Counter-Mapping School Wellbeing with Youth in Alternative Education

Abstract

In alternative education programs, school wellbeing is enacted partially through the spatialized (emplaced and embodied) lived experiences of students whose educational futures are fragile. Displaced to a series of trailers and limited to half-day attendance, the participants in this qualitative study were removed from mainstream classes in a large urban high school to attend alternative programming. Utilizing a critical counter-mapping youth participatory action approach, 24 participants mapped their barriers and supports to school wellbeing by moving through, sitting within, and writing together in the school spaces they were no longer permitted to occupy during their studies. As a research collective, students produced twenty-six annotated counter-maps, inscribing their school histories, present tensions, and hopes for educational futures onto existing geographical maps of the building. Findings contribute to understandings of students’ perspectives on best practices for complex school interactions as a foundation for building school climates that center educational wellbeing, care, play, and relationships. In addition to insights into current spatial practices in schools and how they might be rewritten to advance an equity-orientation, this work makes visible the tensions between the school’s emphasis on academic performance and the youth’s lived experiences of injustice on the spatial and metaphorical edges of the system.

1. Introduction

Youth in alternative educational programming are underrepresented in school wellbeing survey data, and are a population for whom educational wellbeing is crucial for graduation and yet extremely fragile (Kelly, 1993; Panina-Beard & Vadeboncoeur, 2022). Referrals to liminal and flexible alternative programs that operate in the margins of the system are complicated, offering opportunities for new futures while also aggressively repositioning these students within educational space. This article asks how experiences with spatial regulation and exclusionary discipline affect the educational wellbeing of these students, who have a high likelihood of early school leaving.

The study discussed here centers the experiences of youth in alternative educational programming within a large Canadian high school. Such programs are common throughout Canada (Crain & Hanson, 2014) and serve as holding grounds for students referred on various criteria that might include perceived behaviors, learning needs, and/or absenteeism that necessitate a modified learning schedule (New Brunswick Health Council, 2023). Enrolment in alternative education (alt ed) at this study site (as with many others) moves students from full days of school to mandatory half-days, for the other half of which they are explicitly not permitted on school grounds. Students’ arrival to the space, which is located at the far end of a long hallway in a series of permanent portable trailers, comes with a change to the structure of every aspect of their learning, including educational relationships, study hours, and academic expectations.

Building on understandings that removal to alt ed functions both as creative emancipation and exclusion from school systems (Vadeboncoeur, 2009), this paper explores how students who have moved to alt ed experience spatial exclusion and differentiation and then examines what effects such a move has on their educational wellbeing. In doing so, it addresses three questions:

• How is student wellbeing in alternative programming affected by exclusionary discipline?
• What spatial practices in schools might be rewritten to advance an equity-orientation?
• What spatialized aspects of just educational futures do students in alternative education envision for themselves?

1.1. Alternative Education and School Wellbeing

Wellbeing factors are individual, cultural, and intersectional, and they vary according to environment, sociopolitical context, identity, and place (Aldridge & McChesney, 2018; Wlasichuk et al., 2022; Falkenberg, 2014). Common critiques of large-scale wellbeing measures suggest that educational wellbeing is best defined by the population for whom it is being discussed in ways that are culturally appropriate, nuanced, and explicitly account for experiences of persistent and historic systemic marginalization (Breakspear, 2012; Diaz-Diaz et al., 2019; Engel & Rutkowski, 2020; Wlasichuk et al., 2022). Themes that surface across wellbeing research in education include the centrality of experiences related to belonging, learner identity, relationships, autonomy, and positive experiences and environments within learning contexts (Falkenberg & Krepski, 2020; İnce, 2025; McCreary Centre Society, 2019; Tierney, 2020; Whitty, 2010).

As each of these factors is impacted by both exclusionary discipline and a removal to alternative education, it is important to attend to the processes through which participants come to be in alt ed and how they might interact with wellbeing factors, and then how such youth might differently experience exclusionary discipline. Students arrive to alternative programs with reduced trust in the school system’s ability to meet their needs, academic or otherwise (Mills & McGregor, 2013). These students represent one of the populations within schools for whom school connection and wellbeing are most critical to prevent early school leaving. Despite the need for this kind of data, alt ed participants are underrepresented and misrepresented in school wellbeing surveys due to a variety of factors including scheduling issues, lack of trust, and technology problems (Brooke, 2026). Current perception surveys of wellbeing are administered through mainstream classes and at specific times of the day that limit these students’ access to participation. Youths’ lack of trust in the system and different approaches to schooling may also deter them from taking the time to invest in a perception survey. Finally, if they do participate, data often cannot be granulated appropriately to create an accurate picture of experiences specific to alternative programming (Crain & Hanson, 2014; New Brunswick Health Council, 2023).

Bascia and Maton (2017) describe how alternative programs meet the social, emotional, and practical challenges of education not addressed by mainstream models through ‘loose coupling’ with schools that allows for educators to engage in creative curriculum redesign. Association with and separation from a mainstream school both legitimizes alternative programming and acts as a sorting mechanism for students with a wide variety of educational frictions with the system. The move to alt ed is characterized by nuanced change in youths’ relative positions within the context of school that offers fresh opportunities for support while also limiting interactions, relationships, and academic options (D’Angelo & Zemanick, 2009; Panina-Beard & Vadeboncoeur, 2022). In doing so, it builds upon Vadeboncoeur’s (2009) observation that “On one hand, participation in these programs enables epistemological, ontological, and axiological positions for youth that are not typically available in formal schooling; and, on the other, the production of these spaces is entailed by processes embedded in schooling that function to displace difference” (p. 281). Fine and Rosenberg (1983) observed that the specific positioning of alt ed as a ‘last resort’ for academic achievement functions partly to delegitimize such students’ critiques of schools and deflects attention away from race, class, and gender biases. In the school definition of these programs, once in an alternative course of study students are positioned within schools as “unable” to function within mainstream schooling (Crain & Hanson, 2014). This labeling of inability then leads to interventions directed at the youth in question, aimed at making them ‘more able’ to engage with mainstream schooling. Such subtle deficit positioning of students and their situations and backgrounds is evident in the way such programs are designed; referrals are not used to guide changes to mainstream class delivery; they are used to guide interventions for the students who leave classes.

