Abstract
This empirical study seeks to understand the narratives of four Black men teachers and two Black women teachers about how they implement school discipline and classroom management in their K–12 contexts. This track draws on interdisciplinary perspectives from education, linguistic anthropology, and African American studies to understand how banter and ritual insults function as alternatives to traditional discipline. Phenomenology and thematic analysis of six semistructured interviews demonstrated Black teachers’ beliefs that outdated and punitive orientations should be challenged. These teachers enacted discipline through talk—particularly banter, ritual insults, and what I call “purposefully Black interactional systems,” which embed discipline within them, allowing Black teachers to reject social hierarchies in classrooms, giving students a liminal space to negotiate discipline, and offering a two-way mutual discipline in which both teacher and students can be held accountable for their behaviors in an open, honest way.
Recommended Citation
Wilson, S. M. (2026). Purposefully Black Interactional Systems: Disrupting Punitive School Discipline Models Through Banter, The Funk, and the Black Aesthetic. Black Educology Mixtape "Journal", 4(1). Retrieved from https://repository.usfca.edu/be/vol4/iss1/13