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Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education Routledge International Handbooks Apple, Michael W.; Au, Wayne; Gandin, LuiÌs Armando Taylor & Francis Routledge 041595861X 9780415958615 9780203882993 English Critical pedagogy--Handbooks, manuals, etc, Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Political aspects , Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Social aspects 2009 LC196.R68 2009eb 375.11/5 Critical pedagogy--Handbooks, manuals, etc, Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Political aspects , Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Social aspects
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Page i The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education
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Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education Routledge International Handbooks Apple, Michael W.; Au, Wayne; Gandin, LuiÌs Armando Taylor & Francis Routledge 041595861X 9780415958615 9780203882993 English Critical pedagogy--Handbooks, manuals, etc, Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Political aspects , Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Social aspects 2009 LC196.R68 2009eb 375.11/5 Critical pedagogy--Handbooks, manuals, etc, Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Political aspects , Education-Handbooks, manuals, etc.--Social aspects
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Page ii Routledge International Handbook Series The Routledge International Handbook of Lifelong Learning Peter Jarvis The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin
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Page iii The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education Edited by Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin NEW YORK AND LONDON
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Page iv First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon., OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Routledge international handbook of critical education/ [edited by] Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin. p. cm.—(Routledge international handbook series) 1. Critical pedagogy—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Education—Political aspects— Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Education—Social aspects—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Apple, Michael W. II. Au, Wayne, 1972–. III. Gandin, Luís Armando, 1967–. IV. Title: International handbook of critical education. V. Title: Critical education. LC196.R68 2009 375.11′5—dc22 2008038172 ISBN 0-203-88299-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 10: (hbk) 0-415-95861-X ISBN 10: (ebk) 0-203-88299-7 ISBN 13: (hbk) 978-0-415-95861-5 ISBN 13: (ebk) 978-0-203-88299-3
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Page v Contents
List of illustrations Acknowledgments
viii ix
Part I: Introduction
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1 Mapping Critical Education Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, & Luis Armando Gandin
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Part II: Social Contexts and Social Structures
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2 The World Bank, the IMF, and the Possibilities of Critical Education Susan L. Robertson & Roger Dale 3 Movement and Stasis in the Neoliberal Reorientation of Schooling Cameron McCarthy, Viviana Pitton, Soochul Kim, & David Monje 4 Corporatization and the Control of Schools Kenneth J. Saltman 5 The Trojan Horse of Curricular Contents Jurjo Torres Santomé (translated by Eduardo Cavieres)
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Part III: Redistribution, Recognition, and Differential Power
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6 Rethinking Reproduction: Neo-Marxism in Critical Education Theory Wayne Au & Michael W. Apple 7 The Reign of Capital: A Pedagogy and Praxis of Class Struggle Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & Peter McLaren 8 Race Still Matters: Critical Race Theory in Education Gloria Ladson-Billings 9 Pale/ontology: The Status of Whiteness in Education Zeus Leonardo
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Page vi 10 What Was Poststructural Feminism in Education? Julie McLeod 11 Safe Schools, Sexualities, and Critical Education Lisa W. Loutzenheiser & Shannon D. M. Moore 12 Masculinity and Education Marcus Weaver-Hightower 13 The Inclusion Paradox: The Cultural Politics of Difference Roger Slee 14 Red Pedagogy: Indigenous Theories of Redistribution (a.k.a. Sovereignty) Sandy Grande 15 Foucault’s Challenges to Critical Theory in Education Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer (translated by Lisa Gertum Becker)
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Part IV: The Freirean Legacy
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16 Fighting With the Text: Contextualizing and Recontextualizing Freire’s Critical Pedagogy Wayne Au 17 Un/Taming Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed Gustavo E. Fischman 18 What Type of Revolution Are We Rehearsing For? Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed Ricardo D. Rosa 19 Against All Odds: Implementing Freirean Approaches to Education in the United States Pia Lindquist Wong
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Part V: The Politics of Practice and the Recreation of Theory
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20 Flying Below the Radar? Critical Approaches to Adult Education Peter Mayo 21 Critical Media Education and Radical Democracy Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share 22 Educating Teachers for Critical Education Ken Zeichner & Ryan Flessner 23 Restoring Collective Memory: The Pasts of Critical Education Kenneth Teitelbaum 24 The Educative City and Critical Education Ramon Flecha 25 The Citizen School Project: Implementing and Recreating Critical Education in Porto Alegre, Brazil Luis Armando Gandin
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Page vii 26 Progressive Struggle and Critical Education Scholarship in Japan: Toward the Democratization of 354 Critical Education Studies Keita Takayama 27 The Circumstances and the Possibilities of Critical Educational Studies in China 368 Guang-cai Yan & Yin Chang Part VI: Social Movements and Pedagogic Work
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28 Critical Pedagogy Is Not Enough: Social Justice Education, Political Participation, and the Politicization of Students Jean Anyon 29 Teachers’ Unions and Social Justice Mary Compton & Lois Weiner 30 Teachers, Praxis, and Minjung : Korean Teachers’ Struggle for Recognition Hee-Ryong Kang 31 Community-Based Popular Education, Migration, and Civil Society in Mexico: Working in the Space Left Behind Jen Sandler
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Part VII: Critical Research Methods for Critical Education
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32 Towards a Critical Theory of Method in Shifting Times Lois Weis, Michelle Fine, & Greg Dimitriadis 33 New Possibilities for Critical Education Research: Uses for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Daniel S. Choi 34 Can Critical Education Research Be “Quantitative”? Joseph J. Ferrare 35 Orientalism, the West and Non-West Binary, and Postcolonial Perspectives in Cross-cultural Research and Education Yoshiko Nozaki
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List of Contributors Index
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Page viii Illustrations Figures 33.1 Distribution of Schools with High and Low Teacher Absenteeism 33.2 Distribution of Schools with High and Low Teacher Absenteeism Correlated with Quality of Geographical Space 33.3 Geographical Proximity of Traditional Public Schools to Neighborhood Charter Schools 34.1 Quantitative/Qualitative Fractal Distinction 34.2 Forging a New Methodological Alliance 34.3 An Example of a 5 × 3 Matrix 34.4 An Example of a 5 × 5 Adjacency Matrix 34.5 MDS Map of Data in Table 34.1 Showing Distances between Subjects 34.6 Correspondence Map of Example Data Showing the Relationship between Highest Degrees Acquired by Parents and Respondent Tables
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5.1 5.2 33.1 33.2 33.3 33.4 34.1 34.2
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Misguided Curricular Interventions School Culture High Teacher Absenteeism Schools Low Teacher Absenteeism Schools Intercorrelation of Variables with Teacher Absenteeism Enrollment Trends by Selected Ethnicities for Neighboring Public and Charter Schools Average Comparisons of Knowledge Domains Row Profiles Showing the Relationship between Parental and Respondent Degree Attainment
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Page ix Acknowledgments A book of this size and scope requires assistance from a considerable number of people. In particular, we would like to express our thanks to Mi Ok Kang. Mi Ok served as the editorial assistant on this volume. Her careful work is very much appreciated. The Friday Seminar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison listened to our arguments, gave thoughtful suggestions about the book’s organization and content, and exhibited that rare combination of solidarity and supportive criticism for which it has become known. We also want to acknowledge the assistance we received from Eduardo Cavieres and Lisa Gertum Becker for their fine translations of chapters that were originally written in Spanish or Portuguese. Finally, all three of us need to say something about our editor at Routledge, Catherine Bernard. Catherine is an extremely talented editor and a special person. She provided us with advice and support that were absolutely crucial for the completion of this volume. Once again, it was a pleasure to work with her.
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Page 1 Part I Introduction
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Page 3 1 Mapping Critical Education Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, & Luis Armando Gandin Introduction Critical pedagogy—and critical educational studies in general—broadly seeks to expose how relations of power and inequality, (social, cultural, economic), in their myriad forms combinations, and complexities, are manifest and are challenged in the formal and informal education of children and adults (Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2003; Giroux, 1997; McCarthy & Apple, 1988). However, this may actually be too general a statement, for the term “critical pedagogy” is very much like the concept of democracy. It is something of a sliding signifier (Foner, 1998) that has been used in multiple ways to describe multiple things. Indeed, at times critical pedagogy seems to have been used in such broad ways that it can mean almost anything from cooperative classrooms with somewhat more political content, to a more robust definition that involves a thorough-going reconstruction of what education is for, how it should be carried out, what we should teach, and who should be empowered to engage in it. This more robust understanding—one in which the three of us are grounded—involves fundamental transformations of the underlying epistemological and ideological assumptions that are made about what counts as “official” or legitimate knowledge and who holds it (Apple, 1979/2004, 2000). It also is grounded in radical shifts in one’s social commitments. This involves a commitment toward social transformation and a break with the comforting illusions that the ways in which our societies and their educational apparatuses are organized currently can lead to social justice. In addition, a more robust understanding of critical pedagogy and critical education is based increasingly in a realization of the importance of multiple dynamics underpinning the relations of exploitation and domination in our societies. Issues surrounding the politics of redistribution (exploitative economic processes and dynamics) and the politics of recognition (cultural struggles against domination and struggles over identity), hence, need to be jointly considered (Fraser, 1997). At the very root of these concerns is a simple principle. In order to understand and act on education in its complicated connections to the larger society, we must engage in the process of repositioning. That is, we must see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions (Apple, 1995). This repositioning concerns both political and cultural practices that embody the principles of critical education; but it also has generated a large body of critical scholarship and theory that has led to a fundamental restructuring of what the roles of research and of the researcher are (Smith, 1999; Weis & Fine, 2004). Let us say more about what this implies.
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Page 4 The Tasks of Critical Educational Research and Action In general, there are eight tasks in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education must engage. 1. It must “bear witness to negativity.” That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination—and to struggles against such relations—in the larger society. 2. In engaging in such critical analyses, it also must point to contradictions and to spaces of possible action. Thus, its aim is to critically examine current realities with a conceptual/ political framework that emphasizes the spaces in which counter-hegemonic actions can, or do, carry on. 3. At times, this also requires a redefinition of what counts as “research.” Here we mean acting as “secretaries” to those groups of people and social movements who are now engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal power or in what elsewhere has been called “non-reformist reforms.” This is exactly the task that was taken on in the thick descriptions of critically democratic school practices in Democratic Schools (Apple & Beane, 2007) and in the critically supportive descriptions of the transformative reforms such as the Citizen School and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil (see Gandin in this volume, Apple et al., 2003; Apple & Buras, 2006). 4. When Gramsci (1971) argued that one of the tasks of a truly counter-hegemonic education was not to throw out “elite knowledge” but to reconstruct its form and content so that it served genuinely progressive social needs, he provided a key to another role “organic intellectuals” might play (see also Apple, 1996; Gutstein, 2006). Thus, we should not be engaged in a process of what might be called “intellectual suicide.” That is, there are serious intellectual (and pedagogic) skills in dealing with the histories and debates surrounding the epistemological, political, and educational issues involved in justifying what counts as important knowledge. These are not simple and inconsequential issues and the practical and intellectual/political skills of dealing with them have been well developed. However, they can atrophy if they are not used. We can give back these skills by employing them to assist communities in thinking about this, learning from them, and engaging in the mutually pedagogic dialogues that enable decisions to be made in terms of both the short-term and long-term interests of oppressed peoples. 5. In the process, critical work has the task of keeping traditions of radical work alive. In the face of organized attacks on the “collective memories” of difference and struggle, attacks that make it increasingly difficult to retain academic and social legitimacy for multiple critical approaches that have proven so valuable in countering dominant narratives and relations, it is absolutely crucial that these traditions be kept alive, renewed, and when necessary criticized for their conceptual, empirical, historical, and political silences or limitations. This involves being cautious of reductionism and essentialism and asks us to pay attention to what Fraser has called both the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition (Fraser, 1997). This includes not only keeping theoretical, empirical, historical, and political traditions alive but, very importantly, extending and (supportively) criticizing them. And it also involves keeping alive the dreams, utopian visions, and “non-reformist reforms” that are so much a part of these radical traditions (Apple, 1995; Jacoby, 2005; Teitelbaum, 1993). 6. Keeping traditions alive and also supportively criticizing them when they are not adequate to deal with current realities cannot be done unless we ask “For whom are we keeping them alive?” and “How and in what form are they to be made available?” All of the things we have mentioned above in this tentative taxonomy of tasks require the relearning or development and use of varied or new skills of working at many levels with multiple groups.
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Page 5 Thus, journalistic and media skills, academic and popular skills, and the ability to speak to very different audiences are increasingly crucial. 7. Critical educators must also act in concert with the progressive social movements their work supports or in movements against the rightist assumptions and policies they critically analyze. Thus, scholarship in critical education or critical pedagogy does imply becoming an “organic intellectual” in the Gramscian sense of that term (Gramsci, 1971). One must participate in and give one’s expertise to movements surrounding struggles over a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. It also implies learning from these social movements. This means that the role of the “unattached intelligentsia” (Mannheim, 1936), someone who “lives on the balcony” (Bakhtin, 1968), is not an appropriate model. As Bourdieu (2003, p. 11) reminds us, for example, our intellectual efforts are crucial, but they “cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of the world is at stake.” 8. Finally, participation also means using the privilege one has as a scholar/activist. That is, one needs to make use of one’s privilege to open the spaces at universities and elsewhere for those who are not there, for those who do not now have a voice in that space and in the “professional” sites to which, being in a privileged position, you have access. These eight tasks are demanding and no one person can engage equally well in all of them simultaneously. However, there is a long tradition of critical scholarship and critical cultural work along multiple dynamics that has sought to “bear witness to negativity” and to recapture the collective memory of pedagogic work that is genuinely counter-hegemonic. We shall examine the latter in the next section. The Political Roots of Critical Pedagogy Before the term “critical pedagogy” was coined by critical intellectuals and activists in Latin America such as Paulo Freire, educators from various communities in the United States and many other nations took up projects that would certainly be considered educationally “critical” by today’s standards. These early manifestations of critical education often challenged existing social relations and power structures, raising substantive critiques of race, class, and gender relations as well as offering radical alternatives to then-existing educational forms. For instance, there exists a long-standing tradition in the African American community and AfroCaribbean community (Jules, 1992; Lewis, 1993, 2000) regarding the aims and nature of their education. At least since the late 1800s, African American intellectuals and activists, for example, have engaged in struggles over the question of just what the education of Blacks in the United States and the Caribbean should consist of, particularly given the context of post-chattel slavery and current institutional racism in their countries (Lewis, 1993, 2000; Watkins, 1993). Models of popular education based on such cultural memories and forms provided powerful resources to counter the dominant colonizing narratives and methods (Livingston, 2003; see also Jules, 1992). Another example of counter-hegemonic activity, this time focused on critical public school organizing around issues of race and class, can be found in the history of Harlem in New York City between 1935 and the early 1950s. At this time the Harlem Committee for Better Schools (HCBS), a coalition of parents associations, churches, and teacher and community groups came together to push for improved schools in Harlem, including free lunches, better working conditions for teachers, and better physical conditions of the schools themselves. The HCBS is notable for several reasons. One is that it was interracial. It originated largely with Jewish communists who were teaching in Harlem schools, and garnered community support through the establishment of parents associations and chapters of the Teachers Union, allowing them to
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Page 6 develop close ties with most of the African American schoolteachers in Harlem. Another reason to note the HCBS is that it represented educational reform, activism, and organizing across constituencies because it included teachers, members of the community, as well as political organizations (Naison, 1985). These are key characteristics of critical educational action at its best. Although there were clear ranges of opinions and perspectives within the African American communities, all represent different responses to what historian Woodson (1933/1990) called the “mis-education of the Negro” in the United States and signify substantial critical race critiques of public education. Similar mobilizations can be found in England and elsewhere and around multiple diasporic communities and can be found across other equally oppressive dynamics of differential power involving gender and class at that time, and more recently. There has also been a long tradition of critical feminist critiques of, and action on, education in nations throughout the world. In the United States, as elsewhere, in the early 1900s several notable women took lead roles in organizing teachers—a predominantly female workforce (Apple, 1986)—for improved working conditions. These included Grace Strahan in New York City and Margaret Haley in Chicago. Others, like Kate Ames, who in 1908 challenged the Male Schoolmasters Association in California, fought against the imposition of patriarchy in school organizational and pay structures (Weiler, 1989). Indeed, these early teachers’ unions’ struggles in the United States, England, and elsewhere (Apple, 1986) became models for organizing that took account of class and gender together. The history of feminist mobilizations and cultural work is replete with examples of the use of popular cultural forms and content to challenge dominance. Although there were justifiable criticisms that critical pedagogical work of this type marginalized women of color, working class women, and “Third World” women (Copelman, 1996; Gomersall, 1997; Martin, 1999; Munro, 1998; Purvis, 1991), at times these critical efforts did cut across class lines. The issue of class is crucial here. Class relations and struggles against them, thus, were not invisible in the history of critical education. In fact, they often constituted a prime focus. Early manifestations of critical education in the United States reached beyond power dynamics associated with the politics of race and gender, although at times these dynamics were also ignored, much to the later detriment of the movement. Even with these weaknesses, however, the attempts to build an education that actively sought to interrupt class dominance were pronounced across international borders. In England and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the struggles over socialist educational policies and practices were powerfully visible (Rubinstein & Simon, 1969; Simon, 1965, 1977, 1991, 1972). Between 1909 and 1911 in the United States, over 100 Socialist school officials were elected to various school districts across the country, and between 1900 and 1920, Socialist activists established more than 100 English-speaking Sunday schools in 20 states, ranging in size from classes of 10 students to schools that enrolled more than 600 students (Teitelbaum, 1988, 1993). The curricula of these schools emphasized that: (1) children should take pride in being working class; (2) workers are systematically subordinated and should find solidarity with other oppressed groups; (3) students should develop a sense of collectivism; (4) students learned about the connections of their immediate social conditions with the broader socioeconomic relations; (5) fundamental social change is absolutely necessary; and (6) the contemporary socioeconomic relations needed to be critically analyzed in light of commonsense understandings of the world (Teitelbaum, 1991). While these Socialist Sunday Schools were not part of the public school system, they represent a class-based, critical community response to public education in the United States at the time. These kinds of socialist responses are mirrored in England and Wales (see, e.g., Rubinstein & Simon, 1969; Simon, 1965, 1991, 1972) and have a powerful history as well in Latin America for example (see, e.g., Bulhões & Abreu, 1992; Caldart, 2003; C. A. Torres, 1990, 1997, 1995).
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Page 7 It is crucial to realize that this history of critical educational action has parallels in many other nations as well. Indeed, throughout almost every region of the world, there are powerful movements and examples of radical pedagogic efforts both within the formal educational sector as well as in community literacy programs, labor education, anti-racist and anti-colonial mobilizations, women’s movements, and others (see, e.g., Van Vught, 1991). For example, in South Korea during the first half of the twentieth century, evening schools were established to counter the colonizing efforts of the Japanese occupiers. These counter-hegemonic practices have continued through the efforts of the Korean Teachers Union to build curricula and models of teaching that are based on critical democratic principles. These efforts have had to overcome years of government repression (Ko & Apple, 1999; Sung & Apple, 2003; see also Kang, this volume). Similar tendencies have recently been seen in Turkey, where the government attempted to declare the largest teachers’ union illegal because of the union’s commitment to both a more culturally responsive pedagogy and a critical position on neoliberal policies in education and the economy (Egitim Sen, 2004). So far we have given a brief set of examples of the efforts by some subaltern groups to challenge dominance in education, efforts that became increasingly widespread even in the face of what were serious and, often, extremely repressive consequences. But as we mentioned earlier, critical education has not only involved overt political and cultural action, it has also both generated and been generated by a growing emphasis on research that both documents reproductive forces in schools and points to possible avenues to challenge such reproductive forces. Thus, the entire range of critical pedagogical movements and efforts has been complemented by the growth of multiple communities of scholarship that have sought both to bear witness to negativity and document spaces for counter-hegemonic work. Bearing Witness and Expanding Dynamics in Critical Education The second half of the 1970s was a key period in the development of critical analyses of education, particularly those that addressed how macro-level social, cultural, and economic structures related to school organization and experience (Whitty, 1985). The central critical research focus of the time revolved around examining the relationship between schools and social and cultural reproduction. While the tradition of critically examining the content and processes of cultural reproduction was already underway in the new sociology of education in England (see, e.g., Young, 1971), in critical curriculum studies in the United States (Apple, 1971), and in the work of Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) in France, much of the debate over this relationship crystallized around Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. In their book, Bowles and Gintis asserted a macro-level correspondence principle between the machinations and needs of capitalist production with that of the production of economic class-based differences in and through education. Further still, this correspondence was a relatively mechanical process, as the structure and outcome of schools seemed to be completely determined by capitalist economics and the paid workplace alone in a largely unmediated way (Apple, 1988; McCarthy & Apple, 1988). Even with its evident problems, Bowles and Gintis’ work did two things. First, it helped establish the contemporary relevance of Marxist, neo-Marxist, and quasi-Marxist analyses of schools and education (Whitty, 1985). Second, it sparked a contentious debate, spurred a number of far-ranging critiques of economic determinist explanations of inequality in education, and moved critical researchers to go even further in their analyses of cultural and ideological reproduction in schooling as well (Apple, 1979/2004; Au, 2006; Cole, 1988). The net result for critical analysts was to continue moving beyond relatively simplistic versions of class-based analyses of schools. Analyses that broadened the class relations that were considered of crucial importance (see, e.g., Bernstein, 1977; Bourdieu, 1984) came to the forefront, as did more explicit attention
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Page 8 to issues of race and gender, and thus signaled the growing influence of British and French theories of the relationship among culture, social institutions, and education (see, e.g., Young, 1971; see also, Au & Apple, this volume, for a more detailed discussion). At the same time, the mobilization and movements that came out of feminist and racialized populations rightly challenged the emphasis only on class in critical work, in both social and economic reproduction. The very notion of reproduction itself was dramatically challenged in the process (Giroux, 1983). Issues of contradiction and conflict within and between these dynamics became considerably more significant. Thus, for instance, McCarthy and Apple (1988) advocated a “nonsynchronous parallelist” framework for understanding issues of race, class, and gender; one that recognized the intense and contradictory interactions within and among various dynamics of exploitation and domination and one that asked critical educators to be less reductive in their assumptions. Taking the lead from work that was based in theories of relative autonomy, a more subtle set of positions developed. Hence, for example, it was argued that racial inequality could not solely be reduced to economic inequality (see also, Apple & Weis, 1983), a position that, while not yet fully developed, prefigures some of the immensely productive arguments of critical race theory (Gillborn, 2005; Ladson-Billings & Tate IV, 1995). To further develop some of these claims, many critical scholars turned to the works of Antonio Gramsci (1971), Louis Althusser (1971), Stuart Hall (1980a), and Raymond Williams (1977), as well as to the scholars from the Frankfurt School (Giroux, 2003), in order to seek new theoretical directions that addressed the complexities that analyses such as Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) lacked (Au, 2006; McCarthy & Apple, 1988; Morrow & Torres, 1995; Whitty, 1985; see also, Au & Apple, this volume). Leaders from within the more structuralist parts of this movement in this regard argued that schools accomplish at least three, sometimes contradictory, goals: (1) they aid in the process of capitalist accumulation by contributing to the stratification of students; (2) they aid in the process of legitimation of ideologies of freedom, individualism, and meritocratic equality, regardless of race, class, or gender; (3) they operate as a site of the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge, skills, and culture (Apple & Weis, 1983). These three “functions” of schooling may at times work against each other. For instance, the ideology of free and equal, competing individuals (meritocracy) exists in direct contradiction to the significant amount of group inequality that exists in our schools and society. Regardless, such critical analyses attempt to grasp the conceptual-theoretical complexities necessary to understand how hierarchies of power operate in education. Yet power was not unidirectional and soon an entire series of insightful analyses based on the relationship among lived culture, schooling, and the economy developed. Stimulated in part by Willis’s (1977) classic book on youth cultures, class relations, and masculinity, Learning to Labour, and McRobbies’ (1978) equally thoughtful insights into the ways in which gender and class dynamics interacted inside and outside of schools, major gains quickly (but perhaps not quickly enough) arose and continue to be made in understanding the ways in which popular cultural forms and practices are dialectically interconnected with classed, raced, and gendered/sexed practices and dynamics (Arnot, 2004; Epstein & Johnson, 1998; Willis, 1990). Like Willis, for example, these analyses pointed to contradictory spaces in people’s lived experience where cultural work might be able to bring youth under more progressive leadership (Weis, 1990). Without denying these emphases on lived culture, others sought to return to a more traditional Marxist position. They suggested that only in such a return, in combination with theories and political practices associated with figures such as, say, Che Guevara, could critical educational theories develop their potential to be truly critical (see, e.g., McLaren, 2000). Yet, even with the immense gains that have been made in Marxist and neo-Marxist understandings, and in research based on feminist and anti-racist theories, these traditions have come under serious scrutiny. Feminist poststructural approaches and powerful analyses based on critical race theory have made provocative interventions into the debates over all of this (Ladson-Billings & Tate,
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Page 9 1995; Luke & Gore, 1992). A focus on indeterminacy, on capillary power, on power as productive—not only reproductive, on identity and on its discursive “constitution” often based on Foucauldian insights (see, e.g., Youdell, 2006) has made critical pedagogy a terrain of rich debates and conflicts. But it also has given it a vitality that keeps it alive and growing. The international nature of these issues has been made more visible by the growth of analyses based on postcolonial perspectives. Influenced by the work of such figures as Said (1978), Spivak (1987, 1999), Thiong’o (1986), and Homi Bhabha (1984), postcolonial theories have proven to be increasingly influential as critical educators attempt to come to grips with the globalization of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and with attempts to interrupt them (Burbules & Torres, 2000; Dimitriadis & McCarthy, 2001; Singh, Kell, & Pandian, 2002). All of this is not to say that critiques of critical pedagogy are not warranted, or that critical pedagogy and the entire terrain of critical educational research and action itself have no need for growth. Feminists and critical race scholars have been among the many to struggle to make certain that critical pedagogy generally addresses racism, sexism, the realities of homophobia (Kumashiro, 2002) and other forms of power in education. For instance, Luke and Gore’s (1992) very important edited volume, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, offers a collection that challenges some of the foundations of critical pedagogy on the grounds that it has failed to “engage with feminism” (Kenway & Modra, 1992, p. 138) while, in many of the chapters, maintaining a view that is still supportive of the overall emancipatory goals of critical pedagogy. Similarly, Leonardo’s (2005b) very thoughtful collection, Critical Pedagogy and Race , does much of the same work in regards to race, racism, and critical pedagogy. Here, Leonardo (2005a) finds that “the question of race has played a secondary role in the development of critical pedagogy,” and that “Race has been interwoven into critical pedagogy but often in relation to a prioritized engagement with class struggle” (p. xii). Our position is that, when guided by an urge to collectively build a “decentered unity” that tries to work across differences, all of these critiques of critical pedagogy—feminist, critical race, and ecological—as well as others (e.g., sexuality and ability, see Chang, 2005; Erevelles, 2005; Kumashiro, 2002) are valuable. They generally help the field evolve and strengthen it as a more viable means for making educational and social change (Au & Apple, 2007). Critical Education and Conservative Social Movements Such vitality and the productive conflicts within critical pedagogy do not guarantee success, however. Let us be honest. Critical pedagogy and critical education as a whole—and the research that is dialectically connected to it—is a maturing and ongoing set of projects; projects that are unfinished. Both remain vitally necessary. Done well, they offer critical analyses that provide theorists and practitioners a means to intervene in ongoing, even increasing, social and educational inequalities. However, this dual set of projects is sometimes weakened by its tendency toward “romantic possibilitiarianism” (Whitty, 1974), its lack of a sophisticated strategic sense of the power of social movements, and especially rightist social movements inside and outside of education in a considerable number of nations (Apple, 2006; Takayama & Apple, 2007). This is a crucial weakness, since the interventions associated with critical pedagogy are of even greater importance given the recent formation of extremely powerful rightist alliances in the United States, Japan, Australia, and so many other nations today. As one of us (Apple, 2006) has argued, there exists an alliance of four major groups in the United States and in an increasing number of other nations in the world. These groups and the tactical alliance they have formed have varying degrees of power and effectiveness, depending on regional and national histories and the balance of forces in each local site. However, it has become ever clearer that the forces behind this alliance currently hold hegemonic power by creating connections between people’s “good sense” and using such connections to disarticulate
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Page 10 social groups and individuals from their previous ideological and social commitments and rearticulate them to new ideological and social commitments. This is a very creative process, one examined by such scholars as Hall (1980b), Apple (1996, 2000, 2006), Apple and Buras (2006), Apple et al. (2003), J. S. Torres (2001) and a number of others. In many nations this alliance—what has been called “conservative modernization” (Apple, 2006; Dale, 1989–90)—is made up of at least three, and sometimes four, social forces—neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious conservatives (particularly powerful in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel, and elsewhere), and the professional and managerial middle class. Neoliberals are generally guided by a vision of a weak state, students as human capital, and the world as a supermarket ripe for consumer (and producer) competition. In education, the neoliberal agenda manifests itself in closer linkages between schools and businesses as well as the implementation of “free market” reforms, such as school vouchers, into education policy. Neoconservatives, on the other hand, are usually guided by a vision of a strong state that asserts control over knowledge, culture, and the body. They seek a return to a romantic past where “real knowledge,” morality, and a supposedly stable social order existed. In education, neoconservativism manifests in national and state-wide testing and curricula, content standards, the heralding of the Western canon of knowledge, a relatively uncritical patriotism, and moral education (Apple, 2006; Buras & Apple, 2008). Authoritarian populists are distinctly different from both neoliberals and neoconservatives. Their sensibility regarding social order comes directly from biblical authority and “Christian morality,” (although at times its authority may come from particular readings of the Koran or of, say, Hindu texts as in the Hindutva movement in India). Inerrantist interpretations of sacred texts provide guidelines for family structure and gender roles—and for what counts as legitimate knowledge and action in general. In education in the West, the authoritarian populist agenda manifests itself, for instance, in struggles over the exclusion of evolution and the inclusion of creationism and intelligent design in science classes and in the rapid growth of home schooling, a phenomenon now found in increasing numbers in countries such as Denmark, Norway, Germany, Australia, England, Israel, and elsewhere (Apple, 2006; Beck, in press). The fourth part of this alliance is the professional and managerial new middle class. This class fraction uses its technical expertise in management and efficiency to support systems of accountability, assessment, production, and measurement required by neoliberal marketization and neoconservative control over knowledge (see Clarke & Newman, 1997 for further elaboration of its commitments). In education, this class fraction supports and benefits from, for instance, systems of high-stakes, standardized testing and educational policies built upon reductive forms of accountability as they provide the technical means to make these systems and policies operational. They engage in complicated conversion strategies in which particular kinds of capital (cultural capital) are converted into social and economic capital. It is often their specific cultural assemblage that also dominates educational policy (Apple, 2006; Au, 2008). While each group of this alliance has its own internal dynamics and historical trajectories, together they have “creatively stitched together different social tendencies and commitments and has organized them under its own general leadership” (Apple, 2005, p. 272), and thus represent a “conservative modernization” of social, cultural, economic, and educational policy in multiple nations, including those with a supposedly social democratic or even socialist past (Apple, 2006; Apple et al., 2003). Progressive Social Movements and Education A recognition of—and a bearing witness to—these worrisome conditions, especially in urban schools, is what grounds some of the recent work on progressive social movements, work that
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Page 11 acts as a counter-balance to critical analyses of conservative hegemonic alliances. For example, Jean Anyon’s (2005) recent book, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education and a New Social Movement, can provide a case in point. It describes and critiques the class and race structuring of schooling in the United States—and, in the process, ultimately offers possibilities for mobilizing around new social movements. It also succeeds in going well beyond the rhetorical flourishes we criticized earlier.1 A key phrase in Anyon’s analysis is “a new social movement.” Anyon recognizes something others have argued at greater length elsewhere—that it is social movements that are the driving forces behind a good deal of social and educational transformation (Apple, 2000). In Apple’s work described above, much of the critical attention was devoted to the forces and movements behind current neoliberal and neoconservative policies involved in conservative modernization, for two reasons. First, whether we like it or not, these movements have been increasingly powerful in transforming our core ideas about democracy and citizenship. The social, economic, and educational effects of the policies that have come from the Right often have been strikingly negative, especially for those who have the least in our own and other societies (Apple, 2006; Apple et al., 2003; Apple & Buras, 2006), and one of the major effects has been to make it increasingly difficult to maintain the legitimacy of critical educational theories, policies, and practices. Second, all three of us think that we have much to learn from the forces of the Right. They have shown that it is possible to build an alliance of disparate groups and, in the process, to engage in a vast social and pedagogic project of changing a society’s fundamental way of looking at rights and (in)justice. Radical policies that only a few years ago would have seemed outlandish and downright foolish are now accepted as commonsense. While we should not want to emulate their often cynical and manipulative politics, we still can learn a good deal from the Right about how movements for social change can be built across ideological differences. Capitalism (as well as the historical regimes surrounding race and gender, and the intersections and contradictions of these dynamics) plays a major part of the driving force behind these dynamics and movements, but saying that says very little about why people join Rightist mobilizations and movements and how they might be convinced to join more progressive ones. Whereas Apple focused on critically understanding why the Right is winning and what we can learn from them, Anyon shifts the focus powerfully. She directs our attention to the historical and current progressive mobilizations that have made a difference in society. She sets about examining the specifics of such social movements, documenting why and how they pushed this society, sometimes against great odds, toward a greater commitment to social justice. We concur with Anyon’s claim that schools can play crucial roles in raising critical questions about, and building movements to challenge, both the ways in which the economy now functions unequally and the ways in which, say, the politics of race operates in every one of our institutions. We are not romantic about these possibilities. But schools are sites of conflict. They embody not only defeats, but also victories in many countries. Thus, they are worth taking very seriously. Anyon helps us here. In the process of telling the stories of different kinds of movements, Anyon also shows how, by participating in political actions, new activist identities are formed by dispossessed groups at the same time as very real progress is made culturally, educationally, politically, and economically (see Apple & Buras, 2006). But activist movements don’t just help to transform economic, political, cultural, and educational institutions and policies. They also have profound effects on other sympathetic organizations. Movements making what seem at the time to be utopian and radical demands historically have pushed more mainstream organizations along, creating a situation where they too must support fundamental changes in policies that are deeply discriminatory and harmful (Sewell, 2004). Anyon is very honest about what is actually required to change schools. This is more than a little refreshing, since all too often we seem to be content with critical slogans, rather than examining what actually is possible and how we might bring these possibilities into existence
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Page 12 in the real world of schools and communities. Anyon highlights powerful coalitions involving anti-racist movements, class mobilizations, and the central place of women activists in these struggles as well (see also Apple & Buras, 2006). She places the politics of race and class at the center. By in essence taking leadership from, say, Black mobilizations, she is able to highlight the ways in which movements against the classed and raced economy, the racial and racializing state, and in the politics of daily life create new collective and more powerful political identities that can challenge hegemonic racisms and class realities. Can Critical Pedagogy Be Put Into Practice? While it is crucial to “bear witness,” to recognize and analyze the strength and the real consequences of neoliberal and neoconservative policies (Apple, 1996, 2000, 2006; Gandin, 1994, 1998, 1999), and to document the ways in which new social movements can grow and have grown to counter such conservative movements and tendencies, it is also essential to understand the renegotiations that are made at regional and municipal levels. As Ball (1994) emphasizes, “policy is … a set of technologies and practices which are realized and struggled over in local settings” (p. 10). Thus, rather than assuming that neoliberal and neoconservative policies dictate exactly what occurs at the local level, we have to study the rearticulations that occur on this level to be able to map out the creation of alternatives. It is here that the critical research tradition(s), the role of the researcher as a “critical secretary,” and the Freirean emphasis on the politics of interruption join. Educators in a number of nations have had to cope with the major transformations of ideology, policy, and practice to which we have pointed in this chapter. For us, it is important to learn two things from the experiences of other educators who are struggling against the forces of inequality. First, we can learn about the actual effects of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and practices in education. Second, and even more important, we can learn how to interrupt neoliberal and neoconservative policies and practices and how to build more fully democratic educational alternatives (Apple, 2006; Apple & Buras, 2006). One of the best examples of this can currently be found in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Gandin, 2006). The policies that were put in place by the Workers’ Party, such as “participatory budgeting” and the “Citizen School,” have helped to build support for more progressive and democratic policies there, in the face of the growing power of neoliberal movements at a national level. The Workers’ Party was able to increase its majority, even among people who had previously voted in favor of parties with much more conservative educational and social programs, because it has been committed to enabling even the poorest of its citizens to participate in deliberations over the policies themselves and over where and how money should be spent. By paying attention to more substantive forms of collective participation and, just as importantly, by devoting resources to encourage such participation, Porto Alegre has demonstrated that it is possible to have a “thicker” democracy, even in times of both economic crisis and ideological attacks from neoliberal parties and from the conservative press. Programs such as the “Citizen School” and the sharing of real power with those who live in favelas (shantytowns), as well as with the working and middle classes, professionals, and others, provide ample evidence that thick democracy offers realistic alternatives to the eviscerated version of thin democracy found under neoliberalism (Gandin, this volume; Apple et al., 2003; Apple & Buras, 2006). The Citizen School has been important not only as a way of giving an impoverished population a quality education that will enable them to have better chances in the paid labor market and at the same time operate as empowered citizens, but also because it has generated structured forms of “educating” the communities both for organizing around and discussing their
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Page 13 problems and for acting on their own behalf through the channels of participation and deliberation. In the process, it has “educated” the state agencies as well. The administrative, organizational, and curricular reforms—taken together—have helped to create the beginnings of a new reality for the excluded. They have forged new leadership, brought about the active engagement of the communities with the communities’ own situations, and led to much more active participation in the construction of solutions to these problems (Gandin, 2006). Once again, we do not wish to be romantic here. There are problems in Porto Alegre—political, economic, and educational (Gandin & Apple, 2003). However, in spite of this, we are optimistic about the lasting impact of its democratizing initiatives and its construction of a more diverse and inclusive education. By itself, the Citizen School has been very successful in including an entire population which, if it were not for this project, would be out of the schools and even further excluded in an already actively excluding society. But the larger educative aspect of the Citizen School—empowering impoverished communities where they are situated and transforming both the schools and what counts as “official knowledge” there—is also of significant moment. The transformations in Porto Alegre represent new alternatives in the creation of an active citizenry—one that learns from its own experiences and culture—not just for now, but also for future generations. For these very reasons, we believe that the experiences of Porto Alegre have considerable importance not only for Brazil, but also for all of us who are deeply concerned about the effects of the neoliberal and neoconservative restructuring of education and of the public sphere in general. There is much to learn from the successful struggles there. Understanding these struggles, documenting them, and actively supporting them can assist us all in our attempts to live out the tasks of critical educational analysis and action that we noted at the outset of this chapter. Tracing the Handbook of Critical Education It is not possible for us to understand the limits and possibilities of critical educational work unless we have a deeply serious understanding of the economic, political, and ideological contexts in which such work would be done. The section on “Social Contexts and Social Structures” provides detailed critical analyses of the economic and social context and ideological struggles that surround education. The section includes a focus on global realities associated with neoliberalism and global capitalist forms, including the ways in which the dynamics of neoliberalism and neoconservativism structure educational reforms internationally and nationally. The chapters include interrogations of: the ways in which the World Bank and International Monetary Fund exert considerable power on educational reforms around the world (Robertson & Dale); the ways in which neoliberalism has provided the context of influential reforms, such as No Child Left Behind in the United States (McCarthy & colleagues); the impulses toward privatization and corporatization in controlling schools (Saltman); and the ongoing tensions of politics and neoliberalism over curricular content in Europe, and especially Spain (Torres Santomé). Doing critical analyses of the way power works in education requires immense subtlety and a recognition of the multiplicity of power relations in any given context. The next section of the book, “Redistribution, Recognition, and Differential Power,” brings together insightful analyses of what Nancy Fraser (1997) correctly called the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. Among the dynamics with which this section deals are such crucial areas as: the neo-Marxist study of inequality in education (Au & Apple); class relations and educational praxis (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & McLaren); the contributions of Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings); whiteness as the ever present fundament of educational policy and practice (Leonardo); the ways in which feminist poststructural approaches provide fundamental resources for engaging in analyses in education (McLeod); the central importance that sexuality and heteronormativity
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Page 14 occupy in schooling (Loutzenheiser & Moore); the dynamics of masculinity(ies) in schooling (WeaverHightower); the location of disability as a core concern in critical struggles in education (Slee); the key role of indigenous knowledge and identities in the centuries-long struggle over unequal power and education (Grande); and the ways in which new perspectives based on the work of Foucault can continue, but also question and add to, the critical tradition of examining the concepts of subject, power and discourse (Fischer). Perhaps the most central figure internationally in the development of critical education was Paulo Freire. His influence remains a key element throughout the world. Because of this, we have devoted an entire section, “The Freirean Legacy,” to the conceptual and political roots of the tradition that has evolved from his work, and to the ways in which this work has influenced critical educators in a number of areas. Chapters in this section include: a detailed analysis of the theoretical and political principles underlying Freire’s critical pedagogy, as well as its development across different contexts (Au); a rereading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed showing its continued relevance to the demands of a truly radical education (Fischman); the immensely creative work of Augusto Boal and the role of Theatre of the Oppressed in mobilizations against domination in Brazil and elsewhere (Rosa); and how Freirean approaches have actually been institutionalized within critical education in the United States, particularly in the State of California (Wong). The politics of critical education and the influence of the multiple traditions of critical education can be found in education at all levels. These traditions have also been influential in institutional transformation. The next section, “The Politics of Practice and the Recreation of Theory,” contains insightful analyses of the influence of a truly critical approach to education in: building critical alternatives in adult education (Mayo); understanding and interrupting the role of media in radical democracy (Kellner & Share); restructuring teacher education in powerful, socially reflexive ways (Zeichner & Flessner); creating socialist counter-hegemonic institutions and processes historically (Teitelbaum); leading to creative pressures to transform national school systems (Flecha); basic transformations of entire school systems that have stood the tests of time and political turmoil in places such as Brazil (Gandin); their role as a site for the development of ongoing movements to interrupt neoliberalism and neoconservativism in Japan (Takayama); and their growing influence in places that have very strong central state authority over education in such nations as China (Yan & Chang). Many of the most creative efforts and results of critical education can be found in social movements. In “Social Movements and Pedagogic Work,” each of the chapters focuses on the connections between organized movements and the building of serious ideological and social transformations. These include the ways in which radical social movements have led to counterhegemonic possibilities in education (Anyon); the place that politically committed teachers’ unions have played in the ongoing battles over critically democratic schooling in many nations (Compton & Weiner) and in the case of South Korea where these struggles have been particularly intense (Kang); and the importance of popular social movements in the development of politicized forms of popular education in Latin America (Sandler). Paralleling the influence of critical education on the development of theories, policies, and practices in educational and cultural struggles, has been a concomitant set of influences on the politics and processes of research. This influence is growing rapidly. The section on “Critical Research Methods for Critical Education” documents some of these gains by focusing on: the emerging methodological impulses underpinning some of the new forms of ethnographic research unfolding in the context of globalization (Weis, Fine, & Dimitriadis); the uses of new technologies such as Geographical Information Systems in tracking growing inequalities made worse by new forms of capitalism (Choi); the significance of quantitative methods to complement the more qualitative methods that have dominated critical research (Ferrare); and how comparative research must take account of the politics of Orientalism and postcolonial perspectives (Nozaki).
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Page 15 Personal and Political Postscript In the concluding section of this chapter, we want to be very honest. We are conscious of the fact that the immense gains that have been made in critical education over the past three decades have made the task of providing a complete picture of the critical education communities nearly impossible. We take this as an extremely positive symbol of the vibrancy of a set of traditions that is still in formation. Given the fact that these traditions are grounded in the eight tasks that we noted at the beginning of this introduction, one of the key foundations lies in the element of critique. A book such as this is one moment in the dialectical progression of these traditions of critique and of the affirmation of new realities and new struggles against oppressive conditions. And a book such as this needs also to affirm more emancipatory projects that have grown out of these critiques. Because of the very nature of this project and the political, empirical, conceptual, and practical fields of which it speaks, we view this volume as a “temporary” assessment that by its very nature will need to be built on, superseded, and itself subject to the kinds of critique that are so necessary if we are to participate in what one of us has called the “de-centered unities” that are so necessary in times of exploitation, domination, and the constant struggles against them both. Hence, all of the authors and editors included here welcome the ongoing dialogue that will inevitably grow from a volume of this sort. Here are some of the tensions that we recognize in this collection. Historically there has been a very real problem of what has been called “commatization” (Gillborn, 2008) in mapping oppressive relations (e.g., class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, …). At the same time that we realize the immense dangers of this additive model, we also realize that it leads to ignoring the problem of intersectionality (Gillborn, 2008). As an example, class occurs in raced and gendered/ sexed bodies. No one volume could fully solve dilemmas such as these nor could it deal respectfully with the growing number of relations of dominance and exploitation. Thus there are silences over crucial dynamics that, given space and resource limitations, could not be included. The map that we have provided in this chapter, like the book as a whole, is a temporary one. It is a first step that clearly requires continued political mapping, and these maps must be constantly redrawn. Even before Foucault’s important work entered into the field of education, many people realized that the categories that are employed to map the world both signify and create power/knowledge nexuses (see Apple, 1979/2004). But problems of categorization and the power/knowledge relations that they establish are but one of the issues we have faced. While we have striven to have analyses from many parts of the world, this is a book written in English. The politics of language are real politics. Inevitably a book such as this, no matter how large, partly centers dominant voices even in its attempt to be conscious of that centering (see Takayama, this volume). Given the geopolitics of publishing and academic writing (Canagarajah, 2002), and the role of English as an imperial project, right now we can but note this as part of a constitutive dilemma. In addition, there are other “linguistic” issues that must be faced. In some ways we have treated critical education as if it was a noun, something that can be known, even if temporarily; yet as all of the people involved in this book fully understand, critical education is better thought of as a verb. It demands multiple kinds of action, personal and social repositioning, and a constant willingness to take risks. This is a crucial point. As Mike Davis (2006) reminds us in his devastating portrait of the ways in which people live (“exist” is a much better word) under the worst conditions of global capitalism, even words that we take for granted such as “food” and “shelter” are all too easily reified and thought about as nouns. But for millions of people all over the world, it would be the height of luxury to even consider these “words” as nouns. One’s daily life is conditioned by the constant labor to provide food, to find shelter. Progressive social movements have formed in nations throughout the world to mobilize around the labor of “food” and
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Page 16 “shelter.” Davis’s insight needs to be taken to heart by all of us involved in critical education. Only then can we have a more fully relational understanding of what it means to actually reposition oneself. Paulo Freire reminded us consistently that any critical education worthy of its name must begin and end in honest dialogue. In recognition of the dilemmas we have noted above, and to stimulate the kind of ongoing dialogue that is an essential core of critical education in all its forms, we wish to give you our e-mail addresses: Michael Apple ; Wayne Au <
[email protected]>; Luis Armando Gandin . We welcome, indeed we ask for, responses, affirmations, suggestions, criticisms, as part of our commitment to keep critical education in constant motion. Just as dominant visions and ideologies of education attempt to cement in place only those forms and processes that are hegemonic, our task, the task of counter-hegemony, is not to replace one reified object with another. Critical education is a collective project, one that is absolutely vital to building and defending an education worthy of its name. We dedicate this volume to those thousands and thousands of people throughout the world who not only keep an education worthy of its name alive, but who continue to teach all of us what is possible even in conditions that can often lead to cynicism. A famous political theorist and activist once reminded us that people make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. We may not be able to control all of the conditions of our work but, above all, let us continue to make our own history. Note 1 We need to openly state that a few of the books mentioned in this essay, particularly the books by Anyon and Weis, are in a series that one of us (Apple) edits. But since the task we were asked to take on in this essay was to give a sense of the state of critical work in the United States and elsewhere, and these books are important statements about this, we felt that to exclude them would have led to a major silence in such an account. References Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Books. Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1971). The hidden curriculum and the nature of conflict. Interchange , 2(4), 27–40. Apple, M. W. (1979/2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed .). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and texts . New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1988). Standing on the shoulders of Bowles and Gintis. History of Education Quarterly , 28 (2), 231–241. Apple, M. W. (1995). Education and power (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1996). Power, meaning and identity. British Journal of Sociology of Education , 17 (2), 125–144. Apple, M. W. (2000). Official knowledge (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2005). Doing things the “right” way. Educational Review , 57 (3), 271–293. Apple, M. W. (2006). Educating the “right” way (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., Aasen, P., Cho, M. K., Gandin, L. A., Oliver, A., Sung, Y.-K., et al. (2003). The state and the politics of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (2007). Democratic schools (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Apple, M. W., & Buras, K. L. (Eds.). (2006). The subaltern speak. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Weis, L. M. (1983). Ideology and practice in schooling. In M. W. Apple & L. M. Weis (Eds.), Ideology and practice in schooling (pp. 3–33). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
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Page 19 Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies. New York: Zed Books. Spivak, G. C. (1987). In other worlds. New York: Methuen. Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sung, Y.-K., & Apple, M. W. (2003). Democracy, technology, and curriculum. In M. W. Apple, et al. (Eds.), The state and the politics of knowledge (pp. 177–192). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Takayama, K., & Apple, M. W. (2007). The cultural politics of borrowing. British Journal of Sociology of Education , 29 (3), 289–301. Teitelbaum, K. (1988). Contestation and curriculum. In L. E. Beyer & M. W. Apple (Eds.), The curriculum (pp. 32–55). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Teitelbaum, K. (1991). Critical lessons from our past. In M. W. Apple & L. K. Christian-Smith (Eds.), The politics of the textbook (pp. 135–165). New York: Routledge. Teitelbaum, K. (1993). Schooling for “good rebels”. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Torres, C. A. (1990). The politics of nonformal education in Latin America. New York: Praeger. Torres, C. A. (1997). Pedagogia da luta . São Paulo: Papirus. Torres, C. A. (Ed.). (1995). Education and social change in Latin America. Albert Park, Australia: James Nicholas Publishers. Torres, J. S. (2001). Educacion en tiempos de neoliberalismo . Madrid: Morata. Van Vught, J. (1991). Democratic organizations for social change. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Watkins, W. H. (1993). Black curriculum orientations. Harvard Educational Review , 63 (3), 321–338. Weiler, K. (1989). Women’s history and the history of women teachers. Journal of Education , 171 (3), 9– 30. Weis, L. M. (1990). Working class without work . New York: Routledge. Weis, L. M., & Fine, M. (2004). Working method. New York: Routledge. Whitty, G. (1974). Sociology and the problem of radical educational change. In M. Flude & J. Ahier (Eds.), Educability, schools, and ideology (pp. 112–137). London: Croom Helm. Whitty, G. (1985). Sociology and school knowledge. London: Metheun & Co. Ltd. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor . New York: Columbia University Press. Willis, P. (1990). Common culture . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Woodson, C. G. (1990/1933). The mis-education of the negro (1990 Africa World Press, Inc. edition ed.). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Youdell, D. (2006). Impossible bodies, impossible selves. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Young, M. F. D. (Ed.) (1971). Knowledge and control . London: Collier-Macmillan.
