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

Reading the School Bus

How do we come to know the meaning of the objects around us? How do they reflect their intended and actual uses for individuals who interact with them? This chapter is an invitation to look closely at the tools you interact with by scrutinizing their histories and contested visions. Even the mundane must be placed under this lens. As Galen Cranz writes in a book-length work about the humble chair, “most people don’t think about chairs much one way or the other, because they are part of our surroundings, meant to support us silently and constantly, without attracting much attention.”1 Though it may be loud, take up substantial space on the street, and play a fundamental role in your family’s daily schooling processes, the school bus has adroitly operated “without attracting much attention” as well. If this vehicle has generally escaped public, scholarly, and policy scrutiny, so, too, have the individual components within the bus.

Like your favorite book or magazine, I suggest that we “read” the bus as a text—scrutinizing its composition, function, and hidden and explicit intentions. My reading of the school bus is done with an eye toward the possibilities of educational technology writ large. It is intended as a kind of open-ended activity that could be done with educational stakeholders. From superintendents to teachers to students to parents, reading the design of a school bus offers an opportunity to revisit what is taken for granted in daily school life and question how we’ve come to accept and operate buses for a century. In this way, I am adapting Shor’s approach to having college students interpret the chairs in their classroom and their intended uses.2 In his guided dialogue, students connect design to intent: “The chair is a hard, unyielding object, so it’s difficult to relax in. Why are you prevented from relaxing in class? Because you’ll fall asleep, students answer.” Shor adapts this approach from a tradition of critical literacy rooted in dialogue around a particular artifact or motif. By replicating this exercise with you, reader, I invite you to meander with me through the at once familiar and now imagined bus you remember from your childhood.

Take your seat. The vinyl benches lack the seat belts you’ve come to expect in nearly every other U.S. vehicle. As discussed earlier, this exclusion is intentional, and safety for student lives is embedded in the design of these awkward benches of seating. As you try to stretch in the seat you’ve taken, you notice only paltry inches of separation from the seat in front of it. The seats on school buses are a snug fit for an adult body. These seats are intentionally made for smaller bodies. Depending on age, schools might cluster two or three children per bench. As an adult, you find your knees jutting into the vinyl in front of you, and you skew your legs diagonally, taking up leg room in the central walkway of the bus (despite the driver’s warnings to keep this area clear). Even if you were smaller, the sharp angles of seat and back, the unforgiving stick of the seat material, and the obstructed views would still be uncomfortable. These vehicles prioritize utility over comfort and sociality. They quickly load a large mass of students and move them to their intended destination; the experience of the journey itself is a secondary consideration at best.

Looking around, there doesn’t seem to be much else to the bus. No arm rests, no storage space underneath or above the seats, and little else to see or fiddle with other than the rattling windows next to you. The lack of amenities, too, is chalked up to safety concerns—though this doesn’t stop other forms of public transportation from offering more versatility.

Perhaps the bus feels sweltering; earlier start dates often mean that bus rides fall in the muggy month of August. Opening the windows on this standard bus is a choreography of digits: simultaneously pressing in tabs on both ends of the window, assuming they are willing to play nice today, guiding fingers, then working to raise and lower the window. These windows are not supposed to be adjusted once the bus is in motion, and so the decision of how much to open or shut a window depends on physical capability, permissibility, and a capacity for predicting the changing climate of a morning or afternoon commute. Could these windows be redesigned? Of course—look at literally any other vehicle’s window design and you can see the agency we could afford students when it comes to their window options. The limitations of access to fresh air are a part of the technological decisions made for students by adults that are not required to regularly ride these vehicles anymore.

Like almost all other aspects of the bus, the floors, ceilings, and walls are little more than corrugated steel and bolts holding together sheets of metal. Other than mandatory signage at the front of the bus and warnings not to meddle with safety equipment—a hatch in the roof that can offer egress, in an emergency, for example—there are no texts or pictures to capture your eye in this bus.

