Shifting The Narrative From Broken Youth To A Broken System: Dismantling Deficit-Based Narratives Of Youth With High ACEs Through A Post-Qualitative Decolonizing Approach

This study interrogates the deficit-centered policies and procedures in education and reveals how they continue to oppress, code, and label youth with high ACEs, positioning them as broken and defective. In this post-qualitative study, I use decolonizing theory to deconstruct the relations of power and dominant discourses that label and flag our students as “at-risk” and “underprepared" for a world of stereotypes that we (as a society, as individuals from dominant groups with naming power, and as institutions) continue to fuel. This study employs the work of Eve Tuck and her conceptualization of deficit-based theory. This study is a form of critical inquiry and resistance as activism, written from within my own experiences as I witnessed these policies and procedures continue to label my students as throwaways, hindering their opportunities, spirit, and self-worth. Using a “thinking with theory” approach, I critically deconstruct the dominant discourses and power relations that shape the way we teach and view students with high ACEs (generally labeled as “at-risk"), while considering how these deficit-based approaches produce and preserve power structures and maintain systems of oppression in education.