The carceral logics of school discipline are well documented and consistently affirm that once a student has been shifted within educational settings from ‘having’ a problem to ‘being’ a problem, they are subject to different disciplinary pathways that are isolating both academically and personally (Annamma et al., 2013; Beneke et al., 2022; Lehr et al., 2009; Meiners, 2017). Sykes et al. (2015) describes exclusionary discipline as a key approach within a set of policies and practices that reinforce a school-to-prison pipeline. They note that such practices represent a “collection of education and public safety policies and practices that place youth at an increased risk of prematurely discontinuing their academic careers while concurrently increasing their likelihood of correctional contact over the life course” (p. 1). Noltemeyer and Mcloughlin (2010) define exclusionary discipline as the use of any disciplinary action that requires or results in “removal from the typical educational environment” (p. 59). As educational reform efforts aimed at supporting students, alternative programs are not framed as disciplinary measures. However, while they often act as a generative third space for creative educational practice, they also extend and reinforce carceral state power through their construction of marginalized students as a risky and troublesome other, best isolated from the educational community at large (Goldman, 2023; Selman, 2018; Vadeboncoeur, 2025). Regardless of disciplinary intent, alternative education functions as a form of exclusion; removal and separation of students from the mainstream school reinforces and upholds disciplinary educational relationships, offers different and often less useful pathways to high school graduation (many alternative programs including the one referenced in this study offer an amended high school diploma that does not meet local post-secondary entry requirements), and legitimizes the offloading of responsibility for inclusive educational design from the state to individual students and specialized programs. Displacement to alt ed isolates students spatially, academically, and relationally within the school in ways that intimately affect their learner identities, as well as their senses of belonging, relationality, and autonomy—all critical aspects of educational wellbeing. To better understand how subsequent disciplinary exclusion might then further affect these students’ experiences of wellbeing, this study examines data from countermapping and moving-together to illuminate spatial and embodied experiences that students chose to center about their educational wellbeing.

1.2. Critical Spatial Theory, Counter-Mapping, and Moving-Together

Critical spatial approaches are often used to illuminate and disrupt complex embedded social and political dynamics (Ferrare & Apple, 2010; Marin, 2020; Miller & Kurth, 2022; Massey, 2011; Monreal et al., 2024). The potential of spatial justice as a lens that attends to colonial legacies of erasure and marginalization has been used to support the reinsertion of spatial work into humanities, social sciences, and education. Examples of this approach include Warf and Arias’ (2008) affirmation that space and experience are politically intertwined, demanding: “a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought” (p. 7). In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja (2013) explained Said’s (1993) concept of a “struggle over geography” as the recognition that consequential geographies are more than outcomes of sociopolitical process: they are also dynamic forces that are always engaged with spatialized human experience. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) took up critical geographies to argue for a re-insertion of attention to space and place in research, and, in particular, to the historical legacies of maps as tools of colonization, erasure and marginalization. There is also overlap between critical geographical approaches and post-humanism; Haraway (1997) and others brought forward space and spatialization as processes, rather than static or stationary aspects of human experience, emphasizing that space is relational and co-created through ongoing human and more-than-human processes (see also: Barad, 2001).

The study of critical spatial dynamics with specific attention to relational movement and mapping is a generative academic space; Marin (2020) and others have differentiated the nuances between landscape, lands, space, and place, attending to the creation of specific places as spatio-temporal events, a collection of “stories so far” (see also: Massey, 2005, p. 130). Within this context, maps represent both the terrain they portray and the ongoing social and historical relationships of their makers and consumers. As research tools and artifacts, maps offer an opportunity for multimodal representations of participant experiences through conversation and geographical/visual exploration. The production of maps and mapped space is therefore positioned within this study as socially and politically constructing and constructed in ways that serve dominant and normative socioeconomic and political interests (Bryan & Wood, 2015; Goeman, 2013; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015).

Counter-mapping is a critical practice that highlights how spatial data is produced and consumed by providing socio-political and historical reference points tied to critical geographical perspectives on power, privilege, and spatial inequities (Kwan, 2002). Intimately intertwined with critical geographical conceptions of space and power, counter-mapping draws from relational paradigms in which identities and intersectionality, as well as power and control, are considered with participants throughout the creation and analysis of map work (Asakura et al., 2020; Gordon et al., 2016; Rubel et al., 2016). Participants in alternative educational contexts tend to have educational histories characterized by tension, lack of visibility, and systemic marginalization (Schoone et al., 2022; Tierney, 2020). In this research, counter-mapping was a pathway to re-centering their experiences and perspectives after they have been moved to the spatial and conceptual margins of the school through a process that Gairola (2021) describes as illuminating both epistemic violence and epistemic re-appropriation through analog spatial engagement. The lack of a dedicated meeting location for research, together with the need for analog engagement with mapped space in this project, necessitated that the group move as a collective through shared school areas. This naturally evolved into informal ‘wellbeing tours’ of the school on which one student or another would suggest that we visit a certain location that linked to ongoing discussion themes. As a group, the collective began to engage with unforeseen politics of mobility, experiencing the effects of moving-together through inequitably shared space (Gutiérrez, 2020). The WalkingLab project directed by Springgay and Truman (2022) takes up the ways in which identities and intersectionality must be accounted for in spatial work. The project describes itself as drawing on “feminist-queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial thought and practice to question who gets to walk where, how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics we can make” (https://walkinglab.org, accessed on 30 January 2026). Such work takes an approach to ethics that is rooted in participatory, community-based research priorities that claim map-making as a method of speaking back to traditional narratives of place. Ethical pathways through research are dictated by the participatory process, location, context, and relationships of participants. Mapping together in the research discussed here became an extension of this kind of movement, drawing from a long history of critical spatial scholarship and extending it through educational space by moving together. Walks both created tensions and opened up new kinds of freedoms and explorations to the group, who were permitted to roam, play, and revisit educational spaces as part of the research from which they had been previously excluded. In this way, movement and mapping together became a generative process with its own products.