To be clear, these features are the result of choices made for this particular object. And these were choices made by adults presuming they know the needs of children. While the wisdom of age guides how we construct schooling expectations and safety, such decisions are made without regard for young people, their ideas, or their desires. For all of the emphasis on literacy development and academic and social growth in schools, the blank walls and unimaginative design inside the bus are grounded in arguments of safety. However, these arguments are made in contrast to calls for well-being and happiness for young people. Could students customize and design space on a bus? Could they see texts or screens or sounds that affirm their lived experiences? Of course. But such possibilities are absent within the drab text of the bus as we have collectively come to know it. Such calls might be inferred as wildly impossible based on our assumptions of what buses are supposed to look like. So let’s step outside the bus for a moment.

Let’s look at the blinking red lights that signal that the bus has stopped at our destination. We notice that a stop sign has flipped from the side of the bus, warning other drivers to halt until the lights stop blinking.

While we might take buses for granted, they maintain incredible social power. They shape how we interact on roads, and as drivers, we adjust our behavior. Both the robotic appendage swinging from the side of the bus and the agentic choice of a driver cause this change in behavior. In his 1960 treatise Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti describes a symphony conductor as an example of the most powerful kind of individual. This person, standing in front of a small army of musicians, with their back to an even larger crowd of eager audience members, controls—demands—silence and attention from everyone in the room: “there is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor.”3 In their use of blinking lights and stop signs, bus drivers, too, wield this power. They surveil and control behavior within the bus and halt traffic and trouble existing flows of cars outside of the bus as well. Busing technology is designed to be helmed by an individual and to alter the behavior of everyone in and around it.

In a seat elevated and distinct from the benches in the rest of the metal tube, the bus driver is surrounded by a complex array of gears, buttons, wheels, knobs, mirrors, vents, lights, and speakers. Theirs is, understandably, a weighty job. Though school bus driver isn’t seen as a high-status job in today’s society (and neither is the job of schoolteacher, mind you), it is a stressful, high-stakes job. Schedules of expectant parents and educators buckle against the ebb and flow of traffic. On most buses, the driver is also the only adult present. Like a teacher who takes on the responsibility and caregiving for young people in loco parentis, the driver cares for all while their eyes and attention remain focused on the road ahead. Like a conductor aware of an attentive audience but focused on the guiding strokes for a set of musicians, the driver maneuvers a willing vehicle toward school while coaxing students into safe and docile behavior.

As an all-encompassing experience, the bus is a platform for directing the experiences of a substantial number of students during their schooling lives. Likewise, the bus is an infrastructural part of how schools fit within society. Buses open a pathway for discussing and understanding contemporary perspectives on social uses of technology. As a physical representation of how platforms operate, the school bus fuses seemingly old technology with contemporary anxieties about competitiveness and educational equity.

Platforms in Education

The past decade has seen the rise of “platform studies,” including what some scholars have referred to as the “platformization of education.”4 Within today’s online systems, platforms are considered “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact.”5 Considering how embedded online networks like Facebook and Amazon and Google might be in the full spectrum of social life, Van Dijck et al. describe contemporary shifts to engaging with these tools as a move into a “platform society.”6

For educational research, platform studies shifts debates away from praising the advantages of individual online tools. It instead reveals how a site like Khan Academy or Classroom Dojo, as broader learning environments, situate and redesign teacher practices and student interactions. As a familiar site that many might know for its online tutoring and enrichment, Khan Academy does not merely support what happens in classrooms. Rather, platforms are environments, and, just like in the rest of the world where our time is spent abundantly on platforms like Amazon and YouTube, school life is being transformed by the ways they operate.

Understanding how platforms have reshaped schooling today is necessary and, I believe, overlooked when considering the role of educational technology. As my colleague Phil Nichols and I have explained, “when teachers think of such platforms as tools, rather than digital spaces, they tend to lose sight of important questions about the kinds of educational environments they want to provide and the kinds of interactions they want to create among students.”7 We argue that educators must pay attention to how our interactions and attention have been pulled to platforms and away from the vast wilderness of tools and online sites. Nichols and I describe three ways to interpret the role that platforms play in classrooms:

• Their social use: how a resource is intended to be used and how is it actually used
• Their designed features: the underlying design decisions for a given platform and what kinds of activities these decisions embolden or hinder
• Their material resources: the energy, materials, and labor that allow a platform to successfully operate

