2. Move on Back: The Experience on a School Bus

With Jorge Garcia and Stephanie Robillard

In popular culture, the yellow school bus is often associated with fun, learning, and adventure. Ms. Frizzle and her Magic School Bus—mentioned in this book’s introduction—entertain countless children. The appropriation of the yellow school bus in Oakland’s “hyphy” movement has ensured that it retains a whimsical place in our collective memory. Media depictions of budding romance offer nostalgia-tinged glasses through which to interpret adolescent and childhood days spent blissfully on a bus with friends. Even when the school bus is boring, it is a place for daydreaming. As a form of technology, the bus is enchanting.

Our research draws a different, more nuanced understanding of the reality of commuting for countless children. First, let’s acknowledge the obvious: commuting three or more hours a day is exhausting for anyone. As adults, we can often determine when and how we will complete a journey and decide what we will eat and where breaks will occur. By comparison, children commuting to school on a yellow school bus have little agency over how the journey will unfold. The rules governing the bus mean that children are unable to take care of their most basic needs, including thirst, hunger, and bathroom breaks. On a journey ostensibly benefiting students, it is striking that their daily comfort and well-being are generally disregarded.

Fundamentally, our research encourages educators, parents, and general members of a schooling community to recognize a truism about technology: when we center the tools of educational technology over its users, we must question who these tools benefit and at what scale. Particularly as the intended users of school buses, students weren’t asked for their input when it came to the design and implementation of school buses, as described in the previous chapter. These vehicles are taken for granted as part of the cost of attending public school today.

As a way of framing what it feels like for these children to ride a yellow school bus, we traveled with one group of children as they responded to a playful invitation to imagine how they might better design their commuting experience. That is, we asked a number of them what they might change about their bus-riding experience if they were in charge. We found their answers telling. It is striking that, essentially, what the children voiced were basic human needs.

One elementary school–aged child spoke of the sleepiness they felt. Getting to the bus stop in time for their 8:00 a.m. class meant getting up and leaving their house at 5:00 a.m.—early, indeed, for a growing child. Another child wished the bus would stop at a drive-through restaurant and buy food for everyone. School bus rules didn’t permit students to eat or drink during the commute, essentially meaning that most students either skipped breakfast or nibbled snacks as they hustled to class. The same child pointed out the cameras installed inside the bus and described the ways they were invasive.

Children shared what we call the need for creative engagement. We pause here to explain that we were invited onto this school bus to help administrators imagine ways to better support the academic learning needs of school bus commuters. While students sought creative outlets, their administrators were also searching for additional learning time from kids stuck in a metal tube each morning and afternoon. Administrators saw this time as a period during which they might alleviate boredom. One idea a school official offered was to give each student a camera to take and share photos (though some students had mobile devices, phones weren’t as ubiquitous as they were among their older peers).

Students were asking very basic needs to be addressed during their time on the school bus. During our months of research, which we detail in the rest of this chapter, we regularly marveled at their capacities to cope. We had not yet become attuned to the idea that this bus—as it was configured and designed by policies and historical legacies that address the injustice of contemporary segregated school systems—was inhumane. When given even a limited opportunity to speak directly to the open-ended question of how they might change things if they were in charge, students asked for basic human rights: sleep, food, privacy, and creative engagement. The absence of these elements troubles a rosy vision of this educational technology.

Throughout this chapter, we detail a year of learning and listening with kids on a bus. We highlight how assumptions of adult expertise often got in the way of the dreams and desires of the kids. In sharing examples from our research, this chapter questions what technological interventions actually do. As a larger critique of tools like busing, we take the historical grounding of the previous chapter as an opportunity for understanding the chaotic lived experience of kids on buses today. We also offer an interactive vision of how research, practice, and policy are constantly shaping and shifting the experiences of students in school settings.1

Meet the Kids

The students we rode the bus with were like many of the countless students in the United States who ride a bus in the wake of desegregation efforts. In our particular case, we rode alongside approximately sixty kindergarten to eighth-grade students from the Bellwood community.2 They were of different ethnic and language backgrounds (65 percent Latinx, 25 percent Pacific Islander, and 10 percent Black, based on available school-reported information) and spent 90 to 120 minutes on the bus in the mornings to get to school and another 90 to 120 minutes in the afternoon to get back home. These were the children from Bellwood whose families had opted in to a voluntary program to transport children to nearby districts. It was launched in the mid-1980s, after years of litigation by parents of the region. Led by a parent of a Bellwood student, several districts near Bellwood were sued for unconstitutional segregation in the schools. As a result, better-performing districts were obligated to reserve space for children from underresourced areas of the region. For more than thirty-five years, the region’s districts have maintained this program. In turn, during this time, children from Bellwood continuously spend up to twenty hours a week on a bus to access the promise of a better education.

