Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School

Zora is a seven-year-old biracial student who features in Carla Shalaby’s exploration of elementary school troublemakers. As the only Black child in her first-grade classroom at the Forest School, her experience anchors Shalaby’s analysis of culture clashes, social exclusion, demands for conformity, and the policing of difference in school environments.

Creative, dramatic, and fiercely spirited, Zora refuses to tone down her personality just to “fit in” with classmates. Her extroverted personality manifests through dramatic jokes and performances that capture peer attention but also spark teacher reprimands to stop “standing out.” Despite her clear strengths and talents, school authorities position Zora’s difference itself as the problem in need of correction. Shalaby traces how punishment of Zora’s colorful self-expression breeds her social isolation and marginalization; she also implies that the school’s response to Zora’s behavior stems partly from its failure to appreciate cultural differences (Zora’s mother is Puerto Rican and her father Black). Craving belonging, Zora attempts to leverage her class clown role to forge social bonds. However, her reputation as a “troublemaker” only heightens her visibility while cementing her exclusion. Shalaby theorizes that rigid school environments force vibrant young spirits like Zora’s into resistance—a kind of “tactical performance art” aimed at signaling institutional harms. Zora’s story therefore gives human face to all three of the work’s major themes: Imposing Conformity Through Exclusion in School Culture, Disruption as Communication and Resistance, and The Clash Between the Cultures of Home and School.

Kate is the devoted single mother of seven-year-old Sean; she respects her son’s fiery spirit even as his school brands him a problem. In Shalaby’s telling, Kate’s more compassionate approach therefore reveals problematic authoritarian norms in education. Kate engages Sean as a full person, treating his desires and opinions as warranting discussion and not demanding a silent obedience that is unnatural to him. Though she at times finds parenting exhausting, Kate consistently reasons patiently with Sean, allowing him space to argue and question rules. She recognizes his need for both kinesthetic movement and adult empathy. Her home contrasts starkly with school culture norms, highlighting the need to examine the harmful demands schools place on children rather than focusing solely on compliance.

While Kate does worry over Sean frustrating his teachers and peers, she attributes his behavior more to relational needs and boyish energy than to individual pathology. Trusting Sean’s essential goodness, Kate resists medical labels and medications until conflicts with his peers escalate. In reality, Shalaby asserts, Sean sparks drama to avoid his own feelings of loneliness: Troublemaking expresses “the human longing for social relationship” (114). Similarly, his argumentative demeanor protests normative classroom cultures, which lack space for connection outside mundane academic tasks. Sean teaches Shalaby that environments that breed isolation themselves engender misbehavior.

Marcus is a lively six-year-old boy navigating Emily’s first-grade classroom at Crossroads Elementary. Featured alongside defiant classmate Sean, Marcus frequently sparks conflict at school through attention-grabbing jokes and explicitly disruptive antics. Marcus’s mother, Cheryl, describes him as highly relational—caring, helpful, and invested in family bonds despite familial economic instability. Marcus misses his incarcerated father, and he dotes on his younger brother. At school, however, adults pathologize Marcus’s lively exuberance as dangerous and deviant. His reputation as a “troublemaker” renders his strengths—empathy and leadership—invisible.

According to Shalaby, Marcus’s behavior aims to disrupt rigid school norms and communicate his social and emotional needs for community and care: “He wants people to help each other, to hear each other” (159). He leverages humor and disruption to assert his worthiness—his worthiness to be seen, known, understood, and embraced with dignity. In this, Shalaby frames Marcus as representative of countless young Black men whom society has dismissed as “problems” but who nevertheless yearn for liberation. Marcus models the power of refusing erasure despite consistent attempts to impose conformity through exclusion.

Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) was an influential activist, writer, and philosopher whose work partly inspires Carla Shalaby’s vision of educational transformation in Troublemakers. Born to Chinese immigrant parents, Boggs’s experience of marginalization fueled her lifetime of civil rights leadership, beginning in the 1940s. In 1992, Boggs cofounded Detroit Summer, which involved young people in rebuilding city neighborhoods.

Boggs’s concept of “solutionaries” to reimagine classroom community is particularly important to Shalaby. Schools focused on control, compliance, punishment, and exclusion produce adult citizens ill-equipped to challenge oppression and enact social change. Boggs argued that ordinary people, especially youth, can drive social progress through grassroots organizing, constructive work, and visionary reform. Troublemakers echoes Boggs’s faith that children’s defiant spirits signal hope.

Mrs. Beverly is a veteran first-grade teacher at Forest School. Portrayed as a commanding presence wearing bold accessories, Mrs. Beverly has taught for nearly two decades at Forest alongside her close friend and teaching partner, Mrs. Norbert. Though the creative curricula of their mixed-age classroom celebrate diversity, Shalaby argues that Mrs. Beverly actively works to acculturate students to standards of “white-bread America” (7).

Mrs. Beverly’s view of her role centers on preparing students not just academically but also behaviorally for the rigid order of later grades. Though conflicted over having to constantly redirect and silence vibrant students like Zora, she persists, believing this will help marginalized students avoid stigma and succeed in predominantly white institutions. According to Shalaby, however, problematic assumptions underlie Mrs. Beverly’s caring intentions: Enforcing conformity denies Zora’s identity while deepening her social exclusion. Furthermore, Mrs. Beverly’s methods teach white students to police difference, embedding messages that diversity itself is disruptive.

Yet Shalaby’s portrait of Mrs. Beverly also reveals complex systemic pressures on teachers. Mrs. Beverly feels trapped upholding standards she deems arbitrary and even racist, and she is not wrong that later grade-level teachers will be less tolerant. Her tough love aims to shield children from harm. Shalaby suggests that Mrs. Beverly’s conflicting impulses illuminate the urgent need to shift school culture, as teachers have limited power to resist engrained norms alone.