2. Methods

2.1. Participatory Action Research

This study is situated within Participatory Action Research (PAR) models. PAR is described by Cornish et al. (2023) as an approach that “prioritizes the value of experiential knowledge for tackling problems caused by unequal and harmful social systems, and for envisioning and implementing alternatives” (p. 2). They delineated three key aspects of this research approach. The first is that its goals are oriented toward social change; the second is that it involves community members as active knowledge collaborators; and the third is that it consists of iterative research cycles that involve planning, action, and reflection. Unlike traditional research, which is often focused on knowledge production for scholarly purposes, PAR models specifically prioritize knowledge creation for the purposes of community change. Leavy (2017) described PAR as working from a transformative paradigm, driven by the core concept that participants as stakeholders within the research context must be valued and included in research design. Most PAR work today builds on the idea that meaningful community change can only take place with full involvement of the parties for whom that change is needed (Hall & Tandon, 2017). Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) involves youth as knowledge collaborators and takes up the values of PAR with two additional foci. The first acknowledges the place that adolescent youth occupy socially and culturally and attends to their specific knowledges and experiential understandings of their social and political contexts (Conrad, 2020). The second focus employs education as a vehicle for social transformation. This goal and its corresponding practices of citizen training and collaboration are taken up in PAR as possible research outcomes, but are explicit goals within YPAR (Berkeley YPAR Hub, 2025; Hall & Tandon, 2017). This study therefore used YPAR methodology as an opportunity to reposition students relative to data about their experiences, centering not only their perspectives but their choices about how work was conducted and what was shared from the work (Tuck & Habtom, 2019). Within this particular educational context, creating opportunities for these students for improvised movement and self-expression was an act of resistance to the reproduction of systemic marginalization that they experience on a daily basis.

2.2. Considerations of Youth and Power in Research

Research centered in this article seeks to understand the links between educational and relational space, and the ways in which the two connect and overlap in young people’s lived experiences of wellbeing. Drawing from YPAR practices, this work is therefore informed by the perspectives of youth as active research participants (Tuck & Habtom, 2019). As such, it was designed with specific attention to issues of power and perspective. Issues of power come to the forefront specifically in research with youth, who occupy a uniquely marginalized position within every intersectional context. Horgan (2017) noted that “the participatory process itself is not neutral and systematically facilitates certain dominant perspectives while subduing others” (p. 249). Switzer (2019) outlined various pathways through which power impacts the way visual methods are applied, understood, and adapted in different contexts. These pathways can be traced through systems of oppression, structural forms of violence, and institutional power. While intersectional approaches to participatory work can mediate some aspects of oppression that participants and their communities may experience (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2005), Cooke and Kothari (2001) offered the perspective that the process of participation may not be able to ensure equity in practice when working with participants experiencing poverty. This is also true for student populations within school spaces where non-participation and even critical thinking can be penalized if they run counter to adult needs and comfort within the space (Pain & Francis, 2003). In acknowledgement of this dynamic, the study’s methodology focuses on data co-production with youth in ways that prioritize a drop-in model, purposeful anonymity through collective products, and choice within multimodal approaches. Because these methods also produced visual products, they were grounded in a review of arts-based methods within participatory work (Leavy, 2017) and draw on the work of Gubrium and Harper (2013), who situated visual participatory research as a community-oriented set of methods aimed at collaborative social change through visual media (see also: Clark, 2011).

This study was designed partially in response to staff concerns shared during the preparation of this research, that alternative education students’ experiences and non-academic needs are difficult to see in wellbeing data, and their needs are deprioritized within larger district and department infrastructure. Research preparation for this project began more than twelve months before data collection started. As a community-based researcher, my first step is always a series of coffee talks to ask what kinds of research might be most useful to the educational space that I wish to learn about. In this case, I reached out to schools with the offer to co-design data collection with the broad focus of student wellbeing. Over many casual conversations and cups of coffee, teachers and administrative staff (principals and vice-principals) shared their concerns, questions, and opinions about the collection and implementation of student wellbeing data as well as their observations about what kinds of additional research they might find most useful. The issue of alt ed representation within wellbeing data and planning came up frequently, with school administrators observing that the wellbeing survey data that guides their planning is not granulated or specific enough to include alt ed attendees, and alt ed program staff noting that they would welcome any information that might help them understand how to support the youth in their program. As an outside researcher, I spent six months learning from staff, designing research, and drafting proposals. I then spent another six volunteering in the alt program before offering research activities. This allowed me to build an understanding of the program that informed research design and planning, and relationships to the program within which conversations about wellbeing might feel safe for some students.