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Page 21 Part II Social Contexts and Social Structures
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Page 23 2 The World Bank, the IMF, and the Possibilities of Critical Education Susan L. Robertson & Roger Dale Introduction The error that Vico criticized as the “conceit of scholars” who will have it that “what they know is as old as the world”—consists in taking a form of thought derived from a particular phase of history (and thus from a particular structure of social relations) and assuming it to be universally valid. (Cox, 1981, p. 131) In those times when the world seems to be at a turning point, when the accustomed framework of life seems to be upset, there arises a demand for new knowledge that will better enable people to understand the changes going on in them. The assumptions upon which prevailing forms of knowledge were based are challenged. A different set of problems thus has to be confronted. (Cox, 2002, p. 76) Re-examining the Parameters for Doing Critical Education Policy Work The invitation to write this chapter has provided us with an opportunity to reflect upon our own approach to what it means to be “critical” when doing education policy work at this particular historical conjunction. First and foremost, our approach has been informed by the work of Robert Cox which was first developed within the discipline of International Relations first published in 1981. Cox’s framing of the premises of a critical theory approach, as well as his contrast between critical theory and problem solving, has proven particularly useful over the years. Cox emphasizes the importance of standing aside from the prevailing order and asking how that order came about; of calling into question the nature and origins of institutions and their social relations, and how they might change (Cox, 1981, pp. 88–89), and the importance of reviewing old and generating new categories with which to understand changes in social relations. In an innovative move, Cox contrasts critical theory with what he calls problem-solving theory—arguing that “problem-solving theory takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which it is organised, as the given framework for action” (p. 88). Problem-solving theories are oriented toward the maintenance
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Page 24 of the status quo; they are ahistorical in that they assume a continuing present; and they aim to make institutions work more smoothly by fixing limits and parameters on problems. However, critical theory premises insist we see theorizing as a continuing process in which there are no fixed positions. As he argues: Two principal factors shape theory. One is the objective movement of history, which is continually throwing up new combinations of social forces that interact with one another. The other is the subjective perceptions of those who contemplate social forces with a view to understanding and acting upon a movement of history. (Cox, 2002, p. 26) And, as we show below, processes of globalization profoundly challenge the mental frameworks that we have used to make sense of education policy problems, both objectively and subjectively. The contrast with problem solving tells us what is critical; it shows us what makes theory critical and why it is so important to make that distinction. This has enabled us to advance an approach to education policy analysis that has moved beyond what we called an “education politics” agenda to one that saw the agendas for education being shaped by wider economic and political concerns (see Dale, 1994). However, we will also be emphasizing, and attempting to follow, what is probably the least remarked element of Cox’s definition of critical theory, that it is necessarily reflexive, as theories do not stand outside of time, space, and social relations. It follows, then, that we must reflect upon, challenge, and reconstruct our theoretical tools if they are to do “critical” work. This is especially important when we consider that it is more than 25 years since Cox first published the article that contained the distinction —and it is scarcely necessary here to spell out the changes that have taken place in education policy since then, particularly as a result of globalization. A precondition of effective critical work in the area is to recognize and theorize the nature of these changes and their consequences for education policy. With these thoughts in mind, this chapter sets out to do three things. First, we will argue that in order to do “critical” work in contemporary education policy studies our conceptual and methodological premises in this field need to engage with the ontological and epistemological challenges posed by the wider social, political, and economic transformations for education systems. This is necessary because of a tendency to take forms of thought derived from a particular phase of history—in this case, we would suggest, les trente glorieuses from 1945–75—and assume them to be still valid. This results in the construction of what we refer to as theoretical and methodological “isms”—the tendency to take particular theoretical and methodological approaches as fixed, absolute, necessary, and sufficient. Here, we will focus on three such isms, “methodological nationalism,” “methodological educationism,” and “spatial fetishism.” In other words, we need to get beyond framings and analysis of education policymaking that continue to assume education to be a national enterprise taking place within what has historically been called the “education sector.” We will argue that these approaches are inadequate to capture the new complexities of education policy, where new actors, scales, and projects are being strategically represented, advanced, mediated, and institutionalized, and which involve significant transformations in the education sector. This is not to suggest that education policy analysts have failed to engage with understanding such developments. However, our point is that when new scales of policymaking and action are invoked—as in the “global”—there is often a weak conception of agency, and when agents are identified (typically in the form of a reference such as “OECD/IMF/World Bank”), these agents’ interests, agendas, and effects are assumed to be known a priori and not systemically investigated further. This limits in important ways our understanding of the nature, scale, and scope of the kinds of changes taking place and the focus of this paper.
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Page 25 Second, and consequential to the challenges posed by globalization, there is an urgent need to revisit our conceptualization of doing “critical theory.” In the chapter we will do this in two ways. First, we will return to and review what it means to adopt a critical theory perspective; and, second, reflect upon what purchase this approach gives us on contemporary developments in education. Specifically, we will be suggesting that education policy analysts (including ourselves) have tended to view “critical” as the critique of the existing social and political order in order to transform that order. The implicit assumption here, however, is that this is the position and preserve of the “left,” while the “right” are relegated to the space of “problem solvers” in order to preserve the status quo (as formulated above). However, this would be to forget the first point made in Cox’s (1981) statement—that “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (p. 128). This has two implications. The first is that we cannot automatically assume that “critical” and “left” are necessarily and intrinsically linked, and the second is that identifying the provenance and interests behind critical theories is, itself, a key element of critical theory. In terms of the first of these, we should recognize that many of the theories on which the international agencies base their policies conform fully to Cox’s recommendations for critical theory; and in terms of the second, it is in the “for whom” and “for what purposes” that we find the political differences between critical theories. The purposes are fairly plain. They are the construction of as liberal a set of policies and practices as possible, through the elimination of “unnecessary” barriers to them, such as state “interference,” in order to enable the optimum development of capitalist markets which will (it is argued) bring greater prosperity to everyone. The way that they are translated into policy also shows that critical theory is not necessarily to be linked with problem solving—indeed, as we shall argue below, “problem solving” itself is very much a creature of the era in which it was coined. So, far from problem solving, we will show that what particular international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), are advancing is a radical agenda for transforming education systems in the developed and the developing economies in order to promote and produce a social and political order very different from the prevailing order. Viewed in this way, “critical” education in the field of education policy can and is being done by the “left” and “right,” by critical educators working with subaltern movements such as the World Social Forum and the IMF/WB. This clearly presents important challenges to “critical” educators wanting to ensure that the purposes of critical theory are not aligned with projects that do not have an explicit concern with more equitable distribution of resources, the effects of asymmetries of power on participation in society, for models of economy that feed off exploitation and the appropriation of surplus value, and so on. In the concluding section of the chapter we suggest that in order to overcome this problem, a “left” critical theory needs to be more explicit about its normative project. With this in mind, we explore what possibilities there are in the social justice framework being advanced by Nancy Fraser—of embracing redistribution, recognition, and representation politics and ethics in our approach to what it means to use a critical theory perspective—as one starting point in responding to the challenge. Moves and Challenges Move 1: Reflecting Upon Critical Theory What does it mean to adopt a critical theory perspective in education policy analysis? Critical theory is derived from one of the major endeavors of seventeenth-century Europe—the use of critique and criticism as a form of critical reasoning (Connerton, 1976, p. 16; Therborn, 1996, p. 55). Critique is a product of the Enlightenment. As a process, it is intended to subject to its
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Page 26 judgment all spheres of life accessible to reason—in the form of oppositional thinking—and was central to Marx and Engel’s dialectical approach. As Therborn notes, Marxism was “the theory of this dialectic of modernity as well as its practice” (1996, p. 54). It saw the emancipatory potential as well as the exploitative dimensions of the modernity/capitalism model of development. It was thus a manifestation of modernity in both a sociological and a theoretical sense. As a social force, it was a “legitimate offspring of modern capitalism and enlightenment culture” (Therborn, 1996, p. 53). However, whilst Liberalism and Enlightenment rationalizing represented the affirmation of modernity (raising no critical questions of science, accumulation, growth, and development), Marx’s theory charted the rise of capitalism, focusing on the progressive stages of the historical development of capitalism, including its contradictions, as well as pointing to class exploitation and crisis tendencies within capitalism. Critical Theory (later to be known as the product and approach of the Frankfurt School) was launched in 1937 by Max Horkheimer—writing in exile in the United States. This school drew upon Marx’s work, but also diverged in important ways—with a focus on superstructure not just infrastructure; in its recognition of the power of ideology—particularly through the media, social psychology, and art; of the rise of instrumental reason and technical efficiency and its potential to be self-undermining; and on the development of a theory of politics that prioritized dialogue and reason as a new basis for social life (Connerton, 1976, pp. 22–32). For Horkheimer the meaning of the term was a philosophically self-conscious, reflexive conception of the “dialectical critique of political economy” (Therborn, 1996, p. 56), however the concept “critical theory” replaced the word “materialism.” This linguistic move by Horkheimer has had important consequences for critical theory more generally, for by de-linking it from a more explicit connection to materialism, it has also made less visible the way it undergirds critical theory, a point that we will return to in the final section of the chapter. In addition to oppositional (dialectical) thinking, the Frankfurt School was indebted to two new meanings of critique—reconstruction and criticism. The first, reconstruction , refers to the conditions of possible knowledge—that is, on the potential abilities of human beings possessing the faculties of knowing, speaking, and acting. Critique in this sense has its roots in Kant (2004). In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant set out to answer the question: what are the conditions of our knowledge through which modern natural science is possible, and how far does this knowledge extend? (Connerton, 1976, p. 17). Kant (2004) began with the fact that social realities are a profusion of senses and impressions yet we tend to perceive the world as a world of ordered things. It is our faculties that produce this order, so that things are “constituted” by us in the sense that we can only “know” through certain a priori forms or categories which are embedded in the human subject. A critical theory approach, by interrogating these categories to see how knowing is constituted, enables us to see more clearly the link between categories for ordering knowing, and what comes to be known. The second sense of critique, criticism , refers to reflections on the system of constraints that are humanly produced—as in the distorting pressures that arise from social relations, such as the relationship between the capitalist and the worker. Critique in this sense has its roots in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind (1966). Hegel developed the concept of “reflection” as the basis of liberation from coercive illusions—for instance, where the workers come to see the real basis of the relationship between themselves and the owner of the means of production. Hegel’s analysis of the relationship between the Master and the Slave is instructive here. Through reflection/ criticism, the Slave comes to view his/her situation, and it is his/her theory about the conditions which, in turn, entails a change in his/her practice. From this brief introduction, we can see that there are important differences between the two additional moments of critical theory (Connerton, 1976, pp. 19–20). First, reconstruction tries to understand anonymous systems of rules which can be followed by any subject, provided they
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Page 27 have the requisite competences. Criticism is brought to bear on something particular; it examines the shaping of an identity or the identity of a group. Second, reconstruction is based on the data that are considered to be objective (such as sentences, actions), while criticism is brought to bear on the objects of experience so that through criticism, distortions are made evident and liberation is made possible (emancipation). Third, reconstruction explains what is considered to be “correct” knowledge; that is, the knowledge that we need to operate the rules competently, while criticism aims at changing or removing the conditions of what is considered to be false. Equally important is the insistence that the only unchangeable basic thesis of critical theory is that critical theory is itself changeable. It follows, then, that “through an analysis of the historical conditions which inform its own categories, it seeks to adapt those categories anew to historical reality” (Connerton, 1976, p. 22). Robert Cox’s (1981) approach to critical theory which has informed our own work draws upon this tradition of critical theory, the basic premises of which are: • An awareness that action is never absolutely free but takes place within a framework for action that constitutes its problematic. • A realization that not only action but also theory is shaped by the problematic. • The framework for action changes over time and the principal goal of critical theory is to understand these changes. • The framework has the form of a historical structure, a particular combination of thought patterns, material conditions, and human institutions, which has coherence among its elements These structures do not determine people’s actions in any mechanical sense but constitute the context of habits, pressures, expectations, and constraints within which action takes place. • The framework or structure within which action takes place is to be viewed, not from the top in terms of the requisites for its equilibrium or reproduction … but rather from the bottom or from outside in terms of the conflicts which arise within it and open the possibility for transformation. (Cox, 1981, p. 97) The innovation in Cox’s (1981, p. 129) approach is to introduce the idea of problem solving as a contrast with critical theory. As we have already noted, problem-solving theory is viewed by Cox as tending toward conservativism in that it is oriented toward the maintenance of the status quo rather than generating change. Most importantly, problem-solving theories also view theories, categories, and frameworks for action in universal and ahistorical terms, thereby occluding the way in which power and interests shape how we come to know and view the world. In the following sections we respond to the issues raised concerning the status of the critical in education policy analysis beginning with the challenges posed by processes of globalization and a series of responding moves. Challenge 1: Globalization’s Challenges to “Critical” Education Policy Frameworks Important aspects of education policymaking and processes are taking place within, as well as beyond, national borders, and that policy itself is produced or mediated by an expanding array of actors, not just the state, who are operating across multiple scales. It is increasingly evident that some of the key actors involved in making and shaping policy on education operate well outside of the traditional education system. In other words, there is an evident shift away from a predominantly national education system to a more fragmented, multiscalar and multisectoral
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Page 28 distribution of activity that now involves new players, new ways of thinking about knowledge production and distribution, and new challenges in terms of ensuring the distribution of opportunities for access and social mobility (Dale & Robertson, 2007). These kinds of shifts require not only a rather different kind of analysis, but a set of concepts that are able to grasp hold of the more dispersed, fragmented activity that constitutes education and is the object of education policy. However, much education policy tends to be shaped by what we refer to as “isms”—that is, the tendency to see categories as natural, fixed, necessary, and sufficient—or, in other words, as ontologically and epistemologically ossified. In the area of education policy analysis, three “isms” are prominent: “methodological nationalism,” “methodological educationism,” and “spatial fetishism” (see Dale & Robertson, 2007; Robertson & Dale, 2008). Methodological nationalism assumes that the nation-state is the container of society, so that the object of education policy analysis entails examining the policies produced and circulated by the nation-state (see Beck, 2002; Beck & Sznaider, 2006; Dale, 2005). However, methodological nationalism is misleading in at least five ways. First, it assumes that policy is “done” (specified, planned, processed, implemented) at, by, and in the interests of the national level. In order for this to be possible, it assumes the coincidence of sovereignty and territory. It assumes a “world” made up of nation-states, an interstate system, with extra national transactions confined to the inter-national—exchanges between states. This system reinforces the salience of the national level, as the national becomes the basis of collection of statistics which, in turn, encourages inter-national comparison as the main way of analyzing differences between forms of, purposes of, and approaches to, education—and this is non-coincidentally linked to the problem-framing role of international organizations. The emphasis on comparison between nations further contributes to a more restricted range of means of understanding. Finally, it assumes that all nation-states are “the same,” at least for comparisons of analysis, so that both “national” and “state” conceal huge differences in social relations, both between and within the designated entities. Methodological educationism refers to the tendency to equate education with the formal education sector, particularly schooling, with the result that policy problems, programs, and practices tend to be those within the formal system. It comprises, is based on, works through, and delivers to, an education sector, which is seen as exclusive, though usually taken for granted and unspecified in terms of its boundaries (which are, however, assumed to be national). What is ignored here is the wider range of actors involved in education policymaking, including departments of trade, finance and industry, private firms, non-governmental organizations, as well as households and communities. This more privileged focus upon, and equation of education with, schooling, tends to isolate schooling as a (professional) activity. Second, it takes for granted that education is a good thing, that more of it is better, and that the purpose of policy is to make it (serve) better. It also sees schooling through particular policy lenses; these have changed from a “redistributive” lens, extending the benefits of the worker citizen (cf. Robertson, 2007); a recognition lens, recognizing and fostering individual difference and identity; and critically a “civil actor” lens, based on representation-based social justice conceptions. Finally, spatial fetishism refers, on the one hand, to the tendency in education policy analysis to reify and naturalize processes, as in “globalization does” or “the local is,” and on the other, to continue to be locked into unchanging (ahistorical/atemporal) state-centric epistemological frameworks for which states are relatively fixed, self-enclosed geographical entities (Harvey, 1982, 2006; Lefebvre, 1974). Where the spatial is invoked, we do not have a sense of spatiality as a process; rather, it is often a backdrop or static platform for social relations, upon which events take place (Brenner, 2003, p. 29). Where there are breaks with state centrism, as in the idea that the state is contracting or dissolving (as in the diminished state thesis), this sidesteps the crucially important task of analyzing the ongoing reterritorialization and rescaling of political-economic
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Page 29 relations under contemporary capitalism and how education is being reconstituted within that. What is needed in a critical education policy approach is a conceptualization of social space that is dialectical and processual so that it is able to reflect the continual, constantly changing social relations of capitalism and its consequences for education. Such an approach must be attuned to the possibilities of transformations taking place within established political economic geographies, including within the national state space, and the role of the national state as site, medium, and agent of contemporary globalization (Jayasuriya, 2001; Sassen, 2006). In other words, a critical education policy analysis needs to take into account how the geographies of state space are being transformed at various geographical scales. In view of the reflections above, one way we might review and reinvigorate the critical dimension in education policy is to conceptualize the changing nature, scope, and sites involved in the work of education of an emerging “functional and scalar division of the labour of education” (Dale, 2003). This conception is essentially intended to both reveal and move beyond the assumptions of education policy analysis as it had been inherited from the post-Second World War period, which, as we have suggested, has perpetuated the series of “isms” we sketched out above. Thus, education policy analysis tends to assume the homogeneity of “education” as schooling, brought about through the exclusivity of the national as the basis for bounding both the education sector and the activities it contains, and the entities with which it might be compared, or to which it might relate (the assumed universality of the national scale leading to inter-national, rather than inter-scalar, and “horizontal” rather than “vertical,” relations). The idea of a functional and scalar division of the labor of education is also intended to indicate the need for, and to provide a means of, going beyond yet another ism that has tended to dog education policy analysis (including our own), that is, methodological statism, which involves, in a nutshell, the assumption that “the state does it all,” certainly as far as education policy is concerned (see Dale, 2008a). The basis of these assumptions was undermined by the rise of neoliberal globalization that became dominant after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This had two particularly relevant consequences for the isms. First, it essentially spelled the end of “national” economies; the drivers of economic activity had moved to the transnational level, with the increasing dominance of transnational capital and companies and an international division of labor, and with production increasingly carried out in low age, “peripheral” countries, rather than in the countries of the West. This simultaneously removed the basis of national economies, transformed the basis of their wealth production, disrupted labor markets and moved the control of economies to the transnational rather than national level. The other consequence was the forms through which neoliberal globalization installed itself. Rather than seeking merely to minimize the role of the state, as in classical liberalism, neoliberalism worked through the state, in what Gill (2003) calls “the constitutionalization of the neo-liberal.” This means in essence that states are no longer (only) barriers to free trade, but can become part of an infrastructure that promotes it, and in which it can flourish. This is brought about not so much by changing the activities of the state as by changing the ways that what are to count as state activities, and their purposes, are determined. What this entails has been summed up as a shift from government to governance, and its major consequence for our argument here is that the governance of education, rather than its content or purposes, becomes the key to how it operates and to its priorities. This then undermines all the isms, and not just statism. Clearly, the national level, territorially defined, can no longer be taken for granted as the only important source of education policymaking, both because of the increasing prominence of the extra-national, and because one major effect of neoliberalism has been the separation of the automatic link between territory and sovereignty (the best example of this, of course, is the European Union—EU). Education can no longer be taken as a homogeneous whole whose homogeneity and sectoral integrity rest on a national base. Instead, we see divisions of labor of education both within and
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Page 30 across scales. At a national level, the governance of education now includes a significant presence of agents and stakeholders other than the state, with many of these distinctions being made according to function—funding, provision of services, and so on. Functions may also be allocated across scales, which is perhaps the most significant of the changes for education policy. As we go on to show, international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, along with the OECD, effectively set agendas for key elements of education. They also (and here again the EU is the best example) may involve education in processes of “resectoralization,” with some “traditional functions of education being separated out into new sectors (in the EU we find, for instance, education involved in both ‘knowledge sector’ and a social policy sector” (see Brine, 2006; Dale, 2008b). It is important to recognize that this is not a formal or static process but, to a degree, contingent on existing arrangements. It works through particular mediating structures—for example, the World Bank’s Knowledge Assessment Methodology (Robertson, 2007), the Open Method of Coordination guiding European-level governance (Dale, 2004), the progressing of the Bologna Process (Dale, 2008b; Keeling, 2006), and the OECD’s PISA indicators. The basis of the division of labor is the place(s) of education in the circuit of capital, with production-related activities more likely to be determined at the transnational level of the economy, and infrastructural/ embedding activities carried out at the national scale. Move 2: Bringing the IMF/World Bank and Education Policy into View by Challenging Isms So far we have been arguing that in our approach to education policy analysis we need to be attentive to the transformations that are taking place in the reconstitution of education through a recalibration of our theoretical lenses. In this section we ground this claim by focusing upon the IMF and World Bank as two related international agencies that are continuing to not only shape education agendas in the developing and developed economies but who are seeking to reconstitute education as part of the wider services sector within a global knowledge economy framework. In doing so, we are not suggesting there is no critical scholarship in this area. Mundy’s (1998) work is exemplary here. She draws upon the work of critical theory scholars to examine the evolution of educational multilateralism since 1945 over three phases: an initial period of institutionalization (1945–65), a period of contestation (1966–late 1970s) and an ongoing period of transition shaped by neoliberalism. Our point here is not only to reveal the ambition and extent of the project under way, but to present a second important challenge to critical theory being canvassed in this paper by asking why isn’t/shouldn’t the IMF/World Bank’s radical and strategic political agenda for global governance be considered as a form of critical theory? To some analysts, the IMF/World Bank’s turn away from a harsh Washington Consensus—and its embrace of the good governance agenda (World Bank, 1989) through “adjustment with a human face” (Cornia, Jolly, & Frances, 1987), represented a victory for social movements and non-governmental organizations who were able to focus attention on the devastating effects of structural adjustment policies (Leftwich, 1993), particularly in the social policy arenas such as education. The Bank turned to what were claimed as more participatory initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Development Framework, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and to joint programs such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC). While some pundits have viewed this “about-turn” as representing “the emasculation” of the IMF and World Bank (Woods, 2007, p. 5), we beg to differ. The Post-Washington Consensus period that ensued did not represent a complete break from the Washington Consensus. The overall logic of structural adjustment remained largely unchanged with macroeconomic policies (market liberalization, exportoriented free markets, the removal of trade barriers and tariffs) all paramount (cf. Robertson et al., 2007 for an extended analysis). As Mundy also notes:
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Page 31 The Bank’s recent educational prescriptions, in line with its renewed interest in poverty alleviation, echo the marriage of populist and modernisation arguments forged in the 1970 World Bank discourse: education enhances individual productivity and overall economic growth, and it ensures political stability through greater equality. (1998, p. 474) For Mundy, the IMF/World Bank agenda had much the same ring as of old. While to some extent we support this view, we also agree with Cammack (2003) who argues that “something new and significant is happening at the level of global regulation” and that “the two institutions are seeking to define and exercise a relatively autonomous role, promoting and sustaining a framework for global capitalism” (p. 39). Cammack interprets the evidence as suggesting that recent joint activity of the IMF/WB reflects a project for the institutionalization and management of global capitalism, and that this has arisen out of a recognition that a “genuinely global capitalist system generates contradictions that cannot be addressed at the national level alone, even by the most powerful states” (p. 39). From the beginning of the 1990s and following the turn to a post-Washington consensus, the World Bank’s efforts to alleviate poverty were premised on the adoption of policies that would extend the scope of the world market and the global reach of capitalism. Later policies, such as Investing in Health (1993), Workers in an Integrated World (1995), Knowledge For Development (1989/1999) and Attacking Poverty (2000/2001), all amounted to a comprehensive program to put into place a set of policies infused with the disciplines and class logic of capitalism as if they were inspired by benevolence. The IMF has played a key role here, in that it uses conditionalities in a selective and strategic way to strengthen the institutions of capitalism globally (Cammack, 2003, p. 54). While the policies outlined above have been directed toward refashioning the economic and social policy sectors in low- and middle-income countries, the IMF/WB has also been very active in promoting policies that constitute education as a new services sector and market. In 2002, the Bank, together with the OECD, hosted a major conference on education and the General Agreement in Trade in Services (Robertson, Bonal, & Dale, 2002). This was followed in 2003 with a major policy initiative Lifelong Learning for the Global Knowledge Economy where the Bank argued that the access and quality agendas of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) should be met through the development of public–private partnerships, and opening up education to for-profit firms (see also Tooley, 2003). These processes of commodification of education represent a significant erosion of education as constituting a public good and public sector. Similarly, the World Bank’s Knowledge for Development (K4D) program has sought to advance a particular imaginary of economic development that sees investment in education as the basis for growth and for the realization of a so-called knowledge-based economy. In order to facilitate the implementation of the model and incorporate economies from around the world into this project, the Bank has developed a Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) (see Robertson, 2008), and declared itself the midwife of this process (Chen & Dahlman, 2005). The KAM is made up of a complex set of indicators around four pillars: (a) the implementation of a digital technology infrastructure; (b) an education regime where there are significant investments in education—particularly science and technology; (c) an economic regime that reflects free-market and progressive liberalization principles; and (d) an innovation systems regime that is directed toward developing institutions for intellectual property. IMF/WB’s territorial interest extends well beyond the developing world. The KAM provides indicator and relational data on countries around the world (from Finland to the USA, Turkey to Tanzania) and should be viewed as a strategically selective tool that advances the interests of Westerncentered capitalism. It is also a tool for putting into place the ideological and institutional means to enable the developed economies, to generate new value from knowledge services globally (Robertson, in press, p. 19).
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Page 32 Challenge 2: Is the IMF/World Bank and Knowledge Economy Policy “Critical Theory” or “Problem Solving”? If our analysis is correct, and what is occurring at the global level is that the IMF/WB’s project is directed at the institutionalization and management of a Western-centered architecture for global capitalism, then this seems to us to be an obvious case of Cox’s critical theory rather than problem solving. Viewed in this light, the case of problem-solving theory is both interesting and revealing for it now seems rather more a reflection of the time when it was introduced than does critical theory. It might be seen to assume an era when “policy” was the dominant means of “steering,” by the state, of addressing the problems of education systems that were assumed to be national; the state taxed, spent, and “policied,” and it based its policies on “solutions” provided mostly, at the time, by academics, or government departments that commissioned research from academics, typically in a distinctly “problemsolving frame” (for an extended critique of this approach and its consequences in the UK, see Dale, 1994). Moreover, it presumes that class interests are necessarily oriented to stability, order, and the status-quo as we see with this claim: “Problem solving theories can be represented, in the broader perspective of critical theory, as serving particular national, sectional and class interests which are comfortable within the given order” (Cox, 1981, p. 129). Now, while elements of that approach remain, the nature of the problems to be addressed, the scales at which they are addressed, and the agents involved in addressing these have all changed—as we have shown with the case of the IMF and World Bank. This may not be immediately apparent, since the terminology used to describe what is occurring is often unchanged—but its meaning is radically altered. As Gavin Smith puts it, “a whole series of key concepts for the understanding of society derive their power from appearing to be just what they always were and derive their instrumentality from taking on quite different forms” (Smith, 2006, p. 628). This applies powerfully in this case. For instance, the state is still present as a key actor, but it is a very different state space from that of a quarter of a century ago. It no longer operates in/on/through the same spaces as it did when it steered by taxing, spending, and “policing,” but it acts through new forms and techniques of governance that include both a wider agenda for the governance of education (e.g., privatization, fees) and, especially, new, non-state actors. Problems are still to be solved, but they are no longer homogeneous in form as they were in the post-war era when there was broad agreement at a national level on the goals of education. One important way of construing our central argument in this chapter is that while states might still be involved in problem solving in education, they are not either necessarily involved in the definition of all the problems to be addressed, or solely responsible for “solving” all of them. For these reasons, then, problem solving can no longer be seen as the “other” of critical theory, and just as it helped so much to define critical theory in the original formulation, so a new formulation of the other of critical theory might help us move forward here. Move 3: Revisiting Problem-Solving and Critical Theory—By Way of Conclusion There are two related moves we now want to make here. One concerns the reformulation of problemsolving theory to reflect a particular kind of theory-making/constituting of the world and the “other” of critical theory. The second move is to argue, briefly, that critical theory needs both to emphasize its interests in the material conditions of social life, and to develop a more explicit normative dimension.
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Page 33 The new “other” of critical theory, we suggest, might be not problem-solving theory, but problem-framing theory. By this we mean that in a neoliberal age, rather than taking the world as it finds it, the other of critical theory takes the world as it constructs it. Under neoliberalism, the world is no longer ruled by states, or at state level but, rather, also through global actors such as the IMF/World Bank, WTO, and OECD. The problems that national states face, and their means of addressing them, are both framed by representative institutions of neoliberalism. Thus, the way we see the prescriptions and advice of international organizations is not so much as problem-solving contributions , but as problemdefining and framing interventions . Essentially, it is through these agencies that states learn what their problems really are. The best example of this is the Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) (or the variants on it; the precise formulation matters much less than the general lack of content and precision of the term, and its asserted applicability to the whole world). The problem for all states is to make their education systems contribute to their most effective participation in the global KBE. Problem solving is thus apparently retained at a national level, but as we shall see, that becomes increasingly less based in fact, at the same time as the appearance of national autonomy serves to conceal the real sources of problems and power. This enables us to redefine somewhat the focus and task of critical theory. Formerly, it was contrasted with a problem-solving theory that took the world as it found it, and its main purpose was seen as making problematic what problem-solving theory took for granted, or consigned to a ceteris paribus clause. However, in an era where its opposite is problem-shaping theory, which constructs the world in particular ways, its problematic is similarly transformed, at two levels. It has both to examine and seek to reveal the play of power at the problem shaping stage, and to examine the means of governance— and especially the role of the state in this—through which these problems are addressed and their “solutions” shaped. We have pointed to the activities of the World Bank and IMF as examples of the former. The latter involves identifying both the ways that neoliberalism has been “constitutionalized” (Gill, 2003; Jayasuriya, 2001), and the discourses and mediating structures through which solutions are shaped and implemented, together with the autonomous and contingent effects of these (see Dale, 2008b). We might see this shift as reflecting a change in the role of states from structural to strategic selectivity, with structural selectivity now seen much more clearly as taking place at the level of the capitalist system itself. Second, a critical theory perspective needs to be continually vigilant in making clear “for whom” and “for what purposes” it is working. It also needs to be more articulate and explicit about its own purposes, not in the sense of “seeing” more clearly objects, events, and social relations (reconstruction) but to see that the point of criticism is to reveal the social relations in order to change them. In other words, critical theory needs to link more firmly back to its historical materialist roots. As Nancy Fraser argued in her essay on critical theory in 1985, in this case in relation to gender: A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification. The question it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. For, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models which revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological rival approaches which obfuscated and rationalised those relations. In this situation, then one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it has been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy,
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Page 34 would be: How well does it theorise the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women? This requires an understanding of what “ought” to be; of what might be the basis for an alternative framework for action. In saying this we are aware of more than two decades of debate about the problem of metanarratives, and we do not wish to re/instate old injustices. We do, however, believe that there is considerable mileage in thinking through frameworks for social justice, such as that advanced by Nancy Fraser (2005), in bringing together redistribution, recognition, and representation politics, as the underpinnings for a more socially just order. By redistribution Fraser is referring to institutionalized mechanisms to ensure that the material conditions of life tied to production and the boundaries around social reproduction (housework, sexuality, reproduction), are shaped by principles informed by a socialist imaginary—of egalitarianism and solidarism (p. 298); by recognition, she means the mechanisms through which differences are recognized positively (as opposed to negatively through status and hierarchies); and by representation, Fraser means making evident the sites and mechanisms for political claims-making arising from the changing scales and state-territorial framings from globalizing and transnationalizing developments (pp. 304–305). And, while she argues that developing such a threedimensional politics is not easy, it is an important critical move. Likewise, we conclude by arguing that processes of globalization, the rescaling of education, and emerging spaces of governing, require not only a new conceptual approach but that this is a necessary step in order to advance and enable a socially transformative agenda for critical education policy analysis. References Beck, U. (2002). The cosmopolitan society and its enemies. Theory, Culture and Society , 19 (1–2), 17– 44. Beck, U., & Sznaider, N. (2006). Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences. The British Journal of Sociology , 57 (1), 1–23. Brenner, N. (2003). New state spaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brine, J. (2006). Lifelong learning and the knowledge economy. British Educational Research Journal , 32 (5), 649–665. Cammack, P. (2003). The governance of global capitalism. Historical Materialism , 11 (2), 37–59. Chen, D.C., & Dahlman, C. (2005). The knowledge economy, the KAM methodology and World Bank operations. Washington, DC: World Bank. Connerton, P. (1976). Critical sociology. New York: Penguin. Cornia, G., Jolly, R., & Frances, S. (1987). Adjustment with a human face. Oxford: Clarendon. Cox, R. (1981). Social forces, states and world orders. Millennium Journal of International Studies , 10 (2), 126–155. Cox, R. (1996, 1997). Approaches to world order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, R. (2002). The political economy of a plural world. London and New York: Routledge. Dale, R. (1994). Applied education politics or political sociology of education? In D. Halpin & B. Troyna (Eds.), Researching education policy (pp. 31–44) . London and Washington, DC: Falmer Press. Dale, R. (2003, March 20–21). The Lisbon Declaration. Paper presented to the RAPPE Seminar Governance, Regulation and Equity in European Education Systems, Institute of Education. Dale, R. (2004). Forms of governance, governmentality, and the EU’s open method of coordination. In W. Larner & W. Walters (Eds.), Global governmentality (pp. 174–194) . London: Routledge. Dale, R. (2005) Globalisation, knowledge and comparative education. Comparative Education, 41 (2), 117–150. Dale, R. (2008a). Neoliberal capitalism, the modern state and the governance of education. Tertium Comparationis, 13 (2).
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Page 35 Dale, R. (2008b). Shifting discourses and mediating structures in the co-construction of Europe, knowledge and universities. In N. Fairclough & R. Wodak (Eds.), European discourses of the knowledgebased economy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Dale, R., & Robertson, S. (2007). Beyond “isms” in comparative education in an era of globalisation. In A. Kazamias & R. Cowen (Eds.), Handbook on comparative education. Netherlands: Springer. Fraser, N. (1985, Spring-Summer). What is critical about critical theory? New German Critique , 35 , 97– 131. Fraser, N. (2005). Mapping the feminist imagination. Constellations, 12 (3), 295–307. Gill, S. (2003). Power and resistance in the new world order. New York: Palgrave. Harvey, D. (1982). The limits to capital.London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2006). Spaces of global capitalism.London: Verso. Hegel, (1966) Phenomenology of the mind. London: George Allen and Unwin. Jayasuriya, K. (2001). Globalization, sovereignty and the rule of law. Constellations, 8(4), 442–460. Kant, I. (1781). The critique of pure reason (N. K. Smith, Trans.).London: Palgrave. Keeling, R. (2006). The Bologna process and the Lisbon research agenda. European Journal of Education , 41 (2), 203–223. Lancrin, S. (2006, September). Building capacity through cross-border higher education. Paper presented at the Cross Border Higher Education for Capacity Development, World Bank/OECD/Nuffic Seminar, The Hague. Lefebvre, H. (1974). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwells. Leftwich, A. (1993). Governance, development and democracy in the Third World. Third World Quarterly, 14 (3), 605–624. Mundy, K. (1998). Educational multilateralism and world (dis)order. Comparative Education Review , 42 (4), 448–478. Robertson, S. (2007). Globalisation, education governance and citizenship regimes. In P. Lipman & K. Monkman (Eds.), Handbook on education and social justice. London and New York: Erlbaum. Robertson, S. (in press). “Producing” knowledge economies. In M. Simons, M. Olssen, & M. Peters (Eds.), Re-reading education policies: Studying the policy agenda for the 21st century. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Robertson, S., Bonal, X., & Dale, R. (2002). GATS and the education service industry. Comparative Education Review , 46 (4), 472–496. Robertson, S., & Dale, R. (2008). Researching education in a globalising era. In J. Resnik (Ed.), The production of educational knowledge in a global era. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Robertson, S., Novelli, M., Dale, R., Tikly, L., Dachi, H., & Alphonce, N. (2007). Globalisation, education and development. London: DfID. Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, G. (2006). When “the logic of capital is the real which lurks in the background.” Current Anthropology, 47 (4), 621–639. Therborn, G. (1996). Critical theory and the legacy of twentieth century Marxism. In B. Turner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to social theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Tooley, J. (2003). The global education industry. Washington, DC: Institute for Economic Affairs. Woods, N. (2007). Power shift . London: IPPR. World Bank. (1989). Sub-Saharan Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (1989/99). Knowledge for development. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (1993). Investing in health. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (1995). Workers in an integrated world. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (2000/2001). Attacking poverty . Washington, DC: World Bank Group. World Bank. (2003). Lifelong learning for a global knowledge economy. Washington, DC: World Bank.
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Page 36 3 Movement and Stasis in the Neoliberal Reorientation of Schooling Cameron McCarthy, Viviana Pitton, Soochul Kim, & David Monje Introduction Invoking the opposition between movement and stasis in modern life, Dennis Carlson, in his book Leaving Safe Harbors (2002) admonishes educators to move out of the “safe harbors” of settled educational practices and philosophies in order to better address the challenges posed to schooling by the dynamics associated with globalization and multiplicity. In this important book, Carlson offers a proper riposte to the atrophy of critical theoretical and empirical work within the field of Education and the Social Sciences in general. He also responds to the bellwether ringing in the popular press, such as that of Emily Eakin who maintains that “The era of big theory is over” (2003, p. 9). Indeed, with great assurance and self-satisfaction, Eakin insists: The grand paradigms that swept through the humanities departments in the twentieth century— psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, postcolonialism—have lost favor or have been abandoned. Money is tight. And, leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating. (Eakin, 2003, p. 9) One is reminded here of a similar hand wringing and a similar denunciation of the amorphous Left in the New York Times in the late 1970s by the senior anthropologist, Marvin Harris who was invited by the newspaper to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of affairs in that beleaguered discipline on the occasion of the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting. In his New York Times article, Harris suggested that: anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program. (Ortner, 1994, p. 372) The New York Times, the newspaper that the late Edward Said liked to call the “newspaper of record,” has made it its business to periodically prognosticate upon the ridiculousness of the Left and its last days. Fortunately, Carlson puts us in completely different territory inviting us to
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Page 37 consider the seriousness of the malaise of mainstream life and mainstream schooling and our need to move beyond conventionalism and the institutional practices of confinement to embrace hope and possibility. Above all, Leaving Safe Harbors suggests movement like the movement in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. It is the suggestion of movement in the context of stasis, where, as George Lipsitz (2004) notes, too many inner-city youth and their schools are “locked on this earth” (p. 1). They are locked in the bureaucratic deployment of schooling that is articulated to a hierarchical organization of society and unequal access to its social rewards, goods, and services. This process is analogous to what Melville lays out on the deck of the Pequod in his magnificent novel, Moby Dick. Arrayed around Ahab, on the deck, is the projection of social classification: first mate, Starbuck, second mate, Stub, third mate, Flask. Then there are the first harpooner, Queequeg, the second harpooner, Tashtego, and the third harpooner, Dagoo of third world, Native American and African backgrounds. We are familiar with this penchant for hierarchy and top-down leadership in the university and the school. We have, then, embodied in Carlson’s book, echoing Herman Melville, the announcement of a Shakespearean story of tragic proportions on schools that is about to unfold. This is the story of movement and stasis—the vigorous turn in education toward neoliberalism and its false promises of greater individual freedom and choice (movement) while consolidating and exacerbating the problems of access and inequality for the minority and working-class disadvantaged (stasis). But the matter goes further as we shall see in what follows. Movement and Stasis We must try to understand the context of this movement in stasis, this dizziness, this uncertainty that W. B. Yeats defined in “The Second Coming” as “the best lack all conviction” (1994, p. 154). However, we maintain here, against the grain of Yeats’ notion of movement as entropy, that the worst are full of conviction and pursue their orientation with a sense of direction. By this, we are referring to those neoconservative policy-makers, fully schooled in neoliberalism (we discuss this in the next section), that have begun to take hold of the organization of school knowledge at all levels of the educational system in the United States and elsewhere. This neoliberal framework emphasizes the universalization of the enterprise ethic throughout all social institutions, education included. The broad sweep of this project is articulated at a national level in the United States by the No Child Left Behind Act of the Bush regime. There are powerful forces at work at the local and regional levels, too, as illustrated in Chicago’s Commercial Club inspired policy initiative Renaissance 2010, which we will discuss later. These documents produced in the past few years are really benchmarks of an accelerated and deepening trend of the movement of resources out of the public institutions into private hands, and the steady corporatization and refeudalization of educational institutions in particular (Habermas, 1992). We want to step back for a moment from Carlson’s specific reading of education and try to speak more broadly of the post-9/11 context in which we operate in schools, the ordeal of intellectual labor, and the character of the intellectual labor process in these new times. We want to talk about the context and network of new relations that define our times. This is the context of neoliberalism and the specific interpretation of globalization and multiplicity in the modern world undertaken by neoliberal policymakers. It is a context that has generated a set of dynamics that has transformed modern subject relations to the state and society at the dawning of the twenty-first century. It is a world marked by movement and stasis but not entirely in the sense that is often invoked in the literature on globalization as a kind of technological determinism and associated binarism. By binarism we refer to the oppositional logic that is captured in, say, Zygmunt Bauman’s “tourist” versus “vagabond” or Anthony Giddens’ “radicals” versus “skeptics” (Bauman, 1998; Giddens, 2003). These binary oppositions, among other things, suggest that those
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Page 38 with access to technology are on the move, free of containment and those who are pre- or undertechnologized are marching in place while the world passes them by. Of course there is some truth to this. But what we are prepared to identify as well is the severe loss of theodicy and meaning in the educational enterprise generally—a process that is reflected in the broad tendency of neoliberalism to compromise educational institutions and practices. But these neoliberal logics are even broader in reach and implications. Indeed, it might be argued that, instead of the end to the game of totalization announced in the aforementioned New York Times article, we, modern citizens, more than ever, are being seduced, inducted, incorporated into ever-larger discursive systems and materialisms, led forward as much by the state as by multinational capital. We are being seduced by large-scale programs of renarration of affiliation and exclusion, holding out the possibility of identity makeovers, place swapping, and material exchange and immaterial rewards. Our daily lives are being colonized by massive systems of textual production that transgress the customary boundaries between private and public life and that seem to have, at the same time, the ambition to conquer all of global and planetary space. Here, we are referring to the “U.S. war on terrorism,” the new interoperable information technologies, such as digital face and eye-retina scanning, aimed at gaining fuller access to human characteristics for the purpose of sorting human bodies in a vast domestic and international project of surveillance and human capital extraction, the rise of state-driven post-Fordist authoritarianism in the name of national security, the human genome project and the dream of human perfectibility, the aspirations of corporate American sports such as basketball and football to conquer the globe, one brand name after another, and one world series at a time. However, against these manifestations of the logics of neoliberalism we are also witnessing a growing resistance, as educators, teachers and students, and disadvantaged citizens fight back against gentrification, school closures, and the wholesale transfer of resources from the public school sectors to private ones. As neoliberal policies and their effects are better understood, the denizens of the inner city of New York or Chicago are demonstrating that they are not entirely “locked on this earth.” How might we understand these developments? How might we theorize their conjunctural relationship to schools? What general organizing principles or terms might we deploy to both sum up these developments and identify their dominant vectors? It is not enough, as Carson suggests, to offer vain formulations at the level of abstraction of the mode of production. We need to pay proper attention to patterns of historical incorporation and the work of culture and identification practices in specific institutional contexts and programmatic applications. Neoliberal Re-articulations We have identified the dominant (but often underdiagnosed) complex or network of relations now affecting schools as neoliberal re-articulations and transformations. It is this context of neoliberal hegemony and moral and cultural leadership itself and its relationship to what Michel Foucault has called government (i.e., the regulation of conduct of populations through systems of administration and self management of everyday life1) that we must examine in order to better understand the specific impact of current political, cultural, and economic forces on education, understood here as the promise of the public good. By examining the nature and the conditions under which neoliberalism operates, some current trends in education such as privatization, accountability, entrepreneurialism, and decentralization, among others, can be better understood and confronted with new democratic educational policies that enhance the public support for education at all levels and contribute to the development of more equitable educational conditions. Consequently, we will start by defining neoliberalism and discussing its relationship to globalization. Secondly, we will discuss how neoliberalism has redrawn the limits between private and public spaces and has reoriented educational institutions. Finally, we will assert the
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Page 39 need to safeguard education from neoliberalism’s relentless investment in accumulation and consumerdriven individualism and reconnect education to its critical dimension—a critical dimension linked to a working conception of social justice. How do we define neoliberalism? One way of talking about neoliberalism as it has arisen in the social science and political science literatures of the last two decades has been to define it in terms of the universalization of the enterprise ethic. This is to see its logics in the context of multinational capital’s strategic translation of globalization (globalization is understood here as the rapid intensification of migration, the amplification of electronic mediation, the movement of economic and cultural capital across borders, and the deepening and stretching of interconnectivity all around the world) and the corresponding withdrawal and disengagement of the state in a broad range of economic and political affairs. Within this framework, neoliberalism can be broadly understood as a new form of liberalism which integrates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of free market and laissez-faire into, potentially, all aspects of contemporary life. Foucault offers a thorough analysis of the neoliberal governmentality in his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France and concentrates on two variants of post-Second World War neoliberalism: the Ordo-liberals or “Freiberg School” in Germany and the Chicago School of Human Capital in the United States. The Ordo-liberals support “the active creation of the social conditions for an effective competitive market order” (Olssen, 2006, p. 218). They believe “the market mechanism and the impact of competition can arise only if they are produced by the practice of government” (Lemke, 2001, p. 193). Consequently, they devise social policies not oriented toward compensatory functions, but aiming at universalizing the entrepreneurial form within the social arena and the redefinition of law to guarantee its success. Whereas the Ordo-liberals intend to govern society in the name of the economy, the Chicago School theorists, on the other hand, omit any difference between the economy and the social. In this model, the economic encompasses all forms of human action and behavior (Gordon, 1991). Furthermore, the Chicago School neoliberals highlight the importance of the individuals’ skills, knowledge, and abilities in the process of production. In their view, individuals are self-governing entrepreneurs who rationally assess the benefits and risks of their actions, make choices, and accept their consequences. Moreover, they argue the market is the organizing and regulative principle underlying the state. The state keeps controlling individuals, but without being financially responsible for their social burdens (i.e., unemployment, poverty, disease, etc.). Building upon Foucault’s arguments on the neoliberal forms of government, Thomas Lemke (2001) contends that neoliberalism is not merely an economic theory, but a political rationality seeking “to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for personal responsibility and ‘self-care’” (Lemke, 2001, p. 203). The rationalizing principle is the market, whose existence and functioning depend on certain political, legal, and institutional conditions that must be created by the state (Bourdieu, 1998; Burchell 1996). As Barry et al. (1996) contend, “Neoliberalism … involves less a retreat from governmental ‘intervention’ than a re-inscription of the techniques and forms of expertise required for the exercise of government” (p. 14). That is, far from losing its capacity for regulation and control, the neoliberal state has been reorganized and restructured in such a way that keeps its traditional regulatory functions, but has transferred its historical responsibility for social welfare to the individuals (Klees, 2002). In the 1970s, these theoretical ideas found the propitious conjunctures in the United States and Great Britain, where stagflation and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of international exchange led to the removal of capital controls (Stiglitz, 2002). Alongside the extensive deregulation of the economy and capital markets, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal policies resulted in the overturning of Keynesianism and the disinvestment of the state in projects of welfare for the poor and the common good. These practices, promoted in policy
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Page 40 documents endorsed by international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the OECD and numerous national governments, have come to be praised worldwide as the proper approach to development (Thomas, 2001). These neoliberal policies imply the systematic reordering of state priorities in which the state’s accumulation function is predominant in the modern system of rule at a distance, subordinating the processes of legitimation and democratic involvement of citizens. Given that the neoliberal rationality changes the concept of citizenship as a means of political empowerment to one of economic empowerment, the relationship between citizens and state, as well as the political foundation of government, end up being transformed (Blanchard et al., 1998). Consequently, “democracy in the form of accountability mechanisms regulating citizen–government relationship is also altered” (Xing, 2001, p. 90). In relation to this, it is being argued that by submitting every aspect of political, cultural, and social life to the market rationality, neoliberalism has rendered democratic institutions irrelevant (Brown, 2003). Other scholars, though, contend that liberal democracy has not vanished but, rather, it has been redefined. In this vein, it is asserted that neoliberalism and liberal democracies manage to coexist because “democratization has been restricted to certain liberal rights and formal state institutions” (Patomäki & Teivainen, 2002). Neoliberalism not only redefines economic and political relations, but also operates decisively through culture. For instance, McChesney (1999) contends that “it is precisely in its oppression of non-market forces that we see how neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well” (p. 7). Culturally, neoliberalism works by “creating a subjectivity that fits within the prevailing … rationality” (Fitzsimons, 2002, p. 1). Indeed, in the neoliberal culture, individuals are encouraged to behave according to the ideal of the entrepreneur, a person capable of rationally choosing the optimal course of action to maximize his/her interests. That is, neoliberalism: reconceptualizes the individual by expanding on classic liberalism’s faith in the individual as rational chooser within markets. Under neoliberalism the individual is no longer merely a rational optimizer but conceived as an autonomous entrepreneur responsible for his or her own self, progress, or position. (Lipman & Hursh, 2007) In sum, neoliberal subjects become “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Foucault, 1979, as cited in Lemke, 2001, p. 198). Accordingly, in a culture where the market is regarded as the ethic guiding all human action, the subject’s identity is constructed in and by the market. As Davies (2005) puts it: The neoliberal self is largely defined in terms of income and the capacity to purchase goods. The desire for goods can be satisfied to the extent that the worker produces whatever the economy demands. This emphasis on consumerism makes the worker compliant to whatever must be done to earn money, since to lose one’s job, to be without income, is to lose one’s identity. In order to hold their jobs, neoliberal selves are necessarily flexible, multiskilled, mobile, [and] able to respond to new demands and new situations. (p. 9) As the neoliberal subject’s survival is no longer dependent on society (it is now his or her responsibility), he or she does not have the same commitment to the social. Consequently, skills for individual survival (i.e., ability to earn money, flexibility, competitiveness, etc.) replace those essential values for maintaining the social fabric (i.e., solidarity, fairness, and compassion, among others). In this context, then, the neoliberal subject is one who chooses for her/himself among different social, political and economic alternatives, not one who strives with others to transform
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Page 41 or organize those (Brown, 2003). The implications are, thus, political quiescence, social demobil-ization (Kurtz, 2004, p. 279), and the loss of a sense of community from which the independent autonomous chooser is cut off and thrown into the consumerist global jungle.2 Neoliberalism strategically addresses the new post-Fordist subject, the new cultural citizen of mobile privatization who exists within the self-contained unit of the home, of the school, and so forth, and who mediates his or her environment through the new smart technologies driven by computer hardware and software—the smart Zenith TV and VCR that we can program, the remote control, the cell phone, video/digital games (hand-held or console based), and the ultimate phenomenon since 9/11 of the flag car as the symbol of the nation riding on the back of the mobile patriotic citizen—the moving ground, so to speak, of a popular post-Fordist authoritarianism. These new technologies have helped to elaborate a discursive order and rearticulate time, duration, and the rhythm of production, consumption, and leisure in the constitution of our everyday lives—mobile and sedentary. Further, the mobile digital gadgets, such as the cell phones, the car navigation system, lap-tops with wireless Internet connection, iPods, and so forth, which are already widespread in the United States, complicate the existing negotiation process between movement and stasis by allowing continuous streams of electronic navigation, communication, transaction, entertainment, and information retrieval for people on the move. In these digital appliances, the representation of others and environments looks simple, effortless, fast, and shape-shifting. Because these devices provide prompt information about environments and others, users require less direct contact with their fellow citizens and need to take into account less and less of a meaningful relation to their locales and environments. In the context of what Raymond Williams called “mobile-privatization” (1975, p. 26), we are now experiencing the evolution of the ability to look out from within, to be vicariously active, to move while staying in place, to intercourse with the world while hiding in the light and in a state of retreat. To these technologies, we can add the surveillance camera, the fax machine, scanning machine, the PC; the cable network uplinks in the school that allow us the illusion of control over our physical environment while we measure and monitor, often ourselves, from the safety inside. It is through these new social densities associated with electronic mediation, computerization, and the new digitally and genetically driven biometric technologies of surveillance, identification, and verification that neoliberalism operates as a supported master code translating the new terminologies of the Age associated with globalization, movement and stasis, place-swapping, and identity make-overs. The Unmaking and Remaking of Schools and Universities The university and schooling are not inured from these dynamic material practices associated with neoliberalism. Indeed, neoliberalism has a privileged position in the educational field “as a technique of government, regulation and social control” (Silva, 1994 as cited in Gandin, 2007, p. 182). It is not surprising, then, that the market ethic has been introduced into the educational arena, replacing the public good ethic (Gandin, 2007). Education, as Molnar (1996) points out, has been colonized by marketization; school reforms are being discussed in commercial terms, and expressions such as “future consumers,” “future workers,” and “future taxpayers” are being used in reference to children and school youth. In sum, education is seen “as a product to be evaluated for its economic utility and as a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else in the ‘free market’” (Apple, 2000, p. 111). The subordination of education to economic ends is evident when one looks at recent educational reform initiatives—not only in the United States, but internationally—whose main rationales are arguments favoring a tighter link between “education and the wider project of ‘meeting the needs of the economy’” (Apple, 2006, p. 23). To this end, neoliberal efforts in
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Page 42 education aim at reorganizing schooling so the needs of the local and global economy are met by producing human capital sufficiently skilled, adaptable, and flexible. In addition to conceiving schools as producers of “human capital,” neoliberalism has an equally critical cultural agenda: “It involves radically changing how we think of ourselves and what the goals of schooling should be” (Apple, 2006, p. 23). Under neoliberalism, then, educational institutions are expected to form students for market competition by transforming them into entrepreneurs and by convincing them that “competition is a natural phenomenon, with winners and losers” (Gandin, 2007, p. 182). Nancy Cantor and Paul Courant (2003), for instance, identify three dimensions of neoliberalism or the universalization of the enterprise ethic that are transforming the life world of schools and universities understood as institutions for the optimization of the public good and molding culture, economy, politics, and ideology into a template of a new educational order. These three neoliberal tendencies can be identified as follows. First, there is virtualization, or the process of managing the university as an on-line community and a paperless world. Second, there is vocationalization, or the insistence on consistently derived and derivable returns on education. The third tendency in the process of educational neoliberalization is the practice of fiscalization or bottom-line budgeting as the ruling measure of viability of all departments and units of educational institutions. Cantor and Courant understand these trends as fiscal and budgetary dilemmas, we see them here as deeply cultural in the sense that they set off particular configurations of interests, needs, desires, beliefs, and system-wide behavioral practices in the life world of universities and schools with respect to ethos and milieu and the organization of knowledge, the regulation of individual and group relations in these institutions, and the sorting and sifting of social and cultural capital. Virtualization The first trend that we will discuss here is virtualization . Virtualization of educational processes involves the rise and intensification of virtual interactions in more and more of our institutional activities. It is driven forward by our on-line proclivity towards information craving, speed, efficiency, optimization, and maximization which, now, as a set of dispositions, is rapidly displacing face-to-face interaction and embodied decision making and community feeling in our institutions. Education in its virtualizing tendency is susceptible to the “Internet paradox”—the other side of deregulation as the centrifugal logic of neoliberalism and laissez-faire—that is, “dependence on a social technology that often breeds social isolation” and insulation of knowledge and disciplines as much as it facilitates interaction (Cantor & Courant, 2003, p. 5). We now know more about each others’ group and society by the proxy of images than by experiential encounter. This is not a Luddite argument, it is, as Cantor and Courant suggest, the proper concern that “the delivery of education solely on the Internet may rob students of the experience of the clash of ideas out of which emerges empathy with others and a desire for compromise” (p. 5). For some, the arrival of the Internet heralded yet another clean technological break with the past. But unlike car manufacturers and fashion designers, we in the humanities and in the social sciences need the past for more than nostalgia and the ephemeral. We cannot jettison it ruthlessly bringing on stream the latest gizmo or style. We need to study the past to better understand the present and the future. This raises questions bearing upon the status and nature of the contemporary public sphere and the fact that we seem to have a multiplicity of strongly insulated publics in educational institutions in the Nancy Fraser sense—publics where conversations are shorn off by essentialism and tribalism (Fraser, 1997). Virtualization has not lived up to the promise of universalizing or flattening out our particularisms. Indeed, it may have heightened these latter tendencies, breeding new nationalisms that glow in the dark—each man turning his key of endless data, in his own door, to use the imagery of T. S. Eliot (1954): “And each man fixes his eyes before his feet” (p. 53). The fact is that virtualization within the university setting as an example has been
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Page 43 more often than not dominated by the will to power of university administrations which now use “the” network for information and image control, surveillance, unidirectional communication, edicts, and coercive demands on actors lower down. The promise of openness of the virtual network capacity has been replaced too often by the elaboration of defensive shields sealing off administrative personnel from the rest of campus. Vocationalization In the neoliberal scenario, vocationalization is now a ruling logic in curricular arrangements and the overall calculation of educational actors. According to Mulderrig: education is positioned in terms of its relationship with the economy and broader state policy [where] an instrumental rationality underlies education policy discourse, manifested in the pervasive rhetoric and values of the market in the representation of educational participants and practices. (Mulderrig, 2003, as cited in Hill, 2003, p. 7) This commodification of education is further advanced by policy documents that acknowledge the relevance of lifelong learning,3 a key component developing workforce versatility which accommodates the needs of flexible production4 and “ensures that responsibility for employment tenure belongs to individuals themselves, ensures the possibility for companies to offset responsibility for social and fiscal payments, and enhances the freedom of business in a global environment” (Olssen, 2006, p. 222). In this context, information replaces knowledge in the interests of an ever-changing system of production, and educational goals are assessed in terms of the quantitative appropriation of skills and information for the labor market. We are living in the era of a new Taylorism in which knowledge production processes are being bent out of shape for the purposes of information delivery, strategic planning, and value extraction from culture (see, for example, the strategic plans on globalization of the University of Illinois for both the Chicago and Urbana campuses (www.uillinois.edu/president/strategicplan)). At all levels, education has become a market commodity. As Miyoshi (1998) warned us a few years ago, in his essay “‘Globalization’, Culture, and the University,” transnational capital has overridden the line between the university and its outside, enveloping its sinews, reorganizing its infrastructures, closing the distance between education and economy in the privatization of the organization of knowledge. As Miyoshi maintains, university students and administration seek to empty the rigorous and complex content out of curricular knowledge in the humanities, relabeling it and putting it up for sale. The goal is to maximize returns on investment as in the marketplace: Higher education is now up to the administrators. And, sooner or later, research too, will be up to the administrators. Of course, we know that administrators are merely in the service of the managers of the society and the economy who exercise their supreme authority vested in the transnational corporate world. (Miyoshi, 1998, p. 267) This investment in the enterprise ethic within the university has meant that on many campuses there has been an eroding of support for humanities and humanistic social sciences. For example, as Cantor and Courant have pointed out, “representation in superior humanities programs at public universities has dramatically declined between 1982 [and the present]” (2003, p. 5). Indeed, it is precisely these courses that provide the best preparation for democratic citizenship and critical thinking. And it is, indeed, the case that humanities disciplines have
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Page 44 consistently produced forms of knowledge that operate as a check on the worst aspects of societal modernization and industrialization. In undertaking our deep investment in the enterprise ethic, we have sacrificed this critical investment in knowledge for taking the pig to the market. One is reminded here of the Ohio State Journal of 1870, whose editorial cautioned educators and professionals at the time of the founding of Ohio State University: the lawyer who knows nothing but law, the physician who knows nothing but medicine, and the farmer who knows nothing but farming are on par with each other. They are all alike starved and indigent in the requirement of true culture. (Alexis Cope quoted in Cantor & Courant, 2003, p. 6) In regards to schooling, Richard Hatcher (2001) claims that global capitalism needs to ensure that schools produce effective and flexible workers and that they “subordinate to the personality, ideological and economic requirements of Capital” (Hill, 2003, p. 8). To guarantee this, neoliberalism creates institutional practices and rewards for enforcing the market rationale and competition in education.5 For instance, World Bank loans to given countries have been conditioned to the implementation of school reforms in line with neoliberal formulations.6 Similarly, the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States contributes to the support of a “global” neoliberal agenda pushing towards an increased presence of market dynamics in education by rewarding managerial practices in schools and by setting rigid standards they should meet in order to receive financial support. Fiscalization Vocationalization is closely tied to the process of fiscalization of the university and schooling, the application of “bottom-line” budgeting, and the proliferation of surveillance and control mechanisms— compulsory and nationally monitored tests, publication of schools’ and districts’ performances, and “policy emphasis on ‘shaming and naming’, closing, or privatizing ‘failing’ schools” (Hill, 2001)—that are arising everywhere as illustrated by the No Child Left Behind Act. As we live in a context of chronic budgetary crisis within the economy generally and within education, there are increasing demands for accountability and fiscalization. For instance, in view of the strict limits placed by the state on public funding, income generation has become an increasingly powerful imperative among tertiary institutions (Henkel, 2005). Johnstone (2002) states that governments worldwide have to supplement their revenues, “not only with ‘cost sharing,’ but also with sale of faculty services, sale or lease of university facilities, vigorous pursuit of grants and contracts, and fund raising” (p. 4). Concomitantly, research agendas are being made the target of rationalization as public funding in universities becomes oriented to “strategic” researches (Rip, 1997), that are “likely to make at least a background contribution to the solution of recognized current or future practical problems” (Henkel, 2005, p. 160). From this perspective, basic or “pure science” may receive funding only if it is responsive to socially and economically strategic needs. Besides, “the pathway to innovation is now seen as often beginning in industry rather than the university and as entailing more variable, complex, uncertain and interactive patterns of communication and collaboration between the university and industry” (Henkel, 2005, p. 160). More importantly, these institutional constraints are “an insidious way of lessening academic independence” (Musselin, 2005, p. 146) as the nature of the relationship between universities and academics changes under the influence of a managerial perspective that dictates criteria and norms to be applied to academic activities, and ensure that these criteria and norms are respected.