As the transportation program was an effort to desegregate, it is important here to note the role of busing not only in desegregation efforts but also in policies of segregation, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Building Inequality: The Spatial Organization of Schooling in Nashville, Tennessee after Brown, Ansley T. Erickson3 asks, “how much of the burden of desegregation should children be expected to shoulder?” Children most negatively impacted by segregation have had to shoulder the burden of desegregation efforts and policies. Busing reveals itself to be a function of both segregation and desegregation regimens.

Riding Along

Our study was born from districts’ desire to better understand the academic learning needs of students routinely commuting from Bellwood to the Hays and Jackson School Districts. Recognizing the time spent on the school bus, a superintendent reached out to Antero wondering how his previous research on mobile media4 might show how to better support bused students. Our research team was invited to support the district as it tried to find ways to enhance the bus-riding experience. We wanted to understand what the children participating in this program experienced every day. With a broad mandate to explore and pilot interventions, we took up different kinds of playful learning experiences with students after first spending time sitting and feeling life on the school bus. We planned narrative-based games and project-based learning opportunities and choice-based reading. As we describe subsequently, some of our efforts proved promising in the limited confines of the bus. But we were continually thwarted by the sheer noise and discombobulation of the bus experience.

We had been warned by some district administrators that the bus was an unruly space, as behavioral issues were regularly reported. In contrast to the misbehaving youth about whom we were warned, however, we discovered a rich ecosystem of interactions, learning, and coping that children had crafted for themselves. It took us a while to adjust, as mixed in with the delight of engaging the children with activities and conversations, some of us experienced motion sickness, headaches from the cacophony of unrelenting engine and road noise, and utter brain fatigue from exhaustion. Riding the school bus is an intense experience that we too often discount in our vestiges of memory. If we, as adults, felt the exhaustion of this occasional research experience, just think of the physical and emotional toll this commute takes on America’s youths. As a research team, we spoke often of how the children managed this day in and day out, as a passage to school and back home.

Our planned activities for exploring learning and engagement with young people were often thwarted by the sheer noise of the bus. In response, we brought instruments to measure sound levels and worked with students to measure how loud the bus was at any given time. We engaged these kids as they wrestled with making sense of the data. We also listened closely to the ways children used, modified, or superseded sound as they crafted their own aural space in the cacophony of the bus ride. This proved to be a fruitful approach, as we began to see sound used as a means to create community and engage in acts of resistance. We began to recognize the malleability of sound and the power of sound to mediate spaces.

Veratl

As a research team, we were interested in constructing unique experiences for young bus riders that might rival the time their non-bus-riding peers were enjoying at home or in after-school programs. Was it possible for the bus ride to be a joyful and fun experience? After riding alongside these students for a quarter, we designed Project Scout, a project-based learning experience about an extraterrestrial being who was interested in communicating with fellow travelers. Veratl—an adolescent, gender-neutral, amorphous being from outer space—would initiate contact with students, inquire about their lives, and gain an understanding of what these bus-riding travelers’ lives were like.

We created a backstory for Veratl; they would need four crystals to power their spaceship to return home. These crystals represented data we would collect along four themes: curio (curiosity), communo (community), chrono (chronology), and carto (place). We recruited a fellow researcher to play the role of a space scientist tracking extraterrestrial communication. To inspire curiosity, we placed QR codes around the bus, hoping that students would use their digital devices to access a message from Veratl (which a team member recorded using a voice modulator). Immediately, these ludic efforts floundered. Younger students were frightened by the message, whereas others immediately assumed it was fake and lost interest. Not deterred by flagging interest, we planned to press forward with a year-long engagement within this alternate reality game. Of course, it was not meant to be; when it comes to learning on a school bus, there is never a smooth or easy journey.

The end of Project Scout began within weeks of its beginning. One reason we phased it out was our inability to maintain engagement with the project when we were not present. Even then, we noticed that a smaller portion of the older students participated only because we asked them. They were, in fact, doing us a favor. We were troubled that students were participating out of a sense of obligation. This was their space, and we were coddling them in ways we did not intend. Then, another, more significant reason for ending the project emerged: one of our research team members, Miroslav, had developed a burgeoning friendship with one of the older boys, named Josué. Miroslav would often sit near him and talk about his day, gaming, or other interests. Josué was not interested in Project Scout and believed the entire project to be fake. After our fellow researcher dodged the direct question about this project repeatedly, Josué stopped talking to any of us. This project we imagined to be so engaging ended because we realized that we were forcing it on students. We were unintentionally impinging on their time, alienating them, and perhaps violating an unspoken agreement about our relationships. To be clear, Project Scout wasn’t all that different from the ways we burden students in schools every day. We impose school expectations and technological interventions on the lives of students constantly, with little opportunity for their input, as we presume expertise. Adults seemingly know what’s best, a premise that our time on the bus suggests is dubious.

