alternative cultural frame, control remained the dominant organizing cultural frame in schools, as it was deeply embedded in norms, beliefs, and institutional practices. Thus, facilitators enacted a frame of empowerment that fit within, and thus was distinctly circumscribed by, control. This meant that the empowerment frame looked very different in schools than it did in the context of the organization. Within the harsh disciplinary contexts of schools, facilitators put empowerment into action as intentional and shared opposition to two mechanisms of the dominant culture of control: the marking of at risk or troublesome youth and disciplinary authority over in-class behavior. When they engaged with students, facilitators, carrying out their belief in empowerment as they saw it and as they were able to from their distinct position, consistently used individualizing and anonymizing language, as well as positive labels. In doing so, they eased the sting of stigmatizing marks typically attached to students in urban schools and presented students with alternative ways of thinking about themselves in relation to the school. The result was that youth were constructed as “the future” rather than “at risk.” This had a positive impact on young people’s self-concept, temporarily changing the way that young people saw themselves. However, young people were still sorted and tracked by the school largely outside of their view.

In addition, facilitators, unable to empower students within the strict hierarchy of the school, adapted how they defined empowerment. They brought behavior that would often be viewed as disruptive and was likely to be sanctioned in the course of regular classroom activity into the realm of shared discussion and analysis in the program context. Facilitators worked to avoid any negative critiques of youth contributions and practiced a strategy for managing students through symbolically leveled classroom authority. These strategies undermined the interactional mechanisms that can otherwise push students toward punitive discipline (Nolan 2011; Rios 2011). This helped to counter the normalization of a culture of control among students and instead sent young people the message that schools can support their empowerment, albeit in a circumscribed manner.

In addition to being limited and redefined, this research suggests that alternative cultural frames, when situated within a larger culture of control, may have unintended consequences. Although it had short-term benefits for individual students, we should be wary of the implications of short-term empowerment in disciplinary places. When facilitators moved on and when students left the classroom, youth remained in the same disciplinary school, subject to the same culture of control. Students who come to take on the empowerment frame, and perhaps see themselves as a future leader, may be brought low when a teacher or administrator tells them they are bound for prison. Students who try to treat their interactions with a harsh administrator as a conversation between equals may be seen as disrespectful. In short, empowered students may be more likely to be disciplined.

This research suggests that cultural frames are not seamlessly transferred from outside organizations into students’ heads. Instead, cultural frames are made sense of, shifted, and enacted by social actors and in relation to one another. In the case of many urban schools, alternative cultural frames are enacted within an overarching culture of disciplinary control. Therefore, new frames carried by adults—and likely youth—into schools can not only challenge, but also be subsumed within the culture of control. This research suggests that other frames which set out to transform school cultures—such as RJ, PBIS, health promotion, or antibullying—will interact with the overarching culture of control as well. Research must consider both the cultural frame that is brought into schools, and how it is transformed as it interacts with the overarching culture of control. For example, PBIS uses a cultural frame that largely hinges on clearly defining the behavioral rules and norms of a school, and RJ programs deploy a frame that centers reconciliation and rehabilitation. These distinct cultural frames surely both challenge and are constrained by the culture of control.

In addition to complimenting sociological research on the culture of control in schools, this research also suggests a gap in evaluative scholarship on in-school programs. Previous research conceives of facilitators as direct conduits between the curriculum and the minds of students and ignores how facilitators decide how to engage with the organizational apparatus and the cultural frames of the school. The actions of facilitators—and presumably their efficacy—are more complicated than previous research allows, as facilitators must navigate cultural dynamics beyond the narrow implementation of the formal program, including school discipline, labeling, classroom management, and more.

This study provides a qualitative account of the practices used by program facilitators within one urban school district, and thus, has several limitations. First, the practices which I illuminate are shaped by the particular aspects of both local school policies and the particular culture of the nonprofit organization that employed these facilitators. In addition, scholarship on school discipline suggests that race (Ferguson 2001), class (Willis 1977), and gender (Ferguson 2001; Rios 2011) are dimensions of the operation of control in schools. Further research should explore intersectional implications of empowerment programs in practice. It is not clear, from a focus on facilitators alone, how students experience and take up this enactment of empowerment. We know that many students seek dignity, freedom, or anonymity in response to harsh school discipline (Oeur 2016; Rios 2011), but it is not clear whether empowerment would bolster those goals or undermine them. Empowerment, as practiced by facilitators, values anonymity, not name-making; performative leveling, not equality; dignity, not freedom. But what this means to students depends, in large part, on whether they perceive programs as part of or oppositional to the school. Further research should explore these questions, along with how adults, drawing on diverse cultural frames, manage their approaches within the context of school discipline. In particular, PBIS and RJ, which have seen widespread implementation and which rely on frames that are distinct from empowerment, deserve further research to determine how facilitators reconcile their beliefs and values with the culture of control in schools.