My status as an outsider to the environment required months of preparation and afforded interesting opportunities. Had I been a teacher, walks would have had a visual signifier of legitimacy that may have changed the tone of hallway encounters in a variety of ways. My formal distance from school administration and teaching staff offered students the opportunity to share their histories, relationships, and experiences on their own terms, uncolored by their school records or histories that staff already know. Students also felt comfortable sharing information about activities that might be discouraged or reported by school staff, and making connections between their wellbeing and aspects of relationships and behaviors in a more open way than they might with school staff. Had this research been conducted by teaching staff, curricular connections and learning opportunities within the activities might have been leveraged in interesting ways; at the same time, for this particular project the lack of curricular connection allowed for attendance and participation that felt authentically optional as it was not part of any formal set of studies, nor was it conducted by someone who related to students in an evaluative capacity.

2.3. Participants

Participants were 24 youth between the ages of 14 and 18 who were enrolled in the study site’s alternative education program. Participants were between the ages of 14 and 18 years of age. Demographic information on alt ed programs is not collected in New Brunswick and thus was unavailable for the program at large, and demographic information beyond age was not collected from participants. That mainstream classes did not work for these students could speak to academic quality, educational relationships, curriculum delivery, subject matter, location, school environment, or any combination of these factors in relation to students’ identities and experiences. Each student affiliated with the alternative program and currently in attendance while the group was meeting was offered the opportunity to join the research group each week, and was able to opt in or out both within the sessions and throughout the weeks of the study. Some joined every week, others attended based on their disciplinary status, academic needs, and level of comfort with participation. Flexible involvement allowed for several cases of proximal attendance, in which one or more students would spend time with the research group without formally contributing while they learned what it was about. Of these, five ended up joining the project and contributing between weeks 5 and 10 of the study (see the included slide reflecting participation notes from the project’s report to the school, Figure 1: Participation Timelines).

2.4. Activities

This project employed participatory mapping as a research method in order to center and draw out participant experiences of school. The goal of these activities was to allow youth to express themselves in ways that work for them. Because of this, the concept of a “map” in the context of this study includes any product that expresses a relationship between experience and space. Such products might be textual, artistic, and digital. Content was delivered using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and adjusted based on staff feedback for specific student needs (CAST, 2024). Prompts for each activity are included in Appendix A. Students within the alt program work independently during their half-day attendance, moving at their own pace, and opt in or out of a variety of extracurricular offerings that include guest speakers and workshops that might cover topics like social and emotional learning, career preparation, and personal development. Within this context, the research group activities were offered the same way, with students opting in or out on a weekly or daily basis depending on their inclination to participate.

The study site was a Canadian high school of approximately 1700 students. Of these, 200 attended the school’s alternative program, which operated from a group of four portable trailers attached to the school, but not included on its maps. Data were collected over 18 research sessions (9 with morning attendees and 9 with afternoon attendees) in a period of four months. Sessions averaged two hours and used rolling, opt-in participation. There were an average of 9 attendees per session, and a total of 24 participants. Most participants attended 5 or more of the 9 sessions available to them. Research offered youth seven overlapping workshops centered on school wellbeing and presented as a weekly series of activities that ran twice-daily. The first two sessions were used to define educational wellbeing for participants and engage with existing school data sets created through large-scale perception surveys. Participants then defined and explored their own wellbeing themes spatially, counter-mapping safe spaces, educational relationships, and school tensions by annotating pre-existing diagrams of the school; erasing, drawing, color-coding, and adding post-it notes. Finally, they illustrated their hopes and suggestions for possible school futures by creating new maps and storyboards as well as adding future possibilities to existing maps. They then storyboarded step-by-step instructions or illustrations related to themes of importance that they wanted to highlight for staff.

The research group was given permission to move freely through the shared spaces of the school, including hallways, cafeteria, and outdoor areas. While moving-with was not part of the original study design, the process of moving together through hallways illuminated and prompted discussion of regulatory spatial dynamics within the school. This secondary data set created through movement is captured in audio recordings of walks, as well as hallway and cafeteria encounters with school staff and subsequent discussions of such encounters. Data generation took place through a series of seven overlapping activities:

• Activity 1: Understanding and Defining Wellbeing

This first conversation began with a discussion of wellbeing in school grounding the study in a common language for subject matter rooted in student experience and vocabulary, and ensured that study themes were rooted in student, rather than academic, conceptualizations of wellbeing. Students discussed a variety of prompts in small groups (e.g., Prompt 1. What does wellbeing look, feel, and sound like here in this school? How do you know when someone is okay or when they are well?). Large-scale assessment data concerning wellbeing specific to the site was presented and discussed in terms of its design, administration, and content, and students reflected on whether they participated or felt represented by survey results, and how and what they might survey if they wanted to know about student wellbeing within the alt ed program.

• Activity 2: Defining What Matters

In this second activity, youth used results from the first conversation to engage in analog collaborative brainstorming with discussion and post-it notes. Students discussed Activity 1 results and decided what aspects of their educational wellbeing they felt were most important to clarify, and what they might want to convey about those experiences. This generated a set of wellbeing themes that the group then used as a focal point for countermapping.

• Activity 3: Mapping the School

Using the themes generated from Activities 1 and 2, students used pre-existing maps of the school to identify and describe locations of relevance to their chosen research themes. On their maps, students marked locations, feelings, and experiences that were relevant to their themes using notes, legends, colors, and text.

• Activity 4: Mapping Relationships

This activity drew on critical place inquiry and focused on the nature of school space as a social and political context for students who move through it (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Using Gordon et al.’s (2016) approach to critical spatial thinking, youth added relationships within the school that were relevant to their chosen themes. In doing so, the group engaged with the relationship between social and spatial processes within certain spaces.