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Page 45 The pervasive measuring, accountability, and feasibility pressures have forced the humanistic disciplines to be on the defensive. Neoliberals have proven themselves particularly adept at blurring and bending political, ideological, cultural faiths to achieve means-end rationalities. We live in such a time on campuses across the United States in which the pressure of rationalization has placed humanistic programs in doubt, forcing them to establish new codes and rules of the game. Programs, particularly in the humanities disciplines, that will never be profit making enterprises are feeling the pressure of the bottom line. We are trapped in the marketplace logic of student credit hours and sponsored research objectives: more teaching, less time off, and less pay. Our relevant models are now the business school, the law school, and the natural sciences, wherever and however money is to be made there lie selfjustification and validation. The immediate casualties are interdisciplinary research, collaborative writing projects, and innovative curricula projects. The more long-term casualties are our students who now see us less as models of thoughtfulness than as purveyors of knowledge fast food. Likewise, disinvestment in public schooling has “destabilized and weakened its very own immunities as a secular institution in protecting and developing the public good” (Paraskeva, 2007, p. 154). Scholars such as Jurjo Torres Santomé (2001), Michael Apple (2003), among many others, concur, pointing to the ill-fated effects of disinvesting in public education (i.e., deficient infrastructure, lack of material and intellectual resources, low-quality teacher education programs, etc.). In João Paraskeva’s view, state disinvestments in public education acted as the needed sign “for the market forces to hijack public schooling from a public social domain to an economic private sphere” (p. 154). Ultimately, education as a public good is being compromised to privatization. Alongside all of these transformations, neoliberalism in education functions by curtailing any kind of critical thinking. Education is reorganized in a way that intends to produce skilled and flexible workers, but in so doing hinders a critical engagement with their reality (Harvey, 2000). Acknowledging the importance of critique for overcoming those constraints and engaging questions about the purposes of education within a democratic society, we will analyze the implications of suppressing criticality in the educational field. We will also provide current examples that have arisen as alternatives to neoliberalism, which defy the neoliberal instrumentalist view of education and advocate for change for students and teachers, school and society. Opening Critical Spaces in Education: the Resistance against Renaissance 2010 and the Citizen School In addition to increasing social class inequalities in educational provision and inflicting a loss of democratic accountability in educational institutions as a result of new public managerialism (Hill, 2007), the neoliberalization of education has contributed to the loss of critical thinking within a culture of performativity (Ball, 1999; Mahoney & Hextall, 2000). Neoliberalism hinders criticality not only by subduing the educational experience to standards of performativity and measurability but, also, by redefining education in an instrumental way, by operationalizing the centralization of curriculum (Gandin, 2007) and, overall, by constructing a discourse so powerful and pervasive that it becomes almost impossible for anybody to even imagine an alternative outside market hegemony (Paraskeva, 2007). Regarding the latter, Apple (2006) argues what makes the neoliberal discourse in education so compelling is that it addresses parents’ concerns about their children’s future in a global economy whose common traits are low wages, capital flight, and insecurity. Gandin (2007) and Hill (2004) refer to the centralization of curriculum as another aspect contributing to the compression of critical space in education. The efforts to centralize the curriculum, which might seem to contradict the neoliberal creed of choice and devolution, in
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Page 46 reality, operate to regulate and control the form and substance of what is taught in educational institutions. This apparent contradiction can be understood if one considers the neoconservative influence over education in countries such as the United States and Great Britain. The conservative agenda for education in these countries seeks to delimit what traditional knowledge and values need to be included in the school curriculum, what texts are “legitimate” and how different social relations (i.e., gender, race, and class) are conveyed to the students (Apple, 2006). For instance, Paraskeva (2007) claims that neoconservatism transformed and distorted the meanings of “specific key concepts and agendas that historically were deeply rooted within the marrow of a progressive educational and curriculum body, such as social justice and freedom, [reframing them] to assume a marketwise cultural meaning” (p. 146). In the same vein, Apple (2000) posits that, for example, equality is no longer regarded “as linked to past group oppression and disadvantage. It is now simply a case of guaranteeing individual choice under the conditions of a free market” (p. 19). In this context, then, student failure is no longer analyzed in relation to the policies and educational practices implemented but, rather, it is increasingly seen as the student’s fault. The neoliberal curriculum is not only increasingly centralized but, also, it is more and more “depoliticized.” For instance, Hill (2004) shows that the British teacher education curriculum has been purged of any “critical, sociological, and political examination of education and society” (p. 516). To illustrate this, he shows how the focus on, and the time for, issues such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and special needs have been drastically reduced, alongside “policy responses and political analysis of classroom and school pedagogy, and of national policy and legislation” (p. 516). In sum, school teaching and teacher education have been “largely detheorized, technicized [and] deintellectualized” (p. 517). Under neoliberalism, critical space—understood as “the potential and actuality for criticism of the existing society and the search for and promulgation of alternatives” (Hill, 2004, p. 515)—is not only being compressed by “(de)(re)meaning” (Paraskeva, 2007, p. 146) key progressive concepts or by subtly silencing certain voices within the educational discourse but, also, by explicit repressive or “witchhunting” (McLaren, Martin, Farahmandpur, & Jaramillo, 2005) practices aimed at marginalizing “those who have challenged the viability of the market as a mode of social organization” (Gabbard, 2003). In relation to this, Peter McLaren et al. (2005) provide different examples of disciplinary actions in the United States applied by schools and the police against teachers and students expressing opinions against the supremacy of the market and/or American policy. Neoliberalism is, indeed, pervasive and seems to have embedded its logic in every social area. However, it is not instituted without resistance. Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 serves as a case in point. This plan, announced on June 24, 2004 and sponsored by the Commercial Club—a group promoting the interests of Chicago’s corporate elite—aims at introducing markets and competition into public education, “shifting control away from elected school councils and towards the unelected Commercial Club, and substantially reducing the power of the teachers’ and other school employees’ unions” (Lipman & Hursh, 2007, p. 164). To put it directly, Renaissance 2010 “exemplifies the increased corporate control of schooling under the neoliberal turn” (Lipman & Hursh, 2007, p. 165). And, it mirrors and complements national neoliberal agendas such as the No Child Left Behind Act, according to which schools that persistently fail to reach the test score benchmarks can be turned over “to a private company” approved by the Department of Education or restructured as a charter school (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Despite its promises of improving the performance of Chicago public schools, this plan showed the reality of neoliberalism: increased inequality within the system, lack of democratic community participation in local schools and worsening conditions for teachers and students. Consequently, Renaissance 2010 is facing a broad-based resistance by teachers’ unions, local school councils, parent organizations, community organizations and progressive teacher educators and school
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Page 47 reformers. Even if the resistance practices have gained partial victories and basically have consisted in stopping some school closings, they have been strong enough in effect to put recentralizing neoliberal reforms under public scrutiny. More importantly, “this resistance has forged new alliances across communities and social sectors that had not been working together” (Lipman & Hursh, 2007, p. 173). The resistance against Renaissance 2010 shows that anti-neoliberal democratic struggles have taken root in education and that public education can potentially be recovered from corporate and financial interests. For instance, the “Citizen School” project—an educational initiative of the municipal government of Porto Alegre, Brazil—is being developed “to build support for more progressive and democratic policies in the face of the growing power of neoliberal movements at a national level” (Apple, 2006, p. 25). This project aims to create schools: Where everyone has guaranteed access, that is not limited to transmission of content; a school that is able to articulate the popular knowledge with the scientific knowledge. A school that is a public space for the construction and experience of citizenship, that goes beyond merely delivering knowledge and transforms itself into a social-cultural space, with a pedagogical policy oriented toward social transformation, where the student is the subject of the knowledge and where the pedagogy takes place in an interdisciplinary perspective, overcoming the curricular fragmentation present in schools. A school that has the necessary material resources to implement this policy, where the participation of the whole community can lead to the construction of an autonomous school, with a real democratic management, where all segments of the community have their participation guaranteed. (Azevedo, 1999, as cited in Gandin, 2007, p. 180) This project shows that new progressive spaces in the field of education can be constructed as an alternative to the neoliberal creed. The relationships among communities, education, and state can be rearticulated in participatory ways. A new language for education not reduced to instrumental accountability, but committed to egalitarian policies and practices can be created. Here, those “locked on this earth” mobilize to speak back to power exemplifying movement in the context of constraint and transformative will and efficacy in the context of slender resources. As Paraskeva (2007) posits, “we have the right of a ‘pedagogy of indignation’ and the right to refuse to participate in kidnapping the very gracious concept and practice of public schooling as public good” (p. 156). Or, as Apple (2006) concludes, “this is not time for pessimism. … The possibility of constructing and defending much more democratic schools does exist” (p. 26). It is our task to imagine and elaborate this possibility, working toward the broad realization of transformative educational change. Conclusion As we have shown, neoliberalism has reoriented educational institutions and has given a new meaning to learning and the goals of education. Equally important, “the commodification of education rules out the very critical freedom and academic rigour which education requires to be more than indoctrination” (McMurtry, 1991, p. 215). As Jurjo Torres Santomé (2008) asserts, the school curriculum conveys information “that neither reveals nor problematizes the structural causes underlying the cases it appears to denounce” (p. 198). The lack of sustained critical approaches to addressing social issues in educational institutions prevents students from realizing the human potential for the recreation of their own life world. Neoliberalism in education not only compresses critical spaces, but also hinders the likelihood of building democratic school
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Page 48 communities as competition “stymies the potential for system-wide policies designed to equalize opportunities” (Marginson, 2006). Having said all of this about neoliberalism and education, then, our greatest challenge is to create the conditions “for solidaristic, movement-style relations” (Marginson, 2006, p. 219) and counteracting a neoliberal language that “destroys social responsibility and critique, that invites a mindless, consumeroriented individualism to flourish, and kills off conscience” (Davies, 2005, p. 6). We need to stop the neoliberal appropriation of education by safeguarding the autonomy of the teaching learning process, the autonomy of intellectual production, and fostering the reproduction of critical scholars and the conditions for widening access for those who are severely disadvantaged by the current formulas and who are being shunted around from bad educational options to worse ones. Educational discourses and practices need to be reconnected to a progressive emancipatory project based upon solidarity and social justice. These are the central issues at stake even as we set out with Carlson from the “safe harbors” of educational practice and custom, seeking movement in the context of constraint, and refusing the stasis of administrative containment and neoliberal myopia. Notes 1 Foucault argues that government refers to “the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed … [it] is to structure the possible field of action of others” (1982, p. 221). 2 Many corporations such as Nike, Starbucks, and Disney have appropriated Keynesianism by rearticulating it as an ironic substance or residue in the form of philanthropy and thereby morphing it into the role of state-like promoters of ecumenical feel good affiliation, self-help forms of involvement in community, and so forth. Disney, in fact, provides a super model of community (“of the way we are supposed to be”) in the form of the fabricated town, Celebration—the new urbanist heaven in Central Florida, that Andrew Ross insightfully calls “Privatopia” (see his The Celebration Chronicles , 1999). For as the state disinvests in the public sphere, corporations move into, and redefine, community in neoliberal terms, absorbing philanthropy into cause-related marketing and the building of new synergies and brand share. From this development, if we were, then, to follow the ideological direction of, say, Teach for America and the No Child Left Behind Act, by this logic, IBM, Xerox, and, earlier, Ross Perot can do more for schools than the government, the state, or we, the intellectuals in the university—“the bright but useless ones.” 3 As Lambeir (2005) argues, “lifelong learning is the magic spell in the discourse of educational and economic policymakers, as well as in that of the practitioners of both domains” (p. 350). 4 In relation to this, some scholars contend that the discourses on lifelong learning represent “a form of biopower” (Marshall, 1995) or self-regulation aiming at reducing the “time lag” between individual skills and economic and technological innovation (Tuschling & Engemann, 2006, as cited in Olssen, 2006). 5 A similar argument is found in Brown’s (2003) work, where he posits that neoliberalism involves a normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such rationality. 6 In relation to this, Jones’s (1992) book provides a thorough description of the World Bank’s instrumental role in promoting Western ideas about how education and the economy are—or should be —related. Terms such as “external inducement” (Ikenberry, 1990), “direct coercive transfer” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996), “exporting ideas,” or “policy pusher” (Nedley, 2007) serve to illustrate the promotion of fiscal discipline and other neoliberal measures in poorer countries through donor agencies that condition their loans to the adoption of such measures. For instance, the World Bank demands curricular and structural change in education when it provides loans, alleging that those changes contribute to rationalizing and equalizing the delivery of this social good (Weiner, 2005).
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Page 49 References Apple, M. (2000). Official knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. (2003). The state and the politics of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. (2006). Understanding and interrupting neoliberalism and neoconservatism in education. Pedagogies , 1(1), 21–26. Ball, S. (1999). Performativity and fragmentation in postmodern schooling. In J. Carter (Ed.), Postmodernity and the fragmentation of welfare . London: Routledge. Barry, A., Osborne, T., & Rose, N. (1996). Foucault and Political Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Blanchard, L. A., Hinnant, C. C., & Wong, W. (1998). Market-based reforms in government: toward a social subcontract? Administration and Society , 30 (5), 483–512. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance. New York: The New Press. Brown, W. (2003) Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory and Event, 7(1), 1–25. Burchell, G. (1996). Liberal government and techniques of the self. In A. Barry, T. Osborne, & N. Rose (Eds.), Foucault and political reason (pp. 19–36). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cambridge, E. (2006). Relationships among globalization, development, primary education spending and brain drain in the developing world. 2007. The Heinz School Review , 3(1). Cantor, N., & Courant, P. (2003). Scrounging for resources. New Directions for Institutional Research , 119 , 3–12. Carlson, D. (2002). Leaving safe harbors . New York: Routledge. Davies, B. (2005). The (im)possibility of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , 26 (1), 1–14. Dolowitz, D., & Marsh, D. (1996). Who learns from whom? Political Studies , 44 (2), 343–357. Eakin, E. (2003, April 19). The latest theory is that theory doesn’t matter. New York Times. (Art and Ideas, Section D), p. 9. Eliot, T. S. (1954). The wasteland I. In, T. S. Eliot, Selected poems (pp. 51–53). London: Faber and Faber. Fitzsimons, P. (2002). Neoliberalism and education. Radical pedagogy. Retrieved June 12, 2007, from http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_2/04_fitzsimons.html. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power, Afterword. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault (pp. 208–226). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus . New York: Routledge. Gabbard, D. A. (2003). Education IS enforcement. In K. Saltman & D. A. Gabbard (Eds.), Education as enforcement (pp. 61–80). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Gandin, L. A. (2007). The construction of the citizen school project as an alternative to neoliberal educational policies. Policy Futures in Education , 5(2), 179–193. Giddens, A. (2003). Runaway world. New York: Routledge. Gordon, Colin (1991) Governmental rationality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect (pp. 1–51). Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Habermas, J. (1992). The structural transformation of the public sphere . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hatcher, R. (2001). Getting down to business. Education and Social Justice , 3(2), 45–59. Henkel, M. (2005). Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment. Higher Education , 49 , 155–176. Hill, D. (2001). State theory and the neo-liberal reconstruction of schooling and teacher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education , 22 (1), 135–155. Hill, D. (2003). Global neo-liberalism, the deformation of education and resistance. Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies , 1(1), 1–26. Hill, D. (2004). Books, banks, and bullets. Policy Futures in Education , 2(3), 504–522. Hill, D. (2007). Critical teacher education, new labour, and the global project of neoliberal capital. Policy Futures in Education , 5(2), 204–225. Ikenberry, G. J. (1990). The international spread of privatization policies. In E. Suleiman & J. Waterbury (Eds.), The political economy of public sector reform and privatization. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Page 50 Johnstone, D. B. (2002, July). Chinese higher education in the context of the worldwide university agenda. Adapted paper from an address to the Chinese and Foreign University Presidents Forum held in Beijing, PRC. Jones, P. W. (1992). World Bank financing of education. London-New York: Routledge. Klees, S. J. (2002). Privatization and neo-liberalism. Current Issues in Comparative Education , 1(2), 19– 26. Kurtz, M. J. (2004). The dilemmas of democracy in the open economy. World Politics , 56 , 262–302. Lambeir, B. (2005). Education as liberation. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 37 (3), 349–356. Lemke, T. (2001). The birth of bio-politics. Economy and Society , 30 (2), 190–207. Lipman, P., & Hursh, D. (2007). Renaissance 2010. Policy Futures in Education , 5(2), 160–178. Lipsitz, G. (2004). Locked here on this earth. Unpublished paper, University of California, Santa Cruz. Mahoney, P., & Hextall, I. (2000). Reconstructing teaching standards, performance and accountability. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Marginson, S. (2006). Engaging democratic education in the neoliberal age. Educational Theory , 56 (2), 205–219. Marshall, J. D. (1995). Foucault and neo-liberalism: Biopower and busno-power. In A. Neiman (Ed.), Philosophy of Education 1995, Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society (pp. 320-329). Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society. McChesney, R. (1999). Profits over people. New York: Seven Stories Press. McLaren, P., Martin, G., Farahmandpur, R., & Jaramillo, N. (2005). Teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McMurtry, J. (1991). Education and the market model. Journal of the Philosophy of Education , 25 (2), 209–217. Miyoshi, M. (1998). “Globalization,” culture and the university. In F. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Eds.), The cultures of globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Molnar, A. (1996). Giving kids the business . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Musselin, C. (2005). European Academic Labor Markets in Transition. Higher Education , 49 (1/2), 135– 154. Nedley, A. (2007). Policy transfer and the developing-country experience gap. Retrieved June 3, 2007, from http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/poli/news/sem3esrc/nedley.pdf Olssen, M. (2006). Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: Lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism. International Journal of Lifelong Education , 25 (3), 213–230. Ortner, S. (1994). Theory in anthropology since the sixties. In N. B. Dirks, G. Eley, & S. Ortner (Eds.), Culture/Power/History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Paraskeva, J. M. (2007). Kidnapping public schooling. Policy Futures in Education , 5(2), pp. 137–159. Patomäki, H., & Teivainen, T. (2002). Critical responses to neoliberal globalization in the Mercosur region: Roads towards cosmopolitan democracy? Review of International Political Economy , 9(1), 37–71. Rip, A. (1997). A cognitive approach to relevance of science. Social Science Information, 36 (4), 615– 640. Ross, A. (1999). The celebration chronicles. New York: Ballantine Books. Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and its discontents. London: Penguin. Thomas, C. (2001). Global governance, development and human security. Third World Quarterly , 22 (2), 159–175. Torres Santomé, J. (2001). Educación en tiempos de neoliberalismo. Madrid: Morata. Torres Santomé, J. (2008). School culture and the fight against exclusion: An optimistic curriculum. In C. McCarthy & C. Teasley, Transnational perspectives on culture, policy, and education (pp. 183–217). New York: Peter Lang. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2002). No Child Left Behind. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Weiner, L. (2005). Neoliberalism, teacher unionism, and the future of public education. New Politics , X (2). Retrieved June 3, 2007, from http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue38/weiner38.htm Whitty, G., Power, S., & Halpin, D. (1998). Devolution and choice in education. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Williams, R. (1975). Television. New York: Schocken Books. Xing, L. (2001). The market-democracy conundrum. Journal of Political Ideologies , 6(1), 75–94. Yeats, W. B. (1994). Michael Robartes and the dancer. Ithaca, NY: Cornel University.
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Page 51 4 Corporatization and the Control of Schools1 Kenneth J. Saltman The corporatization of schools is part of a broader assault on public and critical education and the aspirations of a critical democracy. By the “corporatization of public schools,” I mean both the privatization of public schools and the transformation of public schools on the model of the corporation. In what follows, I schematize corporatization in terms of economic, political, and cultural transformations. More specifically, I consider how the corporatization of public schools redistributes economic control and cultural control from the public to private interests. I argue that these intertwined redistributions of power undermine public democracy (the possibilities for the development of a more participatory and deeper democracy), just social transformation, and critical citizenship, while exacerbating material and symbolic inequality. Criticism of the corporatization of public education is predominantly restricted to the critical and radical political traditions.2 For example, one tends to find criticism of corporatization framed by liberal writers as “business involvement in schooling” or by the more limited notions of “privatization” or “school commercialism.” From right-wing perspectives, views on corporatiza-tion range from fiscal conservatives who champion privatization to cultural conservatives whose agendas are abetted by privatization to cultural conservatives and religious conservatives who worry about the ways business involvement in schooling threatens the traditions of schooling they support.3 What distinguishes critical perspectives on corporatization is their focus on how privatization and the remaking of the school on the model of the corporation relates to broader social, political, economic, and cultural struggles.4 From the critical perspective, the public school is a site and stake of struggle5 for broader egalitarian social transformation. In each section I will discuss how the criticism of corporatization from a critical perspective differs from liberal and right-wing views. The Expansion of Corporate Power While the institution of the modern corporation can be traced back to the origins of the European colonial expeditions of the late fifteenth century and their charters to exploit the new world (charters that initiated genocide of the indigenous populations of the new world as well as the genocidal African slave trade), the modern limited liability corporation dates back more recently to the mid-nineteenth century. Chartered stock corporations began historically to raise capital for public projects. The earliest corporations were highly unstable with spectacular financial
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Page 52 implosions. Prior to the invention of limited liability, corporate collapse resulted in the financial responsibility of each shareholder for the project’s debt. The advent of limited liability insulated the investing shareholder from devastating financial risk, paving the way for greater and greater levels of economic investment and development projects. However, limited liability also limited the responsibility for financial or socially devastating effects of investments from the individual investor. Once the stated mission of the corporation was accomplished the corporation’s charter would end. New projects required new corporate charters from the public. By the late nineteenth century, states were battling to lure corporations and capital, and this race resulted in the expansion of incorporation rules, the loosening of controls over mergers and acquisitions, and the allowance of a company owning stock in another. The 14th amendment to the Constitution was also reinterpreted such that the legal status of the stock corporation would be, in the eyes of the law, treated as a person. This expanded the rights of the corporate entity. By the early twentieth century, corporations gained further power. In fact, professor and attorney Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation (the book was made into an excellent film by Mark Achbar), contends that if the corporation is to be legally considered to have the rights of a private individual, then we should consider what kind of person the corporation is. How do we judge the character of an oil company that is willing to cut costs and consequently causes vast environmental devastation, or an automaker who lobbies against airbags for decades, causing untold deaths, or an agriculture company that genetically modifies crops in ways that threaten biodiversity and tries to patent life itself, or a fast food company that willingly destroys precious irreplaceable rainforest in South America for cattle grazing land to make burgers? How do we judge the character of any of these companies when they “partner” with schools because they know that they can make lifelong brand impressions on this captive audience? Referring to the DSM-IV, Bakan (2004, p. 57) argues that the corporation is akin to a psychopath exhibiting such traits as: socially damaging behavior, disregard for the well-being of others, singularly self-interested behavior, irresponsibility, manipulative tendencies, grandiosity, lacking empathy, asocial tendencies, and an inability to feel remorse. Bakan stresses that such a critical view of the corporation should not be based in moralism but, rather, in a recognition of what sort of institution results from the kind of laws that allow or even encourage such behavior. For example, corporations are legally required to maximize the financial returns of the corporation for shareholders even if this results in “externalities,” that is, destructive social effects. Bakan emphasizes that the corporation is an artificial and human-made entity and could be redefined through collective political action and will. Others have called for the revocation of corporate charters when corporations cease to serve the social good. The publicly traded and privately held corporation, today, stands as arguably the most powerful social institution, eclipsing the centrality of power held historically by the Church and the state. This is not to say that the corporation has completely replaced either the Church or the state as an ascendant hegemonic institution. However, the corporation has come to dominate nearly every social domain: agriculture, mass media and information, biological sciences, healthcare, energy, etc. As the ultimate corporate mission, the capitalist imperative for the growth of financial profit at any cost , is increasingly injected into all social domains, the social effects are felt everywhere. One effect is commodification: all social and individual things and values appear increasingly for sale. The commodification of the social world imperils collective public values and collective political agency as well as the public deliberation necessary for democratic governance. In nations theoretically dedicated to the promises of the liberal democratic political tradition, the imperatives for corporate profit have highly destructive effects: political campaigns are thoroughly based on advertising revenue and donations, political discourse is rendered all but meaningless as it is packaged into sound bites to fit between commercial messages, candidates are labeled as “electable” or “unelectable” by corporate media in ways that filter out candidates that pose a threat to corporate interests and values.
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Page 53 Corporations also have disproportionate hold over information and the representation of the social world in ways that undermine the possibilities for meaningful political deliberation to take on issues of public import or to enact radical change by transforming the rules of the game. Entire sectors of the economy, such as mass media, share interests with energy, heavy industry, and military corporations. NBC’s parent company General Electric illustrates this clearly. Such interlocking corporate interests across sectors mean that the mass media-led public discussion about, for example, how to understand and address global warming, must stay within the acceptable ideological framework—that is, the possibilities for action must not threaten corporate profit. (Interestingly, the power of a mass media company such as NBC to arrogantly admit this is made into comedy for profit on its television show 30 Rock—this shift belies confidence as a decade earlier NBC censored a Saturday Night Live cartoon that highlighted the relationship.) The corporate management and control of information in mass media shape and limit public discourse and stand as a warning for what the increasing corporate control of public schools will do to the possibilities for schools to address matters of dire public import as well as schools’ abilities to foster in students investigative habits and critical dispositions. Such critical dispositions enable students to develop as critical citizens linking subjects of study to broader historical struggles for power. The hegemony of the corporation results as well in the global spread of the ideology of corporate culture. Corporatization, in addition to privatization, involves the corporate model of organization being applied to institutions that should not aim for the maximization of profit and growth. The corporate organization tends to be hierarchical if not authoritarian, sharing a form closer to the military than to that of participatory democracy. As public institutions, including schools, are remodeled on the corporation, their public and collective organization is replaced with authoritarian features. The ideology of corporate culture not only projects corporate models of governance but also fosters consumerism. Consumerism redefines individual and collective values such that possessive individualism, acquisitiveness, and market-based forms of association replace civic values, collective political aspirations, and ethical pursuits. Corporatization and the Economic Control of Schools Although corporate involvement in public schooling goes back to the beginnings of public schooling (see Spring, 2003), the corporatization of public schools began in earnest in the early 1980s as part of the rise of neoliberal ideology (see Apple, 2006; Giroux, 2005; Goodman & Saltman, 2002; Harvey, 2005; Saltman, 2000). In the United States public education has become increasingly privatized and subject to calls for further privatization while business and markets have come to influence or overtake nearly every aspect of the field of education. Privatization takes the form of for-profit management of schools, “performance contracting,” for-profit charter schools, school vouchers, school commercialism, for-profit online education, online home-schooling, test publishing and textbook industries, electronic and computer-based software curriculum, for-profit remediation, educational contracting for food, transportation, and financial services, to name but a partial list. These for-profit initiatives include the steady rise of school commercialism such as advertisements in textbooks, in-class television news programs that show mostly commercials such as Channel One, soft drink vending contracts dominated by Coca Cola and Pepsi, sponsored educational materials that teach math with branded candy and sportswear, lessons in science and the environment by oil companies, and other attempts to hold youth as a captive audience for advertisers. The modeling of public schooling on business runs from classroom pedagogy that replicates corporate culture to the contracting out of management of districts to the corporatization of the curriculum to the “partnerships” that schools form with the business “community” that aim to market to kids.
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Page 54 Public School Privatization The Educational Management Organization (EMO) focuses on managing primary charter schools. As of 2004–2005, 59 EMOs were operating in 24 states with 239,766 students. Major companies include The Edison Schools (98 schools), The Leona Group (45 schools), National Heritage Academies (51), White Hat Management (38), Mosaica (27). The largest EMO, The Edison Schools, has been beset by numerous financial and accountability scandals which, as I explain in my book, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education , have less to do with corrupt individuals than with the impositions of privatization and the social costs of public deregulation. Major privatization initiatives also include market-based voucher schemes allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court and implemented by the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC, and in the gulf region following hurricane Katrina (see Saltman, 2005a, 2007). Education conglomerate companies such as Michael Milken’s Knowledge Universe aim to amass a number of different education companies. These conglomerate companies hold a variety of for-profit educational enterprises, including test publishing, textbook publishing, tutoring services, curriculum consultancies, educational software development, publication, and sales, toy making, and other companies.6 In the United States, the ESEA law (“No Child Left Behind” (NCLB)) has fostered privatization by investing billions of public dollars in the charter school movement, which is pushing privatization, with over three-quarters of new charter schools being for-profit. NCLB is also requiring high-stakes testing, “accountability,” and remediation measures that shift resources away from public school control and into control by test and textbook publishing corporations and for-profit remediation companies. For example, as The Edison Schools failed to profit financially as a “publicly traded” company, the company has shifted investment towards for-profit tutoring work through spin-off companies Newton and Tungsten. Despite a number of failed experiments with performance contracting in the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s, for-profit education companies and their advocates have continued to claim that they could operate public schools better and cheaper than the public sector. This claim appears counter-intuitive: after all, how could an organization drain financial resources to profit investors and still maintain the same quality that the organization had with the resources that could be paying for more teachers, books, supplies, and upkeep? Evidence appears on the side of intuition. To date, the evidence shows that it is not possible to run schools for profit while adequately providing resources for public education. This has been equally true whether the profit model is vouchers, charters, or performance contracting. Nonetheless, the business sector, right-wing think tanks in and outside of academia, and corporate media continue to call for market-based approaches to public schooling. This has as much to do with ideology as with financial interest. For example, The Walton Family Foundation (the largest family-owned business in the United States is Wal-Mart) is the largest spender lobbying for public school privatization schemes. Assuredly this has less to do with plans of the company to open Wal-Schools or interest in the public schools developing highly educated and thoughtful Wal-Mart “greeters” capable of union organizing to break the anti-union commitments of the company than it does with the ideological beliefs of the Walton family that business works for them so business should be the model for schooling. Advocates of public school privatization rely on a number of arguments for their economic claims: (1) the larger the company becomes the more it can benefit from “economies of scale” to save costs through, for example, volume purchasing and running schools across multiple states; (2) the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector because for-profit companies must compete with other companies; and (3) the private sector is more efficient because the public sector is burdened by regulations and constraints, such as teachers’ unions
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Page 55 and the protections that they afford teachers that only get in the way of efficient delivery of educational services. Proponents often justify commercialism and other for-profit initiatives on the grounds that they provide much-needed income for underfunded public schools. However, even the business press by 2002 recognized that education is not good business: schools have too many variable costs for economies of scale to work; business would have to be spectacularly efficient to allow for quality and skimming of profits for executives while Enron, Worldcom, Martha Stewart, and The Edison Schools show just how inefficient business can be; far from regulations being a hindrance they provide necessary protections against abuse of teachers’ labor while providing financial transparency. As the largest ever experiment in privatization, The Edison Schools overworked teachers, mis-reported earnings, mis-reported test scores, counseled out low-scoring students, cheated on tests to show high performance to potential investors, and as they approached bankruptcy time and again, they revealed just how precarious and unaccountable market imperatives can be when applied to education. In the 1990s the “cola wars” led to a race by soda companies to get vending machines and advertisements into schools. The subsequent public health crisis that includes unprecedented epidemic levels of obesity and type II diabetes in young children has given weight to multiple local struggles against school commercialism. School commercialism has grown steadily and taken a much larger form than simply soft drink vending (see Molnar, 2005). Advertising in schools has reached new levels with sponsored educational materials (ads for Oreo cookies integrated into math lessons), ads lining school hallways, the sides of school buses, and scoreboards, marketing to students in school, electronic marketing, promotional contests (such as those run by Pizza Hut and Domino’s), and Channel One, an advertising-driven faux-news program launched by Christopher Whittle, the magazine entrepreneur who would go on to create The Edison Schools. From a liberal and critical perspective, the privatization of public schools and the ideology of corporate culture need to be opposed. For liberals the goal is to strengthen public schools. Corporatization undermines the liberal promises of public schooling to make educated human beings and a thoughtful participating polity. From a liberal perspective, even though historically the public sector has failed to universally provide quality educational services equally to everyone, that remains the goal. In this view, the expansion of the “best” schools, that is, those schools free from class and racial privilege, remain the model. Liberals such as Jonathan Kozol highlight the spending disparities between rich predominantly White schools and poor predominantly African American and Latino schools. Per pupil, rich schools get as much as four times more money than poor schools do while poor schools actually need more than rich schools do. For liberals, the project of educational equality is very much defined by the equalization of educational resources towards the goal of inclusion—the equalization of educational opportunity is supposed to translate into economic and political opportunity for participation in existing institutions. For criticalists, the defense of public schools is about defending the public sector towards the goal of critical transformation of the political and economic systems via political and cultural struggle waged through civil society. In this sense, the cultural struggle to make public schools sites for the making of critical consciousness is crucial and is distinct from the liberal perspective. Corporatization and the Cultural Control of Schools The cultural aspect of corporatizing education involves transforming education on the model of business, describing education through the language of business, and the emphasis on the “ideology of corporate culture” that involves making meanings, values, and identifications compatible with a business vision for the future. The business model appears in schools in the push for
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Page 56 standardization and routinization in the form of emphases on standardization of curriculum, standardized testing, methods-based instruction, teacher de-skilling, scripted lessons, and a number of approaches aiming for “efficient delivery” of instruction. The business model presumes that teaching, like factory production, can be ever speeded up and made more efficient through technical modifications to instruction and incentives for teachers and students, such as cash bonuses. Holistic, critical, and socially oriented approaches to learning that understand pedagogical questions in relation to power are eschewed as corporatization instrumentalizes knowledge, disconnecting knowledge from the broader political, ethical, and cultural struggles informing interpretations and claims to truth while denying differential material power to make meanings. Business metaphors, logic, and language have come to dominate policy discourse. For example, advocates of privatizing public schools often claim that public schooling is a “monopoly,” that public schools have “failed,” that schools must “compete” to be more “efficient,” and that schools must be checked for “accountability” while parents ought to be allowed a “choice” of schools from multiple educational providers, as if education were like any other consumable commodity. Shifting public school concerns onto market language frames out public concerns with equality, access, citizenship-formation, democratic educational practices, and questions of whose knowledge and values constitute the curriculum. As an offshoot of corporatization, market language and justifications for schooling eradicate the political and ethical aspects of education. For example, within the view of corporatization students become principally consumers of education and clients of teachers rather than democratic citizens in the making who will need the knowledge and intellectual tools for meaningful participatory governance; teachers become deliverers of services rather than critical intellectuals; knowledge becomes discrete units of product that can be cashed in for jobs rather than thinking of knowledge in relation to broader social concerns and material and symbolic power struggles, the recognition of which would be necessary for the development of genuinely democratic forms of education. School commercialism is the most publicized aspect of public school privatization. This owes largely to liberal assumptions that commercialism taints the otherwise neutral and objective space of the school with business ideologies. From the progressive and radical traditions, such liberal horror at, for example, ads for junk food in textbooks is naive because the school is already understood as a political “site and stake” in struggles for hegemony by different groups including classes, races, and genders.7 Schools teach the knowledge and skills necessary for students to take their places as workers and managers in the economy. Skills and know-how are taught in ideological forms conducive to social relations conducive to the reproduction of relations of production. In the 1970s this was dubbed the “hidden curriculum”: students learn to be docile workers from teachers who emulate the boss; tests and grades prepare students for understanding compartmentalized, often meaningless, tasks and numerically quantifiable rewards that are extrinsic; earning grades prepares kids to work for money; school bells segment time in ways conducive to shift work while desks are arrayed with the teacher/boss at the big desk and the student/workers at the little desks … All of this suggests that the space of school is hardly free of capitalist ideology from the outset. As Henry Giroux has suggested in his important discussion of the politics of No Child Left Behind (Giroux, 2003), the hidden curriculum is no longer hidden. As neoliberal ideology has resulted in the triumph of market fundamentalism in an overt fashion to all realms of social life, schooling has been remade on the model of the market.8 Corporatization and Neoliberalism Contemporary initiatives to corporatize public schools can only be understood in relation to the neoliberal ideology that presently dominates politics.9 Neoliberalism, a form of radical fiscal
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Page 57 conservatism, alternately described as “neoclassical economics” and “market fundamentalism,” originates with Frederic Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the “Chicago boys” at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. Within this view, individual and social ideals can best be achieved through the unfettered market. In its ideal forms (as opposed to how it is practically implemented), neoliberalism calls for privatization of public goods and services, decreased regulation on trade, loosening of capital and labor controls by the state, and the allowance of foreign direct investment. In the view of neoliberalism, public control over public resources should be shifted out of the hands of the necessarily bureaucratic state and into the hands of the necessarily efficient private sector. Neoliberals seized upon the historical events of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war to claim that there could be no alternative to global capitalism. Within the logic of capitalist triumphalism, the only course of action would be to enforce the dictates of the market and expand the market to previously inaccessible places. As David Harvey has recently written, neoliberalism has been extremely successful at redistributing economic wealth and political power upward. For this reason Harvey calls for understanding neoliberalism as a longstanding project of class warfare waged by the rich on the rest. Not only have welfare state protections and government authority to protect the public interest been undermined by neoliberalism, but these policies have resulted in widescale disaster in a number of places that have forced governments to rethink neoliberalism as it has been pushed by the so-called “Washington consensus.” Originally viewed as an off-beat doctrine, neoliberalism was not taken seriously within policy and government circles until the late 1970s and early 1980s in Thatcher’s UK and in Reagan’s US. Chile under Pinochet was a crucial testing ground for these ideals. The increasing acceptability of neoliberalism had to do with the steady lobbying for neoliberals by right-wing think tanks but also the right conditions, including economic crises facing the Keynesian model and Fordism in the late 1970s. Neoliberalism has a distinct hostility to democracy. As Harvey writes: Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. A strong preference exists for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than democratic and parliamentary decision-making. Neoliberals prefer to insulate key institutions, such as the central bank, from democratic pressures. Given that neoliberal theory centres on the rule of law and a strict interpretation of constitutionality, it follows that conflict and opposition must be mediated through the courts. Solutions and remedies to any problems have to be sought by individuals through the legal system. (Harvey, 2005, pp. 66–67) In education, neoliberalism has taken hold with tremendous force, remaking educational common sense and pushing forward the privatization and deregulation agendas. The steady rise of all of the reforms and the shift to business language and logic mentioned in the earlier sections can be understood through the extent to which neoliberal ideals have succeeded in taking over educational debates. Neoliberalism appears in the now commonsense framing of education exclusively through presumed ideals of upward individual economic mobility (the promise of cashing in knowledge for jobs) and the social ideals of global economic competition. The “TINA” thesis that has come to dominate politics throughout much of the world (There Is No Alternative to the Market) has infected educational thought as the only questions on reform agendas appear to be how to best enforce knowledge and curriculum conducive to national economic interest and the expansion of a corporately managed model of globalization as perceived from the
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Page 58 perspective of business. What is dangerously framed out within this view is the role of democratic participation in societies ideally committed to democracy and the role of public schools in preparing public democratic citizens with the tools for meaningful and participatory self-governance. By reducing the politics of education to its economic roles, neoliberal educational reform has deeply authoritarian tendencies that are incompatible with democracy. As the only concern becomes one of the efficient enforcement of the “right” knowledge, critical engagement, investigation, and intellectual curiosity appear as impediments to learning and teachers are deskilled deliverers of prepackaged curricula prohibiting their potential as critical intellectuals. Educational language has been overrun with neoliberal terms that undergird the framing of educational issues through the ideal of “achievement,” “excellence,” “performance-based assessment.” These nebulous terms falsely presume agreement over what is meant by these goals. Neoliberals have sought to lay claim to the meaning of “democracy” as well. John Chubb and Terry Moe wrote in their 1990 book Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools that the market better facilitates democracy than does political involvement of the public. For Chubb and Moe the bureaucratic strictures of the public sector disable democratic administration while the market facilitates it. As liberal scholar Jeffrey Henig (1994) pointed out in his book Rethinking School Choice, Chubb and Moe’s conception of democracy understands democracy through administrative procedure rather than collective public enactment of shared political and ethical commitments and visions. All critical views on corporatization of public schooling share certain basic assumptions: 1. We live in a fundamentally unjust social order: politically, economically, and culturally. 2. Public schools either function hegemonically to contribute to the reproduction of this unjust social order or public schools can be sites for counter-hegemonic struggle. 3. What goes on in schools (school model, curriculum, pedagogy) matters as to whether public schools function predominantly as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic sites. 4. Critical educational practices can produce critical subjects. 5. Collective social transformation requires critical subjects who can theorize and act—engage in praxis. How does corporatization threaten the critical vision? Liberal and conservative perspectives on public schooling operate through accommodationism. That is, they presume that we live in a fundamentally just social order and that the role of public schools is to accommodate students to that order. While historically and presently state-administered public schooling functions hegemonically, both privatization and the ideology of corporate culture deepen the conservatizing tendencies of public schooling rather than unsettling them. In part this is due to the ways that corporatization reworks public education through the discourse of economism. Corporatization conflates the public and private purposes of public schooling, treating schooling like a for-profit business. While state-administered public education is grounded in the model of the industrial economy, public schooling prior to the advent of corporatization retained secular humanist ideals as well as reference to broader public purposes of public schooling. Corporatization as an expression of neoliberalism reduces the purposes of schooling to economic ends. On an individual level, the school becomes a means to upward economic mobility for the individual. On a national level, the school becomes a player in global economic competition. The economism promoted by corporatization produces a version of the social world in which the capitalist economy and the individual’s submission to its dictates become the organizing principle behind learning and teaching. Part of what is at stake in the corporatization of schools is the diminishment of the public sphere. Some, such as Stephen Ball (2007), have recently suggested that the distinction between public and private in education is too blurred and complex to allow a meaningful distinction
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Page 59 between public and private or to justify defending public schools, and that it is not clear what public values in education might be. Ball appears alternately critical of, and sympathetic to, projects that allow corporations to contract with the state to run schools. There are at least four clear ways that those committed to democratic education must understand how public control differs from private control. I use The Edison Schools10 as an example in each case to illustrate this: 1. Public versus private ownership and control : Edison is able to skim public tax money that would otherwise be reinvested in educational services and shunt it to investor profits. These profits take concrete form as the limousines, jet airplanes, and mansions that public tax money provides to entrepreneur and majority owner Chris Whittle. These profits also take symbolic form as they are used to hire public relations firms to influence parents, communities, and investors to have faith in the company. This is a parasitical financial relationship that results in the management of the schools in ways that will maximize the potential profit for investors while cutting costs. This has tended to result in anti-unionism, the reduction of education to the most measurable and replicable forms, assaults on teacher autonomy, etc. There is no evidence that the draining of public wealth and its siphoning to capitalists have improved public education or that they are required for the improvement of public education. If the state is going to use privatization as a tool (as the advocates of the Third Way in the UK do) then they could exercise authoritative state action directly in ways that do not upwardly redistribute wealth or funnel such wealth into misrepresenting the public influence and effects of privatization. 2. Public versus private governance: There are numerous aspects of the transformation in governance accompanying privatization, including the shift away from community governance, union governance, and the shift to business group governance. In Chicago, public schools are being closed under “Renaissance 2010” and reopened as for-profit and non-profit charter schools. Such schools are robbed of their community school councils and business-dominated councils are installed. With Edison, decisions regarding the use of resources shift from community to a management team with a financial stake in particular outcomes. What is more, public tax money is brought in as profit and is then reinvested in public relations firms that lobby and influence the community (the public) to support Edison. 3. Public versus private cultural politics : Privatization affects the politics of the curriculum. A company like Edison cannot have a critical curriculum that makes central, for example, the ways corporatization threatens democratic values and ideals. While most public schools do not have wide-ranging critical curricula, the crucial issue is that some do and most could. This is a matter of public struggle. Privatization forecloses such struggle by shifting control to private hands and framing out possibilities that are contrary to institutional and structural interest. The possibility of developing and expanding critical pedagogical practices is a casualty of privatization. 4. Public versus private forms of publicity and privacy including secrecy and transparency : Private companies are able to keep much of what they do secret. Edison could selectively reveal financial data and performance data that would further its capacity to lure investors. Such manipulation is endemic to privatization schemes. Collapsing public and private naturalizes public education as a private business despite fundamentally different missions. As public schools are privatized they are subject to a market-based logic of achievement in which knowledge is thought of as units of commodity to consume and regurgitate, it can be cashed in for grades, the grades can be cashed in for promotion, and the promotion can be cashed in for jobs and cash in the economy. The overemphasis on standards and standardization, testing,
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Page 60 and “accountability” replicate a corporate logic in which measurable task performance and submission to authority become central. Intellectual curiosity, investigation, teacher autonomy, and critical thought, not to mention critical theory, have no place in this view. The charter school movement is seldom recognized as an aspect of corporatization. Yet it typifies the social costs of the neoliberal ideals of deregulation and managerialism as they play out in education. Charter schools aim to minimize the “bureaucratic red tape” alleged to be responsible for problems faced by traditional public schools. A business metaphor of efficiency is merged with a celebration of entrepreneurial experimentation to suggest that public regulations keep schools from being efficient and that the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector is all that is needed. The neoliberal mantra of deregulation is applied to create public schools not subject to unions, with reduced administrative controls and, in many cases, public oversight. Although to date there is no evidence of charter schools being better than traditional public schools, charter schools weaken the public mission of universally good public schools and set the stage for further privatization. Once the control of a public school is devolved to local managers it is merely a matter of swapping in a different manager. The central idea of “efficiency” defined by ever-increasing test scores is the only way to understand quality in this view. The Edison Schools again provide a ready example of the ways that privatization as a form of corporatization puts into place economism and anti-criticality. As Edison was struggling to expand to become profitable, it had to show investors steadily improving test scores. The profitability of the company was contingent upon its continued expansion to be able to achieve “economies of scale” in order to deliver more than the public schools could, while skimming out profit at the same time. The possibility of expanding the business and becoming profitable depended upon getting more investor capital. Investors needed to see evidence that Edison was superior in quality to the public schools. So Edison put tremendous pressure on schools to achieve higher and higher test scores to show investors and to use in public relations. This resulted in reports of teachers cheating on tests and encouraging students to cheat on tests. What is more, the tests became synonymous with educational quality. The possibilities of critical forms of education that engage with power-relations, politics, and ethics are foreclosed when in conflict with the institutional interests of the company running the school. Put differently, will an Edison school ever include meaningful criticism of corporate power as part of its curriculum? Can it? Moreover, Edison and other educational privatizers target poor and working-class communities. That is, they target those communities that have been historically short-changed by inadequate funding. These are students slated largely for the low-paying end of the economy. Critical curriculum and school models could provide the means for theorizing and acting to challenge the very labor exploitation that schools such as these prepare students to submit to. Edison does not target for privatization schools in economically and racially privileged communities. Privileged schools not only benefit from success at capturing the bounty of public wealth but they also prepare students for the critical thinking necessary to take management and leadership roles in the economy. Of course, critical thinking in the form of problem-solving skills is very different from the kind of critical theorizing that would allow students to comprehend the social and individual costs of their privilege and to learn to labor for something other than the corporate dream of unfettered consumption. In the progressive tradition public deliberation on matters of public importance is struggled over by citizens and groups. Culture in the progressive tradition is to be interrogated rather than worshipped or feared. What is common throughout the progressive tradition is the idea that acts of interpretation become central to acts of political intervention and participation. That is, in the progressive tradition, the meaning of democracy and the contents of democracy, as well as the contents of the culture, are subject to interpretive struggle. The progressive tradition understands democracy as dynamic rather than static, as shot through with multiple power struggles, and as a quest and process rather than an achieved state that must be fixed and held
