Corridor Cultures: Mapping Student Resistance at an Urban School

3 “It’s just all about being popular”: Hallways as Thirdspace

3 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ “It’s just all about being popular” Hallways as Thirdspace During the four minutes between periods, I usually stood in the hallway to help move students along to class. Though this was a general expectation of all teachers, many did not do it, perhaps because standing in the halls—the nexus of student culture—was an exercise in futility. Because I spent two years teaching in a classroom on the corridor that was the center of student social life, I became intensely aware of my powerlessness in the face of this assertive student hall culture. Students taunted, teased, insulted, and sometimes came near blows (on rare occasions, fights actually began), and my efforts to contain such volatile behavior were met with indifference and even laughter. I could often see more than half my class hanging out within ten feet of my classroom door, and yet most would still enter the room five to ten minutes late. To try to hasten them in, I would go around and tell them directly that the bell had rung, an effort usually politely ignored, though occasionally met with hostility. One student particularly resented my nudging and yelled at me one day, “I’m not done yet!” At other times my intrusions into their hall activity were met with disrespectful commands to “Mind your own business, Miss!” Students who rushed into class in the first few minutes after the bell were usually not marked late. Several teachers I interviewed admitted the same gap in their vigilance and many students reported this assumption 78 ❙ Hallways as Thirdspace as well (see chapter 5). Student rejection of my authority until they had entered my room and their insistence on finishing their “business” before coming to class successfully extended “passing” time—the time students were allowed to be at large in the halls as they passed from one class to the next—by about five minutes beyond the official late bell. More than just an effort to extend the time they were not in class, the defiant lateness I regularly encountered indicated that students felt in possession of the halls. One group of boys who ignored my command to go to class sneered, “We in the halls Miss. You ain’t got no weight.” I use these anecdotes to clarify the significant ownership students took of the halls and the marginality of teachers in that space. I also use them to note my own partisanship in the struggles over the halls. As a classroom teacher I contended with the struggles daily. I wanted to be able to begin my lessons on time, not to have to step into the halls in response to rowdiness during my lessons, and not to have my lessons constantly interrupted by students entering throughout the period. The lively activity of the halls undermined my efforts. As a teacher, I did not see them as a space of equal significance to the classroom. They were a distraction— something kids enjoyed more than class but that offered them little. The fierceness with which students insisted on their right to control the halls for as long as possible suggests that there was much going on, but I was not able to see it. Thus, when I began interviewing students about what they did in the halls, I was surprised by the logical, rule-bound space they described. As a teacher I experienced the halls as chaos, but, in fact, they were a meaningful cosmos. The formidable assertion of the halls as a student-controlled space must be understood in relationship to the high profile of school authority at scanning and teacher control in the classrooms. Once students passed through scanning, the school was unable to sustain such an intense display of power. As students dispersed into the hallways, their numerical advantage and their collective insistence on freedom in the halls enabled them to exercise far more autonomy. In these spaces, students installed a derivative of their local street cultures that affirmed local identities as well as broader notions of Black identity. As the anecdotes above attest, school personnel were socialized, as I was, into an acceptance of this spatial regime . At least during the extended passing time, students ruled the halls, and school personnel made minimal effort to enforce school rules. Hallways as Thirdspace ❙ 79 Most students, including high-achieving and academically oriented students , participated in this hall culture. By participate, I mean that...