• Activity 5: Mapping Experiences

This activity focused on maps as representations of experience and memory tied to geographic locations. Participants produced maps either as text-based sets of directions or videos that trace a pathway through the school illustrating their daily wellbeing in relation to their chosen theme. The goal was for students to interrogate the ways in which they move through school space and represent the intricacies of that experience in a way that supports their own understandings of their wellbeing theme. Final products included walks, videos, and shared photos. This approach draws on Springgay and Truman’s (2022) work with youth on ‘walking-with’ as methodology, aligning itself with the goal of using encounters with place to explore lived experience and relationships. It is also informed by the work of critical disability scholars like Chandler et al. (2019), Parent (2016) and M. Rose et al. (2026), each of whom has interrogated what it means to engage in an embodied exploration of shared spaces through creative spatial practices, as well as what it could or should mean to walk together. While M. Rose et al. (2026) choose to retain the term ‘walking’ using “an expanded definition of ‘walking’ as inclusive of all bodies, welcoming assistive technologies including chairs, sticks, prosthetics, etc. and respecting the different speeds, scales and ways that diverse bodies walk”, this paper reflects the author’s choice to center the idea of movement rather than walking to open up notions of who might participate in such activities and how creative participation in spatial moves looks, feels or sounds (p. 2).

• Activity 6: Maps to the Future

In this activity, students added to collective maps to illustrate how their ideal school wellbeing might look, feel, and sound.

• Activity 7: Creating Directions

In this activity, participants worked on their existing maps and/or storyboarded a set of verbal, text-based, or video explanations of their wellbeing themes and how they might be better addressed by school administrators and teachers.

2.5. Data Analysis

The final data set for this research project included analog maps, storyboards (for potential video/moving through scenarios), photography, video, post-it notes, and transcripts of walks, interviews, and group discussions. Reflective thematic analysis was used to engage with transcript and map data through three rounds of coding (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Initial codes were defined by participants in the first two weeks of the study through discussions of educational wellbeing, and represented themes of importance to participants (Leavy, 2017). These codes were refined through member checking at various points within the study (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). A secondary set of codes informed by research questions and a review of approaches to critical spatial analysis were then defined by the researcher and presented on two occasions for participant feedback (Akbari, 2019; Braun & Clarke, 2021; Tilley, 2019). Informed by a review of potential analytical frameworks for participatory visual research (PVR), the process of counter-map and transcript data analysis involved interpolation of sources with one another through reflexive dynamic reading to create codes related to specific spatial relationships. Map data was coded dependently with video explanations from participants to preserve intended meaning and impact of visual choices (Drew & Guillemin, 2014; Gubrium & Harper, 2013). Maps and illustrations included in this paper are captioned with quotations from video-recorded student explanations to preserve communicated intentions where appropriate (Literat, 2013; Mitchell, 2011; G. Rose, 2014). See Figure 2a,b for examples of visual data.

3. Results and Discussion

This section addresses themes within study data related to exclusionary discipline, spatial regulation, and imagined educational futures. Please note that all participant names mentioned here are pseudonyms.

3.1. The Negative Wellbeing Outcomes of Exclusionary Discipline Are Magnified for Youth in Alternative Programming

The majority of study participants (all but four) had experience with exclusionary discipline (in-school and out-of-school suspensions, expulsions) in addition to their referral and move to alt ed. How these experiences affect school wellbeing was raised in every activity. Moving through the school with these youth made it clear that being excluded from the school grounds (through half-day attendance, suspension, and expulsion) does not mean they stay away; rather for many it complexifies the relationship to educational space and increases tensions and potential for clashes with authority. Students were split between those who had a safe home with access to technology and food, and may choose to spend their days there (Emily, a frequently suspended participant, observed that “suspension is basically a reward”), and those who had nowhere to go when they were not in classes. In a town without a youth drop-in center for the latter group, school—even a school one has been banned from—was still the best choice. However, trying to be undiscovered near school grounds was a constant reminder of what had been lost, of being pushed out from educational space, and of negative relationships with staff. At the same time, the negative effects of being excluded were also an indication of the deep work of repair taking place within the alternative program: participants’ friendships, trusted adults, access to food and heated rooms and mental health supports, were all channeled through the space (see Figure 3) and being excluded carried a variety of academic and personal hardships. Students therefore opted to highlight exclusionary discipline within the context of alt ed as a key theme within their wellbeing discussions. Their observations align with the work of Ryan and Goodram (2013), Gerlinger et al. (2021), and others whose detailed reviews confirm that exclusionary discipline in general is harmful to students, and youth in this study specifically identify negative effects on access to supports and relationships, and the accrual of a negative learner identity as pathways through which harm is caused in the context of alt ed (McNeill et al., 2016).

For students without a stable home life and sometimes without a cellphone, peer connections are often repeated and sustained in educational spaces and through school interactions. Allan, who had recently returned from suspension wanted to know if they could use the research group to make friends, observing “I was away for a few months, I don’t know anyone, I’m lost in here now, I just have no idea what to do.” The alternative program offered students more than adjusted academics: it represented a hard reset for students’ relationships, new trusted adults and advocates, food, employment training, and mental health programming that students see as essential to their ongoing survival within the system. Many noted that the food and extracurricular supports in alt ed are what is helping them most on the path to graduation: these were what they needed in order to be able to approach academic work successfully. In this context, isolation through suspension, even in-school suspensions given for small misdemeanors, was seen as counterproductive to school narratives that teachers want them to succeed or as a severe punishment that leads to further (sometimes permanent) disconnection with school. As Bren noticed: “I actually had the energy to show up to the class. But I’m late. Why give me a punishment for it now. Now I don’t want show up at all.” When asked what suspension and expulsion accomplishes, Blake said: “Accomplish? It doesn’t accomplish anything. It just makes the person kind of fall behind in school. If I’m going to be suspended and stuff, I’m not going to be told go online and do your work. If you’re going to get suspended, you’re punishing me. So I’m not going to go on Teams. You know what I mean? I’m not going to do that if I’m out, I’m just going to… wait every day to go back.”