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Page 61 and protected from corruption. In the progressive educational tradition a democratic society requires citizens capable of not just functional literacy but also critical literacies.11 Public schools are unique in that they hold the public potential to foster such democratic dialogue and debate rather than being reception centers for the knowledge, values, and virtues handed down by selfproclaimed experts. Public school corporatization threatens the possibility for public schools to develop as places where knowledge, pedagogical authority, and experiences are taken up in relation to broader political, ethical, cultural, and material struggles informing competing claims to truth. Struggles against these ideologies and their concrete political manifestations must link matters of schooling to other domestic and foreign policies. It is incumbent upon progressive educators and cultural workers to imagine new forms of public educational projects and to organize to take back privatized educational resources for public control. Although historically public education in the United States has functioned to reproduce racial, class, and gender oppression, among others, it has also been central to, if not at the forefront of, social movements such as civil rights and grassroots multiculturalism. Public schooling has also been open to ongoing experimentation, tinkering, and response to intellectual movements across the political spectrum, including good ones such as progressivism and bad ones such as scientific management. More importantly, beyond responding to social and cultural trends outside of schools, public schools themselves are sites of cultural production. The cultural politics of education do not go away. In other words, teachers as cultural producers are inevitably engaged in making meanings, values, ideologies, and identifications. The crucial questions are under what conditions and with what constraints do they do so. The sanction of commercialism, for example, produces commercial meanings and values, makes subjects as principally consumers and undermines citizenship and the very notion of the public. However, school commercialism can be taken up critically by teachers to highlight the kinds of values, ideologies, and interests represented by a particular product. Such analysis ought to include a focus on the material and symbolic interests embedded in the cultural text as well as analysis of what kinds of identifications and identities such commercial culture asks students to become. The possibilities of critical pedagogical engagement with corporatization highlight the limitations of the liberal approaches to it. For example, liberal approaches to school commercialism end with the demand to keep public schools free of commercial content. Critical pedagogy offers the capacity to use commercialism to criticize the broader structures of power informing its very presence in the school. Privatization schemes, however, materially limit what kinds of critical cultural production can be done. For example, when Disney runs schools in their corporate town, Celebration in Florida, a curriculum addressing what role Disney or ABC or the media monopoly plays in making public meanings is out of the question, as is the likelihood of any serious questioning of the role of the corporation. The implications for a self-critical society are dire. Though public schools do often serve as ideological state apparatuses, they are nonetheless open to the possibility of being remade in democratic ways because ownership and control of such schools remain public and stay within the realm of public debate and oversight. This being the case then, the question is how to strengthen and further democratize a public system that needs to be understood as a crucial place for the making of critical democratic citizens. What are the many ways that democratic cultural politics can be fostered within public schools to reinvigorate democratic culture everywhere? How can corporatization initiatives be reversed so as to reimagine public schools as the site of radical social transformation rather than the reproduction and entrenchment of existing relations of power? There is already an enormous defensive backlash against such anti-critical movements as the standardization of curriculum and the high stakes testing regime. But progressives need to take the offensive by putting forward critical curriculum and approaches and pursuing concrete goals to take back public spaces. What should not be forgotten is that while the battle for critical public schools and against corporatization is valuable as a struggle in itself, it should also be viewed
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Page 62 as an interim goal to what ought to be the broader goals of the left: to redistribute state and corporate power from elites to the public while expanding critical consciousness and a radically democratic ethos. Notes 1 This chapter extensively builds on and expands my brief contributions in: Mathison & Ross (2007); Hare & Portelli (2005). 2 I am referring to the traditions of critical pedagogy and critical theory as well as to the varieties of thought characterized by radical democracy, with its focus on the expansion of egalitarian social relations and its emphasis on the priority of culture as well as the redistributive economic theories of the socialist tradition. 3 In this chapter, I will look broadly at the varieties of right-wing approaches to corporatization, making a division between fiscal and cultural conservatives. For a more elaborate discussion of the varieties of rightist thought including neoliberalism, neoconservatism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarian populism, see Apple (2006). 4 Despite the centrality of broader social struggle and structural transformation, critical perspectives on corporatization are hardly identical and tend to map to the different political, economic, and cultural referents for theorizing the phenomenon. Criticism of corporatization can be found grounded in perspectives including neo-Marxist (Apple, Lipman), Marxist (McLaren, Hill, etc.), critical theory, radical democracy (Giroux, Aronowitz, Trend), Foucauldian (Ball), poststructuralist, pragmatist (Molnar, Boyles), and anarchist (Spring, Gabbard) with many authors drawing on multiple traditions. There is not space here to elaborate fully these different political referents for the criticism of corporatization. However, some of the major disagreements involve questions of the centrality of class and economics as opposed to the centrality of culture, identity, difference, and language, as well as debates over the possibilities for the role of the state in public versus private spheres. Many of the debates that face criticalists often have a legacy that recapitulates many of the central debates initiated by Marx and carried down from the Marxian tradition, though the minority of criticalists define themselves as Marxists. Other disagreements in the perspective on corporatization are a matter of methodological emphasis on institutional analysis as opposed to broader structural analysis. Joel Spring—writing from the anarchist tradition—and Alex Molnar—grounded in Deweyan progressivism—each tend to offer valuable institutionally focused analyses. These are highly compatible with other perspectives that emphasize the situating of corporatization in relation to broader structural forces and trends. All critics of corporatization from a critical perspective view the corporatization of public schooling as an expression of neoliberal capitalism. 5 This critical view of hegemonic struggle can be traced from Gramsci to Althusser and can be seen in the critical response to corporatization in contemporary writers such as Apple, Giroux, Lipman, Saltman, Leistyna, and numerous others (see Althusser, 2001; Gramsci, 1971). 6 For the clearest and most up to date coverage of the terrain and scope of public school privatization and commercialization see Alex Molnar’s annual reports on school commercialism online at the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory available at www.schoolcommercialism.org as well as Alex Molnar (2005). Molnar’s theoretical perspective draws on Deweyan pragmatism and the institutional analysis typified by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s media analysis that focuses on the active role of the public relations industry in “manufacturing consent” to business dominance. Joel Spring’s important, historically sweeping Educating the consumer-citizen (2003), offers essential institutional analysis. Such historical institutional analyses are crucial yet incomplete in that they need to be coupled with a more comprehensive cultural theorization as well as broader situating within global economic structural dynamics. For important recent scholarship on a range of issues involved in privatization see, for example, Boyles (2004); Spring (2003); Kohn & Shannon (2002). See also Saltman (2003). 7 State-run schools in capitalist nations being a “site and stake” of struggle for hegemony appears in the work of Antonio Gramsci and is developed from Gramsci by Louis Althusser in, for example, his “Ideology and ideological state apparatuses” (2001) and, more explicitly with reference to Gramsci,
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Page 63 in Machiavelli and us (1997). The limitations of the reproduction theories have been taken up extensively and importantly, for example, with regard to the theoretical problems of Marxism including the legacies of scientism, class reductionism, economism, etc. See, for example, Aronowitz & Giroux (1989). Despite these limitations Althusser’s work appears important for theorizing the state at the present juncture. 8 Neoliberalism in education has been taken up extensively by a number of authors. A very partial and incomplete and U.S.-focused list includes: Apple, 2006; Gabbard & Ross, 2004; Giroux, 2003, 2005; Goodman & Saltman, 2002; Saltman, 2000; Saltman & Gabbard, 2003. 9 An excellent mapping of these conservatisms and others can be found in Michael Apple’s Educating the “Right” Way (2001) . 10 I take these issues up in greater detail in Saltman (2005b). 11 Within the field of education the contemporary traditions of critical pedagogy and critical literacy continue to pursue and develop this. References Althusser, L. (1997). Machiavelli and us . New York: Verso. Althusser, L. (2001). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Essay in Lenin and philosophy and other essays (pp. 127–188). New York: Monthly Review Press. Apple, M. W. (2006). Educating the right way (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Aronowitz, S., & Giroux, H. (1989). Education still under siege . Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Bakan, J. (2004). The corporation. New York: Free Press. Ball, S. J. (2007). Education plc. New York: Routledge. Boyles, D. (Ed.). (2004). Schools or markets? Commercialism, privatization and school-business partnerships. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates. Chubb, J., & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Gabbard, D., & Ross, E. W. (2004). Defending public schools. Westport, CT: Praeger. Giroux, H. (2003). Abandoned generation. New York: Palgrave. Giroux, H. (2005). The terror of neoliberalism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Goodman, R., & Saltman, K. J. (2002). Strange love, or how we learn to stop worrying and love the market . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gramsci, A. (1971). The prison notebooks. (Q. Hoare, & G. N. Smith, Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hare, W., & Portelli, J. (Eds.). (2005). Key questions for educators. Halifax: Edphil Books. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Henig, J. (1994). Rethinking school choice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kohn, A., & Shannon, P. (2002). Education, Inc. New York: Heinemann. Mathison, S., & Ross, E. W. (Eds.). (2007). Battleground schools. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Molnar, A. (2005). School commercialism. New York: Routledge. Saltman, K. J. (2000). Collateral damage . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Saltman, K. J. (2003). Book review of Education, Inc. in Teachers College Record . 105 (7), 1331–1370. Saltman, K. J. (2005a). Schooling and the politics of disaster. New York: Routledge. Saltman, K. J. (2005b). The Edison Schools. New York: Routledge. Saltman, K. J. (2007). Capitalizing on disaster. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Saltman, K. J., & Gabbard, D. (Eds.). (2003) Education as enforcement: The militarization and corporatization of schools. New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer. Spring, J. (2003). Educating the consumer-citizen . New York: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
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Page 64 5 The Trojan Horse of Curricular Contents Jurjo Torres Santomé (translated by Eduardo Cavieres) The present information-based society has emerged from an accelerated process of knowledge production supported by globalization policies, most of which respond to neoliberal tenets. Knowledge thus appears as the basis for economic productivity and competitive markets, and has consequently shifted from being a common good to what we can call “capitalist knowledge”: a private form of knowledge at the service of multinational corporations of production, distribution, and commercialization. This neoliberal orientation of knowledge is visible in elitist forums such as the G-8’s Meetings of Ministers of Education. This powerful group’s 2006 Moscow Declaration placed new emphasis on the commercialization of knowledge and on raising educational standards in mathematics, science, technology, and foreign languages, as subjects closely linked to the development of markets. At the same time, subjects such as philosophy, literature, arts, or physical education were, predictably, downplayed. The European Round Table of Industrialists, created in 1983, is one of the most influential entrepreneurial lobbies in the European Union. It includes high executives from multinational corporations such as Volvo, Nestlé, British Airways, Rolls-Royce, Heineken, Philips, Volkswagen, Nokia, Renault, etc., who have also used their economic power to pressure governments to align state educational and research policies with these businesses’ commercial interests. In light of this new orientation of knowledge, educational actors increasingly find themselves having to justify the knowledge selected for teaching students. Nonetheless, neoliberal policies have simultaneously caused teachers to lose interest in this selection process through the promotion of textbooks that dictate and sequence school contents. In other words, teachers see little point in analyzing the relevance of contents that have already been analyzed and selected. Even homework and exercises come pre-packaged, the teacher’s manual providing all the “right” answers for teachers. Considering how this knowledge is connected to the spread of global markets, educational institutions would do well to teach students to analyze, among other things, how political, economic, and social models can be(come) just; what perversions and injustices are generated by the capitalist neoliberal model; what dominant modes of relationship exist between knowledge and power; and how scientific rationality shapes identities in educational institutions, as well as in people’s everyday lives. Likewise, schools should help students reflect on the negative influences of society, and on how younger generations can become hopeful and confident about the potential of human beings. This requires focusing on how the people repeatedly opt
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Page 65 for hope and somehow manage to overcome adversities. It also demands developing reflective and analytic skills, and a dedication to fighting for justice and democracy. Educational Institutions are not Always Designed for Diversity Optimism should result from efforts to promote diversity and multiculturalism. Many such efforts have extended into daily life at school. The gains made from these struggles are reflected in the declarations promulgated by world institutions such as the United Nations and UNESCO, in order to protect people’s basic rights. This is not to say that these goals are fully achieved and secured, but some important progress can be acknowledged. Still, there is much to be done. Around the globe, school failure figures are disturbing; they testify to the fact that educational systems are still far from being just. The working and middle classes are concentrated in public schools located in marginal areas. Any struggle for justice should therefore demand that the educational system guarantee all students access to an appropriate education, regardless of their intellectual, physical, or sensorial abilities, their religious and cultural beliefs, ethnicity, gender, or social class. If schools are to contribute to increasing justice and recognition in society, they need to analyze to what extent the curriculum is respectful of people’s different cultures. In past years, educational systems have tried to address diversity through programs dealing with cultural backgrounds, social equity, and disadvantaged students. However, these measures will remain insufficient as long as other aspects are not revised, such as schools’ mandatory contents, dominant methodologies, and teacher education. A diverse student body does not fit neatly into schools that are uniformly designed and intended to impose an unchallenged, dominant cultural model. This is so because, among other reasons, there is no space to do so. We must realize that, in current educational systems, a great number of students do not feel acknowledged because their sociocultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds are either not addressed in the mandatory contents taught in classrooms, or their cultures are presented as trivial (Torres Santomé, 2006a). Building a just educational system that respects diversity and is committed to anti-discriminatory projects requires the revision of this Trojan horse curriculum: one that manipulates information and knowledge in order to impose a particular view of society. In this chapter, I will present nine curricular strategies used in schools to reproduce dominant forms of discourse, all of which need to be revised in order to create curricular alternatives (Table 5.1). I will be focusing on Spain. Table 5.1 Misguided Curricular Interventions 1. Segregation Grouping by gender, ethnic identity, and social class 2. Exclusion Silenced cultures 3. Disconnection The exceptional “Day of …” curriculum Curricular segmentation into disciplinary subjects 4. One-sided argumentation Naturalization 5. Psychologizing 6. Paternalism—pseudo-tolerance The “Benetton” treatment 7. Infantilization “Walt Disneyfication” The “tourist curriculum” 8. Strange realities 9. Presentism or historical void
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Page 66 1. Segregation This strategy consists of “grouping students” according to their gender, social class, ethnicity, and abilities. Grouping According to Sex Various disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology have been used to claim the inferiority of women and to justify their exclusion from educational institutions, or their segregation in all-girl schools. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a pioneer of modern education, in his work Emile (1762), emphatically advocated that girls receive a separate education from boys because women were to be prepared to serve mainly as wives, as subordinates to their husbands. Nevertheless, many voices have supported women’s rights to equal education. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), one of the first feminist thinkers, denounced that segregated education imposed wife roles that made women weak of character. Instead, she argued, women should be allowed access to the same educational opportunities as men (Wollstonecraft, 1994). In 1882, in an international educational congress in Spain, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Public Instruction Advisor ( Consejera de Instruccion Pública), emphatically condemned the constrained nature of the education women received: “the current kind of education provided to women cannot be called education, but domestication, because it pursues obedience, passivity, and submission” (Pardo Bazán, 2006, p. 105, translated from the Spanish). In Spain, during the socialist Second Republic (1931–1939), coeducation was accepted and promoted in only a small number of schools. However, the dictatorship instituted by Franco in 1939, and supported by a fundamentalist Catholic Church, banned any form of co-schooling. It was not until the General Education Law of 1970 ( Ley General de Educación de, 1970) that this ban could be revoked. Still, those countries most influenced by Catholicism tend to limit coeducation based almost exclusively on moral and religious principles. Catholic institutions such as Opus Dei and the Legion of Christ continue to promote the separation of girls from boys in schools. This being so, voices from philosophical and scientific sectors have asserted that there is no basis for this segregation in societies claiming to be democratic and respectful of human rights. Indeed, coeducation is essential to guaranteeing truly equal opportunities for both sexes. Grouping According to Ethnic Background Another form of segregation consists of schooling children according to their ethnic background. In the Spanish context, we cannot forget our experience with the so-called bridge-schools ( escuelas-puente). In 1978, as a result of an agreement between the Ministry of Education and Science and the “Gypsy Apostolate” ( Apostolado Gitano)—an organization linked to the Catholic Church—a series of educational units were created to give gypsies an initial education that would allow them to eventually integrate into common schools. However, what it actually did was to segregate gypsies from these schools. As a response, gypsy communities, supported by various educational movements, unions, and political parties, mobilized to put an end to the bridge-schools and to advocate for the full integration of gypsy students into ordinary schools. Today, gypsy students are aided by Compensatory Education programs within the same early childhood and elementary schools attended by the rest of the population. More recently, so-called “linking classes” ( aulas de enlace ) can be considered as another segregating initiative that some Autonomous Communities (the various governing regions of Spain) are implementing with public funding. These classrooms are created to facilitate and speed up learning the Spanish language among foreign students so that they can be “incorporated into the school
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Page 67 and the social context in a minimal amount of time and in the best possible conditions” (Consejería de Educación, Dirección del Área Territorial de Madrid Oeste, 2003, p. 1). However, this legislation has led to other outcomes. For example, if schools want to receive funding to implement these “linking classes,” they need to demonstrate that they have sufficient space. Consequently, some private schools have simply claimed that they cannot provide such space, and have therefore forced the public system to take full responsibility for these students. In other cases, even though some private schools do offer these classrooms, they use buildings set apart from the main school facilities. In the end, these schools take advantage of public subsidies while keeping their student body segregated. In Spain, most of the immigrant students remain concentrated in public schools. Private schools have resisted enrolling minority students. A report from the State Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo, 2003) states that 82% of students coming from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, non-communitarian Europe, Asia, and Australia study in public schools. The report therefore suggests that “because private schools are also financed publicly, educational policies should aim at an homogeneous redistribution of the foreign student body throughout the public and private systems” (p. 414, translated from the Spanish). Grouping According to Social Class Students are also grouped according to their social status. In Spain, empirical findings repeatedly confirm that social class continues to play a very important role in the educational system (Grañeras et al., 1998). For instance, private schools that charge extremely high fees are clear evidence of the existence of schools exclusively directed to the culturally and economically dominant classes. Among these schools, there is an important number of publicly subsidized institutions that use various covert strategies favoring the selection of students from high- and high–middle-income families (Torres Santomé, 2007). This social polarization is so pronounced that in many cities almost all the middleincome and working classes, poor immigrants, and gypsy populations are schooled in public institutions, while students from the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and high-income, professional middle class attend private schools. Grouping According to Abilities Another form of segregation groups students according to their so-called abilities. Traditionally, students with intellectual, physical, sensorial, and psychological disabilities were, and still largely are, educated in separate special education schools. But because pedagogical stimulation and social interactions within these schools have tended to be poor, they end up reinforcing and legitimating the social exclusion of these students. The effects of activist struggles—most of which have emanated from English-speaking countries— against this form of discrimination finally reached Spain. Since the 1970s, different family associations with members suffering some form of disability; educators accessing specialized research and literature; groups in favor of pedagogical renewal; and political parties from the left, have influenced educational policies to facilitate the emergence of a more inclusive educational system. From the very beginning, these activists, rather than using medical and biological arguments, have preferred to use discourses based on social conceptions favoring a model of justice that values human recognition, redistribution, and representation (Fraser, 2006). The meanings of disability provided from this sociopolitical perspective offer a more useful conceptual tool, and a more respectful language from which to advocate for change (Barton, 1998). This perspective provides a deeper understanding of the rights, needs, and possibilities of people with disabilities by helping to situate the root causes not only of the disabilities themselves, but of the social
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Page 68 marginalization this sector experiences, in relation to overall economic, political, and cultural structures (Barnes, 2006). An inclusive education should promote equity and collaboration. In the last two decades, this kind of education has experienced substantial progress, for we now have a first generation of teenagers who, in general, know how to interact with people with disabilities because they have learned and interacted with them in the same classrooms. Children with disabilities have, in turn, benefited from participating in this same context thanks to the greater array of stimuli it offers, while the rest of the students have further come to understand that people with disabilities are not only much more able than might be expected, but must also confront a series of additional injustices throughout their lives. 2. Exclusion An excluding curriculum ignores minority cultures and promotes pedagogical resources that serve to silence them. Consequently, dominant racist, classist, and/or sexist discourses tend to be reproduced. One subtle way to do this is to not give public voice to these cultures. Silencing cultures is therefore a major form of exclusion. Educational systems silence cultures when they promote a monocultural model of society. Most textbooks in Spain still hold the underlying philosophical assumption that, in this world, there are only White, Western, middle-class, urban, employed, adult men, who also happen to be Catholic, heterosexual, thin, healthy, and robust (see Table 5.2). In such curricular materials, it is very hard to find information about topics such as: the history of women and the spaces in which they have been discriminated against (domestic work; maternity and child bearing; violence against women; labor insecurity; the “glass ceiling”); or critical analysis of what it means to be a girl, a boy, or an adolescent in our world. Such materials generally do not address people with physical or mental disabilities, the elderly, or people with serious illnesses; nor do they acknowledge gay, lesbian, bi- and transsexual identities and culture. These materials usually do not portray the living conditions of the unemployed or poor, or of working people who receive low wages and/or experience appalling working conditions. There is no analysis of living conditions in rural settings or fishing communities. There is no mention of oppressed ethnic groups, of cultures belonging to colonized nations, or of the realities immigrants face, and the injustices they must endure. In Spain, dominant conceptions about human beings and the world either derive from the Catholic Church or are coherent with its worldview (Torres Santomé, 2006a). Table 5.2 School Culture Existing voices Absent voices The masculine world The feminine world Adults Children, youth, and the elderly Healthy people Mentally and physically disabled people Heterosexual identities Gay, lesbian, bi- and transsexual identities Prestigious professionals The working classes and poverty Urban communities Rural and fishing communities Powerful states and nations Nations without states The White race Minoritized or powerless ethnic groups The Western, First World Eastern countries and the Third World The Catholic religion Other religions, agnosticism, and atheism
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Page 69 When excluded groups resist being silenced they are soon labeled as supposedly having fewer innate abilities or inferior productive skills. Similar labeling occurs when the expression “Culture” is used as the opposite of “popular culture.” In this context, “Culture” is presented as superior, and is consequently placed at the center of public attention. This is the kind of culture represented in the school curriculum, and recognized as the door-opener to the labor market in today’s neoliberal, conservative societies. By contrast, “popular culture” is construed as the marginal experiences of particular “powerless” groups, and therefore as lacking importance. 3. Disconnection There are two main ways in which this pedagogical strategy is implemented. “The Day of …” (“ El Día de …”) In Spain, this is one of the most common ways that schools teach topics related to values, social problems, and cultural practices that might be highly significant to students, but which are not explicitly included in the prescribed curriculum or textbooks. This curricular practice consists of working for one day alone on issues such as the oppression of women (International Women’s Day/ El Dia de la Mujer); the struggle against racial prejudice (Hispanic Day/ El Día de la Hispanidad ); the condition of the working class (International Workers’ Day/ El Día de la Clase Obrera ); wars (World Peace Day/ El Día de la Paz ); or civic rights and duties (Constitution Day/ El Día de la Constitución ). This is the only “Day” in which issues considered to be conflictive are addressed at school. Nonetheless, although these interdisciplinary subjects might be particularly relevant and significant to students, they are taken up almost exclusively as mere pedagogical tokenism. As a result, students are not able to relate their work on these issues to the official programs or grading assessments that establish what kind of knowledge really matters. Instead, students usually consider such “Days” as the occasional, entertaining respite from the daily grind of school work. Curricular Segmentation into Disciplinary Subjects For all its prevalence as a means of organizing and systematizing curricular contents, the disciplinebased curriculum does not help students to acquire a thorough comprehension of reality, or, by extension, of social, cultural, political, and religious issues. This model for curricular design and development, in fact, turns contents into disconnected parcels of information. The Spanish Educational Law of 1990 (the “LOGSE”) was enacted to undo this limitation by introducing “transversal” subject matter ( materias transversales ), but since then, no governing administration has made any serious effort to encourage this kind of learning. In schools, the units of study in each discipline are based on mandatory contents stipulated by both the central government, and the various Departments of Education of each Autonomous Community (or each governing region of Spain). This hardly provides space for locally relevant and significant student learning. Yet, ironically, it was precisely reference to this kind of learning that allowed the Felipe Gonzalez Administration (1982–1996) to get “transversal education” included in the LOGSE. That being so, no clear policy has since been developed to reinforce this transversal curriculum, which is why the traditional curriculum based on isolated subjects has prevailed. Moreover, implementation of the transversal subjects has led to some cases of conflict between schools and the right-wing Popular Party ( Partido Popular ) Administration headed by José María Aznar (1996– 2004). For example, schools wanting to teach the mandatory transversal subjects of Peace Education ( Educación para la Paz ), Moral and Civic Education ( Educación Moral
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Page 70 y Cívica), and Environmental Education ( Educación Ambiental ), focused on urgent current events such as the ecological disaster produced by the oil tanker “Prestige” along the Galician coastline in 2002, or the Spanish intervention in the Iraq War. The conservative Galician Autonomous (regional) Government reacted by claiming that the pedagogical usage of these events was inappropriate. Thus, in 2003, an official document was issued giving instructions concerning the use of publicity and propaganda in schools. Its long and confusing juridical language transmitted a set of regulations that referred to the Spanish Constitution, to several educational laws, and to a dozen or so articles from the Quality of Education Law ( Ley Órganica de la Calidad de la Educación —LOCE) of 2000, then recently approved by President Aznar. It is my belief, as well as that of most school communities, that these instructions were issued to intimidate. School administrators were warned about making claims that were supposedly unrelated to the purposes of public schools. Any “other” intentions conveyed via publicity, propaganda, or statements on issues not considered as part of the schools’ goals were deemed illegal. In the days following the issuance of these instructions, school agents debated on what to do with their work on the Prestige ecological disaster, or the Iraq War. Many schools decided not to heed the warnings posed by the Galician Government’s Department of Education ( Consellería de Educación, Xunta de Galicia). According to the respective school councils, these social issues were totally in line with the transversal contents dictated by the educational legislation that was current at the time. In the end, the Ministry of Education had no choice but to recognize these schools’ freedom to teach. However, conservative groups adhering to the Popular Party have since continued to explore all means by which to control the knowledge produced and transmitted in schools (Torres Santomé, 2004). The current Education Law ( Ley Orgánica de Educación— LOE) of 2006 represents another example of how dominant groups have tried to undermine the teaching of certain topics. In this current Law, the term “transversal” is used on only two occasions. Although it is mentioned to support citizenship education within the curriculum and to connect and reinforce these transversal subjects as part of schools’ educational projects, the lack of real support remains clear. This is also evident in the policies on free textbooks promoted by the various Educational Administrations, for such policies do not enhance interdisciplinary work within schools. On the contrary, my sense is that they are a real time-bomb set against interdisciplinary approaches and projects seeking a more integrated curriculum. 4. One-sided Argumentation The one-sided argument strategy is complementary to the strategy of exclusion. Its goal is to present only those texts aligned with particular discursive frames for justifying social, political, economic, religious, ethnic, gender, and linguistic inequalities. This strategy likewise involves excluding from textbooks all views that would help students to critically analyze such dominant conceptions. Instead, textbooks and pedagogical resources tend to construct a worldview in which social actors are arbitrarily characterized as inferior or even grotesque. The intent is to present a one-sided “truth.” A truly emancipatory education should reveal the falsities behind these assumptions and the trickery used to build racist conceptions that undergird commonsense reasoning. It should also point out how science is presented as neutral and objective even though it is replete with prejudices and stereotypes founded on discourse that selects particular perspectives, topics, and metaphors on the “way our good things and their bad things are being enhanced or mitigated” (van Dijk, 2005, p. 18). We need to be aware that textbooks in Spain may be full of colonial perspectives supported by educational and research institutions aiming to portray an assumed “superiority” of “our Culture.”
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Page 71 Martin Bernal (1987) in his work Black Athena claims that Eurocentrism—Europe being the “sole heir” of classical Greek and Roman values—is a myth. This myth was built during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explain the predominance of the Aryan race by relating it to Greek heritage. Philology, among several other sciences, was used to back this statement. According to some scholars, the discovery of the Indo-Germanic languages proved that these languages were common to a particular European or Aryan race. The Greeks, therefore, had to be recognized as founders of this European language pool. The works of Ernst Curtius, an expert in Greek culture, are considered crucial to achieving this purpose. He specifically claims that “the people who knew in such a peculiar manner how to develop the common treasure of the Indo–Germanic language were … the Hellenes” (cited in Bernal, 1987, p. 334, translated from the Spanish). Consequently, the most important discoveries of Antiquity are attributed to the superiority of the Greeks, while influences from Egypt and the rest of Asia or Africa are underestimated. The reason lies in the fact that European countries have refused to acknowledge that they are indebted to the countries they once colonized and expropriated. They prefer to present themselves as benevolent world leaders who acted with generosity and justice, offering their rich legacy to the colonized peoples (Paraskeva, 2006). The dominant elite have always tried to influence the production and orientation of knowledge by using, even manipulating, supposedly scientific data to favor certain ideological perspectives. The history of Nazism is filled with numerous such examples. As Mark Walker (cited in Cornwell, 2003) documents, prestigious professionals—those holding positions of power in universities and research institutes, and connected to government offices in charge of public health and sanitary policies—played a crucial role in the construction and reformulation of scientific theories in order to develop the concept of a Germanic culture, and to justify the alleged supremacy of the Aryan race. The feminist movement has also made great strides in proving that sexism arose largely from support from science, the humanities, and the arts. Over the last two decades, research produced in these fields has only recognized the work of a small number of important women while silencing the immense amount of additional contributions made by this gender (Solsona i Pairó, 1997). It cannot be denied, then, that “the theories that have influenced the social and life sciences were invented during the development of historical battles between genders, and used as weapons” (Harding, 1996, p. 93). Recent historical accounts claim that women have been silenced in the musical field as well, where they have been very active as composers as well as performers (Green, 2001; Ramos López, 2003). Patricia Digón (2005), in her research on music textbooks in Spain, shows how women do not appear as composers but merely as singers. As performers, they are not depicted playing any kind of instrument involving physical exercise or affecting their facial expression. Such silences allow these books to portray men as the only ones with true composing abilities in all genres (classical, jazz, rap, rock). We are witness today to a wave of neoliberalism that actively uses science to legitimize recent economic transformations. Along these same lines, Cornwell (2003) explains that in the United States the “National Science Foundation, charged with supporting pure science, came under pressure to scrutinize the relevance of its funding targets” (p. 459). The new goal is to place the enormous power of American research networks at the service of the political and economic interests of multinational corporations and other lobbies and pressure groups influencing the government. If this kind of pressure is carried out in academic and research institutions, it is obvious that textbooks coming from other levels of the educational system, and containing what is considered to be official knowledge, will also offer exclusive versions of reality to justify the particular visions of such dominant groups. For example, if we compare all the information used in Spanish textbooks to teach about the “Discovery” of America with the work carried out by
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Page 72 specialists from the “discovered” countries, we will find a lot of information that has been silenced or tergiversated in Spanish school textbooks. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) is a case in point. During his lifetime, this Dominican Spanish friar was proclaimed the “Apostle of the Indians” because of his defense of indigenous populations and his fervent denouncement of the genocide and expropriation missions led by the Spanish colonial powers during what has come to be known as the Discovery of America. However, instead of teaching about Fray Bartolomé, Spanish textbooks tend to focus on the supposed contributions to the development of the American continent made by the Spanish Crown and the official Catholic Church. Naturalization One way of justifying a particular view in society is to present it as something natural, as something that cannot be changed because it responds to the laws of nature. Thus, certain groups may be at a disadvantage only because they have certain dominant genes that naturally predispose them to failure, or because these groups try to produce more than their limited natural abilities may allow. I call this strategy the naturalization of situations of injustice (Torres Santomé, 2007). In an era of pronounced political neoconservatism, the discipline of biology is often employed in these strategies of naturalization. A good example is the documentary “Why Men Don’t Iron,” produced in 1998 by Jim Meyer for the BBC. Using “scientific” evidence, this documentary tries to prove that we are conditioned by our biological sexual differences, and that these determine the kinds of jobs we choose. In other words, the proponents of this theory find biology to be the best science for explaining why they think there is no sexism in the way labor is distributed in our society, or that the sexual “distinctiveness” in the labor market is a natural process that is respectful of human nature. A similar biological claim can be found in the book La libertad de elección en educación (Freedom of election in education) written by the former General Secretary of Education during the Popular Party Administration, Francisco López Rupérez (1995). López states that “without arguing about the exact proportion, natural genetic factors constitute, over time, the first cause of diversity in academic performance, and in addition, in the educational process” (p. 175, translated from the Spanish). Alternative discourses are needed to confront these dominant assumptions. Indeed, some have been emerging from research in the fields of biology, anthropology, history, and psychology. They argue that “it is unacceptable that gender and human sexuality (identities, behaviors, roles, and desires) is determined by the sexual differences needed for reproduction” (Harding, 1996, p. 117). This kind of statement shows how knowledge has been manipulated to impose a one-sided argument that privileges some views over others. If these new discourses continue to be eliminated from, or restricted within, the school curriculum, students will have fewer opportunities to challenge discriminatory conceptions presented as natural realities; as the only ones that exist. Limiting students’ exposure in this way to some forms of argument and not others, keeps them confined within such a narrow knowledge base that they are essentially made to give their “consent without their consent” (Chomsky & Herman, 1990). 5. Psychologizing This strategy consists of using psychological arguments to explain the causes of inequality, but without paying attention to broader social structures. Not long ago, in European countries and North America, the marginalization of African populations was justified via the claim that the racial composition of such populations reflected genetic deficits or lower IQs than those
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Page 73 corresponding to the White race. This kind of reasoning totally discounts the political, economic, cultural, military, and religious conditions that produce oppressive living conditions in the first place. In 1971, Richard Herrnstein published an IQ-based study in The Atlantic Monthly in which he attempted to prove that Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engel’s structural analyses were not consistent with psychological research findings. Herrnstein’s argument was based on the following syllogism: (a) if different mental abilities are inherited, (b) if social success requires these abilities, and, (c) if income and prestige depend on success; then, (d) the social status (that reflects income and prestige) is based, to a certain extent, on the inherited differences among people (quoted in Eysenck, 1987, p. 163). This same author received enormous media coverage in the 1990s following the release of his book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), coauthored by Charles Murray. Charles Murray was a conservative ideologue and member of The American Enterprise Institute. He was also “a guru of the Reagan Administration in welfare issues” (Wacquant, 1999, p. 14), and was already renowned for his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, one of the key publications Republicans relied on to justify the destruction of the Welfare State.1 The Bell Curve’s main thesis is that measurable genetic traits differ among biological races, and account for some groups being more intelligent than others. This is how the authors came to claim that in the United States—or any country, for that matter—the fact that the most profitable jobs are in the hands of White people is not, by their view, discriminatory. To prove their point, Herrstein & Murray assert that, on average, the IQs of African Americans fall 15 points below those of the White population. Accordingly, those with lower IQs have a comparatively higher chance of becoming poor. Although this is supposedly proved by a set of tests, these authors pay no attention to the living conditions of African American populations living in ghettos or attending schools lacking the minimal resources necessary to provide quality education. The overall message of the Bell Curve is very clear: society is not responsible for the lack of opportunities or social failure experienced by certain racial-minority groups. Just a few weeks after the book’s publication, the Republican Party pushed the U.S. Congress to vote in favor of keeping taxation low, and reducing social spending on poor mothers and food and healthcare programs. While these cuts adversely affected low-income households, the corporate and business elite could only gain from them. Psychological arguments are also used to justify the marginalization of people with nondominant ethnic and gender identities. In Spain, for example, gypsies are marginalized because it is assumed that they are “thieves by nature,” or that they can at best occupy jobs related to the entertainment world (song, dance, the circus, fairs, etc.) or to the kind of traditional handcraft work expected from minority groups. At the same time, Galicians in Spain are labeled as “distrustful” and Andalusians as “cheats.” Some forms of psychology have thus greatly served the conservative tradition of attempting to legitimate the current stratification of society and the inequitable distribution of socioeconomic goods on the basis of supposedly genetic intellectual inheritance. Under this logic, efforts to reduce inequality are doomed to fail because society cannot go contra natura. Success and opportunities for promotion are the alleged consequence of people competing with each other by means of individual effort and inherent natural abilities. Unfortunately, this perspective has been gaining greater ground vis-à-vis other views that attribute social failure to structural deficiencies. In the case of the Spanish educational system, the Popular Party’s promotion of the slogan “the culture of effort” ( la cultura del esfuerzo ) attracted broad support because it not only advanced the false assumption that equal opportunities for all had already been achieved, but it also implied that, as a result, particular groups would have to make a greater effort to “succeed” in society (Torres Santomé, 2006b).
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Page 74 The Spanish educational code privileges yet another form of psychological reductionism, that is, a very narrow and individualistic conception of constructivism, which is promoted as the cornerstone for the pedagogical innovations enhanced through educational reforms. While slogans are used to convey that people construct their own knowledge, there is no reflection on what type of knowledge, or on when, how, in what conditions, with what goals, or in whose service this knowledge should be produced. It is around these key issues that the silences of “official” constructivism become deafening. Aside from making individuals the only responsible parties for their personal fate, this strategy has increasingly fostered the assumption that the behavior of impoverished groups is directly related to delinquency, regardless of the fact that those who experience urgent poverty in many cases commit illegal acts to satisfy basic needs. Unfortunately, as Bauman (2000) remarks, the dominant form of reasoning only helps to “exile the poor from the world of moral responsibilities” (p. 120), or to reduce broader moral responsibility in society to the narrow realm of charity. 6. Paternalism and False Tolerance Paternalistic analyses present certain cultures as “superior.” This can be seen in many classrooms where oppressed cultural groups are portrayed as unable to make progress while “we,” the official Spanish voices, are the successful redeemers. Spanish textbooks are paternalistic when they present an Africa devoid of highways, modern buildings, or prestigious personalities in the fields of science and technology, for instance. On the contrary, the imagery depicting African populations usually connotes ignorance and inferiority. Textbooks do not inquire into how African nations came to be expropriated, or how their lifestyles, values, and languages have been altered and subordinated to the colonial metropolis. Likewise, terms such as “donations” and “charity” are used to describe First World engagements with the Third World, whereas “justice,” “solidarity,” and “equality” are hardly mentioned. Such discursive selections persistently deny racism while overstating the First World’s supposed goodwill toward the Third World. The Benetton Treatment A good example of paternalism can be found in the publicity model developed by the Benetton Corporation (Giroux, 1996). This group uses images depicting “social differences” in terms of problems such as AIDS, racism, or poverty, while simultaneously depoliticizing and recontex-tualizing such problems under the new frame of “ Colors” (the name of the magazine published by this corporation), harmony, and world peace. In this way, Benetton has, in effect, turned human tragedy into mere decoration. The voyeuristic quality of this corporate imagery resituates social problems within the consumer-observer’s emotional sphere, and thus allows observers to feel relieved for living at a safe distance from such misery. Poverty, thus contemplated from an aesthetic perspective alone, leaves any other in-depth reflection to the wayside. Such imagery does little if anything to raise awareness in observers about social transformations requiring deeper commitments from the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the WTO. 7. Infantilizing There are two ways in which this pedagogical intervention might be expressed.
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Page 75 “Walt Disneyfication” This strategy is premised on the belief that students should be sheltered from knowing about social injustices and the “hard realities” of “the real world,” and thus kept within an artificial paradise. Most textbooks at the pre-elementary and elementary levels convey this infantilizing approach, or what we can call the Walt Disneyfication of school culture (Giroux, 1996). The information children interact with is inundated with fantastical images which, in many cases, narrow reality down to cartoonish representations and happy-go-lucky depictions of society. Many textbooks overuse this kind of imagery, making it difficult for students to distinguish fact from fiction. Instead, these curricular materials become the powerful framers of student knowledge, based on the consumption of a conservative kind of “comfortable leisure culture” that reproduces classism, racism, sexism, and ageism, and is promoted by multinationals such as Walt Disney, Hanna Barbera, and Mattel. The “Tourist Curriculum” Another form of curricular “infantilization” is operative in the creation of what I call the “tourist curriculum,” in which subaltern cultural realities are treated in the trivial ways tourists usually experience them. Engagements with such cultures are limited to learning about eating habits, clothing, ritual practices, housing structures, landscapes, etc. Another way to trivialize foreign cultures is to represent them through drawings as opposed to photographs. Such drawings present these cultures as uncommon, exotic, or even unreal. A “different” social group is often depicted in ways that reproduce dominant stereotypes (for example, Black girls are drawn with curly hair, living in poverty in rural areas, and surrounded by wild vegetation). The problem is that, for children, drawings are just drawings; kids do not tend to show disapproval when watching a cartoon cat and mouse fight, but would they react in the same way when presented with real-life violence through newspaper photographs or videotaped news segments? 8. Diversity as Strange and Distant In this case, conflictive social realities are presented as if they existed in a far away place, as if they had no connection to life in classrooms. They are treated as exceptional realities that are strange or exotic, caused by “them” not “us.” In textbooks, conflicts between native European populations and immigrants from developing countries are minimized or denied in order to keep all sorts of racist dynamics hidden from view. And when racist dynamics are exposed, they are usually attributed to immigrants who supposedly do not want to “integrate” into the country’s mainstream way of life. Violence against women is given similar treatment. In Spain, it is dealt with as an exceptional problem that does not affect many women, or as criminal behavior that only strange, mentally ill men, who are different from “us,” would commit. Given that today’s societies are increasingly more sensitive to matters of racism and discrimination, blaming the “other” is “smoothed out” or assuaged by means of the occasional compliment allotted to one minority group or another. This is evident in newspapers and on television when an isolated heroic act from one of “those” people helps one of “us.” However, this anecdotal kind of news is nevertheless rare, and seldom interrupts the predominant and recurrent production of discourse on, for example, the “criminal” and “evil” behavior of the world’s Islamic populations. Another “othering process” consists of dominant cultures engaging with non-dominant cultures through what Martha Nussbaum (2005) calls normative skepticism, that is, an erroneous
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Page 76 form of multiculturalism. This skepticism consists of merely describing certain cultural realities without offering any form of normative judgment as to the positive or negative aspects of such realities, the idea being that “difference” should be “respected,” no matter what. Although it may be positive not to pass judgment, it is also important to note that: true tolerance is not indifference to ideas, or a generalized skepticism. It actually presupposes a conviction, a faith, an ethical choice, and, at the same time, the acceptance of expressions of ideas, convictions, and choices that are contrary to our own. (Morin, 2001, p. 123, translated from the Spanish) Critical multicultural education must give voice to those who are silenced in any culture. This is why it is so necessary to combat essentialized notions of cultural difference, for they prevent people from critically examining, understanding, and expressing opinions about specific cultural beliefs and practices, especially when these pose a threat to basic human rights. The wholesale acceptance of “difference” at any cost has a lot to do with the emergence of an exaggerated form of relativism and identity essentialism that conservative and neocolonial elites exploit in order to remain indifferent to the problems that adversely affect foreign cultures but benefit their own. It goes without saying that ethnic groups, thus represented as exotic or strange, must have the opportunity to express their perspectives and be heard by socially dominant groups. At the same time, the tactics employed by the mass media to misrepresent, discredit, or offend immigrants and/or the citizens of “other” countries must be denounced and challenged. Ethnic minority groups should be able to defend their rights through political and civic education. They have the right to oppose any process, policy, or practice that attempts to assimilate or restrict their traditions, identities, and human rights (which should be expanded, for example, to include the right to migrate). 9. Presentism—or Historical Void This curricular strategy consists of representing cultural diversity in an historical void. The social evolution of different cultural groups is simply not addressed. Textbooks do not specify that cultures are the result of historical processes, instead preferring to present them as fixed entities. This can only lead to the essentialization of their respective realities. This educational philosophy is coherent with theories and ideologies about the supposed “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), which claim that the world cannot be improved because this is the best, if not the only, world possible. These discourses attempt to convince people to accept as inevitable their lot in life, for, it is argued, no realistic alternatives to the current, dominant, capitalistic economic order exist. By extraction, it is also considered futile to reflect on the many dysfunctions caused throughout history by capitalism. The ultimate goal is to convince the population that unemployment, injustices, and poverty emerging from the present world economic order are normal and transitory towards a future world filled with great wealth (for those who learn how to use the system to their advantage, of course). And yet, “educating” means something entirely different: it means helping students construct their own views of the world by providing them with key information about present and past events that explain the potentials and limitations of social, cultural, political, and scientific development. Educating students to be hopeful about the future requires implementing what I call an “optimistic curriculum” (Torres Santomé, 2007). Such a curriculum should facilitate understanding how humanity has, in many cases, successfully improved living conditions for all through strategies developed by different social groups to challenge, and to seek alternatives to, personal, social, economic, cultural, scientific, and religious problems.
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Page 77 If the histories of women or of slavery were taught rigorously, they would have exemplary influence on an adolescent generation that continuously complains about worldwide injustices and the lack of possibilities for change. These fatalistic expressions demonstrate the extent to which these youngsters have worked with curricular resources that have silenced the key elements that move and transform our societies. Instead, a curriculum that reveals, for example, how women have been able to challenge enormous ideological, scientific, religious, and military apparatuses, in order to convince whole populations that they are not inferior beings, would be a great antidote against such pessimism and similar ongoing oppressions. In these times when imperialistic political powers divide the world between the good and the bad, between Islam and the rest of the world, it is essential that in Spain we remember the experience of the Al-Andalus—the Spanish region governed by Muslims from 711 to 1492—especially the Region of Cordoba where Maimonides (1135–1204) and Averroes (1126–1198) were born. While the former was a prestigious philosopher and physician, the latter was one of the greatest philosophers and scientists of the Arab world, whose work led to his renown as the “commentator of Aristotle.” We cannot understand the European culture without considering the contributions of these two personalities and other thinkers from Andalusia, which came to be considered at the time as “the most modern city of the continent” (Jahanbegloo, 2007, p. 69). Thanks to the respect for pluralism that characterized the Al-Andalus, the rest of Europe could come to recognize the great contributions from classical Greek and Roman culture. If, by contrast, people feel under-acknowledged or excluded, this may cause them to radicalize their demands, or to organize around tightly closed groups, and to do whatever it takes to defend their political, economic, social, and cultural views and rights. These are the people who are most likely to become members of fundamentalist groups that (at least seemingly) provide them with alternatives for defending themselves and reinforcing their racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic pride (Wieviorka, 2003). Although fundamentalist ideologies instrumentalize people’s deprivation, many do offer the promise of a life after death filled with satisfactions. The followers of these fundamentalist ideologies “acquire an identity that affirms their superiority over others. If necessary, this affirmation also stands against any form of resistance” (Meyer, 2007, p. 21, translated from the Catalan). If alternative concepts are not created and promoted—alternatives that differ from the dominant conceptions in use—but are instead silenced or constrained, this might encourage new forms of fundamentalism to emerge, or it might lead to the naturalization and justification of whatever occurs in today’s society as the only order possible. Obstacles to an Anti-discrimination Education Curricular praxis that challenges the various dysfunctions described above demands that we be aware of a whole set of teaching traditions and cultures that serve as obstacles to change. These obstacles are: • Teachers’ obsession with making students study whole textbooks, or all mandatory curricular contents prescribed by public education administrations. • The omission from textbooks of controversial topics, as well as sources of information that view conflicts from alternative and divergent perspectives. • The fear of dealing with socially controversial issues within the classroom. This fear responds in large part to pressure from parents or school administrators. • The lack of a culture and tradition of debate in classrooms. Debating skills are not connatural; neither is the moderator role of teachers.
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Page 78 • The curricular tradition of addressing reality by segmenting it into various disciplines or subjects does not promote a holistic understanding of the multiple layers of reality. • The existence of external assessment policies based on curriculum standards, which leads to an obsession with teaching test topics and little more. • The lack of informative resources for students to engage with controversial issues, in part due to the monopoly, as well as the ideological stances, held by textbook publishers. • Many teachers claim that they are unfamiliar with these controversial issues and that they are not connected to the rest of the curriculum. For all these reasons and more, a culture of debate must be fostered in our classrooms. By so doing, we will allow the diversity that already exists in our lives to enter into the curriculum. We are in urgent need of opposing the prevailing indifference toward the “Other,” the oblivion of the “Other.” The curriculum can become a space that brings us together, not one that divides—one in which the right to be different while still mutually respecting our legitimate rights, is made possible. Note 1 According to Loïc Wacquant (1999, p. 15), the Manhattan Institute offered Charles Murray US$30,000 to write Losing Ground. The Institute then organized a grand symposium in New York, inviting journalists and specialists on public policies and the social sciences, paying them significant amounts of money. Charles Murray was invited to introduce his ideas to the American public on the most widely viewed TV talk-shows in the US. This attests, once again, to the enormous power with which the media select certain cultural contents and promote them as reasonable, while others are ignored. References Barnes, C. (2006). What a difference a decade makes. Reflections on doing “emancipatory” disability research. In L. Barton (Ed.), Overcoming disabling barriers. Oxford: Routledge. Barton, L. (Comp.). (1998). Discapacidad y sociedad . Madrid: Morata—Fundación Paideia. Bauman, Z. (2000). Trabajo, consumismo y nuevos pobres. Barcelona: Gedisa. Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (1990). Los guardianes de la libertad. Barcelona: Crítica. Consejería de Educación, Dirección del Área Territorial de Madrid Oeste. (2003). Instrucciones generales de la Viseconsejería de Educación para el curso, 2003–2004 . Retrieved June 2, 2008, from http://www.madrid.org/dat_oeste/a_enlace/ae_instrucciones.htm Cornwell, J. (2003). Hitler’s scientists . New York: Viking. Defensor del Pueblo. (2003). La escolarización del alumnado de origen inmigrante en España. Madrid: Defensor del Pueblo. Available at: http://www.defensordelpueblo.es/ Digón, P. (2005). ¿Qué fue de Nannerl Mozart? Género y música en la escuela obligatoria. Seville: Morón-Cooperación educativa Kikiriki. Dijk, T. A. van (2005). Racismo, discurso y libros de texto. Cuaderno de Antropología y Semiótica, 2(2). Buenos Aires: Potlatch. Retrieved from http://www.potlatch.com.ar Eysenck, H. J. (1987). La desigualdad del hombre. Madrid: Alianza. Fraser, N. (2006). La justicia social en la era de la política de la identidad: Redistribución, reconocimiento y participación. In N. Fraser & A. Honnet (Eds.), ¿Redistribución o reconocimiento?: Un debate político-filosófico. Madrid: Morata—Fundación Paideia. Fukuyama, F. (1992). El fin de la historia y el último hombre . Barcelona: Planeta. Giroux, H. (1996). Placeres inquietantes . Barcelona: Paidós.
