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The Presence Of Bodies In CampusesAt all the schools, students were materially visible in their bodily presence, a presence that frequently vanished at Boarding and Suburban High Schools as bodies were effectively moved to classrooms. Nevertheless, the murals sustained a hint of the youth at Boarding High. At lunch and between classes, the students owned the grounds through their overwhelming presence at Urban and Suburban Highs. I was never present during lunch at Boarding High, but their smaller numbers and the large campus would certainly have made less of an impact as observed during the centennial celebration. Nevertheless, just as de Certeau (1986) discussed, students had mostly a transient effect, using a period during the day reserved for lunch and the minutes between classes to assert a presence on campus; the places were merely borrowed from the institution. In one study of high school students, Hemmings focused on hallways by distinguishing a “corridor curriculum.” In hallways and lunch rooms, she found that supervision was minimal and that students structured the culture of these areas (2000, p. 5). In southern California schools, however, hallways and lunch rooms are frequently outside, broadening the area to be structured and potentially lessening the control of authorities. Places within the larger campuses afforded different activities and different social structures, but observations about how students typically used them were limited. Overall, few differences were noted in how Boarding and Suburban High School students used their grounds, but several minor incidents at Urban High revealed distinguishing features. The first involved the fences and their role in constraining and perhaps promoting activity. One group of students were observed scaling the fences to escape, laughing as they did so. The fences kept more students within school grounds than may have remained on campus otherwise, but these boys seemed to gleefully take on the challenge that the institution had offered. This moment is significant because it is consistent with video activity, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Another incident was also revealing: One day a school “lock down,” which was in response to the discovery of a homemade bomb, had forced everyone to stay beyond the end of the school day, and a large crowd accumulated in one area because a routine exit gate remained locked. It did not become a significant problem but posed a hazard. In general, the fences were artifacts that communicated an intent to keep people in and out of the campus and that inconvenienced people, preventing the use of shorter routes, keeping students from their cars, and sectioning off areas for no apparent reason. A related issue concerns the way buildings were placed: Small, private areas were created that resisted observation. The Media 3 teacher more than once chased students away from the back door of the studio, and the gleeful escapees were able to climb the fence in part because they found an area where few people would see them—in the forgotten territory near the Studio. The limits on surveillance necessitated the more direct constraint of high fences. The other two schools had open fields between buildings and the perimeter of the grounds such that the possibility of being seen was stronger. These differences were consistent with observations of the relations between students and teachers: Constraint dominated at Urban High but failed to prevent damage to cameras. Teachers relied much more on promotion at the other two schools, and problems were rarer. Strategies of surveillance as described by Foucault (1980) were implemented more thoroughly at these two schools such that less effort was needed in controlling students. |
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