Context: Scholarship on transgenerational trauma has examined how suffering persists through familial, collective, historical, colonial, and embodied forms of transmission. Critical scholarship on schooling has likewise demonstrated that educational institutions can produce patterned forms of vulnerability and harm rather than simply receive traumatized students from elsewhere. Less attention has been given to the temporal processes through which institutions reproduce harm across successive generations of occupants who may share no genealogy, community, memory, or direct relationship. This essay isolates that institutional process while distinguishing it from established accounts of transgenerational trauma. Focus of Study: This essay develops two concepts for theorizing how institutional harm persists across time. Institutional recurrence names the cycling of different people through durable positions of vulnerability, while institutional recursion describes the return of subjects shaped by those positions into roles of authority, where adaptations formed under earlier exposure can enter new institutional relationships. Reading Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers as educational theory, the essay examines how institutional roles and routine practices distribute protection unevenly and shape defensive strategies for managing vulnerability. It further considers what these processes mean for trauma-informed pedagogies that locate both trauma and repair primarily within individuals and interpersonal relationships. Research Design: This study is a theoretical inquiry conducted through close reading of The Holdovers , situated within traditions of educational theorizing through popular culture rather than empirical research on schools. The film is treated as a thinking device that condenses institutional processes ordinarily dispersed across longer periods of educational life. The analysis moves between film scenes, screenplay, and scholarship on trauma, institutional harm, teacher formation, and trauma-informed pedagogy. Attention is given to Barton Academy’s institutional roles, administrative practices, and teacher–student relationships as sites through which vulnerability, protection, and defensive adaptation are organized across time. Conclusions: The analysis suggests that institutional harm can persist not only through transmission between people or communities but also through durable positions that repeatedly expose successive occupants to similar vulnerabilities. When people formed within those positions later enter roles of authority, strategies developed under earlier institutional exposure may reappear as practices of withdrawal, control, recognition, or care. Institutional recurrence and recursion therefore shift attention from damaged individuals toward the roles and arrangements through which vulnerability is repeatedly produced. For trauma-informed pedagogy, this framework suggests that relational care remains necessary but cannot by itself transform institutions whose procedures continue to reproduce unequal exposure and make care costly or precarious.
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has fundamentally changed how college students produce their academic work. As a result, it has also unsettled long-standing assumptions about what constitutes student success. Yet, much of the discussion has focused on academic dishonesty and detection, leaving a more funadmental question largely unaddressed: What happens to student success when the thinking it is meant to represent can be offloaded to GenAI? Drawing on Perna and Thomas’s (2006) framework of student success, this essay distinguishes between traditional indicators of success, such as grades, persistence, and completion, and the developmental process those indictors are presumed to reflect. I introduce the concept of student success bypass to describe how GenAI enables students to achieve conventional benchmarks without necessrily engaging in the cognitive and relational work traditionally associated with them. This bypass can produce cognitive debt and contribute to what I call hollow persistence, in which students continue progressing toward a degree without meaningful learning. I close with recommendations for how institutions can move beyond conventional indicators of success to more direclty assess the development processes they are meant to represent.
Context: The national completion and accountability agendas for higher education have intersected in complex ways with our current moments of racial reckoning and pushback, lending renewed urgency to data-informed equity work in colleges and universities. Although the purposeful communication of data is widely understood to be a pivotal tool in equity efforts, data alone cannot improve policy and practice. The advancement of equity in higher education hinges on social processes that take institutional actors from disaggregated data to sense-making to action, and yet the research on these phenomena is still emerging. Faculty and administrators’ direct experiences with data-informed equity work can tell us a great deal about how policy and practice come together, informed by institutional and individual social contexts. Purpose: Focused on understanding practitioners’ recounted experiences, this study helps to address the need for more research on how the intricacies of data-informed equity work unfold on the ground. Consistent with recent calls for further research, we apply critical social theory and critical-race lenses to understand how participants experience social processes surrounding data in the context of institutional equity efforts. Research Design: We conducted 29 semistructured interviews with 14 faculty members and 15 mid- to senior-level administrators working at five institutions that had been recognized for data-informed equity and student success efforts. Analyses entailed iterative rounds of coding, pragmatic horizon analyses, and collaborative peer debriefing. We paid particular attention throughout to cultivate researcher reflexivity and to understand the ways in which our positionalities and experiences played a role in the research. Drawing on critical qualitative research methodology, we applied frameworks (critical race theory and theory of communicative action) that center intersectionality and theorize about how systems of oppression implicitly structure our everyday lives in unacknowledged ways. Conclusions: Applying critical qualitative methods and critical-race lenses in our analyses, we examined how systems of power and oppression worked in predominantly White contexts to shape: (1) the conditions of action, (2) the subjectivity and positionality of actors, and (3) microprocesses practitioners encountered in their efforts to advance equity through the use of data. Participants recounted processes that ran into several types of complications and obstacles, including inequitable dynamics, attitudes and beliefs that normalize inequities, and work structures that point participants and collaborators toward technorational solutions. The complexities participants engaged—and those they elided—illustrated critical-race concepts in multiple ways. Findings and implications underscore the need to center institutional responsibility for equity explicitly and address the complexities of systemic racism embedded in our social and operational structures.