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Page 79 Grañeras, M., Lamelas, R., Segalerva, A., Vázquez, E., Gordo, J. L., & Molinuevo, J. (1998). Catorce años de investigación sobre las desigualdades en educación en España. Madrid: CIDE. Retrieved from http://www.mec.es/cide Green, L. (2001). Música, género y educación. Madrid: Morata. Harding, S. (1996). Ciencia y feminismo . Madrid: Morata. Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: The Free Press. Jahanbegloo, R. (2007). Elogio de la diversidad . Barcelona: Arcadia. López Rupérez, F. (1995). La libertad de elección en educación . Madrid: Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES). Meyer, T. (2007). La socialdemocràcia i la política de la identitat. Barcelona: Fundació Rafael Campalans. Morin, E. (2001). Los siete saberes necesarios para la educación del futuro. Barcelona: Paidós. Nussbaum, M. C. (2005). El cultivo de la humanidad . Barcelona: Paidós. Paraskeva, J. (2006). Portugal will always be an African nation: A Calibanian prosperity or a prospering Caliban? In D. Macedo & P. Gounari (Eds.), The globalization of racism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Pardo Bazán, E. (2006). La educación del hombre y la de la mujer. La dama joven. Memorias de un solterón. Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco—Servizo Galego de Igualdade da Xunta de Galicia. Ramos López, P. (2003). Feminismo y música. Madrid: Narcea. Solsona i Pairó, N. (1997). Mujeres científicas de todos los tiempos. Madrid: Talasa. Torres Santomé, J. (2004). El contexto sociocultural de la enseñanza. In J. Gimeno Sacristány & J. Carbonell Sebarroja (Coords.), El sistema educativo. Barcelona: CISS Praxis. Torres Santomé, J. (2006a). Globalización e interdisciplinariedad . Madrid: Morata. Torres Santomé, J. (2006b). Yo me esfuerzo, tú debes esforzarte. Y ellos, ¿también se esfuerzan? Cuadernos de Pedagogía, 361 , pp. 90–93. Torres Santomé, J. (2007). Educación en tiempos de neoliberalismo . Madrid: Morata. Wacquant, L. (1999). Les prisons de la misère. Paris: Raisons D’Agir. Wieviorka, M. (2003). Diferencias culturales, racismo y democracia. In D. Mato (Coord.), Políticas de identidades y diferencias sociales en tiempos de globalización. Caracas: FACES—UCV. Wollstonecraft, M. (1994). Vindicación de los derechos de la mujer . Madrid: Cátedra.
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Page 81 Part III Redistribution, Recognition, and Differential Power
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Page 83 6 Rethinking Reproduction Neo-Marxism in Critical Education Theory Wayne Au & Michael W. Apple In this chapter we offer a kind of introduction to neo-Marxism in critical educational theory. We begin here with a discussion of the roots of neo-Marxist educational theory, outlining the ways it grew out of a reaction to mechanistic, functionalist accounts of the role of schools in the reproduction of economic inequalities. Then we explain some of the major theoretical tenets of neo-Marxist educational theory, particularly the concepts of hegemony and relative autonomy. We then provide a review of some of the key ways that neo-Marxist theorists have applied these concepts to broaden and deepen our understandings of the processes of social, cultural, and economic production and reproduction in education. In the process we explore the ways in which neo-Marxist emphases can be complemented by an appropriately politicized set of postmodern and poststructural approaches even when tensions exist both within and among these critical impulses. We conclude this chapter with a discussion of some of the tensions that exist within the neo-Marxist critical educational tradition as well. Reproduction in Education In order to understand neo-Marxist educational theory, it is equally important to understand what has been popularly framed as Marxist educational theory. In the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , Marx (1968) wrote the following: In the social production of their life, [humans] enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. (p. 183) Of all of Marx’s extensive writing on political economy and philosophy, there is perhaps no other single segment that has produced as much dissent and argument as this one. These three
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Page 84 sentences outline what is commonly referred to as the base/superstructure model, where the “legal and political superstructure” rises out of the “relations of production” that make up the “economic structure of society.” Thus, it has been commonplace to interpret Marx’s conception as one where the economy is the sole determinant of social relations, and such a view is commonly referred to economic determinism, structural-functionalism, or mechanistic rationality. Despite the reality that such economic determinism is theoretically and philosophically opposed to the actuality of Marx’s conception—a conception that instead relies on dynamic, fluid, and interactional processes (Allman, 2007; Au, 2006, 2008a), analyses of education that saw mechanical, functionalist relationships between schools and the economy were ultimately marked as being Marxist. Indeed, Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America is often referred to as the touchstone, typically Marxist educational account. In their theorizing, Bowles and Gintis (1976, 1988) advance the “correspondence principle” of educational relations. According to this principle, in capitalist societies, the division of labor in education, as well as its structure of authority and reward, mirror those of the economy … [and] in any stable society in which a formal educational system has a major role in the personal development of working people, there will tend to emerge a correspondence between the social relations of education and those of the economic system. (Bowles & Gintis, 1988, p. 237) Bowles and Gintis’ formulation asserts that schools simply function to serve the needs of capitalist production in nearly a one-to-one correspondence, and thus offers a mechanistic interpretation of Marx’s analysis of the relationship between the economic base and superstructure. It could be said that such mechanistic, economic determinist analyses, of which Bowles and Gintis’ was but one representative, provided the very friction that birthed neo-Marxism in critical educational theory. Bowles and Gintis’ “correspondence principle” was sharply criticized, and neo-Marxists argued that the correspondence principle ignored the role of teachers, culture, and ideology in schools, is too mechanical and overly economistic, and neglects students’ and others’ resistance to dominant social relations (see, e.g., Apple, 1979/2004, 1980, 1980–81; Giroux, 1980, 1983; Sarup, 1978; Sharp, 1980). Arnot and Whitty (1982) provide a clear summary of these critiques in their observation that: the political economy of schooling as presented by Bowles & Gintis … failed to describe and explain classroom life, the conflicts and contradictions within the school and the distance and conflict between the school and the economy. Further, it could not account for the variety of responses of teachers and pupils to the structures of the school—some of which were liable to threaten the successful socialisation of the new generation. (p. 98, original emphasis) Even with these criticisms, however, the position of Bowles and Gintis set the contours and trajectory of a significant portion of the critical educational theory that was to come, including neo-Marxism. In response to the economic determinism perceived as “Marxism,” neo-Marxists sought to analyze issues of culture, ideology, hegemony and relative autonomy in education as a means of addressing what they felt were the overly structuralist tendencies in concepts such as the correspondence principle. In doing so, many turned to the works that highlighted the complex relationships among the spheres of culture, the state, and economy (Althusser, 1971). They sought a much more fluid understanding of the contradictory relations among these three spheres. Among the most fruitful concepts that came out of the need to comprehend the richness of these relations were “hegemony” and “relative autonomy.”
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Page 85 Hegemony and Relative Autonomy in Neo-Marxist Theory Within neo-Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party who was imprisoned by the Italian Fascists in 1926, is considered the leading theorist of the concept of hegemony. Gramsci (1971) posits that “social hegemony” is the: “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. (p. 12) Further, according to Gramsci, social hegemony takes on a sense of universality because it is often communicated as commonsense ideology and common culture, even though it is an expression of the power of dominant elites. In this way, Gramsci’s “hegemony” describes how consent of the masses is organized through leadership that works either in the form of domination or in the form of direction (Allman, 1999). Hegemony is therefore not only political, but also cultural. As Williams (1977) explains: [Hegemony] is a whole body of practices and expectations … : our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and the world. It is a lived system of meanings and values— constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming … It is … a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes. (p. 110) Thus hegemony is not something only found in our heads but, rather, something that inculcates our day-to-day practices (Apple, 1982). Gramsci’s conception of hegemony reflects his formulation of the relationship between the superstructure and the economic base. He specifies two basic ways that the superstructure reproduces capitalist relations: The first is hegemonic through ideology and universalized “spontaneous consent,” and the second is through “legal” enforcement of judiciaries and other institutions associated with the state (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12). While Gramsci does place an emphasis on the superstructure’s autonomy from the economic base (Carnoy, 1982), he does not, however, elevate the superstructure to independent status. Rather, he conceives of the superstructure as being dialectically related to the economic base: [Economic] structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc.” That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructure is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only a totalitarian system of ideologies gives a rational reflection of the contradiction of the structure.… This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 366, original emphasis) In this way, Gramsci provides neo-Marxists with a conceptual tool to address the dilemma presented by mechanical, functionalist analyses of the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure. Even early on, however, there were still worries about Gramsci’s conception of base and superstructure within critical educational theory, even though it was much more fluid and
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Page 86 insightful (Apple, 1982; Apple & Weis, 1983). For this reason, the work of Louis Althusser (1969, 1971) proved important to neo-Marxists because aspects of Althusser’s analysis also allow for a nonfunctionalist, non-economic determinist conception of the base–superstructure relationship. For instance, Althusser (1971) posits that: It is easy to see that this representation of the structure of every society as an edifice containing a base (infrastructure) on which are erected the two “floors” of the superstructure, is a metaphor, to be quite precise, a spatial metaphor … this metaphor … suggests that the upper floors could not “stay up” (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base … Thus the object of the metaphor of the edifice is to represent above all the “determination in the last instance” by the economic base. (p. 135) Given the superstructure’s “determination in the last instance” by the base, he arrives at two conclusions: “(1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ of the superstructure on the base” (p. 136). Althusser further identifies two distinct components of the superstructure: the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which the powerful use to maintain hegemonic control through force and ideology, respectively. The word “state” here is where Althusser made one of his most important contributions, since he posits a third sphere which, like the cultural sphere, is also relatively autonomous from the economic base: the political sphere. For Althusser it is the ISA, of which schools are a part, that maintains ideological hegemony for the ruling class. Indeed, Althusser sees state-sanctioned education as central in maintaining hegemony. In his discussion of the role of schools he states, “I believe that the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations … is the educational ideological apparatus ” (Althusser, 1971, p. 153, original emphasis). He goes on to discuss how schools, as a tool of bourgeois hegemony, are presented as a universally neutral and natural mechanism: The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology … (p. 157) Althusser’s conception of schools in relation to hegemony meshes with the Gramscian view in that schools transmit the “universally reigning ideology” while simultaneously maintaining the image of being a “neutral environment purged of ideology.” Thus, they contribute to, in Gramscian terms, the “spontaneous consent” of the dominated. Once again, even though Althusser provides a major break with some of the previous analyses, many people were concerned that it still had reductive elements and assumed ideological success by dominant groups. This is an historical and deeply troubling position, given those movements that have proved that it is perfectly possible to interrupt the ways in which economic, political, and cultural forms of domination operate in real life (Apple, 1995; Apple & Buras, 2006; Apple et al., 2003; Au, 2008a). However, it still is true that, ultimately, both the concepts of hegemony and relative autonomy created a theoretical opening out of the functionalist, economic determinist accounts provided by Bowles and Gintis and other theorists often derogatorily labeled as “orthodox” Marxists or “traditional” Marxists. This neo-Marxist opening allows for the recognition that issues associated with society, ideology, politics, and culture, are not totally determined by the relations of economic production, and that such issues, in addition to being reproductive, may have
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Page 87 productive aspects of their own. Further, by making a break with economic determinism, neo-Marxists established the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological justification for analyzing ideology and culture in their own right as valuable and worthwhile areas of critical analysis, and as contradictory but important sites of interruption. Gains in Neo-Marxist Critical Educational Theory Neo-Marxists in critical education theory have made fruitful use of the concepts of hegemony and relative autonomy in their analyses of schools and social reproduction. For instance, Gramsci’s conception of hegemony has been helpful for critical educational theorists in explaining how consent of the subordinate is essentially “won” by those in power. To maintain their hegemonic legitimacy, dominant elites often offer compromises or accords with subordinate groups (Apple & Buras, 2006), accords that can act as “an umbrella under which many groups can stand but which basically still is under the guiding principles of dominant groups” (Apple, 2000, p. 64). This understanding of hegemony has been used within critical educational policy studies in the United States, for instance, to frame why some segments of racially oppressed communities have lent their support to the movement to privatize public education via the use of vouchers—a movement that ultimately increases social inequality (Apple, 2006; Apple & Pedroni, 2005; Pedroni, 2007). Within such an analysis, the conservative Right hegemonically uses appeals to racial equity to gain the support of communities of color, who see their immediate interests served through the implementation of a policy such as school vouchers. Thus, Gramsci’s conception of hegemony allows for critical education theorists to recognize human agentic action as a constitutive aspect of individuals and communities as they consciously relate to social, economic, cultural, political, and educational “structures.” Gramsci’s conception of hegemony also has utilitarian value specifically in relation to analyzing what happens in schools: Understanding hegemony as a process in and of itself that takes place partially through education allows it to be explicitly targeted, analyzed, and potentially disrupted—a tactical position that has been noted by neo-Marxist educational theorists. As one of us (Apple, 1980) explains: As Gramsci was adamant in pointing out, there will be countervailing tendencies and oppositional practices going on as well. These tendencies and practices may not be as powerful as the ideological and material forces of determination that aim toward reproduction; they may in fact be inherently contradictory and relatively disorganized. But, they will exist. (p. 60) Viewing education as a site for resistance to bourgeois hegemony is a key concept for neo-Marxist theorists. It stems from the recognition that, because schools are in part sites of ideological reproduction and production, they are contested because ideologies themselves are contested and continually struggled over (Apple, 1981). Thus, within the neo-Marxist account, schools play a role both in ideological domination and as a site for complex and contradictory forms of resistance. The same argument can and should be made regarding cultural production, reproduction, domination, and resistance, as well (see, e.g., Dance, 2002; McRobbie, 1978; Willis, 1977). Althusser’s “relative autonomy” has similarly been taken up by neo-Marxist critical education theorists. For instance, one of us (Apple, 1995) illustrates this in explaining that: [T]here was as dynamic interplay between the political and economic spheres which was found in education. While the former was not reducible to the latter—and, like culture,
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Page 88 it had a significant degree of relative autonomy—the role the school plays as a state apparatus is strongly related to the core problems of accumulation and legitimation faced by the state and a mode of production. (p. 26, original emphasis) Strands of Althusser’s formulation can also be found running through the work of theorists such as Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Bernstein (Apple, 2002; Bernstein, 1990) to explain the ways that schools, even in the act of reproducing what are essentially class relations, often do so through the reproduction of cultural relations and, therefore, because of the dynamic nature of cultural forms, are in effect sites of imperfect, relatively autonomous reproduction. However, many critical educational researchers have moved well beyond the limits of theories of reproduction and increasingly have stressed that this is only one moment in a larger, dialectical movement that has come to be called the relationship between structure and individual agency. In an earlier period, for instance, Althusser’s concept of relative autonomy was used to develop “resistance theory” in education. As Giroux (1983) explains: In resistance accounts, schools are relatively autonomous institutions that not only provide spaces for oppositional behavior and teaching but also represent a source of contradictions that sometimes make them dysfunctional to the material and ideological interests of the dominant society. (p. 260) Resistance theory takes on issues of cultural production and reproduction as central fields of inquiry, and is perhaps epitomized by the ethnographic work of Paul Willis (1977, 2003), who, in his work with the “lads” in the United Kingdom, found that working-class schoolboys “resisted the mental and bodily inculcations of the school and rejected students who showed conformist attitudes to the school authorities” (Willis, 2003, pp. 392–393). Despite these gains, we have specific worries about the entire concept of “resistance theory,” as we noted above. Resistance, even thought about in its most complex manner, can only be understood as part of a larger set of dialectical relations, contradictions, and movements. Isolating the moment of resistance is useful to remind us of human agency, but without situating it back within its larger meanings and the ensemble of relations in which it takes place, it ultimately has little explanatory power. Tensions in Neo-Marxist Educational Theory It is important to recognize that, even as significant gains in the theorizing of critical education theorists have been made vis-à-vis the neo-Marxist project, certain tensions do exist within neo-Marxism itself. For instance, taken on the whole, Althusser’s conception is ultimately contradictory. While he does challenge economic determinism broadly through the concept of relative autonomy, he also denied human subjectivity and agency in relation to social, economic, and historical structures. This has been termed Althusser’s “antihumanism” where: the self, the human subject, does not so much constitute but is constituted by the structural, systemic relations in which it finds itself. It is the belief not that [humans] make history but that history makes [humans] or that history makes itself. (Smith, 1985, p. 649) Indeed, Althusser (1969) argues that Marx’s analysis of human agency should be disregarded in favor of a focus solely on the power of larger structures in human lives (Poster, 1974). Critical
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Page 89 educational theorists did, in fact, critique Althusser’s emphasis on structuralism. Giroux (1980, 1983, 2003), for instance, has grouped Althusser with the economic determinism of Bowles and Gintis (1976). “Relative autonomy” notwithstanding, Althusser’s formulation belies the power of humans, as agentic subjects, to act in the world. Another fundamental tension that exists within neo-Marxist educational theory relates to the assumptive origins of neo-Marxism itself. As one of us (Au, 2006, 2008a) has extensively argued, the “neo” turn away from what has been labeled “traditional” or “orthodox.” Marxism has a tendency to base itself on what may be only partial or less complex understandings of Marx’s original conception of the dialectical relationship between the economic base and the superstructure. Unfortunately, work such as that presented by Bowles and Gintis, for instance, which posited a mechanical, economic determinist relationship between capitalist production and the structure and function of schooling (discussed above), was either proclaimed or assumed to be representative of the “traditional” or “orthodox” Marxist analysis. True, in the case of Bowles and Gintis, they were making use of a form of class analysis, and they were critiquing capitalism for the reproduction of class relations in schools. However, it is arguable that this economic determinist account of schooling represented an actual application of Marxism (Au, 2006, 2008b). Indeed, the other of us (Apple, 1982) made this exact point some time ago, explaining that, “Marx himself consistently employed the ideas of base and superstructure in a complex way. Rather than calling for an economistic perspective where ‘the economy’ produces everything else, we find a much more substantive usage” (p. 10). One just needs to return to Marx and Engels’ texts to find evidence of a quite fluid and dynamic analysis of the relationship between economic production and social, cultural, political, and ideological elements (Au, 2006, 2008a). Still another tension is neo-Marxism’s focus on culture as a unit of analysis separate from the relations of production under capitalism. Such critique has been laid at the feet of one of us (Apple) and others (e.g., Bernstein, 1977) by some Marxian scholars in the field (see, e.g., Kelsh & Hill, 2006). While we strongly disagree with substantial portions of these scholars’ particular critiques, we do recognize that the neo-Marxist impulse, with its focus on relative autonomy, hegemony, resistance, culture, and ideology, certainly opens the door for one to adopt a culturalist analysis that denies any role the economy or relations of production have to play regarding power, domination, and schooling. Indeed, this has been a concern in both of our work (see, e.g., Apple, 1982; Au, 2008b). One of us (Apple, 1982) addressed this issue in the following discussion of the then burgeoning of neo-Marxist analyses of education: To primarily focus on culture—either in its lived or commodified forms … can itself be awfully limiting, however. For in the process we may tend to neglect the crucial issues related to mode of production and objective class structure that the investigators of economic reproduction have so rightly brought to our attention. We may forget how very important and real the connections among the economy, ideology, culture and other aspects of society are … Given this, any serious analysis of education and reproduction … requires a concomitant investigation of the way education functions in the process of class formation and struggle, capital accumulation and the legitimation of the privileges of dominant groups. (p. 3) A logic that implies that power relations are essentially cultural means that social and economic transformation (and educational transformation) becomes essentially a matter of cultural transformation, thus leaving the inequalities associated with capitalist socioeconomic relations untouched. Unless they are made more powerful and more connected to the ensemble of relations of which we spoke earlier, culturalist analyses can ultimately prove to be problematic. This is especially the case if one is interested in working towards social, economic, and educational equality.
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Page 90 However, it is important to recognize that, just because one studies the role of cultural production and reproduction in education, for instance, one is not dismissing the importance of economic relations relative to culture. Indeed, some of the best analyses that have a cultural turn directly show the ways in which culture, economy, and the state interconnect and form each other (Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997). Here the work of Bernstein (1977, 1990, 1996) proves particularly illustrative. Bernstein’s work essentially focuses on the role that pedagogic discourse, that is, classroom practice, operationalizes cultural codes, and that these cultural codes are based on social relations external to schools. Thus, for Bernstein, hierarchies of power in society are embodied and communicated in the cultural reproduction that happens in the classroom, and that this happens through the selection and distribution of identities. As noted above, however, Bernstein is indebted to notions of relative autonomy in that the relays for the communication of these cultural codes are not mechanical or rote. Instead these relays are inexact and imperfect, leaving the space for resistance and some level of flexibility at every step (Au, 2008b, 2008d). Functionally, then, on one level Bernstein is clearly focusing on and arguing for the reproduction of culture as the central mechanism for the reproduction of inequality in schools (Apple, 1992; Bernstein, 1977). We would argue, however, that even though Bernstein did focus on culture in his analysis, it is not necessarily because he is asserting that culture is the hinge upon which social and economic transformation is made. To the contrary, Bernstein (1977) has consistently maintained that, while there is some level of relative autonomy between education and capitalist production: Education is a class-allocatory device, socially creating, maintaining and reproducing non-specialized and specialized skills, and specialized dispositions which have an approximate relevance to the mode of production … The state, historically, has gained increasing control over the systemic relationships whilst maintaining the educational system in its essential role as a class distributor or the social relationships of production. The class-based distribution of power and modalities of control are made substantive in the form of transmission/ acquisition irrespective of variations in the systemic relationships between modes of education and production. In this way, the educational system maintains the dominating principle of the social structure. It is clear that the systemic relationships between education and production create for education the form of its economic or material base. (pp. 185–186, original emphasis) Hence, Bernstein’s focus is on a specific unit of analysis: pedagogic discourse in relation to cultural reproduction. Relative to this specific unit of analysis, Bernstein’s thesis is that, in education, power is transmitted through cultural codes, leaving open the space for both culture and education to have much of their grounding in the materiality of socioeconomic configurations associated with capitalist production. Thus, within Bernstein’s formulation, while the structure of education is generally bound by the unequal social relations associated with capitalist economic relations, this binding is, at least in part, communicated through the transmission of cultural codes. What Bernstein gives us is a powerful understanding of the way in which class works in the dynamics of cultural reproduction, even though he is not specifically neo-Marxist. Similarly, the work of Bourdieu (1984) also offers exceptionally important analyses of the relationship between class dynamics, official and popular culture, and the way these things are appropriated, mobilized, and then used to define groups of people. Both of these critical researchers extend the range of classes with which we should be concerned. In addition to the above discussion of the politics of culture, Bernstein, for instance, also goes beyond a two-class model of analysis, arguing that the New Middle Class has increasing power under capitalism (Apple, 2006; Au, 2008c; Ball,
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Page 91 2003; Bernstein, 1977). Alternatively, Bourdieu (1984) focuses our attention on the “dominated fraction of the dominant class” and illuminates the ways in which the classed body, classed knowledge, and class experience, all work together to create a class habitus that favors those dominant groups with “appropriate” economic, social, and cultural capital. This intervention into the taken-for-granted ways in which class analysis has tended to be done provides further opportunities for us to think about class in more complex ways without, we hope, giving up the power of Marxist conceptions of how classes are formed and act. Expanding Critical Resources In the last section we discussed a number of the internal tensions within the neo-Marxist traditions. We need now to focus on other ways in which neo-Marxism has related to other critical movements within the broader community of critical educational studies. The extension of critical concerns so that the net of political concepts is broader than what has often been the usual corpus of neo-Marxist material, has brought gains but also has led to certain tensions created by theories that have grown partly externally to the traditions on which we have focused thus far. A good case in point here is the incorporation of various “post” theories within critical educational studies. In the introductory chapter to this volume, we urged critical educators to take a particular position; that position implied that we are not in a church, so we are not worried about heresy. Both the neo-Marxist traditions (the plural is important here), and the postmodern and poststructural traditions (the plural is again important), have important things to learn from each other, but we also argue that “newer” postmodern and poststructural analyses were not replacements for those understandings that were grounded in the more structural and materialist positions. The growth of the multiple positions associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism is powerful and important and has served to teach us a considerable amount and to make critical educational theory more productive. This growth is indicative of the transformation of our discourse and understandings of the relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980). The rejection of the comforting illusion that there can (and must) be one grand narrative under which all relations of domination can be subsumed; the focus on the “pragmatic” and on the “micro-level” as a site of the political; the illumination of the utter complexity of the power–knowledge nexus; the extension of our political concerns beyond the “holy trinity” of class, gender, and race; the stress on multiplicity and heterogeneity; the idea of the decentered subject where identity is both non-fixed and a site of political struggle; the focus on the politics and practices of consumption (not only production)—all of this has been important, though not totally unproblematic to say the least (Best & Kellner, 1991; Clarke, 1991; Youdell, 2006). Many of these justifiable criticisms have grown from those scholars who have been strongly influenced by Foucault (1980, 1995). In no way do we want to dismiss the insights that have arisen from Foucault and those who have based their critical analyses on his work. However, at times Foucault has been reappropriated in ways that turn him into simply a more elegant theorist of social control, where all is normalizing practices and governmentality. Yet this forgets that Foucault himself reminded us that such practices qualify people for resistance. These indeed are issues that need to be taken as seriously as they deserve (see, Apple & Whitty, 2002). Yet, even though the “linguistic turn,” as it has been called in sociology, education, and cultural studies, has been immensely productive, it is important to remember that the world of education and elsewhere is not only a text. There are gritty realities out there, realities whose power is often grounded in structural relations that are not simply social constructions created by the meanings given by an observer. Part of our task, it seems to us, is not to lose sight of these gritty realities in the economy, in the state, and cultural practices, at the same time as we recognize the dangers of reductive and essentializing analyses.
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Page 92 Our point is not to deny that many elements of “postmodernity” exist, nor is it to deny the insights of aspects of postmodern theory. Rather, it is to avoid overstatement, to avoid substituting one grand narrative for another (a grand narrative that actually never existed in the United States), for example, since as we mentioned class, state, and political economy only recently surfaced in critical educational scholarship there and were only rarely seen in the form found in Europe where most postmodern and poststructural criticisms of these explanatory tools were developed. Indeed, we wish to make something of a postmodern point here: the intellectual and political histories of the United States and other nations may have important differences from those of, say, the parts of Europe where a good deal of postmodern, poststructural analyses originated. Thus, context counts, and just as we must be cautious of assuming that globalizing capital is exactly the same all over the world, we need to be just as cautious about automatically assuming that the entire world is uniformly experiencing the conditions of postmodernity. And here we agree with Green and Whitty (1994) that one of the main problems on which a critical analysis of education should focus is not only “meaning and its [supposedly] non-existent foundations, as poststructuralists would, by inversion, have it, but action and its consequences, in particular the structuration of opportunities to act, including to signify and make meanings, as action” (Green & Whitty, 1994, p. 21). Thus, “structural conditions cannot simply be thought ‘away,’ they must be thought ‘through’ in order to be ‘acted away,’ and our ‘thinking’ will never be fully up to the task” (Green & Whitty, 1994, p. 21). We need, then, to continue to “think through” the complicated structural and cultural conditions surrounding schools, to uncover the cracks in these conditions, and, in doing so, to find spaces for critical action. With the growth of postmodern and poststructural literature in critical educational and cultural studies, however, we may have tended to move too quickly away from traditions that continue to be filled with vitality and provide essential insights into the nature of the relations between schools, and the economic, political, and cultural spheres. Thus, for example, the mere fact that class does not explain all aspects of these relations has been used as an excuse to deny its explanatory power. This is a serious error. Class is, of course, an analytic construct as well as a set of relations that have an existence outside of our minds. What we mean by it and how it is mobilized as a category thus needs to be continually deconstructed and rethought, and we must be very careful when and how it is used, giving due recognition of the multiple ways in which people are formed. Even given this, however, it would be wrong to assume that, since many people do not identify with, or act on, what we might expect from theories that link, say, identity and ideology with one’s class position, this means that class has gone away (Aronowitz, 1992; Wright, 1997). As Marx himself reminded us, capitalism is a dynamic and constantly evolving ensemble of relations (Au, 2006, 2008b). And therefore classes and their relations will themselves be constantly shifting and evolving. Thus, this is not a call for reductive or mechanistic analyses, but a clear recognition of the basic tenets of a set of traditions that, itself, has to be subtle and evolving. As we indicated above, we are certainly cognizant of the fact that there are multiple relations of power— not only that “holy trinity” of race, class, and gender. We also recognize that conflicts not only among these relations but within them as well are crucial and that power can be productive as well. While we don’t totally agree with Philip Wexler (1992) that in schools and the larger society class difference is always the overriding organizing code of social life, we are deeply worried that issues of class have been marginalized in critical work in education. It took so long for questions about class and political economy to come to the fore in our understanding of educational policy and practice—especially in the United States where class discourses have been much more muted than in Europe (Apple, 1995; Fraser and Gordon, 1994)—that it would be a tragic circumstance if, just when a fuller understanding of these dynamics is needed the most, they were marginalized (Apple, 1999; see also, Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & McLaren, this volume). The neoliberal and neoconservative economic and ideological offensive that is being
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Page 93 felt throughout the world demonstrates how very important it is that we take these dynamics seriously (Davis, 2006). The same must be said about the economy. Capitalism might be in the process of being transformed (and perhaps not totally in the ways suggested by “post” theorists), but it still exists as a truly massive structuring force (Au, 2008b). Many people might not think and act in ways predicted by classessentializing theories, but this does not mean that the structures of the racial, sexual, and class divisions of paid and unpaid labor have disappeared; nor does it mean that relations of production (both economic and cultural, since how we think about these two might be different) can be ignored if we do it in non-essentializing ways (Apple, 1996). Thus, it is important not to evacuate a critical (and selfcritical) structural understanding of education. While being cautious of economic reductionism, this does require that we recognize that we live under capitalist relations. Milton Friedman and the entire gamut of privatizers and marketizers who have so much influence in the media and in the corridors of power in corporate boardrooms, foundations, and our governments at nearly all levels spend considerable amounts of time praising these relations. If they can talk about them, why can’t we? These relations don’t determine everything. They are constituted out of, and reconstituted by, race, class, and gender relations, but it seems a bit odd to ignore them. There is a world of difference between taking economic logics and dynamics and the state seriously and reducing everything down to a pale reflection of them. While some postmodern and poststructural analyses in education do, in fact, place justifiable emphasis on the state as well, we do worry that at times it is treated as if it floats in thin air (see, especially, Hunter, 1994). But our conclusion remains the same. We must again stress that poststructural and postmodern criticisms of structural analyses in education are fruitful, and the multiple traditions that have developed under the umbrella of postmodernism and poststructuralism remain essential tools and perspectives that have much to teach us about an appropriate critical politics in education. This is especially the case when such analyses have come from within the various feminist and postcolonial communities (Apple et al., 2003; Luke & Gore, 1992; McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993. We have tried to be generous in our appraisal of the importance of a multiplicity of traditions and perspectives within critical education and, as we stated earlier, there are clear parallels in the work around issues of identity, cultural politics, and the relationship between power and knowledge, in both the neo-Marxist and “post” analyses. We do have a final worry, however, and that is that just as those of us who identify more closely with neo-Marxist understanding have felt called upon to read deeply within the literature in postmodernism and poststructuralism, it is also the responsibility of those within “post” traditions to be equally generous and continue to be taught by equally vital traditions within neoMarxism. Conclusion In this chapter we have explored some of the limits and possibilities of the expanding conceptual political and empirical work that is now guiding critical educational studies. We have chosen to examine only selective parts of these approaches, but the key points, we hope, are clear: the necessity to deal carefully and in depth with the best of each approach and not to stereotype them; to remember that our task is not simply an “intellectual” one, but to engage in analyses that are aimed at interrupting the relations of exploitation and domination in the larger society and in education; this will require much more of a cooperative effort among all of these critical tendencies. Our aim must be one of a “decentered unity” (Apple, 2006), but it is clear that neo-Marxism provides a core element in any serious attempt at forming such a movement.
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Page 96 7 The Reign of Capital A Pedagogy and Praxis of Class Struggle Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & Peter McLaren The injuries of class are deep and long lasting … Imperialism, war, and a domestic police state are an unholy triad that magnify enormously the injuries of class. (Yates, 2008, p. 10) Cutting ourselves off from Marx is to cut off our investigative noses to satisfy the superficial face of contemporary intellectual fashion. (Harvey, 2000, p. 12) One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist social relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be “vulgar.” In this climate of Aesopian language it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. (Ahmad, 1997, p. 104) Introduction Ahmad’s assertion rings even truer today than it did in the late 1990s when he first penned his indictment of postmodern orthodoxy and the intellectual retreat from class. Today, talking about class is still largely “unpopular” and too “old-fashioned” for an intelligentsia seemingly more titillated by the academic eroticism of studying all forms and varieties of cultural “difference.” Even among the educational left —comprised of self-described “progressive” critical pedagogues and radical democrats—Marxism and the concept of class have been deemed defunct and class struggle is viewed as anathema to serious political progress. Apparently, one can fulminate against neoliberalism as a form of cultural pedagogy while largely flouting the fact that “neoliberalism is in the first [emphasis ours] instance a theory of political economic practices” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2) designed to benefit the global capitalist elite on the backs of the laboring classes. One can also, presumably, ignore that neoliberalism is a class practice and that “neoliberal ideology was the dominant classes’ response to the considerable gains achieved by the working and peasant classes between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s” (Navarro, 2006, p. 24).
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Page 97 In addition, one can objurgate the Bush administration—with its motley blend of Christian apocalypticism, neoconservatives, and nattering nabobs of neoliberalism—for fomenting war in Afghanistan and Iraq, pursuing authoritarianism at home, and empire abroad with barely a whisper about capitalism. While it is certainly the case that the Bush administration’s quest for empire has been blatant, it is vital to acknowledge that the growth of empire is not peculiar to the United States or to any one administration but is, rather, the “systematic result of the entire history and logic of capitalism” (Foster, 2006, p. 13). Moreover, while such critics (rightly) highlight the emasculation of democracy and citizenship, the increase in inequality, and the declining accountability of the state to the “public” it purportedly represents, they often attribute such processes to the capture of the state by corporate interests. However, as Saad-Filho (2003) notes, this view is both misleading and inadequate for capitalism itself “ necessarily limits democracy .” Moreover, “the expansion of democracy into critically important areas of life requires the abolition of capitalism” (pp. 15–16). Although capitalism is “compatible with political (formal or procedural) democracy” which includes, among other things, free and regular elections, freedom of the press, etc., “capitalism necessarily limits the scope for freedom because it is inimical to economic (substantive) democracy. These limits are imposed by the capitalist monopoly over the economic sphere” (p. 17). In other words, capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Sadly, large swathes of what Kelsh and Hill (2006, p. 2) refer to as the “revisionist left” have embraced the inevitability of capital and in lending their voices to the symphony of TINA (there is no alternative) have, essentially, served as ideological ventriloquists of the capitalist class and revealed the utter superciliousness of their radical posturing. Their counter-cultural criticism often masks an aristocratic radicalism underwritten by a liberal affective politics and warmed-over liberal pluralism that rarely challenges the capitalist system as a whole. In our current world-historical state of affairs, our lives are increasingly shaped by the needs of global corporations. At the level of the academy, resistance to neoliberalism and the invasion of capitalist commodification into everyday life has taken many shapes and forms but in the main, it has remained mostly at the level of a politics of representation. And in this politically amorphous arena, the cultural turn towards “sign value” has been the hallmark of so-called avant-garde theories that detach the social relations of production and class struggle from cultural representations. Historical materiality has disappeared into the vortex of the “non-representational,” the “anti-mimetic” and the “incommensurable” as language and meanings became severed from the social relations of capitalist production (Ebert & Zavarzadeh, 2008). Yet, capitalism is the invisible backdrop against which everyday life in the United States plays itself out in complex and contradictory ways. It permeates the whole cloth of familial, cultural, social, and institutional life. However, the preservation of capital goes beyond the reproduction of the principal Western powers. Capital must continue to be self-renewing worldwide since it remains the systematic controller of our social metabolic reproduction as a human species. The forced reconstitution of the modern state—which produces the totalizing command structure of capital—that is compatible with capital’s normality is the means by which capitalism is reproduced as a world system, even though such “forced normality” demands that we suffer endless wars, deprivation, famine, the dissolution of international law, the rewriting of constitutional rights, humanitarian military intervention, pre-emptive military strikes, and possibly nuclear annihilation (Meszaros, 2006). As conditions for the many continue to deteriorate under the rule of globalized capitalism, we contend that it is increasingly difficult to ignore Marx. When he and Engels penned the Communist Manifesto, capitalism as we know it was still confined to a few countries. Today, the reign of capital is more absolute than ever and key passages of the Manifesto ring truer today than they did in 1848 as “key features of nineteenth-century capitalism are clearly recognizable, and
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Page 98 even more strongly developed, in the early twenty-first century” (Saad-Filho, 2003, p. 1). Furthermore, as capitalism has become “increasingly global the number of people in a proletarian position is greater than ever before” (Brosio, 2008, p. 13). That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated was correct. However, we contend that Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day, and that a return to the tough, simple truths that lie at the core of Marx’s analyses is an essential condition of effective political praxis. In making such a claim, we recognize that we might be perceived as theoretical Neanderthals naively clinging to the mental furniture of a bygone era. We understand, as Ahmad suggests above, that those who argue that the concept of class still has tremendous explanatory power are routinely dismissed as “vulgar,” unreconstructed Marxists who remain convinced that the fundamental relations within contemporary capitalist society are, with minor distinctions, essentially the same as they were at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Yet, while capitalism has undergone seismic shifts since its emergence, it is also the case that the violent capital relation that is rooted in the exploitation of labor has remained relatively constant. More importantly, what must be confronted as offensive, as vulgar is the savagery unleashed by capitalism’s barbaric machinations. Ours is a world that is internationally connected but ultimately dominated by the whims of the capitalist class and the agenda of corporate “globalization”; a world where the profit motive reigns supreme and where it subordinates every area of society and every corner of the globe to its logic. A world where “free trade” has become nothing more than coerced compliance and where “freedom” increasingly refers to the freedom to structure the distribution of wealth and to exploit workers more easily across national boundaries. A world in which “global inequality is worsening rapidly” (Juhasz, 2006, p. 101) and where “democracy” has become nothing more than the “Free World’s whore” and “Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism” (Roy, 2004, pp. 54, 56). It is a world where naked imperialism has clearly made a comeback as the aggressive U.S. administration does the bidding for the global capitalist class; a world where scores of innocent people are caught in the crossfire of imperial wars and the crosshairs of austere “structural adjustment programs.” A world in which “torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade” from Chile to China and Iraq (Klein, 2007, p. 15). We are currently witnessing one of the most vicious forms of deregulated exploitation of the poor in history. The gap between rich and poor has widened considerably as we continue to observe with dismaying regularity an obscene concentration and centralization of social, political, and, most importantly, economic power in the hands of a small number of oligopolies. The combined wealth of the three richest people in the world exceeds the combined gross domestic products of the 48 poorest countries and the combined wealth of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s population. Roughly 3 billion people struggle to sustain themselves on less than US$2 a day. There are 852 million people across the world who suffer from chronic or acute hunger. As we write, riots have broken out in Haiti and elsewhere as food costs escalate, damning those already suffering to slow and sure death. All this misery despite the fact that a mere fraction of what the United States currently spends on the military could end world hunger as we know it (Galeano, 2003, p. 19). In the United States, one in four jobs “pay less than a poverty-level income.” Recent statistics indicate that 37 million residents in America are “officially poor” (Jeffery, 2006, p. 20). Concomitantly, the richest 1% of the American population—George W. Bush’s “haves” and “have mores”—continue to reap the benefits of his generous tax cut package which represents one of the most brazen redistributions of income to the wealthy that the nation has ever seen. Twenty-two years ago, American CEOs earned, on average, 42 times more than production workers. Today, they earn 431 times more. In 2004, while “seventy-six Americans became billionaires,” poverty increased and “real median earnings of full-time workers fell” (Juhasz, 2006,
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Page 99 p. 100). These are the concrete realities that exist—tales of desperation and despair alongside ostentatious displays of avarice. Given this sobering context, one wonders why many educators have been reluctant to confront the injuries of class in any systematic fashion. Class Matters The class war rages unabated as liberals and radicals alike seem either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe. (Harvey, 1998, p. 31) There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. (Buffet, 2006, cited in Stein) The sentinels of intellectual fashion constantly tell us that class struggle is obsolete. Yet, we would dare to remind them that such a struggle does, in fact, exist in the form of the “struggle by capital for profit,” the struggle by capital to exploit labor, the struggle of capital to impose “its form of social relations” on us (Holloway, 2003, p. 233). Within educational theory, an iron wall whose purpose is to further ghettoize Marxist conceptions of class from less combative Weberian and neo-Weberian conceptualizations confronts us. Even within discourses of critical pedagogy, we are surrounded by a motivated amnesia with respect to the efficacy and strategic potential of a Marxist analysis of class. In fact, “over the last several decades, the revisionist left has systematically discredited and displaced the Marxist concept of class,” or when class is discussed by educational researchers, it refers to “social divisions, social strata, that are effects of market forces that are understood to be (relatively) autonomous” from “the relations of exploitation between labor and capital” (Kelsh & Hill, 2006, p. 3). Following Weber, individuals are perceived as belonging to strata on the basis of skill, occupational status, income, consumption patterns, etc. and these various strata are then taken as proxy social classes. Yet, such conceptualizations don’t really tell us much about class relations for these base categories are not social class ones at all but categories of social stratification founded on the combination and aggregation of various measures of social inequality and relative social status. Hill and Cole (2001) have criticized neo-Weberian views of social class on three grounds. They argue that such formulations: (a) ignore, indeed hide, the existence of the capitalist class that owns the means of production as well as the means of distribution and exchange and which therefore dominates society economically and politically; (b) “gloss over and hide, the fundamental antagonistic relationship between the two main classes in society”—the capitalist class and the working class which consists not only of manual workers but millions of white-collar laborers whose work conditions are similar to those of manual workers (p. 152); (c) work ideologically to segment the working class and to hide “the existence of a working class.” They “serve the purpose of ‘dividing and ruling’ the working class” by “segmenting different groups of workers” and thus inhibiting the “development of a common (class) consciousness against the exploiting capitalist class” (pp. 152–153). Such critics suggest that these conventional classifications are ideological in nature: “in effect if not by design, Weberian-based formulations of class serve the interests of the capitalist class … insofar as they erase” the fundamental antagonism which lies at the heart of capitalism—that which exists between the laboring class and the capitalist class (Kelsh & Hill, 2006, p. 6). The ideological role that they play might help to explain their prominence in education theory. In order to get a real grip on class we must veer from the safe path of the mainstream to the lost highway of Marxist theory, for as Brosio (2008, p. 5) reminds us, Marx “sought to develop a form of common language for politics so that the scattered and disunited working-class people
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Page 100 could understand their plight and make common cause in solidarity to overcome their oppression.” Like Hill and Cole, we find neo-Weberian formulations problematic. Similarly, we reject postmodern assertions that class is primarily a language sign whose meaning is overpopulated with referents and therefore “undecidable” or that class is merely one among a diversity of semiotically constructed identities and just another form of “difference.” Against such conceptualizations, it is imperative to acknowledge that class is connected to where a person is located within the capitalist division of labor. While it is certainly the case that class is, in many ways, a lived culture and lived experience, this should not preclude an understanding of class as an objective entity. Marxists well understand that class has an objective existence as an empirical category and a subjective existence in terms of the way in which it is lived and interpreted. However, in jettisoning Marxism and/or positing class as an effect of culture, the revisionist left has fallen prey to an uncritical and ahistorical “culturalism” that cleaves class from the relations of production. Therefore, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural/discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a “subject position.” The category of class is presumed to acquire “its subjective weight as a meaningful identity from cultural elements” and in relation to other (i.e., ethnic, racial, gender, etc.) identities (Buechler, 2000, p. 126). In such theoretical trickery, class is effectively cut off from the political economy of capitalism and severed from an exploitative power structure in which those who control and benefit from collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not. Culturalist analyses of class also conflate individuals’ objective locations with respect to the means of production with individuals’ subjective understandings of how they are situated based on their “experiences.” As we have argued elsewhere, experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing (Scatamburlo-D’Annibale & McLaren, 2004, p. 189). That is, merely because individuals might or might not articulate their sense of self (or identity) in terms of class does not negate the fact of their objective location within larger class formations. Class is not simply another ideology that serves to legitimate oppression; rather, class denotes “exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production” (Gimenez, 2001, p. 24). Furthermore, classes “do not come into being by subjective fiat”; rather, “they are organized by the capitalist class to appropriate value” (Petras, 1999, p. 63). Marx, Class, and Value In his attempt to make sense of capitalism as a social relation, Marx’s genius was in identifying the historical specificity of value-producing labor and his analysis of capitalist exploitation revolves around this labor theory of value. Marx argued (1887/1967) that the value of any given commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time that is used in production. As he puts it, “the labourtime socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” (p. 41). In the context of his labor theory of value, commodities are exchanged in the market at costs that correspond to the necessary labor time embodied in them. However, surplus value is realized when a commodity is sold or exchanged for more than its labor value. Capital relies for its very existence on the generation of surplus value—that is, value over-and-above necessary labor. When a worker works beyond what is necessary to ensure his or her survival, he/she is generating surplus value for the capitalist. Moreover, surplus value—profit—is “the value determined, ultimately by capitalist class practices in their totality, to be above and
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Page 101 beyond (‘surplus’) the value that owner must pay in wages to the laborer to ensure she is able to reproduce her labor-power” (Kelsh & Hill, 2006, p. 4). Marx (1867/1967) argues that to “extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, and consequently to exploit labor-power to the greatest possible extent” is the “directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production” (p. 331, as cited in Kelsh & Hill, 2006, p. 4). Exploitation, through the extraction of surplus value, “is a systemic feature of capitalism” (Saad-Filho, 2003, p. 35). Capitalists “ must exploit their workers if they are to remain in business” since “exploitation is the fuel that moves capitalist production and exchange.” Without “surplus value there would be no wage employment, no capitalist production, and the system would grind to a halt” (pp. 35–36). All of this points to the fact that within capitalism, the fundamental opposition is between labor and capital—a relation that is constituted at the level of production . Hence, the primary social contradiction within capitalism is the specific antagonism that exists between classes under the totalizing logic of capital and commodification. According to Dyer-Witheford (1999), capitalism: is a system based on the imposition of universal commodification, including, centrally, the buying and selling of human life-time. Its tendency is to subordinate all activity to the law of value—the socially imposed law of exchange. It relates a monological master-narrative in which only money talks. Such a system operates by process of massive reduction—Marx called it “abstraction”—that perceives and processes the world solely as an array of economic factors. Under this classificatory grid—this “classing” of the world—human subjects figure only as so much labor power and consumption capacity, and their natural surroundings as so much raw material. This reductionism—the reductionism of capital—has today a totalizing grip on the planet. Other dominations, too, are reductive—sexism reduces women to objects for men, racism negates the humanity of people of color. But neither patriarchy nor racism has succeeded in knitting the planet together into an integrated, coordinated system of interdependencies. This is what capital is doing today … In doing so, it is subsuming every other form of oppression to its logic. Contrary to the post-Marxist belief that different kinds of domination politely arrange themselves in a nonhierarchical, pluralistic way the better not to offend anyone’s political sensibilities, capitalism is a domination that really dominates … Indeed, it is possible now to see much better than Marx in his day could how the capitalist international division of labor often incorporates, and largely depends on discrimination by gender or ethnicity to establish its hierarchies of control. (pp. 9–10) Dyer-Witheford suggests that it is necessary to acknowledge that most social relations constitutive of difference—including those of race, gender, etc.—are considerably shaped by the relations of production. Yet, the fact that racism and sexism are necessary social relations for the organization of contemporary capitalism and new forms of emerging neo-colonialism seems to escape the collective imaginations of those who approach difference in an exclusively culturalist manner. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that post-al theory has largely abandoned the problems of class and labor exploitation at a time when colonialism is making a comeback in the form of global trade rules and structural adjustment programs. The so-called “third world” is being reconquered—not with gunboats—but with the protocols articulated by organizations such as the WTO and the IMF. Yet, culturalist narratives have not “translated into a serious engagement with the geopolitics of the global assembly line” or the “internationalization of migrant labor comprised primarily of women of color” (San Juan, 2002, p. 236). Nor have “postmodernist/ poststructural ‘critical’ theorists” looked at or condemned the “ravages of contemporary capitalism’s drive to beat down wage workers” (Brosio, 2008, p. 8).