These three lenses reveal how a software product like Google Docs—popular in classrooms for word processing—might be intended to allow teachers to assign, review, and grade student writing. However, as an actual use, many students use the chat feature embedded in the product to socialize with peers while still appearing to be on task in a classroom. Likewise, examining a resource like Twitter, it becomes clear that features such as liking, replying, and retweeting a message limit what “counts” as civic communication on a popular platform that has yielded long-term sociopolitical consequences. Furthermore, the role of content moderators—the thousands of unseen and underpaid laborers who review violent, racist, sexist, and pornographic images to shield the public’s view of this material—allows us to recognize that platforms are powered by people and their physical and emotional labor.

The idea of platforms taking up substantial space across educational landscapes is by no means new. As Nichols and I have further argued, “even though it is common to talk about, or evaluate, platforms in terms of what they do (e.g., delivering goods and services), understanding them requires that we also grapple with how they do it—that is, the ways they mediate relations among users, service providers, and other technical systems.”8 This is a relational view of platforms that situates them within a broader picture of schooling and technology today.

Talk of platforms and the current, messy state of educational technology is well and good. However, where the rubber meets the road, both literally and figuratively, is in recognizing that platforms aren’t new, nor are they solely digital and online. The rumbling, stop sign–blinking, window-chattering, vinyl-seat-leg-dimpling bus can be understood as a platform that disrupts and newly “mediates relations among” children and systems of schooling.

School Bus as Platform

Although platform studies in education may be intended to speak to present tools, resources, and mediating impacts of technology today, it also shines new light on past tools. For example, as my colleague Roberto Santiago de Roock and I have argued,9 the contemporary description of platformization offers a retroactive viewing of technological interactions in nondigital spaces. Furthermore, the contexts of “platforms” illuminate broader orienting practices that persisted in corners of society long before Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube brought the term into digital parlance. For instance, classrooms and schools can be interpreted as platforms. Like an online social network, a classroom has given rules and expectations that orient what people do within the space and what is permissible. This reading offers new lines of critique for the systems and processes by which students are schooled today.

Taking the three lenses from earlier, we can interpret the classroom as a platform intended to orient youth bodies into specific spaces for intended outcomes (though student ingenuity perpetually reorganizes school spaces). Classrooms are designed for specific kinds of bodies and present texts through a curriculum that affirms particular racial and sociopolitical identities. We can see classrooms that draw on the resources of teacher labor, unseen custodial vigilance, and curricular material—from books to tablets to furniture—produced at large scale with few opportunities for customization. Once we can recognize the classroom as platform, we can in turn consider the school bus as the ultimate platform that makes schools today function. But first, let’s take a quick detour and consider the metaphor at hand.

As a label, “platform” has been picked up by Silicon Valley in a way that erases its original definition. At least for the next few paragraphs, set aside the social media tools and online learning management systems and e-commerce behemoths that have come to represent platforms. Instead, recall the temporary, raised space you stood upon as you embarked from one setting to another. This platform—a diving board, a terrace for viewing a skyline from the top of a building, a subway station stretch of concrete—was a space that was intended for temporary and transient use. You might linger in these spaces, but you don’t reside in them the same way your online activities might be confined to a very small handful of online platforms.

The ubiquitous iconography from the London transit system reminds us, when boarding or exiting a train, to “mind the gap.” We might stumble, lose our footing, or leave belongings behind in the transition from one space to another in the world of analog platforms. The bus, in this way, is a platform of several layers. Like online systems for grading and attendance, the school bus is fundamental for the operation of daily, schooled life. At the same time, the bus is a physical platform that temporarily holds young people as they are moved from one location to another. Both in literal parlance and in the theoretical trappings described previously, the bus is a powerful platform continually shaping students’ lives. Furthermore, as fundamental components on which the operations of schools and policies like (attempted) desegregation are built, networks of school buses winding their ways across the dimpled landscape of America each day illuminate these objects as infrastructure on which our systems of education rely.

Broadening the scope of platforms allows us to imagine technology as more than the accumulation of stuff connected to the internet. In general, a reading of the classroom or the bus as technology illuminates our need to more intentionally recognize the full range of educational technology at play. Like a black light that exposes stains and detritus invisible to the naked eye, a platform schema reveals how intentional designs and considerations have perpetually reshaped schooling in ways that reinforce power, limit student agency, and restrict learning opportunities for young people.

