Contesting With Feeling: Childhood in and Through Public Education

In public education forums people create and contest implicit theories of learning and society. We study a community education council meeting where participants address mask mandates, selective admissions policies, and school violence. We used critical discourse analysis to trace how speakers mobilized emotional configurations about children to guide emotion participation. To influence councilmembers’ votes, speakers contested which children should get to learn, under which conditions, and toward what futures. By invoking ideas such as innocence and rationality, meeting participants engaged the racist underpinnings of U.S. society in calling for individualist or collectivist approaches to learning in schools.