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Page 102 To counteract the politically debilitating narratives that undermine a critical understanding of capitalism, the relationship between capital and labor must be properly understood. But, it is also imperative to note that the labor–capital relation is not a symmetrical one. As Meszaros notes, that “means in the most important respect that while capital’s dependency on labor is absolute —in that capital is absolutely nothing without labor, which it must permanently exploit—labor’s dependency on capital is relative, historically created and historically surmountable ” (2001, pp. 76–77, original emphasis). In other words, “capital, a relation of general commodification predicated on the wage relation, needs labor. But labor does not need capital. Labor can dispense with the wage, and with capitalism, and find different ways to organize its own creative energies” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, p. 68). Hence, revolutionary critical pedagogy believes that the best way to transcend the limits to human liberation set by capital are through practical mass movements centered around class struggle. While the clarion cry of class struggle is spurned by the revisionist left, there is a class struggle—indeed class warfare—being carried out as billionaire Warren Buffet admitted in the quote cited above. It is a class struggle being waged by those few who continue to reap outrageous profits on the backs of the laboring masses. If Buffet can readily confess that class warfare is being waged, we must ask ourselves why there is such a reluctance on the part of “critical” educators to vigorously engage the concept of class. Towards a Critical/Revolutionary Pedagogy and Philosophy of Praxis It is a commonplace among proponents of revolutionary critical pedagogy, following Marx, that ideas must be situated in history and experience as fallible generalizations that need to be ideologically unveiled by means of historical materialist critique. This commonplace takes on a special urgency today, when obeisance to the capitalist class remains an unspoken given, when capitalism’s capacity to integrate the working class through their incorporation in financial markets and through the internationalization of the neoliberal market economy remains steady, and when expectations that neoliberal capitalism can be superseded by a better form of organizing social and economic life—such as socialism—have been fatally renounced. As noted above, part of Marx’s brilliance was in identifying the historical specificity of value-producing labor. Only in capitalism does labor have a dual character, expressed in the division between concrete and abstract labor. Marx was able to understand how concrete labor becomes transformed into abstract labor through socially necessary labor time into an undifferentiated and universal form of activity that defines all forms of human relationships and interactions. For Marx, it became imperative to understand this phenomenon by identifying and clarifying the workings of internal relations and dialectical contradictions. He understood that it was necessary to identify the false dichotomies that mystify our understanding of the objective conditions in which we live and labor and which contribute to a fragmented and partial consciousness. This can best be accomplished by understanding the internal relations that constitute the social universe of capital. In her important work on education, Paula Allman (1999, 2001a, 2001b) enters the thicket of Marx’s thought, scythe in one hand and a hammer in the other, clearing some much needed space for an elucidation of the deep structure of social life. She writes: Throughout the history of capitalism, there has been the possibility of human beings uncritically and unwittingly choosing to participate in their own and others’ dehumanization rather than critically choosing the much more arduous struggle to become more fully
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Page 103 human—choosing to participate with other human beings in the continuous process of humanization. With increasingly disastrous consequences, it is the first possibility—the first “choice”—that has prevailed. (2007, p. 66) For Allman, this challenge means that we need to engage Marx’s philosophy of internal relations which can lead to identifying capitalism’s complicity in the formation of uncritical and reproductive consciousness/praxis. As she explains: [W]hen we conceptualize entities as internally related and focus on the ways in which within an internal relation the entities mutually and reciprocally shape and determine one another, i.e., the movement and internal development of one another, we begin to understand the world and our experiences within the world in a more complex and comprehensive manner. (2007, p. 58) Marx succeeded in forging on the anvil of human agency a praxiological dimension in which the working class can recognize themselves as harbingers of the future. He understood social life as a series of dialectical contradictions and internal relations that constitute the essence of capital/ capitalism. But because of the prevalence of dichotomized thinking within capitalist social relations (a thinking that produces a fragmented and partial consciousness), our understanding is distorted and we fail to perceive the components of these dialectical contradictions as related. We experience related opposites (such as capital versus labor) as if they are discrete or separate from each other—part of what Marx calls “the violence of abstraction.” Allman urges us to overcome such violence by viewing the elements of social life as dialectical—a whole constituted by interacting parts, each of which is important. These parts form what are called internal relations—relations that cannot be changed without affecting the terms themselves between which the relation holds. A philosophy of internal relations helps us develop a historical and developmental way of conceptualizing social life and how its various elements are related over time, and how they are continually shaped by their relation with other elements over time. All dialectical contradictions are internal relations—a relation of two opposite entities/phenomena that could not exist, continue to exist or have come into existence in the absence of their internal relation to one another. The opposites could not be what they are or what they are to become outside of this relation. When this is an antagonistic relation, for example, a dialectical contradiction, the existence of each opposite is variously constrained or hampered by virtue of the fact that it is in an internal relation with its opposite; however, one of the opposites, despite these limitations, actually benefits from the relation. It is in the interest of this opposite—often referred to as the positive—to maintain the relation. The other opposite—the negative—although it can better its circumstances temporarily within the relation, is severely limited by its relation to its opposite and sometimes to the point of devastation; therefore, it is in its interest to abolish the relation (Allman, McLaren, & Rikowski, 2005). Allman expands on this idea: A dialectical contradiction is an internally related unity of opposites, e.g., labor and capital, in which one of the opposites is called the positive in that its role is to preserve the relation; while the other opposite is the negative because its role eventually is to abolish the relation. This abolition is called the negation of the negation. Crucially, abolition involves the relation, and when the opposites are composed of human beings, it does not mean that
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Page 104 they are abolished; however, the opposites, as opposites, will no longer exist. In the example of labor and capital, the negation of the negation means that labor will cease existing as a separate and oppressed class, bringing about the elimination of class divisions and the possibility of authentic human emancipation. (Allman, 2007, p. 8) The most important example of an internal relation/dialectical contradiction/“unity of oppo-sites” is the relation between labor and capital that constitutes the class relation. This relation, together with the internal relation between capitalist production and circulation/exchange, constitutes, according to Marx, the essence of capitalism (Allman, 2001a). For Marx, therefore, “class is not a thing, or socio-economic category; class is a relation, viz., the internal relation between labor and capital” (Allman, 2007, p. 9). Within this relationship, the working class is the internally related opposite of capital. Allman’s approach to educational transformation is also grounded in the concepts of “being/becoming” and “knowledge/knowing.” This, essentially, is a theory of praxis, centered in Marx’s theory of consciousness, that postulates that our conscious thought derives from our activity in the world (our sensuous experience within the material world) but that the world is simultaneously shaped and produced in accord with our consciousness. The material reality that we experience with our senses is the historically specific reality of capitalism. Marxism, according to Allman, has a uniquely important approach to epistemology (or theory of knowledge/knowing) that does not oppose consciousness to the material world. It does not dichotomize thinking and material reality (such as contemporary theoretical approaches that privilege “correct” philosophical thinking or empirical, scientific observation of reality) and rejects the notion that knowledge is immutable and transhistorical—i.e., that knowledge is reified, static, and can be accumulated. Marx’s epistemology underscores a recognition that knowledge is historically specific and always in the making. We seek to know and understand a world that is constantly in movement because it is rife with the dialectical contradictions that come with capitalism. According to Allman: Knowledge must be constantly scrutinized and tested rather than simply acquired. Therefore, the acquisition of knowledge is the beginning rather than the end of a particular learning effort, at which point the original knowledge might have been accepted, rejected or considerably transformed, and whether accepted, rejected or transformed always understood with greater depth than is possible with mere acquisition. Rather than relating to knowledge as if it were a thing to be acquired or possessed, with Marx’s epistemology, knowledge is a tool that we use to delve deeply into reality, and it is a tool that we constantly test in order to ascertain whether it is enabling us to develop a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the world and our existence and experiences within it. We also test it to determine whether it enhances our ability to transform ourselves simultaneously with our immediate social relations, i.e., the social relations within which we are learning. (2007, p. 61) Allman also stresses that Marx’s philosophy provides an alternative ontology, which allows us to comprehend the myriad of ways in which capitalist socio-economic relations thwart our “being” in the present and preclude the possibility of realizing individually and collectively all of our human potentials, of “becoming” now and in the future more fully human, such that “becoming” actually becomes humanity’s vocation. (2007, p. 61)
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Page 105 Marx’s concept of human nature is crucial here particularly in relation to one of his famous sentences (in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ): “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” As far back as 1980, José Miranda pointed out that Marx’s notion of determination must be understood in a way that is not deterministic because the German verb bestimmen is all too often translated as “to determine” and this verb means a lot of things unrelated to determinism. In Marx’s use of this term, he in no way excludes the concept of human freedom or contingency; in fact, he uses the term dialectically. As is evident in the German Ideology , Marx never forgot that just as circumstances help to form human beings, human beings also help to form circumstances. In contrast to what many critics of Marx claim, human beings, for Marx, are far from the passive actors of historical processes. He argued that humans are biological, anatomical, physiological, and psychological beings and that an individual’s human nature must be understood in terms of how it has been modified in each historical epoch. Hence, Marx did not reject the notion of human nature so much as a universal and timeless concept of human nature. Marx clearly could identify human characteristics that are universal and historically invariant and which set limits to the plasticity of human nature. Richard Litchman presciently notes: The very notion of human nature as a tabula rasa is self-contradictory. Even a blank slate must have such properties as will permit the acceptance of the chalk, as the wax accepts the stylus, the inscribing tool. The issue is not whether there is a common nature, but what precisely that nature is. (as cited in Sayers, 1998) When human beings make themselves their own creator by producing their own means of subsistence, then this signals the beginning of human history. The act of production creates new needs and it is important to see Marx’s understanding of human nature within the dialectical relationship of needs and productive powers. New needs are created through the productive activity we engage in to satisfy our universal needs and this activity has to be seen in terms of the social relations which are, themselves, ultimately determined by such needs (Sayers, 1998). New forms of productive activity may result, and, indeed, new productive powers. Needs never arise in a vacuum. That is why in concrete conditions, human nature, in general, does not exist. Marx is interested in the social development of needs, beyond those necessary only for biological survival. From a historical materialist point of view, nature is a precondition of human development and not an explanation of it. You can’t explain the social in terms of the concept of the natural. The laws of natural evolution can’t be transferred to social evolution. For Marx, social and moral developments are judged on how they impact on the growth of human nature in terms of the creation of powers and capacities. The stress in Marx is the development of new needs. As Sean Sayers notes: “Paradoxical as it at first seems, the ideal is the human being ‘rich in needs.’ For in Marx’s view this is equivalent to the development of human powers and capacities, the development of human nature” (1998, p. 164). True wealth, for Marx, lies precisely in the development of human nature. Human nature, then, is not antecedent to social being, something that pre-exists our existence within historically specific social relations of production; it develops within human praxis. The struggle for educators working within a Marxist humanist problematic is to develop a critical pedagogical approach built on these alternative conceptions of ontology and epistemology—conceptions that can help to render uncritical consciousness critical, and enable the formation of critical consciousness within the formation of our species being. The struggle for critical/revolutionary praxis begins with the struggle of humanization:
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Page 106 the process of humanization begins with developing a critical understanding of the way in which our praxis and the world we “make” within this praxis limits both our own individual potential and also the potential of humanity. For Marx, the process of humanization, i.e., of becoming more fully human, is always a collective, a social, process, perhaps best expressed by conceptualizing our individuality as internally related to our collectivity, to humanity, such that the harmonious, progressive development of one is impossible unless inter-connected to the harmonious, progressive development of all. (Allman, 2007, p. 62) When we attempt to create critical/revolutionary praxis within the context of capitalism, we must make sure it involves a reciprocity of self and social/economic transformation. We cannot wait for capitalism to implode of its own momentum. We need to begin working together to fight a long struggle against capitalist social relations and humanizing the relation between “knowing” and “being.” As Jaramillo and McLaren (in press) note: Because we recognize that agency bears the impress of material reality, freedom cannot simply be the product of juggling discourses like an academic circus performer. We cannot determine our lives while at the same time ignore how we have become determined in the same social matrix out of which we attempt to make our own histories. We are not creative spirits operating in or on inert matter. There is, after all, a mutually determining relation between the active subject and the object of contemplation. Subjectivity cannot be separated from objectivity. It is impossible to keep separated the basis of freedom from the basis of necessity. People need to begin the struggle soon since, as Allman notes, “they might become incapable of doing so because over the long-term capitalist dehumanization might permanently debilitate humanity” (2007). Translated into the context of teachers and learners, this speaks to overcoming the teacher/learner contradiction and related contradictions between process/content, means/ends, and the acquisition of existing knowledge and the creation of new knowledge and understandings (Allman, 2007). Allman (2007) also supports a negative concept of ideology which she describes as the seemingly coherent expression of real separations, or fragments, of reality and real inversions in human experience; therefore, because ideological explanations draw upon real aspects of people’s experience, those who articulate them have the power to persuade people to accept, or resign themselves to, the ideological portrayal of reality. (p. 65) Allman (2007) praises Freire as an educator whose negative concept of ideology and concept of internally related dialectical contradictions should be appropriated. For instance, Freire’s concept of the oppressed and the oppressor is an internally related dialectical contradiction “wherein, due to their uncritical/reproductive praxis, the oppressed have only one vision of what they can become, viz., the oppressors” (p. 65). Allman notes that it is only through critical/revolutionary praxis that the oppressed can begin to envision alternative ways of “being” and “becoming” and also begin to purge the oppressors’ substance from its embedded position within their objectivities and subjectivities, their thoughts, feelings and desires. (p. 65) Critical/revolutionary praxis requires a coherent philosophy of praxis.
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Page 107 All of these pedagogical features—the employment of ideological critique, understanding dialectical contradictions as internally related, and humanizing the relationship between knowing and being— conspire timelessly in the process of Karl Marx’s “revolutionary praxis,” as part of an effort to bring about a socialist alternative to capitalism. Revolutionary praxis, stressed Marx, is not some arch-strategy of political performance undertaken by academic mountebanks in the semiotics seminar room but instead is about “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change” (Lebowitz, 2007). It is through our own activities that we develop our capacities and capabilities. We change society by changing ourselves and we change ourselves in our struggle to change society. The act of knowing is always a knowing act. It troubles and disturbs the universe of objects and beings, it can’t exist outside of them; it is interactive, dialogical. We learn about reality not by reflecting on it but by changing it. Paying attention to the simultaneous change in circumstances and self-change and creating a new integrated worldview founded upon a new social matrix is the hallmark of the public scholar and educator. It is Marx’s form of revolutionary praxis that Michael Lebowitz (2005) talks about when he refers to the possibility of “another kind of knowledge”—a knowledge tacitly based upon recognition of our unity and solidarity: It is a different knowledge when we are aware of who produces for us and how, when we understand the conditions of life of others … Knowledge of this type immediately places us as beings within society, provides an understanding of the basis of all our lives. It is immediately direct social knowledge. (2005, p. 64) This is a knowledge “which differs qualitatively and quantitatively from the knowledge we have under dominant social relations” (Lebowitz, 2005, p. 65). This type of knowledge has to be based on certain values that ensure overall human development—i.e., humanization and new ways of seeing and being. Conclusion there are scholars … and others who declare that Marxist analyses no longer apply. Many of them claim that the capitalist system is not what Marx claimed when he was alive, let alone under the changed “post” conditions … although things change, there are historical and institutional consistencies. How post is capitalism in the early twenty-first century? How post are imperialism, racism, misogyny, poverty, religious fundamentalism, war, torture, and governmental oppression? (Brosio, 2008, p. 11) Having stigmatized Marxists as criminal daredevils, as diabolical killer clowns, contemporary soi-disant cultural critics—who fancy themselves as dissident intelligentsia—are foreclosing critique from the totality of history. These academic cultural workers who decry materialist critique only provide more pathways for the cannibalistic capitalist machine to insinuate itself into the world of pedagogy and praxis. This will only add to the narrowing of our understandings as the trauma of neoliberalism is dislocated from class to the register of cultural differences. As Brosio (2008) observes, structural realities “often remain hidden when concentration is limited to the cultural body around the structural skeleton” (p. 9). Critical pedagogy must resist increasing embourgeoisement and political domestication if it is to remain relevant to the struggle to build a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value. It must provide a vibrant forum where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated without limiting the horizons of what might be to “some kind of New
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Page 108 Deal or social democracy” (Brosio, 2008, p. 9). To this end, we agree with Brosio (2008) that Marxist thought “is still primus inter pares for analyzing and combating today’s neo-liberal capitalism” (p. 1). Given that neoliberalism has led to the “penetration of market ideas and realities” into all facets of social life, the “most effective societal and educational inquiries must be radical”—they must get to the “roots and complexities of what is being examined” (Brosio, 2008, p. 1). In other words, they must move beyond the surfaces of post-al preoccupations with representational and discursive apparatuses. Moreover, we concur with Brosio who argues that: Experiences have taught us that understanding things holistically is difficult, and organizing around Marxist ideas and calls for solidarity have never been easy. There are so many “identities” thought to be more important and easier to recognize and rally around than class. However, this has resulted in spotty ameliorative progress at best, improvements that were and are mostly at the mercy of what those who direct the capitalist system believe is necessary for their own advantage presently and in the future. There have been unjust systems before capitalism; however, this system, in all its complexities, is the most powerful secular system in the world today; furthermore, those who suffer, directly and indirectly, must understand how it works in order to oppose it. Marx and Marxists have been our most informative teachers on this subject; therefore, it is within and around the best of this intellectual-activist tradition that promises the best results. (2008, pp. 15–16) As Brosio suggests, those critical educationalists seriously committed to substantive social change can no longer relegate Marxist thought to the scrapheap of history. While bringing Marx back to the realm of the living appears to require a salvage operation on the momentous scale of raising the Titanic from the murky floor of the Atlantic—it is a task that must be undertaken. Armed with a theory of internal relations, guided by the imperative of class struggle and a philosophy of praxis, critical/revolutionary pedagogy can begin to chart a vision of the world outside of capital’s value form. A world where we can put to rest the deeply alienated nature of most working conditions; where we can traverse the terrain of universal rights unburdened by necessity, moving sensuously and fluidly within that ontological space where subjectivity is exercised as a form of capacity-building and creative self-activity within and as a part of the social totality: a space where labor is no longer exploited and becomes a striving that will benefit all human beings, where labor refuses to be instrumentalized and commodified, and where the full development of human capacity is encouraged. References Ahmad, A. (1997). Culture, nationalism, and the role of intellectuals. In E. Meiksins-Wood & J. B. Foster (Eds.), In defense of history (pp. 51–64). New York: Monthly Review Press. Allman, P. (1999). Revolutionary social transformation . Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Allman, P. (2001a). Critical education against global capitalism. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Allman, P. (2001b). Education on fire! In M. Cole, D. Hill, P. McLaren, & G. Rikowski, Red chalk . Brighton: Institute for Education Policy Studies. Allman, P. (2007). On Marx . Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers. Allman, P., McLaren, P., & Rikowski, G. (2005). After the box people. In P. McLaren, Capitalists and conquerors (pp. 135–165). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Brosio, R. (2008). Marxist thought. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 6(1). Retrieved May 5, 2008, from http://www.jceps.com/?pageID=article&articleID=113 Buechler, S. (2000). Social movements in advanced capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Page 109 Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999). Cyber-Marx . Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ebert, T., & Zavarzadeh, M. (2008). Class in culture . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Foster, J. B. (2006). Naked imperialism . New York: Monthly Review Press. Galeano, E. (2003, February). Terror in disguise. The Progressive, 18–19. Gimenez, M. (2001). Marxism and class, gender and race. Race, Gender & Class, 8(2), 23–33. Harvey, D. (1998). The practical contradictions of Marxism. Critical Sociology , 24 (1/2), 1–36. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hill, D., & Cole, M. (2001). Social class. In D. Hill & M. Cole (Eds.), Schooling and equality (pp. 137– 159). London: Kegan Paul. Holloway, J. (2003). Where is class struggle? In A. Saad-Filho (Ed.), Anti-capitalism (pp. 224–234). London: Pluto Press. Jaramillo, N., & McLaren, P. (in press). Not neo-Marxist, not post-Marxist, not Marxian. Das Argument . Jeffery, C. (2006). Poor losers. Mother Jones, 31 (4), 20–21. Juhasz, A. (2006). The Bush agenda. New York: Harper Collins. Kelsh, D., & Hill, D. (2006, March). The culturalization of class and the occluding of class consciousness. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 4(1). Retrieved from http://www.jceps.com/print. php? articleID=59 Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine . New York: Metropolitan Books. Lebowitz, M. (2005, July/August). The knowledge of a better world. Monthly Review , 57 (3), 62–69. Lebowitz, M. (2007, April 9). Human development and practice. MRZine . Retrieved from http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/lebowitz090407.html Marx, K. (1970). A contribution to the critique of political economy . New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital (Vol. 1). New York: International Publishers. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German ideology (Pt.1, C. J. Arthur, Ed.). New York: International Publishers. Meszaros, I. (2001). Socialism or barbarism . New York: Monthly Review Press. Meszaros, I. (2006). The structural crisis of politics. Monthly Review , 58 (4), 34–53. Miranda, J. (1980). Marx against the Marxists. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Navarro, V. (2006). The worldwide class struggle. Monthly Review , 58 (4), 18–33. Petras, J. (1999). The left strikes back. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Roy, A. (2004). An ordinary person’s guide to empire . Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Saad-Filho, A. (Ed.). (2003). Introduction. Anti-Capitalism (pp. 1–11). London: Pluto Press. San Juan, Jr. E. (2002). Racism and cultural studies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sayers, S. (1998). Marxism and human nature. London and New York: Routledge. Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, V., & McLaren, P. (2004) Class dismissed? Educational Philosophy and Theory , 36 (2), 183–199. Stein, B. (2006, November 26). In class warfare, guess which class is winning. New York Times. Retrieved April 16, 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html Yates, M. (2008). The injuries of class. Monthly Review , 59 (8), 1–10.
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Page 110 8 Race Still Matters Critical Race Theory in Education Gloria Ladson-Billings In 1998 I published an article entitled, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” (Ladson-Billings, 1998). This article was a follow-up to the article that William Tate and I (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) published that first introduced Critical Race Theory to the education research community. In the 1998 article I attempted to offer both caution and encouragement to my colleagues. I cautioned those who would jump headlong into Critical Race Theory (CRT) without doing the hard work of reading the legal scholarship in which CRT is grounded. Without those foundational perspectives and knowledge education scholars are likely to sound both uniformed and ignorant. Despite that challenge I also wanted to encourage young scholars to think beyond the narrow paradigms that have historically delimited education research and scholarship. I am happy to report that more scholars have taken up the challenge to use CRT as a theoretical lens and analytic tool. That scholarship has expanded to include what we now know as LatCrit, Critical Race Feminism, and a variety of other strands. This chapter focuses on the basic theoretical assumptions that ground CRT and raises questions about its future in education research. The Origins of Critical Race Theory All of the evidence suggests that Critical Race Theory emerged as a response to a response. By that I mean legal scholars had already begun to challenge the limited way issues of race, class, and gender were taught in law school and written about in law review journals. They began working on what they termed Critical Legal Studies (CLS). CLS takes its perspectives from the social theories of Marx, Engels, Weber, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others associated with the Frankfurt School. It argues that the logic and structure of conventional law grow out of the power relationships of the society and, as a consequence, the oppressed will never be well served by the law. CLS proponents talk about the inherently political nature of the law and its inability to ever be neutral or value free. Although the ideas of the Frankfurt School have been around since the 1930s, CLS has its actual beginnings at a conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977. Here legal scholars, many of them active in the 1960s civil rights movements (i.e., struggles around race, gender, and/or anti-war) looked for ways to infuse the law with the issues and concerns their activism uncovered.
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Page 111 Although CLS is not one single, monolithic movement it has some themes in common. For instance, CLS argues that the law (and its statutes) do not completely determine the outcome of legal disputes, rather the law can give parameters and rules but the ultimate outcome of legal decisions can look significantly different from what the law intended. A good example of this theme is the 2007 Supreme Court decision, Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1 (551 U.S. ___) where the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision was turned on its head to advantage White students. Brown v. Board of Education reversed the longstanding tenet in U.S. jurisprudence that the state could offer racially separate social accommodations (e.g. schools, hospitals, public facilities, etc.) as long as those facilities were equal. This “separate but equal” principle was a result of an 1896 decision known as Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537). The Brown decision declared that separate was inherently unequal and ushered in a period of public school desegregation. States throughout the southern United States were legally ordered to close down the separate schools that had been established for Black children and to desegregate their previously all-White schools. The period between 1954 and the mid-1970s was marked with many pitched battles to allow Black (and in some cases, Latino) children into White schools. Before the Seattle case Brown was used to defend the right of Black and Latino children to attend schools that previously served White children. The parents in the Seattle district who were White used the Brown decision to insure that their children got selected for a high-demand high school (in their neighborhood). The school district used a tiebreaker system to determine who to admit when a school was oversubscribed. The second tiebreaker factor was race, which the district used to insure that the school would not become segregated. By a five to four vote the Supreme Court justices sided with the White parents claiming that the school district’s system was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause and that by discounting race, the court was operating in the spirit of the Brown decision. Thus, as Critical Race Theorists contend, civil rights legislation only passes when it can be used to advantage Whites. Another theme of CLS is that all law is politics. This theme flows from the school of legal realism that argues that since laws are made by human beings, the law is subject to the same shortcomings and imperfections of human beings. This is in contrast to the prevailing notion that although human beings are imperfect the law is not. A third theme of CLS is that the law serves the interests of the powerful and protects them against the demands of subordinate groups such as people of color, the working class, women, people with disabilities, and other marginalized group members. In the United States this theme appears over and over when the justice system differentially adjudicates cases based on the status of the client. Wealthy clients with high-priced legal representation regularly receive lighter sentences than poor defendants. One of the more egregious examples of the differential treatment is apparent in the drug sentencing laws. The Uniform Crime Report data (n.d.) for the period from 1991 to 1995 indicate some disturbing trends: • The Black arrest rate for all drug offenses is four times the arrest rate for Whites. • The Black arrest rate for marijuana offenses is 2.5 times the arrest rate for Whites. • When controlling for drug-use levels the Black arrest rate for marijuana possession is 2.27 times higher than the White arrest rate. • When controlling for drug-use levels the Black arrest rate for all drug possession offenses is 2.89 times higher than the White arrest rate. • The disparity between Black and White arrest rates for marijuana increased between 1991, when the Black arrest rate was 2.13 times higher, and 1995 when the Black arrest rate was 2.56 higher nationally than for Whites. • Black arrest rates for marijuana are over twice the White arrest rate in over two-thirds of metropolitan area counties.
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Page 112 • Black arrest rates for other drug offenses are over twice the White arrest rate in over four-fifths of metropolitan area counties. • Black arrest rates are generally lower in jurisdictions with large Black populations, but regardless of the level of the Black arrest rate for any drug offense it is typically twice or greater than the White rate for the same crime in the same jurisdiction. • The disparity between Black and White arrest rates for drug offenses increases with the severity of the offense. Since 1988 possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine netted an offender five years whereas one would have to have been in possession of 500 grams of powdered cocaine to get the same sentence (Marks, 2007). The primary difference is not in the drug itself but in its users. Crack was much more prevalent among the Black poor in the central cities while powdered cocaine was the drug of choice of the middleincome and wealthy classes. A fourth theme of CLS is that the law is inherently contradictory. On the one hand, it looks to protect individuals but, on the other, it also attempts to serve the interest of the state. In the early school desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s the law was concerned with the interests of the individual African American children who failed to receive equal education. Today, cases such as those brought against the University of Michigan (i.e., Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger ) are based on whether diversity serves the state’s interests. Indeed, the cases often are brought on the grounds that “diversity” benefits the White students. Some of the leaders of the CLS movement included scholars such as Alan Freeman, David Trubeck, and Derrick Bell. However, by 1985 scholars of color in the CLS movement began to grow frustrated with the way that even in the midst of a counter-hegemonic movement their interests and the whole question of race were being pushed to the periphery (Crenshaw, 2002). Their response was to create a new movement called Critical Race Theory (CRT). This new movement used some of the tenets of CLS but insisted on making race a central feature of their scholarly inquiry. By making race the primary feature of their scholarship and not just one among many, CRT scholars were making an important statement about the centrality of race in making sense of inequality in American life in general and American jurisprudence in particular. The little-told story of CRT comes from Kimberle Crenshaw’s (2002) account of Derrick Bell’s proactive moves to challenge Harvard Law School to make good on its promise to hire women faculty of color. Bell left Harvard Law School in protest in 1981 and, as a consequence, a group of law students confronted the school administration about filling both the personnel and curricular void that was left by Bell’s departure. Bell had authored a text entitled, Race, Racism and American Law (1980) that was used in a course on “Constitution Law and Minority Issues.” His approach to questions of race departed from the standard liberal cant of individual rights that did not disrupt issues of federalism, the free market economy, institutional stability, and vested interests. For Bell, the issue was not merely securing individual rights in the face of pre-existing interests but, rather, to expose these pre-existing interests as repositories of racial subordination. Also, for Bell success was not to be measured solely in terms of individual rights but to “understand how law contributed to the systemic disempowerment of African Americans more broadly” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 1347). Bell understood that the effectiveness of civil rights law could only be measured by how powerfully it challenged the actuality of racial domination. Crenshaw (2002) identifies Bell as a realist because he looked at the actual functioning of legal rules, and as a critical theorist because he understood the “indeterminate and frequently contradictory character of law” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 1348). Thus, Bell is identified as, perhaps, the first Critical Race Theorist. Harvard’s response to the students’ concerns was to offer a mini-course taught by two visiting civil rights lawyers because the administration contended that there were no qualified law scholars of color. A group of Harvard Law students who called themselves The Third World Coalition organized an alternative course. They pooled their resources (including monies) and invited
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Page 113 academics of color to come to Harvard to teach a chapter each from Bell’s book. The alternative course registered over 200 students and had the participation of a dozen faculty members from throughout the country. The ground-breaking scholarship of Derrick Bell co-joined with the energy and activism of the law students represents the beginnings of Critical Race Theory. Many of the alternative course students found their way to the CLS conferences and summer camps and inspired students at Columbia, Stanford, and Berkeley (and other law schools) to take up the demands to make changes in law school faculty and curriculum. However, at the CLS conferences scholars of color often found themselves meeting separately to discuss the racial politics within CLS. At the 1985 meeting when the feminists among the CLS workshop organized a FemCrit conference, a group of scholars of color raised the question, “What is it about the whiteness of CLS that keeps people of color at bay?” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 1355). This question was seen, primarily by White, liberal males as a provocation that would destroy the organization. At the 1987 CLS Conference there was a panel entitled, “The Minority Critique of CLS Scholarship (and silence) on Race” whose participants included Denise Carty-Bennia, Harlon Dalton, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Gerald Torres, and Patricia Williams. Crenshaw (2002) describes the 1987 conference as a “watershed moment for CRT” (p. 1359) because it marked the way a loose group of scholars of color on the margins of CLS had become an “experienced group of insurgents” (p. 1359) and changed the face and discourse in CLS forever. During the 1988 academic year, Crenshaw returned to the University of Wisconsin as a visiting fellow and, along with Hastie Fellow and Stephanie Phillips, began developing a workshop tentatively entitled, “New Developments in Race and Legal Theory.” Not satisfied with the generic sound of that title, Crenshaw and others played around with what they were trying to create and settled on a few essential elements: “critical” as the political and intellectual location, “race” as the substantive focus, and “theory” as the attempt to develop a coherent account of race and law. Thus the name that emerged was “Critical Race Theory.” Twenty-four participants of the first Critical Race Theory Workshop assembled in Madison, Wisconsin on July 8, 1989. Like CLS, CRT is not a monolithic movement. According to Delgado (1995), “Critical Race Theory sprang up in the mid-1970s with the early work of Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, both of whom were deeply distressed over the slow pace of racial reform in the United States” (p. xiii). CRT is both an outgrowth of, and a separate entity from, CLS. CRT begins with the notion that racism is “normal not aberrant, in American society” (Delgado, p. xiv), and because it is so enmeshed in the fabric of U.S. social order, it appears both normal and natural to people in this culture. Indeed, Derrick Bell’s major premise in his popular book, Faces at the bottom of the well (1992) is that racism is a permanent fixture of American life. CRT departs from mainstream legal scholarship by sometimes using storytelling to “analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render Blacks and other minorities one-down” (Delgado, 1995, p. xiv). A third tenet of CRT is its critique of liberalism. Crenshaw (1988) argues that the liberal perspective of the “civil rights crusade as a long, slow, but always upward pull” (p. 1334) is flawed because it fails to understand the limits of current legal paradigms to serve as catalysts for social change and its emphasis on incrementalism. CRT asserts that racism requires sweeping changes, but liberalism has no mechanism for such change. Rather, liberal legal practices support the painstakingly slow process of arguing legal precedence to gain citizen rights for people of color. A fourth tenet of CRT is related to its critique of liberalism. This tenet argues that liberal civil rights laws always benefit Whites. Efforts like affirmative action and even the landmark Brown decision have ultimately served to provide advantages for Whites. The cases brought against the University of Michigan1 and the recent Seattle (and Louisville) Schools ruling are examples of how hard-fought civil rights victories get turned on their ears. Today, Martin Luther King’s prescient words have been coopted by conservatives who argue that being judged “by the content of your character” refers to individual not group rights (Steele, 1991).
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Page 114 Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas (1995) argue that there is “no canonical set of doctrines or methodologies to which [CRT scholars] all subscribe” (p. xiii). But, CRT scholars are unified by two common interests—to understand how a “regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America” (p. xiii) and to change the bond that exists between law and racial power. CRT and Education Although the CRT movement is wholly a creation of legal scholars, it has found its way into other fields. In this section of the chapter I will describe how CRT earned a place in education scholarship. As a narrative in which I am fully implicated I do not assume that my telling is objective or balanced. It is fully dependent on my memory and records. In 1991 William F. Tate and I joined the faculty of the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tate was hired in mathematics education and I was hired in social studies education. Quickly, as the number two and three African American faculty members at Wisconsin we formed a fast friendship. Tate was assuming his first academic job, I was leaving a small, private, catholic, liberal arts university for the high-powered Research I environment of Wisconsin. Although I was new to Wisconsin and untenured, my experience in the field told me that Wisconsin was a place that it was better to innovate than replicate. In an early conversation with Tate I asked him about his research. He explained that he did work on functions. “Functions,” I asked. “Aren’t there other people who do work on functions?” Tate indicated that indeed there were a number of mathematics educators who studied students’ understandings of functions. I asked him what else he was interested in and he said the education of Black children. He also told me about some legal scholarship he was reading, some papers his then fiancée (now wife) who was a lawyer shared with him. I asked to read one of the papers while strongly urging Tate to follow his passion for educating Black children. The first paper Tate gave me was Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1988 article, “Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in anti-discrimination law.” Immediately I recognized its consonance with Derrick Bell’s (1987) And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice , and began to think about how we might adapt this work for education scholarship. As we approached the 40th anniversary of the Brown decision William Tate, Carl Grant, and I decided to co-author a paper for a special edition of Educational Policy entitled, “The Brown decision re-visited: Mathematizing social problems” (1993). During the course of writing the paper Tate and I recognized how similar our thinking about race was becoming and how much CRT was influencing that thinking. We resolved before completing that paper to work on a paper that would articulate a Critical Race Theory perspective on education. Tate and I began working on a paper entitled, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” by immersing ourselves in all of the legal scholarship we could find on the topic. In the interim Tate wrote a paper on the voice aspect of CRT (1994). We became familiar with more of the work of CRT scholars Bell, Delgado, Matsuda, Lawrence, Gotanda, Williams, Harris, and others. I found the reading slow going because I was so unfamiliar with the substance and form of legal scholarship. I did not know the case law and I did not understand the citation format. Reading that normally took me an hour invariably spread into two hours. I was challenged by the arguments and inspired by the activism. It was exactly what I was looking for as I struggled to understand why the multicultural paradigm fell short of the provocative and critical edge that was necessary for real social movement and change. We wrote our paper knowing that this new territory would provoke a lot of critique so instead of merely writing the paper and submitting it for publication we used it as the centerpiece of a colloquium we organized. We printed about 50 copies of the paper and invited colleagues and
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Page 115 graduate students to attend a session where we answered questions about CRT and its application to education. To their credit our colleagues did come to the session—some perhaps out of curiosity, some to support us, and maybe even a few to offer stern critique. Their comments and questions gave us a chance to revise the manuscript to prepare it for publication. However, before we got to that step we decided to submit the paper as a proposal to a professional conference. We chose the “Advanced Paper Session” format so that attendees could contact us and have us send them the paper beforehand. We were initially concerned because no one wrote for the paper, but on the day of the session an overflow crowd greeted us. The reaction to our paper was polarized. Many of the scholars of color (but not all) were enthusiastic about this new way of thinking about race and education. Many of our White colleagues (but not all) were extremely upset with us for “deserting” traditional liberal and multicultural perspectives. They saw CRT as a retreat from coalitions that pulled on race, class, gender, language, sexuality, and other forms of difference. At the end of the session one fairly prominent White scholar stormed out of the room visibly upset. However, there was enough interest and support for what we were trying to do to encourage us to do yet another revision to submit the paper for publication. The road to publication was also a rocky one. As rather naive junior faculty members we assumed that we should submit the manuscript to the highest profile journal possible. It had not occurred to us that being high profile in education research and scholarship almost always means being a publication that subscribed to the canons and orthodoxy of the dominant paradigm. To our surprise we received an encouraging word from the editor and waited for another six months for a decision. Predictably, the decision was no, but we received no substantive feedback from the editors. We took the feedback from our colleagues and the professional meeting session and devoted most of the summer to reworking the paper. By early fall we submitted the paper to Teachers College Record and by early spring we knew that it would be published. In 1995 “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) became the first education article to engage CRT. It remains one of the more-cited publications on the subject and was recently reprinted in a volume on globalization (Halsey, Lauder, Brown, & Dillabough, 2006). In the article Tate and I attempted to lay out the propositions that might undergird a critical race theory of education. Those propositions are that: (1) race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States; (2) U.S. society is based on property rights; and (3) the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and consequently, school) inequity. We then detailed how these propositions work together in the context of schooling and education. That race continues to matter seems so fundamental to people like William Tate and me—two African American scholars who have experienced racism up close and at individual, institutional, and symbolic levels. However, it is clear that other discourses exist that suggest that race is not the problem it once was or that since race is a social construction there is no material consequence attached to it, or that race is but one among many forms of difference and should not be privileged in any way. Rather, race would have to be considered among the multiple identities that human beings share. We resolved our decision to focus on race by detailing the particular way that race operates and is made manifest in our lives. There are no neighborhoods or communities to which women and girls are restricted. We cannot locate comparable statistics that indicate that people of one particular religious group were performing worse than any other group. The considerable history, tradition, and policy that has shaped race in the United States convinced us that race was worth exploring. We expressed our concern about the dearth of racial theory and the degree to which race has been allowed to be either subsumed under the rubric of “diversity” or “difference” or to drop off the agenda altogether. The simple propositional statement that race still matters turned out to be one of the more controversial points we made in our article.
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Page 116 The second proposition, that U.S. society is based on property rights, was seen as the more innovative idea. Many of our colleagues would describe themselves as human rights advocates having protested violations in places such as South Africa, Burma, and China. But few had considered that the main basis for civil society in the United States was property rights, not human rights. The idea of human rights violations in the United States rings hollow but it is not a part of the ongoing discourse. The highest value is accorded to property—property ownership, property protection, and property rights. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris (1993) declared that whiteness was a form of property and functioned as such to allow White people an entire set of privileges that people of color could not access. Of course the irony that African Americans experienced was that for more than 300 years they were considered property. Legal scholar Patricia Williams (1991) taught contract law at the University of Wisconsin (and later at Columbia University). In the course she used a document that described the sale of her greatgrandmother to underscore the way property rights pervade every aspect of American jurisprudence. Finally, we asserted that the intersection of race and property provides a useful rubric for understanding the persistent racial inequity in schooling. Although we maintain romantic notions about civil rights and the social progress we have made through these traditional methods, CRT scholars assert that the “equal opportunity” approach has limited power to effect real social change. Instead civil rights laws are enacted that ultimately benefit Whites. A good example of this was seen in the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of the Seattle Public Schools (and the Jefferson County, Louisville, KY schools, previously mentioned). Here the court ruled that the Seattle Public Schools’ use of race as a tie-breaker was unconstitutional. The irony of the decision is that an extremely conservative court invoked the Brown decision—a ruling designed to protect the educational rights of Black children—to secure additional rights for White children. In another article (Ladson-Billings, 1998) I detailed the ways school curriculum, instruction, assessment, funding, and desegregation can be understood using a CRT lens. In this analysis I add discipline as an important aspect of schooling that has CRT implications. Curriculum The curriculum is an excellent example of what CRT in education theorists mean by property. The course-taking and course-offering opportunities vary widely by schools and advising and assignment within schools. One of the high-profile examples of the curriculum as property occurred in Inglewood, CA where the ACLU brought a case on behalf of the Williams family. In 2004 the case of Williams v. State of California resulted in a settlement that requires that all California public school students have adequate instructional materials in clean, safe, and functional schools. This settlement ended in five state-level bills attending to minimum standards regarding school facilities, teacher quality, and adequate instructional materials. However, the genesis of the case was the result of a young African American woman who was denied admission to the University of California despite having earned a cumulative 4.0 grade point average. Her challenge was that the White students against whom she was competing had grade point averages greater than 4.0. This was possible because students in wealthy well-resourced high schools serving White upper middle-class communities offered many Advanced Placement courses that are valued higher than 4.0. Thus, the plaintiff did not have access to the more highly valued curriculum property and could not equitably compete with the White upper middle-class students. An interesting sideline to the Williams case story was the fact that Williams’ high school did not even have enough textbooks for its students and in many courses the textbooks were outdated and damaged.2 The state of California settled the case by making large funding provisions for schools throughout the state with demographic profiles similar to the plaintiff’s school. Unfortunately, the data suggest that Williams case schools continue to post abysmal achievement scores (see, www.uclaidea.org).
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Page 117 The curriculum remains a contested property across and within schools. Even in those schools that offer enriched curriculum/intellectual property, students of color have trouble gaining access to it. They are discouraged by teachers and counselors who suggest that such work will be “too hard” or students themselves reason that because few students of color take such courses they will be isolated and uncomfortable in the classroom. Interestingly, the folk wisdom about African American students not wanting to commit to academics for fear of being told they are “acting White” (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986) by their peers has been countered empirically by Tyson, Darity, and Castellino (2005) who demonstrated in 12 high school sites that high-achieving African American students are admired and encouraged by other African American students. High-status courses such as Advanced Placement, honors, and other college preparatory courses are treated as scarce commodities and more influential parents (typically White, upper middle class) lobby to ensure that their children always have access to these courses. African American students find themselves taking courses to graduate while their White counterparts take the courses that prepare them to be successful at gaining admittance to the colleges and universities of their choice. Instruction The preparation for access to high-status secondary school courses begins in elementary schools. Students are allegedly placed in ability groups for the purpose of instruction. Unfortunately, placement in an ability group often has long-term impact (Oakes, 2005). Students who start out in the “low group” rarely rise up out of that group. By the time the students arrive at secondary school, they are indeed low achievers and are unable to compete in classrooms offering rigorous curriculum. Often, in combination with a lower status curriculum, African American students are subjected to a poor instruction. Jonathan Kozol (2005) poignantly documents a widespread “drill and kill” teaching methodology where teachers are told how and when to use hand signals to elicit specific responses from the students. There is no place for creativity or real thinking in these classrooms because the only responsibility of the teacher is to prepare students for a barrage of high-stakes standardized tests designed to indicate whether the students are worthy of promotion, their teachers worthy of remaining employed, and/or their schools worthy of remaining in operation. Another popular instructional methodology deploys a resurgent “cultural deficit” ideology. Haberman (1991) calls this the “pedagogy of poverty” where teachers rely on rote activities each day, more to control students than actually to teach them. This instructional style is widely employed in urban schools serving poor students of color and schools pay huge consultant fees to hear that the problem with the students is that they come from a “culture of poverty” (Payne, 2003) and the major responsibility of schools and the teachers is to bring order to their presumed chaotic lives. Instead of teaching students, teachers are managing them. This maintain order through tightly scripted drill approach to instruction stands in stark contrast to the kind of teaching upper middle-class White communities demand. Even if the teaching is uninspired at least it resembles a college-level course where students are given a big responsibility for their own learning. Here they are perfectly set up for the large lecture and independent learning that characterizes university classrooms. In a long-term ethnographic study I was able to document teachers of African American students who resisted the culture of poverty ideology and its attendant pedagogy of poverty instructional style (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Their instructional strategies presume that there is worth in the students, their families, and their communities. CRT in education theorists raise questions about why so little of this kind of instruction occurs in classrooms serving children of color.
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Page 118 Assessment Current school reform efforts emphasize accountability and the most frequent form of accountability is standardized testing. In schools serving poor students of color, assessment dominates every facet of schooling. Students receive incentives for posting improved test scores. All classroom activities are organized around practicing, preparing for, and taking “the test.” Some unscrupulous administrators (or those whose jobs are on the line) manipulate their circumstances to ensure that poor test takers do not attend school on the testing days. In one high school I visited in the deep south, the principal told me that during the final quarter of the school year, neighboring schools routinely dump their poor performers and those students enroll in his school. Since the enactment of the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, the school has been unable to meet “Average Yearly Progress” (AYP) and they attribute a large part of their struggle to the fact that a significant number of students enter their school not having had the benefit of instruction at their school. It is true that all schools in a state are held accountable for the same high-stakes tests but the difference in teacher quality, teacher experience, administrator and teacher stability, along with differential resources make the tests a very different entity for schools serving poor children. The fact that these tests are highly public (test scores are published in local newspapers) and have major implications (e.g., retention, job loss, school closure) means that they are more likely to adversely impact the communities with the poorest schools. Many of the schools serving the wealthy are able to post “passing” test scores with little or no instruction. The assessment system is tangential to wealthy schools’ goals (which are to ensure that their students gain admission to elite colleges and universities) but is the central focus of poor schools that disproportionately serve children of color. Funding Another place where CRT in education is evident is in school funding. Here the nexus of race and property is particularly clear. Schools in the United States are funded based on the value of neighborhood property. Poor communities have poorly funded schools and wealthy communities have well-funded schools. Even in those states that attempt to equalize the school funding formulas, wealthy parents have been able to organize “foundations” that permit them to raise funds to supplement the state-approved funding. Kozol (2005) provided data from several large urban school districts and nearby suburban districts that indicated, on average, wealthy suburban districts spend US$10,000 more per pupil compared to their urban counterparts. The conservative rhetoric suggests that the problems of the poor cannot be addressed by “throwing money” at them.3 The Supreme Court maintained unequal funding in 1973 in the case of the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez . In a number of instances poor school districts have attempted to sue states for failure to provide the adequate basic education required by state charters or constitutions. In South Carolina (see Abbeville et al. v. State of South Carolina et al., 1999) eight poor school districts sued the state on this basis. Similarly a case was brought in New York. Typically the plaintiff districts have been able to win judgments at the state level but they have not been able to collect. The Williams settlement (previously mentioned) represented the California State Legislature’s attempt to mitigate a huge court ordered judgment. The challenge of funding in U.S. schools is that the nation-state has taken no constitutional responsibility for educating its citizens and that has allowed the state to treat students and their families as property owners rather than citizens.
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Page 119 Desegregation School desegregation has been one of the more visible intersections of education and the law. The long hard road to Brown is much larger than schooling. Dudziak (1995) argued that this landmark decision was actually about maintaining an edge in the cold war. The Soviet Union was diligent in sending propaganda to non-aligned nations that detailed the ongoing racial inequity in the US. While the US touted its democracy, the Soviets consistently showed images of African Americans being forcibly excluded from civil society. Indeed, World War II began with racially segregated armed services. President Truman had the good sense to end that practice during the war. One would think after 50 years of Brown, school desegregation would be a fact of life in U.S. schools. However, the empirical evidence suggests that our schools are rapidly resegregating (Frankenberg & Lee, 2002; Orfield & Yun, 1999). New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Dallas, San Diego, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Baltimore, all have a less than 27% White student population. Some districts, such as Detroit, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Memphis, have a less than 10% White student population. These are districts that Whites have effectively abandoned and thus there are no White students with which to desegregate. The issue in the school desegregation debate that it seems only CRT scholars discuss is that the most segregated schools in the nation are those in the suburbs. White middle-class students in public schools generally attend all-White (or nearly all-White) schools. Even in those schools where districts have complied with desegregation orders, because of the CRT curriculum and instruction issues previously discussed there is evidence of resegregation within the school itself. Some schools maintain all-White programs in honors or the arts while students of color in those programs experience a radically different curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 2004). One of the more creative CRT moves I have seen happened in San Francisco, where a predominately Black community was forced to bus its children across town because the neighborhood school was all Black and in violation of the court’s school desegregation order. Soon after the busing decision was made the school district started to make major improvements to the physical plant of the school in the Black community. Angered that the district would improve the school for “other people’s children,” the Black parents reenrolled their children by claiming their children were not Black but were “Native Americans.” Because our rules about race are so elastic and irrational, no one could tell these parents that their children were not “Native Americans.” Discipline In our earlier paper Tate and I did not include discipline as one of the elements of schooling to which we could apply a CRT lens. Our decision to omit it was linked to the voluminous nature of the evidence and the space limitations of the journal. Skiba (2006) reports that over the past 30 years we have learned that African Americans are suspended two to three times more often than their White peers. There has been disproportionality in office referrals, suspensions, expulsions, and corporal punishment, i.e., African American students are much more likely to be punished in each of these ways than White students. African Americans are more likely to experience out of school suspension in suburban schools than in urban schools. This fact is telling in that it suggests that African American students are more closely monitored in schools where they are in the minority. There is no evidence to support the assertion that African American students misbehave more than other students. They may, in fact, be treated more severely for the same offenses that Whites commit. White students are punished for smoking, vandalism, leaving classroom (or school) without permission, and using obscene language. Black students are punished for disrespect, excessive
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Page 120 noise, threat, and loitering. What is interesting about these offenses are the differences in degrees of specificity associated with the offenses. There is no dispute whether a student is smoking, committing vandalism, leaving without permission, or using obscene language. However, one could ask, what constitutes disrespect or excessive noise, a threat (other than a student directly stating that he intends to harm you), or loitering? In the past year we have seen the justice system handle African American male students very differently than it has White students. One case, the Jena 6, received nationwide publicity via the Internet. When Black students in Jena, LA asked if they might sit under the “White tree” on the school campus and were told they could sit where they wanted, they were subsequently greeted by three nooses hanging from the tree. A group of the African American boys assaulted a White student and were arrested. The boys were tried as adults and languished in jail until a national grassroots effort emerged and marched on the town. A second example of differential punishment is the case of Genarlow Wilson. This young African American man from the Atlanta area was an honor roll student and star athlete preparing to go to college on an athletic scholarship. After a night of ill-advised partying Wilson was arrested for child molestation. At almost 18 years old he had consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl. He too was charged as an adult and spent almost three years in prison until another grassroots effort put pressure on the court to reverse his conviction. The discipline that African American students experience in school is an important foreshadowing of what happens to African Americans in the society. We now have community activists referring to a school-to-prison pipeline where African American students receive a substandard education, regularly experience inequitable discipline, and are perfectly set up to enter the prison-industrial complex where their bodies continue to be managed and policed. I started this chapter with a discussion of inequitable drug sentencing laws and I can point to this pattern of inequitable sanctions in school as the precursor of this kind of inequity for African Americans. If from your earliest memories you perceive that the rules and the system are stacked against you, you come to accept that inequity as normal. You also fail to develop any real allegiance to the institutions or the state. You see racism as normal, not aberrant. You become a racial realist and a Critical Race Theorist whether you know it or not. Possibilities for Hope As described thus far, CRT appears to be both cynical and hopeless. However, I would argue that it does offer possibilities for social change and hope. CRT’s insistence on story-telling and counter narratives provides us with a powerful vehicle for speaking against racism and other forms of inequity. It raises fundamental challenges to the cultural script we have been asked to accept. That script says that individuals should get an “equal opportunity” and work hard so that they might be successful. That script conveniently omits the fact that there are structural and symbolic constraints that make advancement near impossible. That script omits the fact that global capitalism means that some groups will always be exploited so that small groups of elites can prosper. CRT reminds us that the politics of race is ever-present in the United States and has implications for how we deal with non-White others around the world. CRT explains the way U.S. immigration, economic, and foreign policies are constructed and implemented everywhere in the world. CRT becomes a radical space of possibility because it does not subscribe to taken-for-granted notions about meritocracy and fairness that have no basis in the reality of people of color.4 CRT is unafraid to place race at the center of analysis rather than lumping it together with other identity categories.
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Page 121 The other exciting development in CRT in education is in its spread across the field by scholars such as Lynn and Parker (2006), Solorzano and Ornelas (2004), Donnor, (2005), Dixson and Rousseau (2006), Chapman (2005) and, Duncan-Andrade (2007) along with some nascent international attempts (Gillborn, 2005), and the work of a growing number of graduate students. The other place of possibility and hope for CRT scholarship is in the notion of the nobility of struggle (Bell, 1992) where we understand ourselves as not called to win but, instead, called to struggle. When we consider the history of Black people in America we are looking at a people who fought for almost 300 years against chattel slavery and another 100 years against legal apartheid. This was not a people looking for a short-term win but, rather, a people who understood the absolute necessity of struggle. Critical race theory does not pretend to offer pat solutions to racism in the United States. However, it does attempt to bring a more rigorous set of intellectual lenses to our analyses of race and racism so that the law, education, sociology, and social policy can ask better questions about the role of race in the society. Instead of seeing race only as a variable among many others, CRT argues for the primacy of race in understanding many of the social relations that define life in the United States. CRT is a constant reminder that race still matters. Notes 1 Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger . 2 My source for this information comes from a young woman who was a teacher-activist at the high school at the time. Her frustration was around the fact that all the media attention was being directed to this one student while the entire student body was suffering from a substandard education. 3 I presume this means the problems of the hungry cannot be addressed by “throwing food” at them or the problems of the jobless cannot be addressed by “throwing jobs” at them. 4 In the 2008 U.S. Democratic primary race for the presidency, Michelle Obama, wife of presidential candidate Barak Obama said, “For the first time in my life I feel proud to be an American.” John McCain’s wife, Cindy quickly countered with, “I have always been proud to be an American” and the media critique of Obama was harsh, but never factored in the marginalization most African Americans feel from the nation-state. References Bell, D. (1980). Race, racism and American law (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co. Bell, D. (1987). And we are not saved. New York: Basic Books. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well. New York: Basic Books. Chapman, T. (2005). Expressions of “voice” in portraiture. Qualitative Inquiry , 11 (1), 27–51. Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment. Harvard Law Review , 101 , 1331–1387. Crenshaw, K. (2002). The first decade. UCLA Law Review , 49 , 1343–1372. Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1995). Critical race theory. New York: Free Press. Delgado, R. (Ed.). (1995). Critical race theory . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dixson, A., & Rousseau, C. (Eds.). (2006). Critical race theory in education . New York: Routledge. Donnor, J. (2005). Towards an interest-convergence in the education of African American football student-athletes in major college sports. Race, ethnicity, and education , 8(1), 45–67. Dudziak, M. (1995). Desegregation as a cold war imperative. In R. Delgado (Ed.), Critical race theory (pp. 110–121). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Duncan-Andrade, J. (2007). Urban youth and the counter-narratives of inequality. Transforming Anthropology, 15 (1), 26–37. Fordham, S., & Ogbu, J. (1986). Black students’ school success. The Urban Review , 18 , 176–206.
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Page 122 Frankenberg, E., & Lee, C. (2002). Race in American public schools. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard. Gillborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy. Journal of Education Policy , 20 (4), 485–505. Haberman, M. (1991). The pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 73 , 290–294. Halsey, A. E., Lauder, H., Brown, P., & Dillabough, J. (Eds.). (2006). Education, globalization, and social change. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review , 106 , 1707–1791. Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation. New York: Crown Books. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 11 , 7–24. Ladson-Billings, G. (2004). Landing on the wrong note. Educational Researcher, 33 (7), 3–13. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record , 97 (1), 47–68. Lynn, M., & Parker, L. (2006). Critical race studies in education. The Urban Review , 38 , 257–290. Marks, A. (2007, November 2). More equity in cocaine sentencing. Christian Science Monitor , pp. 1–2. National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (n.d.). Uniform crime reporting program 1991–1995. Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved electronically on November 27, 2007, from http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/ucr.htm Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Orfield, G., & Yun, J. (1999). Re-segregation in American schools. Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard. Payne, R. K. (2003). A framework for understanding poverty (3rd rev. ed.). Highlands, TX: Aha Process, Inc. Skiba, R. (2006, November 20). The color of discipline . Paper presented at the Creating Effective School Environments Conference, Hartford, CT. Solorzano, D., & Ornelas, A. (2004). A critical race analysis of advanced placement classes and selective admissions. High School Journal , 87 , 15–26. Steele, S. (1991). The content of our character. New York: Harper Perennial. Tate, W. F. (1994). From inner city to ivory tower. Urban Education , 29 , 245–269. Tate, W. F., Ladson-Billings, G., & Grant, C. A. (1993). The Brown decision revisited. Educational Policy , 7, 255–275. Tyson, K., Darity, W., & Castellino, D. (2005). It’s not a “Black thing.” American Sociological Review , 70 (4), 582–605. Williams, P. (1991). The alchemy of race and rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Court Cases Cited Abbeville et al. v. State of South Carolina et al., SC 24939 (1999) Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 541 U.S. 1 (1973) Parents involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1 (551 U.S.)
