Critical Reflection 1

Edward D Morris’ “Tuck in that t-shirt!' race, class, gender, and discipline in an urban school” allowed me to reflect on my experiences in schooling, it reminded me mostly of my experiences in high school. Morris’ (2005) main focus in his research was to “show how educators identified students deemed deficient in cultural capital, especially in terms of manners and dress, and attempted to reform these perceived deficiencies through regulating their bodies” (p.26). He illustrates how race, class and gender played a role in this process and how perceptions “guided educators” (Morris, 2005) assumptions of which students lacked cultural capital and which students required discipline. In this reflection I will focus on concepts from Morris and apply them to my experience of high school with some specific and first hand examples. 
 

I did not attend an urban school like the one that Morris works in for his research, however many of these concepts and ideas like bodily discipline and rules for clothing and so forth are still relevant as they are generally the same in most schools. I was enrolled in a rural area high school in which people from surrounding areas had to attend because their town didn’t have a high school. this meant that there was a mix of different sub cultures and style differences. The school was comprised of
mainly white working class and lower middle class students, but the educators seemed to persist on pushing an upper class-like order upon them. Many of the working class students, the ones who took shop classes and other trades classes, were a group treated poorly due to their resistance to dress codes and “appropriate” actions. These students, quite a large population of the school, would wear work boots, camouflage hats and jackets, Dickies work pants and other similar garments in which they were trying to achieve a “working class look”. Although it’s not an example of racial marginalization, this group was still deemed an opposition to what the school and educators wanted and therefore they were perceived as deficient, even to other students, when they were simply following the norms of their community. Morris has an example of this from his research in Matthews Middle School where a girl named Carla is perceived of wearing “ganglike attire” “While normative in her neighborhood, [her clothing] acquired the connotation of opposition within the school walls, causing educators there to assume she did not care about school” (p.27). Just like Carla is categorized as looking like she is part of a gang because of dress (in her case race as well), the students in my school who had the working class look had educators assuming that this group did not care about school when they were simply conforming to the norms of the small working class town in which they are from. 
 

This small town school is predominantly white and only had about three people of other races when I had attended. Racism was expressed overtly in many cases by students but was also exerted by the school systemically. In this research Morris mentions that control and resistance to clothing styles and manners leads to a focus on discipline “Schools use this discipline to rework the behavior and appearance of students so their bodies display acceptable, normative comportment (Morris, 2005, p.27). One time when I was in the office in my school waiting to see the principal when I overheard the secretary call a class on the p.a system as they had requested to have a student come to the office. He arrived, it was the new student who was Latino and just moved into town from an urban area in Toronto. The guidance councilor didn’t take him in to his office but rather came out into the front of the office and told this student that he had to change his clothing style as it reflected “ganglike attire”. The educator requested no long t- shirts, no tucking pants into his socks and so forth. I had seen many teachers tell students to change attires for wearing “ganglike attires” as many students perceived it as a stylish trend, but in this case the student was most likely wearing what was acceptable and normative in the urban area of Toronto. He had refused to change his attire, rightfully in my opinion, and though I do not know if he was disciplined for opposing this request it is most likely the case.

Like Morris discusses, all students are ordered to dress and display a certain look by educators. Even in the case of my school, which has no school uniforms, the educators and dominating white upper class are the arbiters of what is acceptable behavior and dress. I think Morris’ research is relatively well done as it is successful in generalizing the education system as a whole and is not limited to just an urban middle school. 

Morris, E. W. (2005). "Tuck in that Shirt!" Race, Class, Gender and Discipline in an Urban School. Sociological Perspectives, 48, 1, 25-48. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/sable/10.1525/sop.2005.48.1.25