Alternative programming referral signals a degree of educational trauma. Students must first have negative experiences within regular classes to a degree and for a length of time that justifies intervention on the part of a vice-principal and counselor team who engage with the referral process to change a youth’s program of study. These experiences, mapped during initial research, carry tensions for the student and represent a rupture or increased deterioration of school connectedness (Mills & McGregor, 2013). Simultaneously, teachers in alternative schooling programs often innovate to rebuild trust by taking holistic, strengths-based approaches to understanding these students’ experiences (Bascia & Maton, 2017; Mills & McGregor, 2013; Stokes & Aaltonen, 2021). Figure 4 offers an example of how mapped and unmapped school space delineated the positive relational work of teachers in the alt program, represented as a small happy face within the large cluster of unmarked school buildings. It also provides a spatial look at the small range of this positive influence relative to a large educational space. The duality of the alt ed experience for students was characterized during map work by simultaneously feeling seen and understood within the program, and unfairly targeted when traversing the school at large. Diagrams were polarized, with many students choosing to map only the alt space and outdoors, either leaving the school blank, ignoring it entirely, or scribbling it over in a single color. Over time, the difference between interactions with staff within the program and other staff in main school areas reinforced a feeling for students that their participation in alt comes with an increased possibility of experiencing disciplinary exclusion by proximity, a process through which students expressed the feeling that an analog algorithmic injustice accrued to their learner identity. Several participants shared stories about staff assuming they were vaping because they had in the past, or because their clothes from home smell like smoke, rather than because they were caught in the act: “I swear they’re targeting me.”

Youth made observations about the difference between disciplinary action that felt reasonable or appropriate to their understanding of school rules and action that felt personal, subjective, and tied to their association with the alt program. Elaine, a quiet student who had a record of non-attendance due to being bullied before being referred to the program, described herself: “I look like a stereotypical kid who probably would smoke or something because there’s people who would think that anyway. School is just weird and stereotypical in those ways I find.” Based on these conversations, the group began storyboarding their arguments for a restorative justice program (see Figure 5). When asked what should or could happen instead of exclusion, Archer (who experienced multiple suspensions over the course of the project) said: “The teacher should talk to the student about it beforehand. Not just suspend them. Like a real conversation. Instead of just like, yeah, fuck you. Suspension.” When asked about anger management, youth agreed that it would be useful to have a course that took place within the school, highlighting that it needed to be connected to their teachers and educational spaces. At the same time, they acknowledged that solutions need to be co-designed in order to be effective for individuals:

“I think finding out which person that the people who thought would be comfortable talking with because that’s a big thing. Not just throwing them into somebody they’re not comfortable with or don’t know and putting ‘em in the same room… The order would be kind of sitting them down maybe a day or two after the fight and just getting how they feel, cut the whole thing out if they’re willing to talk about it. And then once the whole kind of animosity is settled down a bit, then get the two people to talk to each other about it. The hate between each other is only going to grow if you don’t talk about what happened. Give them a little bit time to cool off before they talk about it.”

(Blake)

“After a fight your mind may not be in the right, it may not be in the right state of mind to be able to do that work as much as someone else expects you to do that. And I think that’s why they should talk to their people afterwards just so they can have a say in what they need. Because some people would just want to be in, have their normal life in school and out of school after that whole thing. Some people want a special area for them. You got to talk to them instead of making the decisions for them because not everything’s going to work for someone.”

(Cara)

Participants’ reflections indicated a nuanced understanding of the tensions of school fights, and a recognition that there was a difference between exclusionary discipline and respectful space being taken or given to calm down or resolve an issue.

Repeated and targeted exclusionary discipline represented for students a fundamental disregard for their educational futures. For many, it indicated a clear prioritization of teacher comfort over educational creativity and possibility that undermines the transformative potential of this alternative educational space, both practically and conceptually. These experiences moderated participants’ discussions of their futures within the school, which were always bounded by comments about whether they were imagining ‘within’ or ‘without’ alt programming, and whether their imagined futures had to be grounded in their schooled histories. Participants’ caveats when speaking about their own possibilities gestured to Fraser’s (2009) notion of frame-setting, acknowledging both that the territorial state (in this case, the school) had set the criteria for a just experience, and that while students had no participatory parity within disciplinary processes, they remained deeply dependent on systemic outcomes for their educational wellbeing.

3.2. Schools Can Advance an Equity-Orientation Through Explicit Discussion and Reformation of Community Spatial Politicies and Practices

Participants’ conversations and suggestions illustrate in detail both a system of control, deficit positioning, and regulation that prescribes their educational and spatial pathways, and their creative responses to this positioning. Practical changes to advancing an equity-orientation through spatial practices might therefore be divided into those focused on radical systemic change, or slow and small revisions that offer respite for present and near-future alt ed participants. This section outlines research group experiences and student approaches from which either kind of solution might be inferred as possible or necessary.