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Page 123 9 Pale/ontology The Status of Whiteness in Education Zeus Leonardo Race scholarship is witnessing a shift. In the past two decades, Whiteness Studies has penetrated what arguably has been the home of scholars of color who write for and about people of color. Around 1990, Whiteness Studies burst onto the academic scene with three important publications, written by White scholars about, but not exclusively for, White people. In fact, we would not be far off to characterize Whiteness Studies as a White-led race intervention. Circa 1990, Peggy McIntosh’s (1992) essay on White privilege, David Roediger’s (1991) Wages of Whiteness , and Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993) White Women, Race Matters, arguably, represent the beginnings of a focus on whiteness and White experiences. Since then, there has been a veritable explosion of critical work on whiteness across the disciplines (Aanerud, 1997; T. Allen, 1994, 1997; Brodkin, 1999; Bush, 2005; Dyer, 1997; hooks, 1997; Ignatiev, 1996; Lipsitz, 1998; Morrison, 1993; B. Thompson, 2001; Warren, 2000; Winant, 1997; Wise, 2007). In education, the impact of Whiteness Studies has been no less (R. Allen, 2005; Apple, 1998; DiAngelo, 2006; Ellsworth, 1997; Gillborn, 2005; Giroux, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Howard, 1999; Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1998; Lee, 2005; Leonardo, 2002, 2004; McIntyre, 1997; McLaren, 1995, 1997; Richardson and Villenas, 2000; Sheets, 2000; Sleeter, 1995; A. Thompson, 2003). It should be noted that scholars of color previously took up the issue of whiteness, but as a secondary if not tertiary concern (see Du Bois, 1904/1989), insofar as studying the souls of White folk was an afterthought to the souls of Black folk. With Whiteness Studies, whiteness and White people come to the center in an unprecedented and unforeseen way. This is different from the centering that whiteness is usually afforded in Eurocentric curricula and writing. Indeed, it would be problematic to recenter whiteness as a point of reference for civilization, progress, and rationality in order to relegate people of color to the margins, once again. In Whiteness Studies, whiteness becomes the center of critique and transformation . It represents the much-neglected anxiety around race that whiteness scholars, many of whom are White, are now beginning to recognize. Whiteness Studies is both a conceptual engagement and a racial strategy. Conceptually, it poses critical questions about the history, meaning, and ontological status of whiteness. For example, it contains an apparatus for the precise rendering of the origin of whiteness as a social category. In other words, whiteness is not coterminous with the notion that some people have lighter skin tones than others; rather, whiteness, along with race, is the structural valuation of skin color, which invests it with meaning regarding the overall organization of society. In this sense, whiteness conceptually had to be invented and then reorganized in particular historical conditions as part of its upkeep (Leonardo, 2007). Inseparable from the conceptualization of
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Page 124 whiteness, Whiteness Studies comes with certain interventions or racial strategies. There are two significant camps regarding the uptake of whiteness: white reconstruction and white abolition (Chubbuck, 2004). In the first, reconstructionists offer discourses—as forms of social practice—that transform whiteness, and therefore White people, into something other than an oppressive identity and ideology. Reconstruction suggests rehabilitating whiteness by resignifying it through the creation of alternative discourses. It projects hope onto whiteness by creating new racial subjects out of White people, which are not ensnared by a racist logic. On the other hand, White abolitionism is guided by Roediger’s (1994) announcement that “whiteness is not only false and oppressive, it is nothing but false and oppressive” (p. 13; italics in original). In opposition to reconstructing whiteness, abolishing whiteness sees no redeeming aspects of it and as long as White people think they are White, Baldwin once opined that there is no hope for them (as cited by Roediger, 1994, p. 13). This essay will consider white reconstruction and abolition for their conceptual and political value as it concerns not only the revolution of whiteness but of race theory in general. Neo-abolitionists argue that whiteness is the center of the “race problem.” They go further than suggesting that racism is a “White problem.” Rather, as long as whiteness exists, little racial progress will be made. In fact, leading abolitionists, Ignatiev and Garvey (1996), argue that multiculturalism and general race theories that accept the existence of races, are problematic for their naturalization of what are otherwise reified concepts. To Ignatiev and Garvey, races are not real in an objective and ontological sense and therefore Whites, for example, are not real either. They do not go as far as suggesting that White people do not exist , which is a different point. They exist insofar as structures recognize white bodies as “White people.” But this recognition relies on the reification of a spurious category in order simultaneously to misrecognize certain human subjects as White people. Race treason encourages Whites to disrupt this process by pledging their disallegiance to the “White club.” Race traitors are white bodies that no longer act like and as White people. The investment in whiteness (Lipsitz, 1998) is the strongest form of investment because it is the most privileged racial identification. As long as Whites invest in whiteness, the existence of non-White races will also continue. Hirschman (2004) has argued that as long as race exists, so does racism and it is anachronistic to imagine one without the other. The clarion call for abolitionists asks Whites to disidentify with whiteness, leading to the eventual abolition of whiteness. I would also add that it leads to another consequence, which is the abolition of White people, or the withering away of a racial category and its subjects. In other words, if whiteness disappears, so do White people. I will have more to say about this last point below. By contrast, White reconstructionists disagree with abolitionists in the former’s attempt to recover whiteness. The disagreement falls within two domains: theory and viability. Theoretically, reconstructionists do not accept Roediger’s maxim that whiteness is only false and oppressive because there are many examples of Whites who have fought against racism, such as the original abolitionists. Reconstructionists argue that Whites can be remade, revisioned, and resignified and are not merely hopelessly racist. Their search is for a rearticulated form of whiteness that reclaims its identity for racial justice. They acknowledge that whiteness is a privilege but that Whites can use this privilege for purposes of racial justice and therefore contribute to the remaking of whiteness that is not inherently oppressive and false. In schools, reconstructing whiteness includes focusing on White historical figures who have fought, and still fight, against racial oppression. Reconstructionists consider this strategy as more viable than arguing for the abolition of whiteness, which most Whites will have a difficult time accepting. The discourse of White abolition will only lead to White defensiveness and retrenchment and does not represent much hope for even progressive or anti-racist Whites. To the reconstructionists, abolitionism is tantamount to promoting a certain self-hatred and shame among Whites, guilting them into accepting a movement that does not recognize their complexity. Rather, they prefer to instill critical hope in Whites.
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Page 125 Clearly, there has been a shift in race studies and whiteness has come to the fore much more visibly. It is driven by a complex yet plainly stated question: What to do with whiteness? The debate between White abolition and reconstruction is a fertile educational ground. It represents a neglected aspect in race studies, which is the future of a privileged people and how they can participate in undoing these same privileges. It also poses the question of, “What do Whites become after undoing these said privileges?” Do they become new subjects of whiteness or do they obliterate a racial category beyond recognition when they commit what Ignatiev and Garvey call “the unreasonable act” of race treason. Just as we may ask what the modern looks like after the postmodern critique (Lyotard, 1984), what do Whites look like, in the ontological sense, after the critique of Whiteness Studies? This essay hopes to generate not only insights about this process, but a rather needed dialogue. It is less concerned with identifying who is a reconstructionist or abolitionist of whiteness (although one can certainly have a productive discussion that begins there), and more with assessing the interventions that each discourse provides. White by Another Name: White Reconstructionism in Education Before we begin, one caveat must be entered. By focusing on whiteness, Apple (1998) warns that scholars of Whiteness Studies may unwittingly recenter whiteness, insufficiently knocking it off its orbit. He writes: [W]e must be on our guard to ensure that a focus on whiteness doesn’t become one more excuse to recenter dominant voices and to ignore the voices and testimony of those groups of people whose dreams, hopes, lives, and very bodies are shattered by current relations of exploitation and domination. (p. xi) Much useful work has been spent on decentering whiteness from its privileged son-of-God status. When the sun of whiteness has been centered, the planets of color have suffered. However, the centering of whiteness has also been an example of a certain inverted understanding, a geocentric theory that mistakes the real dynamics of social life and development. Not only does whiteness encourage us to be “flat earthers” (Friedman’s phrase), but it constructs a Ptolemaic universe that misunderstands a world it has created after its own image (Mills, 1997). As a privileged marker, whiteness assumed that the lives of people of color depended on White progress and enlightenment, whereas a heliocentric critical theory puts whiteness in its rightful place in racial cosmology, as largely dependent and parasitic on the labor and identity of people of color. By recentering whiteness here, we counteract what may be dubbed the superstitious beliefs in the rightness of whiteness and institute a more scientific explanation of how the social universe actually functions. In other words, if critical studies of race recenter whiteness, it is not in order to valorize or pedestalize it. Quite the opposite. A critical study of whiteness puts the social heavens back in order. The rearticulation of whiteness is part of an overall emancipatory project that implicates a host of institutions from economic to educational. Discursive interventions in education to transform whiteness attempt to explain the whiteness of pedagogy as they encourage a pedagogy of whiteness. That is, shifting the white racial project from one of dominance to one of justice requires a pedagogical process of unlearning the codes of what it currently means to be White and rescuing its redeeming aspects. Giroux (1997a) writes, “‘Whiteness’ … becomes less a matter of creating a new form of identity politics than an attempt to rearticulate ‘whiteness’ as part of a broader project of cultural, social, and political citizenship” (p. 295). In rescuing whiteness,
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Page 126 critical educators insert hope in White people as hermeneutic subjects who may interpret social life in liberating ways and not as hopelessly stuck in the molasses of racism. It recognizes the multiple moments of White history as an attempt to complexify racial options for Whites (indeed, speak to its existing complexity). In the dialectics of whiteness, Whites search for positive articulations in history as well as facing up to the contradictions of what it means to be antiracist in a racist society. Seen this way, the current formulations of whiteness are racist, but whiteness itself is not inherently racist. Being White is not the problem; being a White racist is. Dislodged from the hopelessness and helplessness of having to consider oneself as simply privileged (therefore, racist), White students’ humanity is affirmed as the ability to choose justice over domination. Here, abolitionists may agree that whiteness is a choice, at least with respect to the kind of White person one chooses to uphold. This new racial project asks [h]ow students might critically mediate the complex relations between “whiteness” and racism, not by having them repudiate their “whiteness,” but by grappling with its legacy and its potential to be rearticulated in oppositional and transformative terms … ways to move beyond the view of “whiteness” as simply a troupe of domination. (Giroux, 1997a, p. 296) Questioning the essentialism of identity politics, Giroux projects a third space for Whites, which neither valorizes their “accomplishments” nor overstates their complicity in relations of domination (see also Giroux, 1997b, 1997c). Their history is not determined by the originary sin of racism but, rather, a complex web of contradictions that make up what it means to be White in any given context. As such, educators recognize the anti-racist moments within White hegemony as well as the racist traps of White calls for racial justice. The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century provides a glimpse into this dualism if we consider the fact that John Brown and his comrades fought to dismantle slavery while their White privilege made their installment in leadership positions possible over those of Black abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass. A reading of the abolitionists as exceptions to the White rule (so common in history books and lessons) misses the way that White privilege works to favor even White abolitionists; equally, educators note how, by fighting against the institution of slavery, abolitionists were remaking what it meant to be White. It testifies to the fact that “ some of the time, in some respects even when not in all, whites empathize and identify with nonwhites, abhor how white supremacy has distorted their social interactions, and are willing to make significant sacrifices toward the eradication of white privilege” (Alcoff, 1998, http://www.msu.edu/-hypatia/White?People.htm; original emphasis). In short, they were able to “rearticulate whiteness in oppositional terms” (Giroux, 1997a, p. 310). To the extent that the abolitionists were racially privileged and that they used these said privileges to edge out Black abolitionists in discursive and institutional positions of leadership, they were anti-racist racists. They were located in the cauldron of whiteness without being entrapped in its determinisms insofar as they were anti-racist without being anti-White. Within this perspective, social domination is not the sole property of Whites as there have been many examples of non-White forms of domination. As Howard (1999) might put it, whiteness is not the problem but, rather, certain interpretations of what it means to be White that lead to forms of domination. The theory of social dominance is too deterministic because it fails to recognize the multiple positions that Whites take up in the race struggle. There are different ways to be White: from fundamentalist, to integrationist, to transformationist. Or as Ellsworth (1997) once put it, “It is more than one thing and never the same thing twice” (p. 226). Just as Christianity is not the source of a religious problem, but interpretations that encourage subjugation of non-Christian peoples, the ultimate meaning of whiteness is up for reinterpretation under concrete conditions of struggle as educators “disrupt the sanctification of
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Page 127 whiteness” (McIntyre, 1997, p. 149). Rather than rejecting whiteness, Howard suggests “breaking” out of whiteness, “emerging” from it to become something else. This process should not be underestimated. Just as Lenin once remarked that whereas the proletariat must merely be educated and the bourgeoisie must be revolutionized (see Althusser, 1976), so must Whites be transformed or experience a transformative education. In other words, although the social experiences of both the working class and people of color provide the basis for understanding the nature of their oppression, we cannot say the same for the bourgeoisie and Whites who must be “reborn” like the phoenix (R. Allen, 2005; Freire, 1993). Because whiteness is a social construction, a range of possibilities is opened up for White agency. Although durable, racial identity is also fluid and flexible. It fractures into different racial projects, some of which do not merely reproduce and reiterate White power. That said, reconstructionists suggest that struggling with whiteness is well within a racial project, not an attempt to get outside of it (see also, Omi & Winant, 1994). In this sense, racial ideology has no outside . As Kincheloe and Steinberg (1998) note, “As with any racial category, whiteness is a social construction in that it can be invented, lived, analyzed, modified, and discarded” (p. 8), which echoes Omi and Winant’s contention that racial projects can be created, modified, and even destroyed. For the moment, Ignatiev and Garvey (1996) agree when they declare that “what was once historically constructed can be undone” (p. 35). More of an ideological choice than a biological destiny, whiteness is part of a hermeneutics of the self. Though not entirely up to the individual to transform, whiteness represents a constellation of differences articulated to appear as a “lump-sum” category (Pollock, 2004), when in fact “there are many ways to be White” (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, p. 8). Of course there are masculine and feminine ways to be White, poor and rich ways to be White, straight and gay ways, liberal and radical ways as well, which speak to “the diverse, contingent racial positions that white people assume” (Giroux, 1997a, p. 309). In this sense, resignifying whiteness leads us to the “multiple meanings of whiteness” (McIntyre, 1997, p. 4) that, rather than viewing it simply with suspicion for the world it hides, may imagine the world it opens up in front of it (Leonardo, 2003; Ricœur, 1981). A hermeneutics of suspicion promotes disidentification with whiteness as erecting a veil (à la Du Bois) that works against its transparency, whereas a hermeneutics of empathy reserves hope that whiteness may emerge as an authentic worldview. This means that “making whiteness rather than white racism the focus of study is an important pedagogical strategy” (Giroux, 1997a, p. 309). White racism is inherently oppressive but whiteness, seen through the prism of reconstructionism, is multifaceted and undecidable. In rearticulating whiteness, educators offer students discourses that provide not only access to different ways of being White, but also strategies that counter the anxiety associated with current discourses of whiteness. Because essentialist discourses limit the range of possibilities for White students to relate with others, their daily upkeep of whiteness is marked with extreme forms of racial anxiety and inauthenticity (see Leonardo, 2002). Whites traverse the social landscape, threatened of being exposed as bogus racial agents as they round every corner. They know few alternative forms of whiteness outside the colonial framework, where they are interpellated as the colonizer. As a result, the unbearable whiteness of their being overcomes their search for alternative subjectivities and they become paralyzed and unable to act. Giroux (1997a) asks: What subjectivities or points of identification become available to white students who can imagine white experience only as monolithic, self-contained, and deeply racist? What are the pedagogical and political stakes in rearticulating whiteness in antiessentialist terms so that white youth can understand and struggle against the legacy of white racism while using the particularities of “their own culture as a resource for resistance, reflection, and empowerment … a theoretical language for racializing whiteness without essentializing it?” (pp. 310–311)
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Page 128 The question here is less about students unbecoming White and more about what kind of Whites they will become. It suggests coming to terms with the production of “white terror,” perhaps “unthinking whiteness,” but certainly not the abolition of the self, which comes with obvious contradictions for Whites (McLaren, 1995, 1997). It is not a move to promote historical amnesia concerning White atrocities against the Other thereby promoting a certain White “innocence,” but redeeming whiteness in order to come to terms with these crimes and develop a positionality against them. In the process, Whites assert their humanity as beings-in-struggle and beings-for-others, rather than using others-fortheir-being. In this search, Giroux is adamant about developing a “power-strategic politics that refuses to accept ‘whiteness’ as a racial category that has only one purpose, which is closely tied to, if not defined by, shifting narratives of domination and oppression” (Giroux, 1997a, p. 306). It is a call for living with difference that is the cornerstone of the pedagogical interaction that Lisa Delpit (1995) coined as “teaching other people’s children.” Because we know that much of the teaching force is comprised by and large of White women, the reinvention of whiteness becomes even more imperative if the educating population not only will reach, but equally teach, the learning population that is increasingly less White. In articulating a White position against racism, reconstructionists transform White identity from a cul-desac formation of endless oppressive histories into a productive, even positive, subjectivity. Anti-racist Whites may still be caught up in the contradictions of their own positionality and the privileges that come with it, but they can actively use their advantages responsibly to create an alternative racial arrangement that is less oppressive. To the extent that Whites are unable to throw off years of racist lessons and are dogged by their racist unconscious, through self-reflection they inhere the possibility of developing into anti-racist subjects. Whiteness is not a hopeless disease and may be rehabilitated (McLaren & Torres, 1999). Thus: [a] key goal of a critical pedagogy of whiteness emerges: the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive, antiracist white identity that is empowered to travel in and out of various racial/ethnic circles with confidence and empathy … Traditional forms of multiculturalism have not offered a space for Whites to rethink their identity around a new, progressive, assertive, counter-hegemonic, antiracist notion of whiteness. (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, pp. 12, 20) Developing a positive racial self for Whites entails that educators open up pedagogical conditions for students to forge an intersubjective space wherein they are able to enter the other without becoming the other. Now it must be noted that Whites already enter racial/ethnic circles with confidence. The phenomenon of racial exoticization and tourism already encourages Whites to enter non-White spaces in a way that only a colonizer can, who always feels in charge even when outnumbered by the other (Memmi, 1965). From Elvis to Eminem, White privilege confers the mobility to travel in and out of communities of color despite Whites’ irrational (and ironic) fears about violence. Moreover, as Ingram (2005) suggests, it is not clear why Whites must develop identities against racism through positive racial affiliations rather than through religious, secular humanist, or civic patriotic ones. The operative concept here is “empathy.” Rearticulating whiteness reminds Whites that the ghetto and other concentrations of color were created by Whites in order to fulfill the dictates of segregation, the hallmark of American apartheid (Massey & Denton, 1993). Empathy enables Whites to become “border crossers” (Giroux, 1992) with the benefit of critical reflection and recollection. White border crossers understand that transcending boundaries itself is a racial privilege. That is, the policing of people of color limits their mobility despite the fact that some trickle into White spaces. Border intellectuals recognize the difference between racial fetishism that addresses the other as abstract, and solidarity that conceives of the other as concrete, albeit
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Page 129 a concrete generalized other (Benhabib, 1987). Empathy is not a mode of desiring the other to be part of oneself through the process of enfleshment, but rather recognizing the completion of the self through the other. A theory of White reconstructionism comes with certain interventions that make it a viable political movement. To the reconstructionist, it offers a way into whiteness rather than a way out of it. It encourages Whites to own their whiteness rather than disowning it. Reconstructionism is not an idealist politics but a critical, pragmatic one. Kincheloe and Steinberg (1998) put it this way: We are not comfortable with the concept of a new oppositional white identity as a “race traitor” who renounces whiteness. It is unlikely that a mass movement will grow around that concept, as oppositional Whites still would have little to rally around or to affirm. (p. 21) Because reconstructing whiteness is likely to provide Whites racial options that are more appealing and imaginable (without understating the difficulties associated with it), reconstructionism may find its way into education as a pedagogical principle. Just as it is becoming increasingly difficult for Whites publicly to oppose multiculturalism insofar as the emerging question asks what kind of multiculturalism will be forged and not if multiculturalism is desirable (Buras, 2008), White raciality is becoming more difficult to avoid or deny. The question is no longer whether or not Whites are racial subjects—clearly they are— but, rather, how this racial project will play itself out. White teachers and students alike will find their humanity in whiteness rather than denying people of color theirs through White deployments of power. Reconstructed White subjects “[d]evelop both theoretical and emotional support” (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, p. 21) rather than wallowing in guilt, which can be paralyzing for even the liberal-thinking White person. In fact, opting out of whiteness is a racial privilege that people of color cannot enact. Kincheloe and Steinberg punctuate: Whites alone can opt out of their racial identity, can proclaim themselves nonraced. Yet no matter how vociferously they may renounce their whiteness, white people do not lose the power associated with being White. Such a reality renders many white renunciations disingenuous. It is as if some race traitors want to disconnect with all liabilities of whiteness (its association with racism and blandness) while maintaining all its assets (the privilege of not being Black, Latino, or Native American). (p. 22) Disappearing is not something people of color can accomplish. To the extent that Whites may desire it, it speaks to their power to make the other disappear and, when desirable, make themselves vanish. A project of White reconstruction locates whiteness in order to change it, unlearn much of what passes as White normativity, and in the process reappear as transformed Whites. Kill the White, Save the Human: White Abolitionism and a Pedagogy of Zero Degree To the extent that White reconstructionism is a more realistic and reasonable option to address the crisis of whiteness, the White abolitionist movement championed by Ignatiev, Garvey, and Roediger encourages Whites to commit the “unreasonable act” of race treason. Committed to
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Page 130 the understanding that the “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race … so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 10), White abolitionism takes its cue from a hybrid strategy melding both the original abolitionist movement’s focus on nonparticipation and the inversion of a white supremacist charge that Whites who disown whiteness are “race traitors.” In other words, neo-abolitionists ask Whites (particularly poignant for poor and working-class Whites) to opt out of their whiteness in search of a more accurate understanding of their social conditions and political interests; strategically, these new abolitionists favor appropriating race treason as their battle cry rather than their badge of dishonor. This is both an empirical as well as a theoretical injunction. Empirically, Whites have participated in race liberation movements, such as anti-slavery and Civil Rights, but this does not equate with acts of whiteness but actions by White subjects. In fact, White acts against racism are the very opposite of whiteness as a modus operandi insofar as acting against racism threatens whiteness. One might even go so far as saying that dismantling whiteness and racism leads to the eventual breakdown of White people as a social category. Against reconstructionism, abolitionism suggests that there is little empirical proof of a positive iteration of whiteness and searching for examples of positivity is as elusive as the holy grail. Or as Ingram (2005) puts it: The attempt to save whiteness by reducing it to ethnic identity is futile … I therefore conclude that, although white persons need not feel guilty about who they are, they should not aspire to a positive ethno-racial identification in the way that blacks and other oppressed racial minorities might. (p. 247) It also leads Ignatiev (1997) to lay down the gauntlet: We at Race Traitor … have asked some of those who think whiteness contains any positive elements to indicate what they are. We are still waiting for an answer. Until we get one, we will take our stand with David Roediger, who has insisted that whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. (http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html) On one hand, this might appear like a performative contradiction and that race traitors want to have their abolitionist cake and eat it too. That is, even when Whites commit morally supportable acts, these do not fall within the domain of whiteness but rather within otherness. Is this a double standard and part of racial entrapment? This is just the kind of fodder that frustrates many Whites who may take it as an instance of “reverse discrimination.” On the other hand, the sense hinges on a particular conceptualization of whiteness, which suggests that it cannot be reduced to a deterministic relation between actions and which racialized bodies commit them. Not all acts that Whites commit are categorically part of whiteness. Sometimes, White acts are articulated with histories of color rather than whiteness. Historically, transforming whiteness lacks any concrete example. When whites congeal into a skin collective (and people of color may join them), the results have been predictable. History shows that Irish workers picked race over class by edging out Black workers, Californians voted against affirmative action (a staple of Civil Rights legislation), and suburbanization created the hypersegregation of Blacks in ghettos. On the other hand, Whites exist at the intersection of discourses that struggle for supremacy over their subjectivity. They exist in multiple worlds and have had to make decisions about traversing the racial landscape. Here one may insist on the varieties of White people without contradicting the assertion that whiteness exists solely for
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Page 131 stratification. In history, Whites may be and have been transformed. But as we shall see, even this assertion needs to be qualified since transforming Whites may lead to their disappearance. Transforming whiteness also lacks history because it does not come to terms with the function of whiteness—why it was created, where it has been—but, rather, projects an ideal image of whiteness (what it would like whiteness to be) rather than the concrete history that has constituted it. It wishes away whiteness through a discourse of white positivity that is nowhere to be found. Likewise, one can distinguish between Americanism and Americans, the former an ideology the second a form of citizenship (with all its contradictions). Whereas Americanism has been used in imperialist ways around the globe, Americans may fight against this project and establish some distance from it. Of course, even Americans who fight against American imperialism receive the benefits of being constructed as Americans. However, unlike whiteness, we may argue that Americanism retains false premises and is quite oppressive worldwide, but it is not only oppressive and false. When we define the ideology of whiteness as hopelessly bound up with what it means to be white, then Whites are trapped into a particular way of making sense of their racial experience. Recalling Marx’s (1988) words in Theses on Feuerbach , today’s neo-abolitionists argue that the point is not to interpret whiteness but to abolish it (Ignatiev, 1997, http://racetraitor.org/ abolishthepoint.html; original emphasis). In other words, like the young Hegelians who were satisfied with describing the world rather than changing it, White apostasies short of abolitionism do not pose a real threat to the juggernaut of whiteness. In the same vein that a Marxist would abolish capital rather than reconstruct capitalism, the abolitionist sees little purpose in giving whiteness another chance. There is a difference between white bodies and White people. Beyond a structural determinism which signifies that white bodies are always conceived as White people, one can argue that white bodies (termed “white” here for convenience) only become White persons when they become articulated with whiteness. Certainly white bodies existed prior to race but were interpellated into its discursive structure roughly five centuries ago, articulated to appear as given that white bodies have always been White people. In contrast, white bodies are not always White people every single moment , particularly when they are conceived as “race traitors.” Likewise and with its own specificity, people of color who side too close with whiteness have been labeled as inauthentic and implicated with whiteness. With a different force and outcome, both have been guilty of racial blasphemy. In Roediger’s (1994) understanding, poor and working-class Whites live a paradoxical relationship with whiteness. Suffering from capitalist exploitation, poor housing, poor health, and substandard education, lacking social and cultural capital, unrealized (as opposed to potential) political power, poor and working-class Whites desperately hang on to “the public and psychological wages of whiteness” in the face of grim realities (see Du Bois, 1935/1998; Roediger, 1991). Interested in returning Whites to their full humanity, Roediger opts for a racio-economic perspective and struggle (see also Leonardo, 2005). Understanding that class struggle is dependent on, without reducing it to, racial interpellation, Roediger makes sincere attempts to build a race/class analysis. He finds an absence that: [a]lmost no left initiatives have challenged white workers to critique, much less to abandon, whiteness … workers who identify themselves as white are bound to retreat from genuine class unity and meaningful antiracism …. If it does not involve a critique of whiteness, the questioning of racism often proves shallow and limited. (1994, p. 13) In exchange for a more accurate understanding of their class oppression, White proletarians cut themselves off from workers of color in order to invest in their whiteness, which is often all that they have (Alcoff, 1998; see also Willis, 1977). They are both oppressed by class exploitation
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Page 132 and are beneficiaries of racism. As a result, they cannot galvanize a genuine class movement that fails to establish solidarity with workers of color, not to mention the problems associated with Whites licking their economic wounds with white privilege. The race/class problematic has proved to be the thorn in the side of whiteness. Roediger (1994) observes, “Rejection of whiteness is then part of a process that gives rise to both attacks on racism and to the very recovery of ‘sense of oppression’ among white workers” (p. 13). In the end, Roediger observes that their class struggle is intimately bound up with a race struggle; their way out of class is racialized. Ignatiev (1996) agrees: It is not black people who have been prevented from drawing upon the full variety of experience that has gone into making up America. Rather it is those who, in maddened pursuit of the white whale, have cut themselves off from human society, on sea and on land, and locked themselves in a “masoned walled-town of exclusiveness.” (p. 21) Abolitionists attract suspicion insofar as the dismantling of whiteness becomes a racial means to a Marxist end (Alcoff, 1998). In a Marxist project, whiteness is constructed as a distraction to class struggle, preventing White workers from seeing their true objective interests despite the fact that they inhere real, albeit contradictory, racial interests. It seems that a Marxist intervention has failed to galvanize a genuine class struggle because of racial divisions. Therefore, abolishing whiteness (and by implication, race) removes one of the obstacles so that the “real revolution” can get under way. This position may underestimate White workers’ possessive investment in whiteness, which goes against Ignatiev and Garvey’s (1996) notion that most Whites would “do the right thing if it were convenient” (p. 12). Whites of all economic classes cling onto their whiteness, which makes it inconvenient—and to some, inconceivable—to commit racial suicide. That said and the criticisms notwithstanding, abolitionists question the value of whiteness. Their intentions aside—and one cannot be certain here—race treason is about as disruptive to the established racial code as recently imagined. Linda Alcoff does not offer textual evidence for her suspicions of the abolitionists’ ulterior and Marxist motives, which no doubt would have made her objections more credible. However, it speaks of a history of suspicion from people of color concerning Whites when it comes to their sincerity in race struggle due to their consistent lack of commitment to racial justice. Bell (1992) says as much when he writes of “interest convergence” and explains the fact that racial progress in the United States is bound up first with White interests and only second with Black empowerment. In other words, Whites have only accepted racial progress when their overall interest is observed and not threatened. In the case of abolitionists, dissolving whiteness may serve the ultimate end of the impending class abolition. If that is the case, is a movement problematic if it serves more than one end? If abolitionism accomplishes its goal of dismantling whiteness, which in itself is deemed defensible, why should it matter that it contains an ulterior, Marxist motive? If the ultimate goal is objectionable, that seems to be another point altogether but it does not seem self-evident that an ulterior motive would disrecommend the movement even if one accepts the premise but not the conclusion. To the abolitionist, it is unconvincing to argue for the “rearticulation” or “transformation” of whiteness. Rather than rearticulating whiteness, abolitionists prefer to disarticulate it. Like science’s claim to be self-corrective, transforming whiteness assumes that Whites possess enough critical self-reflection and awareness to confront themselves. Searching for an identity that is both white and anti-racist, we may be tempted to conjure up a “new white American,” a “transformed white global subject.” But this suggestion lacks both empirical support and conceptual legs. It appears as the “last stand of whiteness” to assert itself into a history that has never existed or provides no example. Arguing for a transformed whiteness is appealing. Its limitation is that it
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Page 133 substitutes proxy for praxis. It betrays a conciliatory posture toward the function and purpose of whiteness as a parasitic ideology and social practice. Whiteness exists in order to prey upon its racialized counterparts and it has always existed in this manner, according to Roediger. Whiteness has taken different forms in the evolution of societies: official Apartheid there, Jim Crow here, and genocide elsewhere. But its face of oppression is unchanging. On the other hand, White people have made many different choices in life, sometimes working against whiteness but more accurately as vacillating between ideologies of whiteness and the Other, in differing and context-based choices, in various degrees of intensity and commitment. For example, when White teachers and educators question schooling’s racial disparities, they are making a choice against whiteness as White people. They are not transforming whiteness into something positive because whiteness does not transform to become anti-racist. It is by definition racist. As Whites dismantle racism, they eventually undercut the basis for their existence as supreme people. This signals the end of Whites as we know them. There is no other side out of which to emerge as a different White subject. Just as tinkering with tracking to the point that one may imagine undoing its patterned and patent inequalities is hardly tracking anymore (Oakes, 2005), so we may argue that Whites with little to no advantage are hardly White anymore. Race is a figment of the imagination, a veritable monster in the proverbial hallway closet with whiteness as its most frightening expression. Under these assumptions, even anti-racism is doomed to fail because it acknowledges the existence of races. To Ignatiev and Garvey (1996), The task is not to win over more whites to oppose “racism”; there are enough “anti-racists” enough already to do the job … when there comes into being a critical mass of people who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race will undergo fission, and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community. (p. 37) Although Ignatiev and Garvey may be faulted in their overestimation that there are enough anti-racist Whites “to do the job,” their point hinges on questioning the heuristic value of race and, by implication, the political value of race struggle designed to perpetuate race. To be fair, Ignatiev and Garvey do not merely ask Whites to “put up their hands” in desperation when it comes to racial identification, or to keep their hands down when racial interpellation hails their subjectivity. It is hardly subversive for Whites to announce that they are not White. This is already their inclination. Race treason is not just a transgression involving personal identification, but falls completely within the realm of behavior. Through oppositional behavior, race traitors disrupt racial commitments and expectations. Ignatiev and Garvey (1996) write, “The need to maintain racial solidarity imposes a stifling conformity on whites, on any subject touching even remotely on race. The way to abolish the white race is to disrupt that conformity” (p. 36). Abolishing the White race means not only repudiating membership through annunciation (“I am not White”), but, more importantly, through denunciation (“I will not act White”). Denouncing one’s whiteness both at the personal and group level suggests acting against its codes. It answers the call to do the work of race, to labor against racial consent. It requires that we “transform ‘reverse racism’ into an injunction (Reverse racism!)” (Roediger, 1994, p. 17). Again, we see here the ironic strategy of abolitionism to use White logic against itself, of inserting sense into senselessness (e.g., challenging the belief that reverse discrimination exists for Whites). For most Whites, the opposite of abolitionism is more difficult and resisted: white racial ownership. Reconstructionists have a clearer sense of this first step by recognizing the need for belonging and not necessarily in the sense of loyalty to White supremacy, but to some kind of identity. In other words, outside of the call for a universal human identity for Whites, abolitionists do not offer up a specific identity since abolition is precisely the assertion of a non-identity. It is possible that reconstruction might offer the means to an abolitionist end. Alcoff (1998) writes,
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Page 134 “Rather than erase these inscriptions as a first step, we need a period of reinscription to redescribe and reunderstand what we see when we see race” at the same time that we may be able to project the emptiness of whiteness, “which unlike ethnic identities … has no other substantive cultural content” (http://www.msu.edu/-hypatia/White?People.htm). That is, Whites must first come to terms with what whiteness has made of them in order to consider the move towards abolitionism. It is difficult to imagine Whites, many of whom function through color-blindness, taking the radical leap of race treason. Because of their color-blindness, many Whites may find it ironically convenient (and not in the sense that Ignatiev and Garvey predict) to use abolitionism as a way to further mask White privilege. By disabusing themselves of having to take responsibility for White atrocities, White abolitionists do not face up to whiteness, which sounds too familiar. But if, after having participated in recognizing and then reconstructing whiteness, Whites realize the emptiness of the category, the abolitionist position may not have started the story but would likely end it. So in the final analysis, there is a way that reconstructionism would provide the entrance into whiteness and abolitionism its exit. References Aanerud, R. (1997). Fictions of whiteness. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness (pp. 35–59). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alcoff, L. (1998). What should White people do? Hypatia , 13 (3), 6–26. Retrieved September 29, 2008, from http://www.iupjournals.org/hypatia/hyp13-3.html Allen, R. (2005). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), Critical pedagogy and race (pp. 53–68). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Allen, T. (1994). The invention of the white race (Vol. 1). London: Verso. Allen, T. (1997). The invention of the white race (Vol. 2). London: Verso. Althusser, L. (1976). Essays in self-criticism . (G. Lock, Trans.). London: NLB and Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Apple, M. (1998). Foreword. In J. Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, N. Rodriguez, & R. Chennault (Eds.), White reign (pp. ix–xiii). New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well. New York: Basic Books. Benhabib, S. (1987). The generalized and the concrete other. In S. Benhabib & D. Cornell (Eds.), Feminism as critique (pp. 77–95). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brodkin, K. (1999). How Jews became White folks and what that says about race in America . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Buras, K. (2008). Rightist multiculturalism . New York: Routledge. Bush, M. (2005). Breaking the code of good intentions . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Chubbuck, S. (2004). Whiteness enacted, whiteness disrupted: The complexity of personal congruence. American Educational Research Journal , 41 (2), 301–333. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: The New Press. DiAngelo, R. (2006). The production of Whiteness in education. Teachers College Record , 108 (10), 1983–2000. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1989). The souls of black folk . New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1904). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1998). Black reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 . New York: The Free Press. (Original work published 1935). Dyer, R. (1997). White. New York: Routledge. Ellsworth, E. (1997). Double binds of whiteness. In M. Fine, L. Weis, L. Powell, & L. Mun Wong (Eds.), Off white (pp. 259–269). New York: Routledge. Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum. Gillborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy. Journal of Education Policy , 20 (4), 485–505.
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Page 135 Giroux, H. (1992). Border crossings. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. (1997a). Racial politics and the pedagogy of whiteness. In M. Hill (Ed.), Whiteness: A critical reader (pp. 294–315). New York: NYU Press. Giroux, H. (1997b). Channel surfing . New York: St. Martin’s Press. Giroux, H. (1997c). Rewriting the discourse of racial identity. Harvard Educational Review , 67 (2), 285– 320. Hirschman, C. (2004). The origins and demise of the concept of race. Population and Development Review , 30 (3), 385–415. hooks, b. (1997). Representing whiteness in the black imagination. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness (pp. 165–179). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Howard, G. (1999). We can’t teach what we don’t know. New York: Teachers College Press. Ignatiev, N. (1996). How the Irish became white . New York: Routledge. Ignatiev, N. (1997). The point is not to interpret Whiteness but to abolish it . Talk given at the Conference on “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.” University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html. Ignatiev, N., & Garvey, J. (1996). Editorial: When does the unreasonable act make sense? In N. Ignatiev & J. Garvey (Eds.), Race traitor (pp. 35–37). New York: Routledge. Ingram, D. (2005). Toward a cleaner white(ness). The Philosophical Forum , XXXVI (3), 243–277. Kincheloe, J., & Steinberg, S. (1998). Addressing the crisis of whiteness. In J. Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, N. Rodriguez, & R. Chennault (Eds.), White reign (pp. 3–29). New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Lee, S. J. (2005). Up against whiteness. New York: Teachers College Press. Leonardo, Z. (2002). The souls of white folk. Race, Ethnicity & Education , 5(1), 29–50. Leonardo, Z. (2003). Reality on trial. Policy Futures in Education , 1(3), 504–525. Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy. Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory , 36 (2), 137–152. Leonardo, Z. (2005). The unhappy marriage between Marxism and race critique. Policy Futures in Education , 2(3/4), 483–493. Leonardo, Z. (2007). The war on schools. Race, Ethnicity & Education , 10 (3), 261–278. Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lyotard, J. (1984). The postmodern condition (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, K. (1988). Theses on Feuerbach. In A. Wood (Ed.), Marx selections (pp. 80–82). New York: Macmillan. Massey, D., & Denton, N. (1993). American apartheid. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McIntosh, P. (1992). White privilege and male privilege. In M. Andersen and P. H. Collins (Eds.), Race, class, and gender (pp. 70–81). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. McIntyre, A. (1997). Making meaning of whiteness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. McLaren, P. (1995). Critical pedagogy and predatory culture. New York: Routledge. McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary multiculturalism . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McLaren, P., & Torres, R. (1999). Racism and multicultural education. In S. May (Ed.), Critical multiculturalism (pp. 42–76). Philadelphia, PA: Falmer Press. Memmi, A. (1965). The colonizer and the colonized . Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Morrison, T. (1993). Playing in the dark. Vintage Books. Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track (2nd Ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States (2nd Ed.). New York: Routledge. Pollock, M. (2004). Colormute. Princeton University Press. Richardson, T. & Villenas, S. (2000). “Other” encounters. Educational Theory, 50 (2), 255–273. Ricœur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J. B. Thompson, Ed./Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Roediger, D. (1991). The wages of whiteness. New York: Verso. Roediger, D. (1994). Towards the abolition of whiteness. New York: Verso. Sheets, R. (2000). Advancing the field or taking center stage. Educational Researcher, 29 (9), 15–21. Sleeter, C. (1995). Reflections on my use of multicultural and critical pedagogy when students are white. In C. Sleeter & P. McLaren (Eds.), Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference (pp. 415–437). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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Page 136 Thompson, A. (2003). Tiffany, friend of people of color. Qualitative Studies in Education , 16 (1), 7–29. Thompson, B. (2001). A promise and a way of life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Warren, J. (2000). Masters in the field. In F. Winddance Twine and J. Warren (Eds.), Racing research, researching race (pp. 135–164). New York: NYU Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor . New York: Columbia University Press. Winant, H. (1997). Behind blue eyes. In M. Fine, L. Weis, L. Powell, & L. Mun Wong (Eds.), Off white (pp. 40–53). New York: Routledge. Wise, T. (2007). White like me. New York: Soft Skull Press.
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Page 137 10 What Was Poststructural Feminism in Education? Julie McLeod [G]ender is regarded (and lived) by contemporary young scholars and activists raised on poststructuralism as something that can be bent, proliferated, troubled, resignified, morphed, theatricalised, parodied, deployed, resisted, imitated, regulated … but not emancipated. (Wendy Brown, 2005, p. 111) No normative conclusion—this is bad, this must be overthrown—can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one. (Stanley Fish, 2008) This chapter explores the status and implications of poststructural feminism in education, addressing the contemporary state of play by initially considering some of its antecedents.1 The aim is to identify characteristics and effects of this body of work rather than provide an extensive review of the vast range of theoretical and methodological material written under the sign of poststructuralism/feminism/education, or an in-depth discussion of how it has informed empirical studies in educational research—of which there are many. Instead, I began thinking about this topic by posing the question: “What was poststructural feminism in education?” This question, in equal parts serious and tongue-in-cheek, was prompted by a small magazine, one now almost hidden away at the far end of my bookshelf, entitled What was postmodernism? and published in 1991 (Frow, 1991). I would ponder this title as I first read my way through the sometimes exciting, sometimes predictable accounts of how feminism and poststructuralism did or did not go together. I was bemused by the way the simple gesture of the past tense so quickly and deftly deflated ambitions and historicized a “cultural turn.” Recalling this now, I approach questions about the status of poststructural feminism and education in a somewhat quizzical and historical mood. I attempt to interpret these ideas not only as a group of theories that challenged thinking and research practice, but as a kind of historical phenomenon that has represented a particular Zeitgeist about “theory,” about feminism, and about educational reform. These observations are developed via two main routes: first, in relation to emphasized themes and ambitions in the recent history of poststructural feminist thinking in education; and second in response to contemporary reassessments of the purpose, legacy, and history of “Theory” in the post-1960s’ humanities and social sciences. Within an overall view
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Page 138 that looks historically at the formation and characteristics of the field, I draw out two significant features. First, I argue that one of the most significant impacts of poststructural feminism on educational research was its attention to subjectivity and I examine how an emphasis on identity construction and de/reconstruction has played out in gender equity reform and policy. Second, I document influential “founding” debates about definitions and the proper purposes of poststructural feminism, marking out the major points of disagreement and convergence. I show how such debates constituted the field along polarized lines of “good” or “bad” and note some of the sticking points in these disputes. In my final comments, I compare these earlier debates with more recent discussions regarding the purposes and “future” of feminist theory in the wake of poststructural interrogations of the subject and a sense of a radically disrupted present. As a member of the generation whose coming of age paralleled the rise of poststructuralism in educational and feminist research, it is not surprising that my writing was and continues to be influenced by a range of ideas falling within that ever-widening category. My engagement has been accompanied by an interest in the history and effects of poststructuralism, an attempt to extend the spirit of its deconstructive, anti-essentialist, anti-teleological critique to understand its own formation, and the historicity of its moment and truth claims (McLeod, 1998, 2001b). I am someone, then, who in various if provisional ways has thought of my work as located within the territory of poststructuralism and feminism; and I hear myself hailed by others, my researcher subjectivity interpellated as such. But I have also always felt some ambivalence about that identification, not because of the ideas and ways of seeing that it encompassed but because of what felt like the cementing in place of an identity that aligned with a research formula. In an earlier discussion of poststructuralism and education, I argued that it felt dangerously close to becoming another orthodoxy, a normalizing discourse that was not always reflexive about its own truth claims (McLeod, 2001a). Reflecting now, I find a certain irony in writing about a body of theory so much shaped, heralded, reviled, and embraced as the “new” but which now seems so familiar, so “old,” so much part of educational research—in conference programs and presentations, in graduate dissertations, in scholarly and informal discussions. This is not to say that it is completely mainstream and domesticated, or that it has lost its analytical edge. It is merely an observation about how theoretical agendas are historically embedded. And this is particularly striking for agendas that have a history of being oppositional and of being strongly defined by differentiation from the old and “the past,” in this case, from humanism or modernism or the Enlightenment. Of course, neither poststructuralism, nor feminism, nor any alliance between the two represents a homogeneous body of theory or practice or politics. Nor has it been taken up in educational research in a single or monolithic way, even if it is sometimes characterized, or caricatured as such. There are variations in theoretical emphasis and differences in the type of practices to which it is linked—across research, teaching, history, policy, pedagogy, and methodology. Nevertheless, there are identifiable terms and questions that signify a particular theoretical perspective, including a suspicion of grand narratives, a focus on questions about subjectivity, on partial and multiple meanings, on discourse, on processes of becoming, and on construction and deconstruction (Dillabough, 2001; Lather, 1991, 2007a; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Within this, there remain diverse disciplinary and national inflections and different emphases according to allegiance to different key figures. One can claim a poststructural feminist identity and be a follower of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, or Butler, or one can take up a more diffuse and eclectic poststructuralist interest in, for example, discursive constructions or performances of identity, or anti-foundationalism. The ordering of descriptors has itself been significant: Is it poststructuralism and feminism in education? or feminist poststructuralism in education? …—and whether one uses the terms as nouns or adjectives also signifies differences in emphasis and political nuance. Is feminism a noun
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Page 139 representing an annihilation of the subject and of political agency. At the core of this criticism modified by a poststructural perspective, or is it the other way around? Further, is it about “importing” ideas to education or has educational research generated a particular take on feminism and poststructuralism, linked to its status as a field of research, policy, and practice. In the introduction to their influential edited volume on Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (1992) Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore situate the book “within poststructuralist feminisms.” Yet, they describe their primary allegiance as feminist: “as women in education, our positions are feminist. Poststructuralist or postmodernist theoretical tenets have been helpful to the extent that they fit with our feminist political project(s) and our attempts to construct pedagogies” (Luke & Gore, 1992, pp. 4–5). Debates about the order of affiliation were a feature of what I discuss below as definitional and authenticity struggles within the field; and they were a key part of how the politics of theory was negotiated within feminism more broadly. Proliferating Discourses Since the mid-to-late 1990s a proliferation of writing and research has grown up under the umbrella category of poststructuralism/feminism/education. This includes overviews or introductions to the field, methodological texts written under its aegis, and empirical studies guided by named feminist and poststructural concepts—frequently those of subjectivity, discourse, power, femininities/masculinities. What counts as feminist and as poststructuralist has also diversified, reflecting theoretical developments and directions in the respective fields, showing, for instance, the impact of postcolonial and Whiteness Studies, or queer theory or new forms of class analysis—all of which, in different ways, are able to claim an affiliation with an increasingly broad theoretical identity. At the same time, discussions have become more specialized, more commonly focused on debates or tensions within a particular area of poststructural feminist inquiry and where it is heading, rather than debates about what poststructural feminism is and whether such an alliance is fruitful. Even a decade ago, it seemed possible to entertain the idea of writing a comprehensive review of the field of encounters between feminism and poststructuralism, and what this could or did mean for education. And there were many attempts to provide definitions and useful guides, showing how different debates and trajectories came together, or were in tension, and how they could be pursued in educational inquiry (e.g., Francis, 1999; St. Pierre, 2000; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Because of the combined histories of feminism and of education, questions about politics and practice were a frequent feature in such discussions (Dillabough, 2001; Francis, 1999)—even when not the site of anxiety—and these remain recurring tropes in assessments of poststructuralism more generally. So far, I have been writing of poststructuralism and feminism as if they were a kind of joined entity, and in some uses this has indeed become the case. The explosion of research that claims allegiance to both strands has produced a sense of a combined project, suggesting that “the relationship between the two bodies of thought and practice is not inimical but invigorating and fertile” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 477). It is equally important, however to not overlook the history of tensions in this alliance, and how it was, by turns, understood—by feminists, and by educational researchers—as signaling both possibilities and dangers (Francis & Skelton, 2001). During the 1990s especially, much was written on the tango between feminism and poststructuralism and while these debates are more muted today, they continue to echo through exchanges, their traces forming part of the field. If we imagine a continuum of responses, at one end poststructuralism is positioned as antithetical to the feminist political and intellectual project, lie concerns about the implications of a radical anti-essentialism and historicization of subjectivity,
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Page 140 and the associated challenge to foundational discourses. While such criticisms were made of poststructuralism broadly, they were perceived by some as particularly significant for feminism because the critique of the subject (or the judgment of it as a fiction, frequently characterized as the death of the subject) was seen to occur at precisely the time when women’s voice and agency gained political strength and social presence through the liberatory power of feminism (Nicholson, 1990; Ramazanoglu, 1993). While some feminists lamented that poststructuralism was bad for women and bad for politics, other feminists challenged the very formulation of such a view of (feminist) politics and of subjectivity. Judith Butler argued, for example, that “the critique of the subject is not a negotiation or repudiation of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating its construction as a pregiven or foundational premise” (Butler, 1990, p. 9). Here poststructuralist arguments were brought to challenge some of the foundational narratives of feminism itself. At the other end of an imagined continuum, feminism and poststructuralism were seen as pursuing potentially complementary lines of analysis, both posing skeptical and deconstructive questions to normalizing practices and working to destabilize taken-for-granted truths—of gender subjectivity, of gender relations and relations of power, and so forth (Lather, 1991; McNay, 1992; Sawicki, 1988). More recently Elizabeth St. Pierre and Wanda Pillow argued that: Feminists and poststructuralists have worked together and separately during the last half of this [twentieth] century to facilitate structural failures in some of foundationalism’s most heinous formations —racism, patriarchy, homophobia, ageism, and so forth—the ruins out of which they now work. (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000, p. 2) A diffusion of poststructuralist conceptions of identity in educational discourses has been one of the consequences of this “working in the ruins.” Identity De/constructions In a review of the uses of Foucault in educational research, Bernadette Baker and Katy Heyning (2004) identified three main types, and there are some parallels with the range of scholarship conducted in the name of poststructuralism and feminism in education. The three types of use of Foucault were: 1. historicization and philosophizing projects with relativization emphases; 2. denaturalization projects without overt historical emphases and with diversity emphases; and 3. critical reconstruction projects with solution emphases. (Baker & Heyning, 2004, p. 29) In a subsequent discussion of this classification, Bernadette Baker observed that “while orientations to Foucault varied tremendously, both within and across particular pieces of research, most deployments fell within the second approach,” which she characterizes as “more ‘socio-logical’” than the other two categories, with category one “more ‘problematizing’” and category three “more ‘administrative’” (Baker, 2007, pp. 78–79). “Denaturalization” projects with a sociological bent and “diversity emphases” also describe the most common form of poststructuralist feminist research in education though, given feminist political and theoretical concerns, there is a more marked and deliberate engagement with “diversity” and difference than in the literatures
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Page 141 surveyed by Baker and Heyning. Much important work is of course conducted within the other categories and this work sometimes intersects with “denaturalizing projects.” This includes historical studies of gender and of women teachers (Middleton, 1998; Tamboukou, 2003) and “reconstruction” projects that examine, for example, school and policy analyses oriented to changing practices (Blackmore, 1999; Kenway & Willis, 1997). With “denaturalization projects,” the tasks of deconstructing, demystifying, and destabilizing truths, practices, and identities dominate analyses. This intersects with other currents in ethnographic and cultural studies research that similarly expose the historicity and construction of phenomena and social relations. In poststructural educational research the overall orientation has been towards studies that denaturalize what appears as normal, such as standard classroom practices, or curriculum constructions, or conventional gender identities. One of the most significant consequences of poststructural feminist work in educational research has been the prominence given to the concept of “identity” and to the social and discursive processes of identity construction and de/construction. I have examined elsewhere how poststructuralist and neoconstructivist ideas about identity have been particularly influential in Australian gender equity policy and research (McLeod, 2001a). I return briefly to these arguments in order to provide an example of the impact and diffusion of poststructuralist ideas and to foreshadow questions about identity deconstruction within feminist political and theoretical projects. There are many stories to tell about the recent history of feminism in Australian education. One is a policy and school reform story which typically begins with the second-wave of feminism in the 1970s, and the development of equal opportunities and non-sexist programs in schools that sought not to distinguish on the basis of gender difference, but to challenge sex-role stereotypes. This was then followed in the 1980s by attention to essential gender differences and how these played out in pedagogy and learning styles. These shifts in emphasis from equality to difference paralleled wider shifts in feminist theorizing and this continued in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on identity and on gender as a social construction, paralleling the rise of encounters between feminism and poststructuralist ideas (McLeod, 2001a; Yates, 1997). Since the 1970s, the nature and formation of children’s gender identity have been central issues for Australian research and policy on gender and education. While in the 1970s, the problem of subjectivity was most often articulated (and resolved) through the language of the sex role and socialization, since the 1990s identity has been represented in a poststructuralist-inspired language as a “construction,” a discursive and social category that is “made” and open to change. The National Action Plan for the Education of Girls (1993), the national Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997) and numerous commissioned reports identified schools as places where the process of identity construction takes place, and advised schools, teachers and educational systems to promote pedagogical practices that enabled pupils and teachers to examine the process and effects of that construction. One of the purposes of this examination was to de-construct the prevailing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. This strategy, it was believed, would help young people to see the many possible ways in which they could be male and female, thereby helping to break down constricting gender identities. During the 1990s, attention to gender identity expanded from a predominant focus on femininity to encompass masculinity (Lingard & Douglas, 1999). In the educational policy arena and in popular and media discussion, heated debate over the question of “What about the boys?” was typically framed in terms of the content and form of masculine identity. The “boys debate” condenses a number of anxieties about gender and education, including concerns that girls are now “outperforming” boys, that “boys’” needs have been neglected, as well as concerns about the reported difficulties many young men have with their emotional lives; from being prone to aggressive and abusive behaviors, to having poor skills in interpersonal relations. The common
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Page 142 policy and research response to such concerns has been to urge schools to examine the construction of masculinity, to encourage boys to consider other ways of being “male,” and to challenge rigid gender stereotypes or subject positions. Much more could be said about this focus on identity in schools and gender equity programs, including its convergence with both neoliberal individualism and a reflexive and therapeutic culture of the self. But for the purposes of this discussion the salient point is that the manner in which practices of identity construction were normalized via policy, through a process of translation and reinscription, can be traced to the influence of gender and feminist research informed by poststructural ideas (McLeod, 2001a). Second, the focus on identity was taken up in the boys’ education movement in a profoundly individualizing manner that was largely disembedded from a wider analysis of sociocultural context, and that also, paradoxically, opened the way for a reassertion of natural masculinity. That is, the radical critique of identity construction implicit in the earlier feminist deployments was subsumed by, and transformed into, a focus on how boys become boys, and the obligation of schools and pedagogies to accommodate boys’ natural learning styles and ways of being. This deployment of “identity construction” re-engaged notions of the natural child which good teaching could unleash, and re-articulated natural, fixed gender difference. A mass of educational research exposes the various ways school practices, student identities, curriculum programs, and so forth are constructed. In most respects, this observation no longer surprises, as the epigram at the start of this chapter from the American literary critic Stanley Fish suggests. If, as he argues, identifying something as a social construction does not in itself provide the basis for normative judgments—either negative or positive—then it is equally the case that simply asserting and noticing constructions—everything is one—might have a “use-by” date as a political and theoretical project. As the example of gender equity reform suggests, a more useful object of critique could be what is reconstructed, its effects and the circumstances in which that happens. Definitional and Authenticity Struggles From once occupying a relatively marginal position of critique, poststructuralist feminism has become a recognizable field of inquiry, with an informal canon, and texts and authors with citational authority (e.g., Lather, 1991; Luke & Gore, 1992; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Walkerdine, 1990). Overviews of research methodology note its impact (Somekh & Lewin, 2005), and reviews of gender-based research in education acknowledge, if not elaborate, its evolution and influence (Arnot & Mac An Ghail, 2006; Francis & Skelton, 2001; Skelton, Francis, & Smulyan, 2006). A number of “originary narratives” circulate. In one version, feminism rescues poststructuralism from gender (and other) exclusions and brings an embodied and more politically engaged perspective to poststructural studies of education; in another version poststructuralism sets feminist and educational theory free from the shackles of essentialism, naive accounts of power and subjectivity, and the “ubiquitous dominance” of humanism (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 479). Discussions about the rise and influence of theoretical traditions characteristically invoke the name of an “originary person” such as Foucault or Derrida or Butler, to stand in for a body of theory whose claims always exceed the person. In the “isms” of poststructuralism and feminism there are many potential authors and many lines to pursue, yet there has been a common style of grounding its formation negatively. Initial explanations of what the field represented often proceeded by spelling out what it was not, how it was a reaction against or a critique of stifling modernity or the shadow of the Enlightenment, or humanism—often used interchangeably—but all construed somewhat negatively/repressively and standing as the contrast to a poststructural feminist worldview. The task of poststructural feminist inquiry was to identify the “boundaries,
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Page 143 limits and grids of regularity and normalcy [of humanism]” and, “once intelligible” they were to “be disrupted and transgressed” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 479). One of the hallmarks of feminist poststructural writing, particularly in the 1990s, has been a pronounced concern with definitions and preferred or even proper ways of reading and with delineating strands and allegiances within the field. Discussions abounded of “key concepts” and the translation of ideas from feminism, and from poststructuralism, into education. The arguments of American educational researcher Elizabeth St. Pierre capture one influential line of analysis and concept definition. Writing in 2000, St. Pierre provided a detailed overview of “key philosophical concepts—language; discourse; rationality; power, resistance, and freedom; knowledge and truth; and the subject—and examines the ways they are typically understood in humanism and then their reinscription in poststructuralism” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 477). She advocates the possibilities that poststructural critique opens up for feminist and educational research, arguing that its “reinscriptions” and critiques of all that has been taken for granted in humanist thinking and “explanatory fictions” have relevance for educators and feminists: the feminist poststructural critique of epistemology is one of ongoing questioning; a scepticism about the relation of women to power, truth, and knowledge—a permanent political critique that has no end. This critique has been particularly useful for educators who work to produce different knowledge in different ways and to trouble what counts as truth. (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 500) British gender researcher, Becky Francis, while still concerned with clarifying terms and parameters, articulated a quite different, but equally influential, position from the one taken by St. Pierre in the United States. Francis argued that “‘pure’ poststructuralism is incompatible with the feminist emancipatory project” and “certainly not practicable in educational research” (Francis, 1999, pp. 381– 382). The incompatibility resides in the “clash between modernist (feminist) and post-structural positions” and in “the poststructuralist aim of deconstruction compared to the feminist need for a system to explain the socio-economic reality of gender difference” (Francis, 1999, p. 385). According to Francis, the limitations and dangers of poststructuralism for feminist education arise from the way “it pleasures in the deconstruction of current discursive practices, but suggests or builds nothing in their place” (Francis, 1999, pp. 388–389), a task which is a pre-condition for the emancipatory/modernist project of feminism. Definitions about poststructural feminism in education were thus also the occasion for defending particular understandings of what properly constituted feminism. A concern with truth and getting-it-right characterized a frequently cited exchange (e.g., reprinted in Skelton & Francis, 2005) between two feminist researchers on the topic of teaching poststructural feminist theory in education: the litmus test for this was teaching “subjectivity.” In 1997, New Zealand feminist researcher Alison Jones published an article in the journal Gender and Education in which she reflected on the difficulties she had encountered in teaching education students some of the concepts associated with poststructural feminism, particularly to do with the humanist subject and notions of subject positions and deconstructions. She refers to the writings of Australian feminist researcher, Bronwyn Davies as an example of how poststructural ideas had been taken up and conveyed in educational and gender research; and this work was an initial source for both Jones and her students. Jones found that many of her education students struggled with understanding “ideas increasingly popular in feminist education studies” in part due to their lack of knowledge of “relevant aspects of structuralism, and, evident in their difficulties with the concepts of agency, the subject and socialisation” (Jones, 1997, pp. 261–262). While they grasped a critique of socialization processes which position girls in particular ways, they retained a sense of the “irreducible
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Page 144 ‘real person’”; and this is the crux of Jones’ concerns. At the heart of students’ reception of poststructural theory, lies a “humanist subject,” which sits at odds with the anti-humanist subject of poststructuralism (p. 262). Jones attributes this confusion to the complexity of poststructuralism, but also suggests there is a paradox in how feminist scholars themselves have approached this issue. As an example, she cites a discussion by Bronwyn Davies on how subjects are both positioned by discourses but can also make choices. Jones’ students found this an attractive argument because it “seems we can have our cake and eat it too; we are both constituted [by discourses] and yet can choose what we might be constituted as.” This argument, however, served to foster students’ misunderstanding as it encouraged them to “take seriously the anti-humanist language of ‘post-structuralism’ whilst simultaneously invoking a humanist subject (a choosing agent)” (Jones, 1997, p. 266). Moreover, for Jones, this paradox subverts the truth and meaning of poststructuralism, betraying the remnants of unreconstructed humanist thinking. In response, Davies suggested that Jones was stuck on working out a mistaken sense of “correct poststructuralist usage” and that she had got the topic of agency and the humanist subject wrong. Davies then provided her own “correct” account of this matter. I redefine agency as lying in the inscription of some forms of the humanist self (if you are constituted as a powerful agent you may well be able to act powerfully), and more significantly, as lying in the reflexive awareness of the constitutive power of language that becomes possible through poststructuralist theory. I have struggled to reclaim this concept for use in post-structuralist theory precisely because, as a feminist, I am not willing to forgo the possibility of conceptualising and bringing about change. So, yes, I want my cake and I want to eat it. And as a poststructuralist I do not find that problematic. Linear forms of logic are too constraining for those of us who wish to embrace the rich complexity of life lived through multiple and contradictory discourses. (Davies, 1997, p. 272) This is a fascinating exchange, and the rhetorical strategies employed by both authors to make their case and establish their authority warrant further analysis. It will suffice to note here that both articles assert their proper readings and engagements with poststructural ideas by doctrinally defining key concepts and their relation to them. Claims and counter-claims for authenticity are made via elaborate arguments that turn on the meaning of subjectivity, the extent to which the proper poststructuralist will, or can, transcend humanism and what it means to deconstruct subjectivity. In addition, both discussions represent a tendency to moralistic and—despite protestations to the contrary—dualistic thinking, a tendency that has, Baker (2007, pp. 80–81) argues, characterized much educational research. That is, there is a right way—and conversely a wrong or problematic way—to be a poststructuralist teacher, and better and more fine-tuned knowledge of theoretical intricacies will assist in the realization of this identity. Such debates, and others in similar vein, involved arbitrating what counted in the field, and what constituted an authentic and authoritative poststructural feminist position. These struggles perhaps sit oddly alongside a poststructural skepticism towards final and foundational knowledge claims and the provisional and partial status of truth. In more recent discussions, doctrinal definitional battles, although not completely absent, appear to have receded. In part, this is likely to be because of the diffusion and familiarity of ideas. But it is also in part to do with a different set of questions emerging about feminism —and feminism and education—to do with reviewing what various theoretical turns have amounted to and how feminism represents and understands itself in the present. Before elaborating these points, I make a brief comment on the history and impact of “Theory” in the humanities and social sciences. This is offered as a backdrop for considering the rise, influence, and current status of one articulation of that Theory in a specific disciplinary field.