Sound Measurement

Findings from Project Scout prompted us to iterate and imagine different ways of learning with the bus passengers. Said differently, we wanted to put our finger on what shaped so much of passengers’ experience on the bus: sound. How could we attune to this presence and quantify its imposition? What would emerge for students if they approached noise as scientists? Our study explored student sensemaking based on the creation and interpretation of sound on their school bus. We worked alongside students to capture and interpret sound levels on the bus. We began to see how students used sounds to create community, exercise agency, and make meaning of their surroundings. Moreover, students used sound to counteract the pervasive drone of the bus itself.

Our explorations of sound measurement and data afforded students an opportunity to reflect on and reinterpret their lives and activities on the bus. Utilizing multiple handheld sound meters, children on the bus took decibel readings and observational notes about the moment of the readings. We worked alongside them to measure sound levels on the bus and engage in meaningful explorations with their collected data. Nearly one hundred data points were collected over four weeks of student-led sound collection on the bus. In the context of the broader understanding of the bus as educational technology, this activity helped elucidate the designed affordances and conditions of the school bus; what it enables and constrains in the lives of its users are often invisible.

We compiled the student-collected data and provided each student with a handout that summarized key elements of their data. This generated dialogue and multimodal meanings, including emotional responses to the sound pressure levels on the bus in relation to other sounds, speculations on why certain areas inside the bus were louder or quieter than others, questions about the geography of sound along the bus’s route, and critiques of how the data were represented in our summaries.

Through sound data measurements, students allowed us to coconstruct a soundscape. Students then reflected on, contested against, and negotiated meaning around the soundscape. The summary of the data they captured became a sounding board for students to understand the subjective ways that data—on a bus, on a standardized test, or on a national census—are collected and utilized. In this way, the data acted as a prompt for students to vocalize their own perceptions of the sonic texture inside the bus. As an example, we offer Jamal’s insight; Jamal was one of the few Black bus riders, and he expressed frustration by our data summary’s suggestion that his school’s bus stop was the loudest. As student resistance was often in conflict with adult perceptions of permissible sound, Jamal’s voiced concerns spoke to perceptions of being “loud” and its implied negative stereotype of Black people in America.

We found the children deepening their analysis as they spent more time looking at the summaries of the data and discussing them. Above the drone of the bus, a group of riders discussed the data, and several students expressed concern that the sound pressure levels on the bus might be unsafe, based on a chart we provided to students showing them a range of daily sound levels encountered. Students pointed to the subjectivity of data collection and how different data points meant different things for different people. These discussions of the measured data raised an opportunity for the youths to reflect on sound and to see it in stark relief, as they were previously not attuned to it in this manner.

One middle school student, Alejandra, offered a critique of the data collection method; she doubted the authenticity of the highest recorded sound pressure readings and was dubious of how her fellow bus riders were choosing to measure sound. She shared that she had observed measurements being taken while the user was shouting loudly and directly into the sound pressure meter and suggested that data captured and interpreted on our collaborative spreadsheet should reflect this deviation. Alejandra was also curious about limitations and differences between the types of sound pressure meters. She proposed that we create a protocol to ensure uniformity in methods of collecting readings. Absent those methods, she felt that any reported findings were probably not accurate.

Inspired by the feedback from students like Jamal and Alejandra, several of the elementary school students decided to seek the extremes of both high and low sound pressure inside the bus. With eyes on their sound pressure meters, they held their breath in anticipation to see how low their measurements could go. We saw other students also engaged as listeners and as intentional nonmakers of sound. The students then pushed the envelope further and proceeded to collectively scream. The shrieks sounded joyful and cathartic; their sonic smiles could be heard throughout this activity. Youths embraced the opportunity to turn the inside of the bus into an after-school playground. The sound pressure was physically palpable, and some of our research team covered their ears, while the students seemed unbothered. This moment of unrestrained release blended student-driven inquiry with the overriding of sonic norms on the bus. At least for the moments of this activity, the sound became a source of collective joy. Later in the journey, the activity shifted from collective screaming to individual contests in which the winner was crowned the “scream queen.”