Over the course of the study, the research group experienced multiple interruptions, prompted moves, and student checks from staff external to the project. These averaged three per two-hour session, with 26 study interruptions in total over 10 weeks. Interactions with staff who happened upon the group could be generally characterized by either curiosity, exploration, and mentorship, or by mistrust, regulation and interrogation. Of the 26 encounters, 22 fell into the latter category. The character of each encounter was coded based on the tone of the conversation, the kinds of questions asked by staff, and later debriefings with alt ed staff that included a summary of questions and complaints that had been received about the research group. The group received no complaints about behavior, nor did the research group travel to any location that had not received prior approval. Rather, concerns were about where and why the specific students in the group had been permitted to work and walk, and often centered disagreements between staff about how alt ed students should be supervised.

Stokes and Aaltonen (2021) proposed that repeated moments of friction between a young person’s need for flexibility and staff educational control lead to a weakened sense of belonging and school connectedness. They also suggested that positive experiences with alternative education exist where programs give students “a sense of rhythm within their own time-space paths and a sense of agency and control in their learning environment” (p. 1). This research builds on their perspective, offering that youth in alternative educational settings often need and are granted looser time-space paths to accommodate specific circumstances, and this requirement conflicts with the tight time-space paths required to engage with the rest of the school. Moving-together illuminated the way that the benefits of alt ed were spatially bounded to the program area, and that travel back and forth is tense because it brought together differing educational values and approaches into spatialized conflict. Students’ observations about being in the main school hallways touched on these tensions:

Al: I feel like it kind of depends on the setting or something. If you’re in their classroom, they’ll respect you because I dunno they’re teaching you or something, but in the hallway or whatever, when you’re walking they’re like, where are you going?

Cole: Like that. Teachers in halls versus classrooms, they’re just so much more cruel and demanding almost. And they follow you around, even if you look suspicious or don’t look suspicious, they just find someone to target and it’s like they’ll stay behind you and check what you’re doing. I’m going to my class.

Al: It depends who you are, right?

Desi: I don’t want to be mean or anything, but appearance does kind of matter.

Cole: Oh yeah. I don’t know if you dress a certain way, I feel like, I don’t know what I’m saying.

Desi: Okay, so I know what you mean though. For me 100% the way that we’re dressed, the beanie, the hat.

Interactions between students and main-school staff were mediated at various points by the director of alt ed, who issued large-scale wooden hall passes to flag his students for other teachers, asking them to leave his students alone or call him if there was a problem. This did not mediate staff encounters in the intended way, as evidenced by students’ observations:

Joel: I feel like we should start probably bring out hall passes again. If it would stop people from asking me questions all the time… You remember when Mr. Z had those really big ones. Well usually when I bring it they’re like, you’re supposed to be downstairs. You can’t be upstairs. Because they’ll see it and they’ll know it’s from the alt wing.

Pete: “It’s like a big wooden board so they leave you alone.”

Joel: “Yeah, but they still bug you anyway, they always bug me whenever I carry it, so I just stopped bringing it.”

In all cases, staff from the alt ed program were supportive of the research and asserted their professional purview in deciding who participated and where the group was permitted to go. These decisions were contested by other staff in part through hostile hallway encounters. From data, students’ affective educational wellbeing reflected complexity in how teachers chose to engage with them. Interactions that were characterized by curiosity and mentorship supported students in feeling as though they belonged and were respected. In absence of being able to confidently solve for staff variables, exploring these issues with students became about how best to co-create and manage protocols of engagement for areas under pressure.

Youth enacted agentic moments within spatial tensions through their choices about where to go, how to visually self-represent, and how to respond during staff encounters. This was a particularly complex situation for students who felt like they could not or would not adapt the way they look, dress, or smell (of tobacco or marijuana) to decrease the risk of being profiled: for some, doing laundry at home was not an option. For others, self-expression through appearance choices came at the price of being seen as “more alt,” but engaging with this tension was validating in its confirmation that it was not about them; it was about teachers’ misconceptions or lack of fair dealing. Documented agentic responses described by youth to regulatory encounters were varied and included: avoidance of certain areas or school staff, requests for clearance notes, sneaking, joyful play, accessing specific trusted staff relationships, fort-building, lighting fires, log-boxing, fighting, peer support, distraction of staff, misdirection of staff, retreating to cozy downtime (usually within the alt wing), and animal therapy (also in the alt wing). Students regularly observed and responded to differential treatment, and recognized complexity in how teachers may approach them based on school dynamics.

Collaborative approaches to addressing mapped tensions re-centered students’ needs rather than their behaviors or choices, thereby transferring the responsibility for better solutions back on the educational space, rather than offloading it onto students’ individual choices from a menu of unworkable options for meeting their needs. Mapped areas of tension could be discussed in terms of the ongoing issues that they represent, and students were adamant that clear and unified priorities for such interactions could fundamentally change how tense moments were received and responded to. In looking at maps together, it became apparent that without significant renovation of the space, tensions would be ongoing because of different parties’ multiple needs for each area. Once these were color-coded, the group began to naturally try to sort out how the school might meet each of those needs differently, rather than pitting one need against another during individual encounters.

Findings supported the move toward radically collaborative education that centers empathy and community care on the part of both students and staff. Recommendations included a whole-school approach to the character of encounters in shared space that included attentiveness to students’ individual positive potentials and long-term possibilities. Students characterized this work through descriptions of alt ed teaching practice; they saw empathetic, collaborative and relational teaching as necessary for their educational wellbeing (see Figure 6: a composite image of a sample slide from the group’s presentation to staff encouraging them to build relationships with students, and notes on “what makes good teachin” that are amended to add “It’s just Mr. E”, one of the teachers at the alt site). They also suggested that within current regulatory contexts, spatial practices required their own acknowledgement and discussion between students and teachers, especially when consequences for misunderstandings or tensions could have devastatingly final consequences for youth struggling to stay in school.

