Experiences of Students Who Have Been Suspended or Expelled from School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Violence and adversity disproportionately affect students who are Black or Indigenous, come from lower socioeconomic (SES) communities and those with special education needs. These same populations are disproportionately suspended and expelled (disciplinary exclusion). The role of adversity in disciplinary exclusion, however, is rarely explicitly considered. It is difficult to understand students’ and their behaviours, however, if adversity is unacknowledged. Methods This three-paper dissertation presents a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 31 semi-structured interviews with students who have been suspended or expelled (n=15) and the multidisciplinary staff who support them (n=16), in two urban and suburban school boards in Ontario, Canada. The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of students who have been suspended or expelled. The following research questions were addressed: 1) What are the experiences of students who have been suspended or expelled leading up to and including expulsion? 2) What factors do participants (staff and students) feel contributes to a suspension or expulsion?; and 3) What systemic factors (school, community, family) have positively or negatively influenced students’ personal and academic success? Student participants ranged in age from 14 to 19. Most students in the sample were male (n=11), Black (n=10), or identified as having special education needs (n=9). Results Students in this study had experienced multiple and diverse forms of adversity, including conventionally defined adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), as well as systemic racism and inequality, and community and school violence. All students noted the importance of connection with school staff however, an interactive social process emerged within which three identified factors (bias, coping behaviours and limited resources) blocked this connection. Implications The findings call into focus the role of disproportionate exposure to adversity for students who are suspended and expelled. These findings are consistent with recommendations to expand conventional ACEs. The emergent interactive social process is influenced by disproportionate exposure to adversity, which may be unacknowledged as traumatic among students who are suspended or expelled. When expanded forms adversity are unacknowledged student experiences and the ways they are coping can be misunderstood. Policy, practice and research must reflect trauma-informed, relationship-based and culturally aware/responsive strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".