Though there is an immediate need to think critically about how data collected from the lives of ever-surveilled young people are used, this doesn’t mean we can look past the ordinary and less flashy ways we suppress student learning opportunity and socialization. Returning to the data shared in chapter 1, the fact that busing might reorient racial and sociopolitical interactions across the lives of bus riders is important. As I wrote this chapter, I was continually struck by the history of the first chapter of this book. Particularly, I was reminded that bused Black youths reported not feeling intimidated in predominantly white work environments.10 More than any other technology, the cultural influences of the bus on student perceptions, beliefs, and workplace behavior are staggering. These influences are the result of designed decisions that tax the social and emotional lives of Black communities. What might be seen as a benefit is also an internal negotiation for each young person about who they might be and who schooling expects them to become as they step off one platform and onto another. Considering this ongoing transformation, an emphasis on understanding educational platforms is not simply about understanding what new (or old) technologies do but also about understanding contemporary anxieties about these technologies.

What’s Left Behind?

In his 2021 monograph on the role of the filing cabinet as a pervasive form of information technology, Craig Robertson argues that the inauspicious office equipment transforms, consolidates, and dictates the practices of business interactions and memory.11 Like a bus that shifted where and how students went to school, the filing cabinet has reshaped offices and their activities. It is worth recognizing that the filing cabinet’s introduction first in the United States in the 1890s, then later as a staple of commercial offices globally, closely tracks the metaphorical and literal rollout of school buses across the United States. These technologies speak to broader societal shifts in an era of industrialization. Although the filing cabinet is perhaps slowly being replaced by digital storage racks, the memory moving into digital contexts, the bus has remained the stalwart analog interloper in the lives of youths today.

Educational Technology in Analog

By looking back at platforms and “old” tools, the school bus reimagines the meaning of educational technology. It invites us to revisit what it is, where it is used, and the kinds of lasting effects it might make in society and in the lives of young people. If the school bus is indeed a profound reinterpretation of educational technology, we must recognize that it is largely not a digital tool that has been reshaping student experiences for many generations. Rather, as it is a humming engine controlled by a human driver who dictates the use of the bus and its activities, I want to center the analog role of tools, people, and imagination that guide what happens in educational contexts today.

Intentionally moving away from learning in schools that emphasizes digital practices, I call for an embrace of analog tools and interactions. Too often, the past thirty years have focused on the oversold promise of blinking screens, internet-enabled devices, apps, and software that are typically not created with the input and insights of students and teachers. However, the digital stuff that occupies classrooms and fills hours of student instruction has not substantially improved the lives of the kids in schools today. This claim may be contentious, but if we look at the considerable differences that impact educational opportunity in this country by race, gender, and socioeconomic status, technology has not fulfilled its academic promise. Furthermore, if we are to look at the social ills that plague the United States beyond schools—broken partisan-shaped government, increasingly hostile climates of anti-Blackness, and the unrelenting threat of climate catastrophe—digital tools in schools have failed even at prompting meaningful conversation (let alone action) about the great existential threats facing our students.

To be clear, no digital tool will “fix” any of these issues. Rather, as the busing platform demonstrates, human interactions and empathy might advance our educational system closer to justice and action. These are analog practices. Such analog relationships—fostered on buses, in classrooms, and in broader civic society—speak to where and for what ends educational technology must play a supportive role. The rapid shifts that occurred in 2020 because of the global pandemic have drastically demonstrated how educational technology can be understood, reframed, and redesigned. As disastrous as the pandemic has been, the possibilities for new kinds of technological uses and innovation are more apparent than ever. How we move forward and take up the future of the bus as a form of educational technology hangs precariously on our willingness to learn about flexibility and human-driven contexts of learning in the wake of the pandemic. Though these might be seen as policy issues that are framing the future, the time waiting and persisting on school buses is a reminder that relationships are at the center of what good learning looks like, and these are, often, placed on cruise control while an infatuation with educational technology inhabits the driver’s seat.