Friendship, Mentorship, and Traveling Companionship

Alongside understanding how students can make meaning of the sonic phenomenon of the bus, we explored how youth relationships were supported in the aisles of the bus. Demonstrated camaraderie expanded the affective spectrum experienced by the students on board the bus. As the bus picked up students from schools and dropped them off in different neighborhoods, some friendships were born inside its noisy yellow shell. In our time on the bus, we saw the kind of light affection one might expect from years of sharing a morning and afternoon ritual. Children would often read in pairs, curled into the bench seats and tucked below the high seatbacks, carving out an incrementally quieter space together. Some would lean in toward each other to talk, share a device’s screen, or design, fold, and fly paper airplanes. Other students would sit high and rotate in their seats to engage another area inside the bus. We also saw the evolution of more critical and engaged relationships:

Gabriyel held a worn notebook in his hand, reciting lyrics from a page that was pocked with crossed out phrases, erased, and written over. He strained his voice over the bus’s counterpoint and the playful taunts of his peers. As we listened and watched, another student used his Chromebook to play instrumental tracks, with an app that made the keypad a virtual drum machine. Gabriyel was experiencing a comprehensive evaluation and coaching session. Gabriyel shared with us that he had been working on this passage for several days, and we noted his resilience. Most of the unfolding peer feedback was laced with jeers and laughter. “That doesn’t even rhyme!” “You sound tired, why you so tired?” “Do it on beat, why you not on beat?” Gabriyel would listen to the advice, quickly scribe new phrases into his notebook, then exclaim, “Okay, okay, I’m ready!” This continued for the better part of an hour, and his delivery, composition, rhyme structure, and content became more refined.

The students created a safer, engaging space of shared vulnerability within their aural bubble, something we’ve explored in further academic analysis.5 They did it over the din of the typical student chatter and the ever-present eighty to eighty-five decibels of noise inside the bus. Their care and guidance helped Gabriyel refine a piece of writing while honing his reading of the piece and its vocal performance. His tenacity appeared to impress the older students; when they tried to model for him what he should sound like, they experienced for themselves the difficulty of rapping for longer than one verse. This small group of young composers, coaches, and choreographers pushed the boundaries of how communities were sustained as they constructed a peer-led collaborative learning space inside the bus. This same small group of students laughed together at Gabriyel’s progress, groaned when he fell short, and waited excitedly for his revisions. These shared experiences bolstered their relationships by tending to their relational connections above the noise. Though it is not typically cultivated, busing technology can foster community and forms of empathetic civic engagement. It is a malleable technology for social good, if we choose to utilize it as such.

Entertainment on the Bus

Staying entertained was of utmost importance to students on the bus, as it is for many commuters. These students found ways to entertain themselves and have fun. Although a segment of bus riders always immediately put on headphones, listened to music, or watched videos, most students chose to play games. The youngest would play hand games that required coordination, knowledge of the rules, and quick thinking to meet the math or rhyming expectations. In the back of the bus, a group of seven or eight students would play virtual card games against each other over mobile applications. These students’ conversations would often be interrupted with cheers or groans, depending on who had played what type of card.

An additional source of entertainment for the children was music. While some students were able to plug in to their own devices, many relied on the radio preferences of the bus driver. Radio stations would prove a contentious issue, as older students would ask for a song to be turned down just after younger students (seated closer to the driver) had requested for the volume to be turned up. The younger students would also sing songs loudly. While their singing would begin matter-of-factly, as soon as they realized it irritated their older bus-riding companions, they would sing louder, even if it was “Frosty the Snowman” on a March afternoon.

Sound did not always divide the students though. As part of Project Scout, we brought personal headsets that connected to a device transmitting sound, like a private intercom system. Although we initially played snippets of Veratl speaking to the students, we eventually switched to music. Children would call out songs that they wanted to hear, and we would play them by connecting our phones to the transmitter. We eventually made a playlist of songs for them. The headsets reduced the noise so noticeably that the bus driver commented that we should bring them every time. The only exception was Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” a huge pop hit at the time. Recognizing the opening chords, students immediately jumped in singing in unison, startling the bus driver and our research team. The spontaneous joy and delight in that moment were never again replicated to the same degree, even as the bus riders listened to other popular songs.

The Student Costs of Busing

The study described in this chapter was halted in March 2020 as the world as students and adults knew it came to a halt. The global pandemic offered a reprieve from the lengthy commute these students took each day. In doing so, it also cut off the youths of Bellwood from social interactions with their school peers and their city. Extra hours of sleep and recreation were gained as socialization and access to school resources were lost.

To be clear, adult surveillance was a constant problem for students throughout the study. Though we’ve chosen to center student experiences throughout this chapter, the role of adult power was a constant pressure for young people, just like in schools. The design of the bus, as explored in the next chapter, centers the safety and command of a driver. They can surveil and project their voice to all riders. They simultaneously control what transpires inside and outside the vehicle.

Although this chapter has examined how children applied ingenuity to manage protracted, ill designed conditions, we still are left to wonder, who shoulders the burden of addressing broken systems? Are these technologies conferring basic human needs? Are these technologies conferring dignity on the participants as a rule (rather than as an exception)?

3. Beep, Beep, Beep: The Design of the School Bus