Background: Scholarship on interest groups in local education politics is frequently framed as a competition between teachers’ unions and reformers. However, the landscape of education politics has changed considerably. Teachers’ unions have faced setbacks, including the U.S. Supreme Court Janus v. AFSCME (2018) decision. Many school boards across the country have become contested political arenas amid heightened local and national attention. This has all occurred against the backdrop of rising partisan polarization in education. Purpose: Given these developments, it is essential to understand whether long-standing assumptions about interest group activity remain true today. This study fills an important gap in the literature by describing the contemporary landscape of interest group involvement in school boards and provides a critical bridge to a new era of research on how these actors shape local education politics. Research Design: This paper draws on a national survey of school board members and Ballotpedia’s tracking of endorsements across 10 states in 2023. This study examines how the activity and policy priorities of teachers’ unions compare to other interest groups, which groups support the same candidates as the teachers’ union, and where teachers’ unions play the most active role in school board politics and elections. Conclusion: Interest group activity in school board politics can no longer be understood as a simple contest between teachers’ unions and reform groups. Across data sources, teachers’ unions are not the most active group in most districts. Instead, the local political landscape is better described as pluralistic, marked by involvement from political parties, partisan-leaning organizations, and parent groups. These findings suggest that contemporary school board politics are shaped by a broader and more ideologically diverse set of actors than in previous eras.
Background: This study examines the impacts of neoliberalism and its accompanying policies, structures, and narratives on a teacher and her students during the first five weeks of kindergarten—that critical, foundational period in which young children enter the system of schooling and immediately begin to construct their identities as students and form long-lasting ideas about learning and school. Situated within a public school in a midsize city in the U.S. Midwest, this study follows a kindergarten teacher—a white woman teaching predominantly Latine children—who hoped to create a humanizing classroom environment where her young students felt safe, cared for, and joyful. Unfortunately, the context of U.S. schooling makes work like this particularly challenging, as deeply entrenched neoliberal values of efficiency, order, independence, and accountability all have material, daily impacts on teachers and children in their classrooms. This study attends to some of those challenges and explores their impacts on one teacher and her kindergarten class in a neoliberal school context. Research Questions: How does one white female kindergarten teacher navigate her neoliberal context as she works to construct a humanizing classroom environment at the beginning of the school year? How does this work impact the teacher and children in the classroom? Research Design: For this qualitative case study, I observed in a kindergarten classroom twice a week throughout the first five weeks of school, collected more than 25 hours of classroom video, and conducted semi-structured interviews with the teacher and multimodal child-centered interviews with kindergarteners that included drawing, playing with emoji bean bags, photo elicitation, and pretend play. Finally, I collected and analyzed photographs, documents, and other artifacts from the classroom. Conclusions: Findings indicate tensions between the teacher’s whole-child, relational intentions and the neoliberal threats of testing, accountability, curriculum, order, and efficiency that impacted her practice. The study highlights the complexity and contradictions involved in the work of constructing a humanizing classroom environment amid today’s neoliberal pressures and argues for shifts in educational policy and practice that will support the important work of creating more humanizing spaces for children and their teachers in schools.