3.3. Students’ Visions of Just Educational Futures Include Movement, Creativity, Autonomy, Trust, and Outdoor Spaces

The group’s lists of things that would boost educational wellbeing read like a best-practices handbook for early learning spaces, where research demonstrates students need relationships, visibility, and belonging in their learning spaces (Bunting & Jota, 2021; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Lee & Roth, 2003), and that they need safety, trust, and play in order to learn well (Immordino-Yang, 2015). See Figure 6 for examples of future-mapping. Students’ future-maps aligned with cultural-historical and holistic educational perspectives that suggested these needs continue throughout the life course, as all human learning has emotional context and requires scaffolding through supportive environments, relationality and belonging (Kelly, 1993; Vadeboncoeur, 2009; Mills & McGregor, 2013; Te Riele, 2010; Zembylas, 2018). These visions of educational futures highlighted participation as a central tenet of wellbeing and belonging. The kinds of participation that they imagined for themselves were embedded in learning opportunities and in the co-creation of spaces for physical exploration and movement, many of which are in direct conflict with the regulatory and restrictive spatial practices enacted upon students due to a variety of present-day institutional and systemic pressures. Youth participants’ maps of possible futures were overwhelmingly focused on being physically active and being outside, two forms of learning that had become severely restricted with entry into the alt program. They envisioned play and physical comfort: they expressed needs for whimsy, movement, and a sense that they belong and can contribute to the physical space. This was highlighted in walks, where youth pointed out their favorite spaces and dreamed up how to use them differently. Outdoors, Allan designed a bunch of “obstacle challenges” for others to complete. On a walk through the edges of the school fields, Emily and others gleefully shared pictures of tree forts they would built, some chickens that wandered into one of the forts, and the location of “log boxing,” a self-refereed boxing club that they would started in the woods near the school fields. Figure 7 illustrates some of these moments with a photo of the chicken fort and a sketch of Blake’s pathway to last year’s graduation ceremony: “drunk on the roof, suspended, found by Mr. E, better, stayed, be great.” They also pointed out where they would like a graffiti wall to create their own tags and images. On maps, they drew playgrounds. Swing sets, monkey bars, swimming pools, gyms, balance beams and obstacle courses were each referenced on multiple diagrams (see composite images, Figure 8). Youth wanted to be able to sign out equipment to use on the fields—a soccer ball, a frisbee, nerf guns. For these students, asking a teacher for a ball, asking for permission to use it in the field, finding a staff member to physically watch them outside, and being granted permission to play during their half-day study time seemed like an impossible set of tasks.

Conversations about ‘what could be’ centered empathy, autonomy and the flexibility to use school spaces creatively. Youth discussed whether they themselves or others in the program would vandilize new spaces or equipment if it were offered. They concluded that if they built it themselves, they would know how to fix it and be more likely to respect it. They also pointed out that it would be worth it either way, both because it showed care for their needs and because a small amount of play is humanizing and incredibly helpful to their state of mind (this also surfaced with regard to the positive benefits of log boxing). Maps of indoor space included comfort items like soft seating, plants, study carrels, and cozy corners (see also Panina-Beard & Vadeboncoeur, 2022). Unanimously, students wanted wider hallways and more diverse navigation options for getting to class.

3.4. Study Limitations

There is a great degree of variation in how alternative educational programming is structured and delivered, including policies, attendance, referrals, curriculum, relationships to referring schools/programs, and the personal experiences of youth. This study, being from a single site, can be understood as an in-depth snapshot of complexity and is not generalizable to all alternative contexts or attendees. Lack of demographic data on alternative program attendees also limits study findings regarding how a variety of persistently marginalized student populations might differently experience school exclusion. The relatively small sample size restricts the extent to which results might be generalized to other educational populations and contexts

4. Conclusions

Data presented here suggest that exclusionary discipline practices place students in alt ed programs at an increased risk of early school leaving, create increased ongoing tensions between youth and their educational supports, and remove key wellbeing supports (including access to food, shelter, and trusted adults) from these youths’ lives during a critical point in their educational journey. In doing so, such practices represent a direct contribution to the school-to-prison pipeline. For students in alternative spaces the negative effects of exclusionary discipline are compounded by previous ruptures and often also by undermining subsequent significant repairs in educational wellbeing. Each of these situations magnifies students’ needs for safe educational spaces and reduced tensions.

Conclusions from this study support understandings that learning, play, movement, and risk are intertwined in important and meaningful ways for students, and that spatial regulation and exclusion have deeply felt negative effects on the fabric of students’ emplaced learning approaches and their educational belonging and wellbeing. Youths’ maps of school wellbeing indicate that in order to survive in school spaces, they need new terms of educational belonging, co-created and collaboratively designed and built. Three further areas for inquiry emerge from this work. The first concerns how youth respond (and what creative imagining is possible) when confronted simultaneously with the possibilities of empathetic affective transformation in alt ed, and the incredibly narrow bounded areas of educational space in which this permitted to occur. A second significant area for inquiry might address how such systems implicate and affect teacher wellbeing, pedagogy, and practices. A third could explore how moving and mapping together might be integrated with curriculum in ways that support student learning outcomes and generate critical engagement.

Study results have implications for how researchers and educational professionals address competing priorities within schooling contexts: for regulation, academic performance, and order, and for holistic learning, equitable educational futures, and the care of young people. These implications are both macro- and micro- in nature; radical systemic changes that specifically center care, empathy and collective futures are imperative for the survival of young people marginalized by the system, and also small changes now to how teachers pursue and foster relationships, cultures of empathy, and restorative justice practices can be life-changing for youth deciding whether or not to stay in school.