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Page 145 Reassessing “Theory” This has been a time of heightened interest in accounting historically and sociologically for the rise and effects of a particular kind of theory, operating under the sign of Theory, which flourished across the humanities and social sciences in the Euro-Anglo world from the 1960s. Although experienced differently in distinct national and disciplinary contexts, some generalizations about its characteristics are possible. Theory (capital “t”) typically refers to ideas identified by an allegiance to structuralism, but particularly to poststructuralism, postmodernism or deconstruction, and in some instances is designated in nationalist terms as the influence of French theory on the Anglo-American academy (e.g., Fish, 2008). While what inaugurated these reflections will remain an open question here, their questions invite attention because of the perspectives they suggest for thinking about the impact of theory— poststructuralism and feminism—in a particular field of social inquiry and practice. Three strands in these discussions are particularly relevant for our purposes here. The first is a historicizing move; the second a deconstructive move; and the third a reassessment of the aims of theory along with calls for new directions. “We are now living in the aftermath of what might be called high theory,” observed the British literary critic Terry Eagleton (2003, p. 2). He added, despite the legacy of thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, and Althusser that “the world has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled at their typewriter.” He asked: “What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?” (p. 2). In a special issue of the U.S. journal Critical Inquiry (2004) on the topic of rethinking theory and criticism, an array of contributors called for a radical theoretical overhaul and for new ways and tools for theorizing. The present in these discussions seemed to be a kind of liminal time, a time “after theory” or “post deconstruction,” one also repeatedly noted as a time when theory and critique were marked by—and needed to be responsive to—the events of 9/11 and the repositioning of U.S. international and national politics. But the present was also characterized as a time of uncertainty about what the needed theoretical innovations might be, where they might lead, and the relationship between theory and social and political change. Reassessments of Theory were often accompanied by critical reflection on one’s previous intellectual work. In a self-critical gesture, Bruno Latour wondered whether it was “really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools?” (Latour, 2004, p. 243). In the same issue, Teresa de Lauretis, reflecting on stalemates in feminist theory and her frustrations with the “militantly critical theories I have contributed to articulate” (de Lauretis, 2004, p. 365), concluded that: it may now be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discursivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is time to break open the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and the primacy of its many “turns”: linguistic, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it. (de Lauretis, 2004, p. 368) Even authors hostile to Theory, denouncing both its “grandiose ambitions,” and those who have been held in its thrall (Patai & Corral, 2005, p. 2), acknowledge its powerful reach, yet argue change is under way and that the hold of such theory is diminishing. Some debates concerning Theory’s end are motivated by doubts about its political engagement and utility (from questions of was it ever politically engaged to whether it has become increasingly depoliticized), others by doubts about whether it is continuing to generate the best, or most useful questions and insights for contemporary times (Mitchell, 2004). Yet other reflections on the heyday and eclipse of Theory note its failure to be sufficiently reflexive about its own knowledge claims,
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Page 146 such as the analytical power of deconstruction, alongside tendencies—in both proponents and opponents —to overstate its normative and political contribution (Fish, 2008). These various assessments rest on an implicit or explicit historical view about the rise and status of theory. We need “a historical account of the moment of theory” as Ian Hunter (2007) has argued. His particular interest is in developing a Foucauldian genealogy of the moment of theory, a history that attempts to turn “away from the big dialectical processes that are supposed to determine what we must become, and focuses instead on the historical contingencies that make us what we happen to be” (Hunter, 2007, p. 5). In such a genealogy, “theory” would be “constituted as the name of a specific ensemble of intellectual arts that began to undergo intensive dissemination in the Anglo-American humanities academy from the 1960s onwards.” “Constituting theory in this way,” he continues, “entails suspending the question of its truth or falsity.” My interest here is less in the detail of Hunter’s elaboration than in his call to historicize theory, to view it as the “object of an empirically oriented intellectual history,” and to employ a genealogical approach in this endeavor (Hunter, 2007, p. 6)—that is, to use modes of analysis which are part of poststructuralist thinking to study the diffusion and effects of that cultural theory. It is not possible in this chapter to consider the many different ways in which a history of theory could be, or has been, written. My simple point is to insist on the importance of taking a historicizing view on Theory, and on the particular theories that have been most influential in our own work. The second related point is the broadly genealogical one to examine theories not in terms of absolute truth, but as claims to truth or “systems of reason” (Popkewitz, 1998) that have practical effects and that are socially and historically embedded. My questions here have also been informed by Bourdieu’s injunction to place perspective itself under reflexive scrutiny. “To each of the [disciplinary] fields there corresponds a fundamental point of view on the world,” argued Bourdieu (2000, p. 99). He offers the example of sociology to argue that it produces its own intellectual dispositions and it is these and the “epistemic history” and “unconscious of the field” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99) that must be interrogated, rather than the apparently idiosyncratic viewpoints of the individual researcher. I have been arguing that poststructural feminism represents a perspective, a particular way of seeing, thinking about and explaining things as much as a set of concepts that aspire to expose or elucidate phenomena and social relations; and I have offered a preliminary outline of the concerns that have characterized this perspective. And the third point to take from this brief sketch of theory debates is the heightened concern with reassessing theory’s aims and claims, and a mood of doubt and questioning of where things are heading in a perceived new historical era. Similar questions and reassessments are evident in contemporary feminist theory, generally as well as in feminist educational inquiry. To draw these points together, this chapter has not been about whether poststructuralist feminism is inherently “true” or “false,” good or bad, or about making definitive judgments on whether the alliance of the two represents a diminution or expansion of political possibilities. These matters have been considered as they are part of the history of debates and practices that constitute this field of inquiry, and continue to nag at its edges. But the focus of this discussion was on how poststructuralist feminism in education has been constituted and defined as a field of educational inquiry, and some of the effects this has had in regard to conceptions of identity. In the final section, I briefly consider current reassessments of the purpose and future of feminist theory and speculate on the implications of such questioning for feminist, and poststructural, research in education. Where to Now? I have argued that examining earlier debates and disputes within poststructural feminism offers one way of understanding the history of this field of inquiry, not as a bounded, fixed-in-time
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Page 147 transcendental theory, but as a shifting, socially and temporally embedded system of reasoning, that generates particular ways of thinking about education and about feminism—its political project, the topics that warrant “new concepts,” and its sense of history and possible futures. Two trends in current feminist theorizing are relevant here. One is represented in the language of mourning, of lost dreams, and of persistent attachments to past wounds and injustices. And the second, and related, concerns both urgency and uncertainty about the present, a sense of radical rupture with the past and the need to reconceive or at least question feminism’s project in light of this. The American feminist political theorist Wendy Brown has written compellingly on the dangers of feminism’s narratives of its own history, in which injuries of the past are perversely defended in that they provide the basis for identities and a rationale for politics in the present (Brown, 1995). Reflecting on the purpose of contemporary Women’s Studies, Brown declares that it is confronted with the conundrum of what comes after the critique and deconstruction of “core” concepts, such as sex and gender, and what “comes after the loss of revolutionary feminism; it [Women’s Studies] figures itself as a non-utopian enterprise with more than minor attachment to the unhappy present.” Can feminism and feminist scholarship live “without a revolutionary horizon?” (Brown, 2005, p. 99). The question that intrigues is: Not how we may thrive in the aftermath of the dissemination of our analytical objects, but what are we in the wake of a dream in which those objects were consigned to history? What does it mean for feminist scholars to be working in a time after revolution, after the loss of belief in the possibility and viability of a radical overthrow of existing social relations? What kind of lost object is this? (Brown, 2005, p. 99) Responding to these questions involves rethinking the relation between past and present—how the past is apprehended in the present, and vice versa—which, in turn, shapes how we imagine the future. Brown characterizes these relations in Foucauldian terms, so that: History is figured less as a stream linking past and future than as a cluttered and dynamic field of eruptions, forces, emergences, and partial formations. As the discontinuities and lack of directional laws in history are pushed to the foreground … [history is] conceptually wrenched from temporal ordering— and the political possibilities of the present are thereby expanded. (Brown, 2001, pp. 116–117) Following the epigram at the beginning of this chapter, Brown suggests that possibilities for emancipating the subject have been eclipsed by “poststructural insights [which] were the final blow to the project of transforming, emancipating, or eliminating gender in a revolutionary mode” (Brown, 2005, p. 111). What then is feminism to do in this uncertain time, this time after modernity and the possibility of revolutionary politics? What is the task of feminist theory, and of feminist politics? Questions about the purpose and future of feminism, poststructuralism, and Theory are much debated from a variety of angles—as noted above. These reconsiderations are marked by a sense of ruptured time, of a break with the past alongside a sense that new theoretical resources are needed to navigate the present and think the future. There is, for some, a kind of theoretical stalemate, or what the literary critic Lauren Berlant describes as “concept fatigue,” in the meaning of concepts having to bear too much weight (Berlant, 2004, p. 446). For Brown, responding to this uncertainty requires “dwelling in that state of mourning in which a seemingly unendurable loss is also the opening of a possibility to live and think differently” (Brown, 2005, p. 115).
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Page 148 Uncertainty then can generate a more hopeful outlook, a time for destabilizing the old and forging something not yet imagined. For others, recalling the words of Teresa de Lauretis (2004) quoted above, the response is a more cautious hope for still unused concepts that could rescue us or existing concepts that could be revived. Reflecting on feminist research in education, Patti Lather, in more optimistic voice, calls for feminist research to guard against becoming “routinized, static and predictable” and to engage in the process of undoing its own orthodoxies: “Displacing fixed critical spaces enacted in earlier practices to which we are indebted, we move toward an ‘iterative productivity’ that is open to permanent dynamism” (Lather, 2007b, p. 1). Solving the problem of theory, or finding a future for feminist politics or poststructural feminism in education, is clearly beyond the ambition of this chapter. But these current reassessments of theory and feminism in changed and uncertain times speak to the challenge of working out how to negotiate and reimagine feminist education, in a time when there appear to be certain stalemates and cemented verities, alongside imperatives always to seek the new, to be at the cutting edge, even if we are not quite sure what that means, or where it is. Perhaps to look forward we need also to look back, to look more historically at how ideas have formed. Poststructural feminism has clearly had a profound effect on many dimensions of educational research, theory, and practice. It also has its own orthodoxies and blindspots. My aim has been to develop an historical account of poststructural feminist perspectives in education, to document “founding narratives” and emphasized concerns, and to point to some sources of change. Through engaging with currents in contemporary cultural and feminist thought, I have also, in the long view, tried to open up ways of thinking about the uses and histories and promises of “theory” in educational research. Note 1 I wish to thank Jo-Anne Dillabough and Martin Mills for many helpful discussions about the contemporary field of gender, feminist theory, and education, and Jo-Anne for alerting me to the 2007b quotation from Patti Lather. References Arnot, M., & Mac An Ghaill, M. (Eds.). (2006). The RoutledgeFalmer reader in gender and education. London: Routledge. Australian Education Council. (1993). National action plan for the education of girls 1993–97 . Melbourne, Australia: Curriculum Corporation. Baker, B. (2007, February). Normalizing Foucault? Foucault Studies , 4, 78–119. Baker, B., & Heyning, K. (Eds.). (2004). Dangerous coagulations? In B. Baker & K. Heyning (Eds.), Dangerous coagulations ? (pp. 1–79). New York: Peter Lang. Berlant, L. (2004, Winter). Critical culture, affirmative culture. Critical Inquiry , 30 (1), 445–451. Blackmore, J. (1999). Troubling women. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, W. (1995). States of injury. Princeton University Press. Brown, W. (2001). Politics out of history . Princeton University Press. Brown, W. (2005). Edgework. Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Davies, B. (1997). The subject of post-structuralism. Gender and Education , 9(3), 271–283. De Lauretis, T. (2004, Winter). Statement due. Critical Inquiry , 30 (1), 365–368. Dillabough, J. (2001). Gender theory and research in education. In B. Francis and C. Skelton (Eds.), Investigating gender (pp. 11–26) . Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
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Page 149 Eagleton, T. (2003). After Theory. New York: Basic Books. Fish, S.(2008, April 6). French Theory in America. New York Times. Francis, B. (1999). Modernist reductionism or post-structuralist relativism. Gender and Education , 11 (4), 381–393. Francis, B., & Skelton, C. (Eds.). (2001). Investigating gender. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Frow, J. (1991). What was postmodernism? Sydney, Australia: Local Consumption Papers. Hunter, I. (2007). The time of theory. Postcolonial Studies , 10 (1), 5–22. Jones, A. (1997). Teaching post-structuralist feminist theory in education. Gender and Education , 9(3), 261–269. Kenway, J., & Willis, S. (with Blackmore, J., & Rennie, L.). (1997). Answering back. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart. New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (2007a). Getting lost. Albany, NY: State University New York Press. Lather, P. (2007b, April). (Post)critical feminist methodology. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Latour, B. (2004, Winter). Why has critique run out of steam? Critical Inquiry , 30 (1), 225–248. Lingard, B., & Douglas, P. (1999). Men engaging feminisms. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Luke, C., & Gore, J. (1992). Introduction. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminisms and critical pedagogy (pp. 1–14). New York: Routledge. McLeod, J. (1998). The promise of freedom and the regulation of gender—feminist pedagogy in the 1970s, Gender and Education , 10 (4), 431–445. McLeod, J. (2001a). When poststructuralism meets gender. In K. Hultqvist & G. Dahlberg (Eds.), Governing the child in the new millennium (pp. 259–289). New York: Routledge. McLeod, J. (2001b, April). Foucault forever. Discourse, 22 (1), 95–104. McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Middleton, S. (1998). Disciplining sexuality. New York: Teachers College Press. Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. (1997). Gender Equity. Canberra Australia. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2004, Winter). Medium theory. Critical Inquiry Symposium, Critical Inquiry , 30 (1), 324–335. Nicholson, L. (Ed.). (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Patai, D., & Corral, W. H. (2005). Theory’s empire. New York: Columbia University Press. Popkewitz, T. (1998). Struggling for the soul. New York: Teachers College Press. Ramazanoglu, C. (Ed.). (1993). Up against Foucault. London: Routledge. Sawicki, J. (1988). Feminism and the power of Foucauldian discourse. In J. Arac. (Ed.), After Foucault (pp. 161–178) . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Skelton, C., & Francis, B. (Eds.). (2005). A feminist critique of education. London: Routledge. Skelton, C., Francis, B., & Smulyan, L. (Eds.). (2006). The Sage handbook on gender and education. London: Sage. Somekh, B., & Lewin, C. (Eds.). (2005). Research methods in the social sciences . London: Sage. St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education. Qualitative Studies in Education , 13 (5), 477–515. St. Pierre, E. A., & Pillow, W. (2000). Introduction. In E. A. St. Pierre & W. Pillow (Eds.), Working the ruins (pp. 1–24) . New York: Routledge. Tamboukou, M. (2003). Women, education and the self. Macmillan: Palgrave. Walkerdine, V. (1990). Schoolgirl fictions. London: Verso. Yates, L. (1997). Constructing and deconstructing “girls” as a category of concern. In A. Mackinnon, I. Elqvist-Saltzman, & A. Prentice (Eds.), Feminism into the 21st Century. London: Falmer Press.
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Page 150 11 Safe Schools, Sexualities, and Critical Education Lisa W. Loutzenheiser & Shannon D. M. Moore Introduction Context and Purpose Schools are fertile locations to foster social change and fortify the social, economic, political, and cultural status quo (Anyon, 1995; Apple, 1995; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). The production of knowledge occurring within classroom spaces, as well as the lapses and inclusions of gender and sexuality in teaching and learning, demands thoroughgoing and complicated analyses. Without such analyses, there is a risk of the continuation and promotion of gender and sexuality-based stereotypes (Arnot, 2002; Crocco, 2001; Kimmel, 2000; McCready, 2004).1 The ideals of democratic participation, citizenship, civil rights, historical accuracy and social issues are laced throughout these analyses offering particular salience to educational spaces. There are few participants within educational communities, be they teachers, students, administrators or researchers who would argue against the need for change within the K-12 system in North America, particularly for reforms that center on protection and inclusion of all children, youth, and families in educational settings. One answer to reform has been the development of safe schools programs. As will be discussed throughout the chapter, the theme of individual responsibility for change is a keystone within many safe schools curricula. This chapter analyzes recommendations and contemporary incarnations of safe schools through lens of: civic capacity, concerns over individualism, homophobia versus heterosexism, queer youth and their families as “problem-to-be solved.” Why Safe Schools? Much of the contemporary safe schools policies and programs were developed in reaction to a 1993 State of Massachusetts study that reported high numbers of youth, perceived to be gay or lesbian, who were experiencing a hostile school environment (Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, 1993). This hostile environment negatively impacted the achievement of gay and lesbian youth.2 The Massachusetts report made specific proposals, and the State School Board (1993) voted to recommend the development and support of Safe Schools programs within Massachusetts’ schools. The programs were to:
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Page 151 • develop policies that protect gay and lesbian students from harassment, violence, and discrimination; • develop training for school personnel in violence prevention and suicide prevention; • offer school-based support groups for gay, lesbian, and heterosexual students; and • provide school-based counseling for family members of gay and lesbian students. The safe schools movement is also the result of court cases that challenge school systems’ adherence to the law. Aaron Fricke ( Aaron Fricke v. Richard B. Lynch , in his official capacity as principal of Cumberland High School, 1980), a Rhode Island teenager used the First and Fourteenth Amendments to defend his right to bring his boyfriend to a school dance. This was one of the very first cases where a youth sued to gain rights that he or she perceived were available to their peers but denied to them on the basis of sexual orientation. Jamie Nabozny sued his former Wisconsin school district and several school officials for not protecting him from years of homophobic harassment and assaults. In his suit, Jamie sought the award of his high school diploma, attendance at the high school graduation ceremony and US$50,000 in damages. The U.S. District Court of Appeals decision ( Nabozny v. Podleny , 1996) spells out the constitutional obligation of public schools to protect gay students from antigay abuse. They returned the case to the lower court for trial and the small-town jury found school officials liable for failing to stop antigay violence. Before the jury returned to determine the amount of damages, officials offered to settle with an award of nearly US$1 million for Nabozny. This was the first U.S. federal case to decide that schools had a responsibility to protect students from homophobic harassment and that the principal could also be held responsible. In 2005, British Columbia Supreme Court recognized the responsibility of schools and their principals to protect students from homophobic harassment and bullying in the Azimi Jubran case ( North Vancouver School District No. 44 v. Jubran , 2005). The Fricke case was an early U.S. example of why school districts found it necessary to create policies that address the concerns of lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) students; yet, more than 25 years later, while in the midst of the purported safe schools movement, students such as Jubran were, and are, still finding it necessary to turn to the courts for implementation of anti-discrimination protections and policies. The recent cases of Lawrence King and Shaq Wisdom point to the ongoing need for schools to address homophobic and heterosexist harassment in schools. Lawrence (Larry) King from Oxnard, California, was shot to death in his junior high school computer lab by a 14-year-old peer because he “gave another boy a valentine” (Cathcart, 2008). Shaq Wisdom, a young man in Toronto, was harassed at school and online because he had begun to discuss his sexual orientation. As the physical and verbal harassment escalated, Shaq took his own life (Godfrey, 2007). These are real cases with real victims, real families, and real friends to which they were attached and therefore, must be attended to with care. Interestingly, while there is not a gay-straight alliance (GSA) or a safe schools program firmly in place at Larry King’s junior high school, Shaq Wisdom’s high school, Ajax, has a well-established safe schools program (Canada Department of Justice, 2002) and a GSA. Even so, after Shaq’s suicide and revelations of harassment at school, the principal of Ajax, Phil Matsushita, reported that “he was not aware of any homophobic bullying against any student” (Rau, 2007, para. 9). This points to the complicated nature of safe schools as well as the failure of such programs to serve as the panacea that so many desire. While we will critique the current incarnation of safe schools, we do not dispute current acts of violence or suggest that harassment and assaults due to gender non-conformity and sexual orientation have disappeared. We are, however, arguing that those who develop and implement safe schools programs would benefit from interrogating the assumptions behind the goals and objectives of such programs, and the types of often individualistic and assimilationist discourses around which the programs are organized. Using the exemplar of discourses embedded within many safe schools programs, and the response to the deaths of Wisdom and King, we will articulate
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Page 152 the ways in which the building of civic and school capacity may allow changes for schools in relation to heteronormativity, anti-homophobia, and school culture. After a thoroughgoing analysis, we will offer a notion of safer schools that requires the interrogation of privilege and normativity across and among identity constructions and educational systems. Provisional Explications of Queer, Sexuality, and Civic Capacity It is important to define the language employed in this chapter, even as it is problematic and incomplete. For the purpose of this chapter, we offer working definitions of specific terms to aid the reader, noting our discomfort with the possible fixity that the reader might assign by our so doing. Consider the definitions that we suggest as contested and contestable, and as offering an opening for conversation. By sexual minority , we are indicating those who claim gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or queer identities. Sexual minority may or may not be taken up by those who cast themselves as transgender, transsexual, and intersex. Sexual minority identifications maintain interlinkages but differ from an identification of gender minority , which we are suggesting moves outside normative gender constructions and representations. However, just as with the perception of sexual minority status, one must be careful about too quickly assigning categories of gender minority to those who might not identify themselves. In the case of Larry King, who identified as gay, a number of the media stories began to suggest he was transgender because he deviated from traditional masculine gender norms, including wearing articles of clothing identified as belonging to women or girls (Independent Gay Forum, 2008). This demonstrates how even the idea of divergence from adolescent gender norms is understood by adults and peers as outside the norm and in need of labeling and pathologizing. Equally contested is the term queer , which both reclaims a term used pejoratively and is a loose identificatory expression asserting a theoretical alliance (Pinar, 1999). This alliance to queer theories centers on questioning the normativity of heterosexuality and the usefulness of static identity constructions. Returning to the concern that language becomes solidified by its very use, queer is also utilized as an umbrella term for what some consider as the unwieldy acronym representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or transsexual, two-spirited, intersex, and questioning (LGBTTIQ). However, this deployment of queer reifies the very type of concretized identity that queer theories and queer activisms have sought to break apart. The term heteronormativity is used to establish an understanding of the pervasive and systemic assumption of heterosexuality as norm (Warner, 1993). Unlike homophobia , which generally refers to fear of homosexuality and is most often rooted in individual action and responsibility, heteronormativity acknowledges the power of heterosexuality as dominant and privileged within educational settings. Antihomophobia measures are often at the center of safe schools programs, which have the reduction of prejudice, tolerance or acceptance by individual students and teachers as a fundamental goal. Taking heteronormativity as a central analytical lens, then, requires a critical eye and an understanding of discursive and systemic action and responsibility, offering one frame for building civic capacity. Through a Lens of Civic Capacity It might seem odd for a chapter that questions normativity and discursive understandings of sexuality and gender to employ arguments that draw upon theories of capacity . However, we are arguing that the “capacity” of the major players and organizational structures to incorporate and embrace said changes is a crucial factor in any reform effort, and particularly when addressing issues of gender and sexuality as they have been marked as controversial and debatable. That is, the capacity to work within theories that disrupt that status quo and the everyday understandings
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Page 153 of safe schools needs to be fostered among the myriad constituencies involved. Cohen and Ball (1996) offer a helpful definition of capacity that includes “the knowledge, skills and commitments that teachers have and are able to use in order to teach well,” and “the understanding and ability to construct knowledge and skill in practice” (p. x). Using Cohen and Ball’s definition as a starting point, we argue that the discussions of capacity must be broadened in at least three ways to be useful to this discussion. First, the issues imbedded in what Ball and Cohen call “commitments” or willingness, desire and intent must be included in formulations of capacity alongside the ability to learn the skills, content, and instructional methods. When looking at issues of homophobic and heterosexist harassment, issues of willingness, desire, and intent become central, but difficult, to address because they become framed as controversial issues. When an area is deemed controversial, “open” conversation becomes more difficult as ideologies need to be defended. Second, the who addressed by capacity building in education would benefit from moving beyond, yet still including, teachers. Most often when capacity is discussed in educational research, the capacity of teachers is the focus. While instructors are vital to the overall success of any reform measures (Cohen, 1991; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Malen & Fuhrman, 1991; Porter, Archbald, & Tyree, 1991), the issue of capacity is actually a far more broad and complex system of relations. A number of researchers have opened up the possibility of a broader definition of capacity. For example, some researchers (O’Day, Goertz, & Floden, 1995; Spillane & Thompson, 1997) briefly discuss intent or willingness as part of teacher capacity, others mention student motivation (Cohen & Ball, 1996; Massell, 1998), and O’Day, et al. (1995) argue that organizational capacity must be taken into account. However, few projects have focused on these areas or brought issues of organizational capacity and multi-player capacity (including willingness or disposition) to the fore. Including other “players” involved in the school site, such as administrators, students, parents, and community members, will allow the complicated nature of capacity building to emerge. The complex and contradictory stances of these groupings, and the acceptance that each has a place at the table require different types of capacity building. Capacity building of this order may mark a space where the contradictions in goals and objectives become more clear and offer opportunities for implementation of change that begins with the different stakeholders. Students, administrators, parents, community members, and local policy-makers also have a stake in the reforms that occur, and benefit from capacity building efforts. Last, definitions of capacity would benefit from a more complicated rendering that includes organizational and civic willingness, desire, and ability to learn, in order that we also speak about organizational and institutional capacities in relation to the capacities for change within school structures, civic life, and professional communities, etc. Those situated professionally outside of the school walls, with commitments to working against homophobic and heterosexist harassment in schools and toward a more inclusive critical curricula and pedagogy, might be able to support teachers and administrators who wish to spearhead reforms at the classroom, school, and school district levels. This might be thought of as developing a civic capacity that transcends the boundaries of the school building. Civic capacity is the ability to create and maintain wide-ranging social and political coalitions across different segments of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal (Stone, Henig, Jones, & Pierannunzi, 2001). Civic capacity, according to Shipps (2003), “is created and maintained by a combination of government and nongovernmental partners and resources—hence its civic character” (p. 844). While Clarence Stone (2001), arguably the originator of civic capacity and its ability to reform urban schools, draws upon an often overly structural reliance and understanding of capacity, the idea of a broad coalition for change situated within the local contexts offers productive avenues for reform. Smith and O’Day (1991) also reiterate the importance of school climate and school culture, and the interrelationships among the different components within learning environments that need to be aligned if systemic reform is to occur
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Page 154 (p. 251). If one speaks of organizational and civic capacity in the same way that capacity is defined in general, then, instructional planning and the “what and how” of curriculum and pedagogy will be explored. Simultaneously, what is needed to make changes occur, and the willingness and ability of the school culture (and larger civic) to make those changes will also be interrogated. One must question whether any reform effort can be successful without the willing cooperation of the students; yet, the lack of theoretical concern about student capacity denotes that on both theoretical and practical levels they are often not seen as important enough to engage in capacity-building exercises. Yet, a view of capacity that includes multiple actors, which makes motivations and willingness central to reform and capacity for reform and requires looking at the civic and the organizational alongside the individual, opens up as many questions as it answers. It could be in these very questions that previously unthought of possibilities will arise. Yet, the desire to complicate the discussion of schools, heterosexism, and homophobia must live alongside school shootings, ongoing harassment, and the current panic centered on bullying. Again, we are not arguing against the idea of safer schools. Rather, we are arguing that the premise upon which the programs are based must be deconstructed and interrogated. Doing so, we suggest, reveals policies geared to sameness and similarity in both understanding homophobia and heterosexism, and formulating possible avenues for change. When analyzing safe schools one must ask: who deserves safe schools? Who is outside the community that deserves safe schools and who is within it? If the goal is to make schools safe for all students, who chooses what safe looks like and what safety engenders? The chapter will progress to an investigation of the discourses upon which safe schools programs in relation to gender and sexual minorities are predicated, including at-risk, individualism, and essential identity constructions. Last, we will discuss how developing the civic capacity may offer different avenues for reform. Discourses Imbedded in Safe Schools Programs Even as we look at the origins of safe schools, it is also important to underscore that the concept of safe schools has multiple meanings in relation to epistemologies, policies, and curricula. In the North American context, it has evolved into a catch phrase to encompass all of the policy intended to create diverse climates within schools, encourage inclusive environments (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, 2006), recognize the potential for violent incidence (Day & Golench, 1997; Dwyer, 1998; The British Columbia Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, 2003), and limit bullying, harassment, and intimidation within the school environment (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2007). In the U.S. context specifically, school safety is often thought of as synonymous to reactions to school shootings and apparent increased violence in schools (Dwyer, Osher, & Warger, 1998). Walton (2004) argues that there is a “conspicuous absence of homophobic bullying from safe schools agendas” (p. 25), nor does research on bullying acknowledge sexual orientation or gender identity (Poteat & Espelage, 2005). We are arguing that homophobia, heteronormativity and gender normativity are conspicuously absent and silently regulatory. That is, safe schools programs are able to construct bullying curricula in such a manner as to fold anti-homophobia into it and negate an explicit requirement for direct action to alter school climate and/or limit discussion or pedagogies to address heterosexist or homophobic harassment. Much of the safe schools discourse focuses on individual behaviors, subsequent consequences for individuals (Walton, 2004), and even individual change in the form of students involved with GSAs and charismatic teacher leaders or administrators. At-risk discourses within safe schools programs, the reliance on categories and understandings of LGBTTIQ youth as “at-risk,” overly essentialist renderings of youth, and the locus of responsibility for change are interconnected and rely on similar understandings of change as focused
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Page 155 on the individual. For example, in advocating for GSAs and other safe schools programs, Perrotti and Westheimer (2001) suggest that schools collect and use data on students effectively. For Perrotti and Westheimer, this means giving students the youth risk behavior survey that investigates youths’ risk level for myriad behaviors, but does not measure the ways in which schools contribute to the risk and how the school culture is established or propagated. Similarly, articles and discussions about queer youth in educational settings start with a litany of negative statistics. For example, LGB3 youth are reported to have lower self-esteem, higher rates of homelessness (Cochran, Stewart, Ginzler, & Cauce, 2002), school failure (Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, 2003), and HIV/AIDS infection (Center for Disease Control, 2004). Dropout rates for LGB students are above the national average, and studies have suggested that 30% of all youth suicides are committed by LGB youth, noting that they are three to five times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers; and that they succeed in killing themselves more often (Kourany, 1987; Remafedi, Rarrow, & Deisher, 1991). Yet, many LGBTTIQ youth do not fall within these statistics, which focus on the pathologizing of the youth. The response to these risk factors has been attempts at “fixing” the youth. The original Massachusetts’ charge to set up safe schools programs stated: “Develop training for school personnel in violence prevention and suicide prevention.” While certainly it is important to safeguard all students, it is equally necessary for schools to contribute to an understanding of why students who are subjected to homophobic harassment coupled with systemic heteronormativity might experience difficulty. In other words, training faculty to fix the symptom but not the illness leaves the discussion with the realms of pathology and individualism. As important as it is to question the pervasive victim, at-risk language assigned to queer bodies, it becomes more complicated when the language of resilience is taken up. For example, how is this language being used when Time Magazine reports, “What’s more, the task force [GLSEN] is exaggerating the frequency of assaults on gay kids, the vast majority of whom make it through school safe and happy,” and “As I have pointed out more fully before, research from Cornell’s Ritch SavinWilliams has shown that most gay teenagers are thriving and happy most of the time. They are periodically confused and depressed, but what teen isn’t?” (Cloud, 2008, para. 6). Student-as-problem or victim can also lead to the responsibility for their “problem” status being placed on the youth. For example, the principal at Shaq’s school noted that “the school had no idea there was any problem. He says Wisdom should have told a teacher or staff member. It’s difficult to support any student around any issue if we’re not told there is an issue” (Rau, 2007). Here, the telling about the issue and the initial steps to interrupt the harassment fall upon the youth who is harassed. However, students at the school reported seeing Shaq (and Larry King) harassed in classrooms where teachers were present and failed to respond. The language of at-risk and student-as-problem is notable in the descriptions of the family backgrounds of Shaq Wisdom and Lawrence King. Each young man had some relationship with social services and foster care, and as the stories emerged Shaq and Larry and their families were painted as troubled, suggesting that the families, “personal issues,” or individual deviance from gender norms were partly to blame for King’s murder or the bullying that predated Wisdom’s suicide (Broverman, 2008, para. 4). The need for family intervention is noted in the original call for safe schools that suggests that schools “provide school-based counseling for family members of gay and lesbian students.” Similarly, Massachusetts’ policy also advocated that counseling for individual LGB youth should be made available. Certainly counseling services might be useful for many, but there is an insinuation that parents and guardians would “of-course” have difficulty accepting a child’s non-dominant sexuality or gender identity and that one way to protect the students is to alter the parents’ thinking. This relies on the idea that parents are starting from a place of deficit and that schools can fix that deficit. Again, like fixing students’ problems, fixing the family unit is an individual as opposed to systemic response.
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Page 156 In a more dramatic use of “blame the victim,” the state-appointed attorney for Brandon McInerney, the 14-year-old accused of killing Larry King, argues that King’s discussion of his crush on McInerney was harassment. These are young teens; one has to wonder, if a young man teases a young woman and tells her she likes him would it be considered harassment that mitigated murder? In a second move to sully King’s position, the attorney is arguing that King was violating the dress code and making other students uncomfortable and that the school administrators were supporting “one student expressing himself and his sexuality—King—and ignored how it affected other kids, despite complaints. Crossdressing isn’t a normal thing in adult environments, he said, yet 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds were expected to just accept it and go on” (Broverman, 2008, para. 18; Carlson, 2008). If one follows this reasoning, King is at fault as he “chose” to tell McInerney of his crush, to dress outside gender norms, and to flaunt his sexuality and gender non-conformity. Essentialized notions of who a queer person should be not only regulate LGBTTIQ peoples but also reify the binaries of heterosexual and not heterosexual, thereby regulating what is acceptable gender behavior for all. What if gender and sexuality were understood as not fixed with the lines of victim, atrisk, and identity becoming less well drawn? Might this foster discussions of the impact of heterosexism on all students not only sexual and gender minority students? Even as there has been a move away from focusing merely on at-risk discourses toward an investigation of the role of schools and school culture, youth remain portrayed as victims who must be supported and saved. Within such discourses, there is a single essentialist version that homogenizes queer youth into one hopeless category (Harbeck, 1995). Goldstein, Russell, & Daley (2007) examine the way that the safe schools approach places queer youth in the role of victim, individualizes the problems of queer youth, and normalizes heteronormativity, and the general inadequacies of the safe schools model to address issues of gender and sexuality. A different and more interesting recall of the events leading up to King’s murder, however, turns the idea of Larry as victim on its head. To be sure, King was the subject of ongoing and repeated physical and verbal harassment by his male peers. King’s response to the harassment, according to some of his close friends, “was to push back by ‘flirting’ with some of his mockers. One of whom was McInerney, who seethed over it, the friends say” (Pringle & Sailant, 2008, para. 10). In fact, according to at least one account, McInerney became the subject of homophobic bullying himself as King’s flirting gave their peers reason to question McInerney’s sexual orientation. What is interesting, here, is the reversal of harassment and its possible impact on McInerney, as well as the possibility that King did not, as reported by almost all the papers, have a crush on McInerney but was actively pushing back with the only strategy he had. These were not the actions of a pathetic, hapless victim, and one has to wonder why the majority of news sources and blogs want, or need, to paint King as the victim. Discourses of victimhood and one-size-fits-all responses to harassment and homophobia on campus rely upon and perpetuate a particular understanding, uncomplicated rendering of LGBTTIQ peoples. Safe schools regulate coming out stories and understandings of LGBTTIQ people, create a singular understanding of/essentialize who queer youth are, reify a binaried understanding of sexuality (Bryson & De Castell, 1993) and ignore intersections of identity (Lugg, 2003). Intersectionality Holmes and Cahill (2004) explore the intersections of race and sexuality when considering the school experiences of LGBTTIQ youth. Considering intersections and context, they reveal the importance of considering multiple factors of identity, as often white middle-class LGBTTIQ students assert power, privilege, and a singular identity within groups. Kumashiro (2001) challenges the fixed, essentialist representations of LGBTTIQ youth and states that intersections
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Page 157 of identity must be considered, noting: “Initiatives to make schools safer for GLBT students and to integrate GLBT issues in to the curriculum also must incorporate an understanding of how GLBT youth of color’s experiences differ from those of white GLBT students” (p. 56). Current representations of LGBTTIQ people and issues within schools, often ignore the intersections of identity, diversity within identity, and fail to trouble privilege, which results in a further entrenching of the Other. Further, LGBTTIQ youth of color often experience racism in white-dominated LGBTTIQ communities, and organizations and support networks such as GSAs historically have been disproportionately supported in suburban middle-class GLBT youth, who tend to be white (Leck, 2000). The silences surrounding race and sexuality are highlighted in the cases of Wisdom and King. That is, while their own sexuality and gender were examined in some detail in the press, the fact that both of these young men were of color was barely mentioned, if at all. The accounts failed to analyze the role of race, or the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are intertwined through regulation of acceptable gender, sexual, and racial performance. The lack of discussion points to the invisibility of race when issues of sexuality and gender are given primacy, and substantiates the ways that identity constructions fail when issues of race and sexuality are explored. Individualism, Safe Schools and Bullying Curricula As noted above, the discourse of safe schools is focused on the individual, either understanding the behavior of an individual or educating people about the other (Clarksean & Pelton, 2002; Dwyer, 1998). Both views of safe schools fail to recognize the role of the system. Anti-bullying programs are at the core of many safe schools programs and offer a useful example of individualism. Anti-bullying curricula look at specific individuals and their tendency to be violent. The programs label the bully as perpetrator and those bullied as victim (never both), rather than focusing on the systemic problems that contribute to the development of the bully and the assumed superiority of the bully, which often relate to privilege and power. However, homophobic bullying is not the same as all other types of bullying. It is based on perceived deviance from gender and sexual norms, and on the perceived superiority of heterosexuality. Folding homophobic and heterosexist bullying into the large bullying curricula, makes to wash one’s hands of the systemic causes of violence, the systemic perpetuation of privilege, and the systemic popularization of violence, conflict, and war. Instead, bullying is an individualized concern with individualized solutions. Goldstein et al. (2007) also note that: “Moreover, by individualizing the harassment of queer youth, schools abdicate their responsibility for challenging power structures and culture that privilege heterosexuality over homosexuality” (p. 185). Further, the focus on the individual perpetuates the notion that problems within schools result from those individuals who do not conform to societal norms, rather than the oppressive dominance of such systemic norms on the construction of the individuals. Further, the lack of direct discussion and action on homophobia mark the issue shameful and invisible. While all bullying is painful, the pressures of discrimination and systemic tolerance of homophobia that LGBTTIQ students face mean that the reason for bullying—that there is something wrong or different about them—is reinforced by teacher silence, media representations, and possible community or familial judgment. The idea of individualism in safe schools policies is not only focused on individual problem youth, be they bullies or bullied. Many safe schools programs and policies also rely on individual educational leaders to develop and implement programs on the school and classroom level. While charismatic leaders are able to accomplish many programmatic changes, what happens when there is no one on site with the desire or intent to develop a program, or to refute the claim of a paucity of queer students within their schools rendering the programming unnecessary? The lack of specific school board, state, or provincial guidelines has the advantage of adaptability to local
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Page 158 contexts; however, much is left to individual administrators and the program dies when that administrator moves to her next assignment. When change is left to one or two individuals the possibility of fostering capacity and creating coalitions across communities is lessened. GSAs are another component of safe schools relying on individual teachers and students for change. Indeed, GSAs have much to offer students. However, they rely on change in the school to be focused on individual youth which can place the responsibility for altering the system and school culture squarely on those who are already in non-dominant positions, as well as remove the responsibility for change from the shoulders of school leaders and teachers (MacIntosh, 2007). GSAs are more likely to focus on antihomophobia (rather than heteronormativity) and receive support as window dressing rather than administratively supported substantive change in school cultures, curricula, or pedagogy. Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Normativity Pedagogies As noted above, safe schools and anti-bullying rhetoric have also become an avenue to introduce antihomophobia curricula into the schools without naming it as such. Certainly, the desire exists to render schools safer for as many students as possible. However, safe schools rhetoric also feeds into neoliberal and conservative discourses of individual responsibility, accountability, and one-size-fits-all curricula and an erasure of queer students and faculty as merely part of a larger antiharassment, safe school culture. The pedagogy of safe schools programs includes prejudice reduction, tolerance, and conflict resolution. The extension of policies that discuss school safety is that the expectation of safety where students can learn and teachers can teach means a lack of challenge or discomfort. Within this there is an assumption that all conflict is negative. And, within this, there is a sense of the utopian that requires an assimilationist, “can’t we all just get along” that rewards similarity and punishes difference and dissent. This, we are arguing can and does filter into pedagogical practices and teacher inculcation where young teachers believe that they should be neutral and conflict in the classroom quashed. We suggest that critical discussions of gender norms, the rights of those who are sexual minorities, the systemic reinforcement of heteronormativity will engender discomfort that can be beneficial in reducing harassment and developing thinking young learners. Moving Forward With the previous concerns about safe schools programs, which admittedly mirror many of the problematics of curriculum, pedagogy, and change in contemporary educational settings, we return again to the notion of building civic capacity as we offer suggestions for moving towards safer schools for students. A notion of safer schools hinges on critical interrogations of the spaces where individual action and responsibility intertwine with normativity and systemic change. A first step in this is to acknowledge that individual conflict reduction, violence prevention, and generic anti-bullying programs do not address the issues at the multiple levels where homophobia and heteronormativity function. As noted above, civic capacity is the ability to create and maintain wide-ranging social and political coalitions across different segments of the community in pursuit of a common goal (Stone et al., 2001). We are suggesting that the common goal in this case is safer schools. It is obvious that safer schools have been, and might continue to be addressed without directly working with issues of homophobia and heterosexism. Therefore, we are arguing that capacity must be built in order that anti-homophobia and anti-normativity policies, programs, pedagogies, and curricula are seen as integral to any conception of safer schools. These are the goals to which the suggestions below are directed.
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Page 159 Reading School Culture Critically A plan to build school and community capacity for change would necessitate developing a different type of enduring capacity from scaffolded learning for teachers, administrators, students, and community members, offering multiple entry points and numerous opportunities to analyze school culture, curricula, and pedagogy. This plan takes as its starting point critical and deconstructive readings of individual action, risk, and responsibility in relation to gender and sexuality, as well as the interrelations of these characteristics with the systemic of the surrounding communities, and governments. As capacity is built, teaching and learning would spread to classrooms, seminars, assemblies, teacher and administrator meetings, and, by example, playgrounds, teacher staff rooms, cafeterias, and school quads. With financial and policy support of administrators, schools, state and provincial governments, ongoing development of teacher thinking about gender- and sexuality-based norms also offers teachers the opportunity to experience critical teaching and learning around these issues specifically, and, then, imagine what building capacity among students for critical inquiry might look like. By recognizing that change is not linear, nor does it look the same for all people, schools or communities, the acknowledgment of difference allows for an opening up of space that will not have prescribed outcomes. By creating scaffolded learning, educators and students can “practice” critical discussions and inquiry. This better prepares youth and teachers to contribute to the building of capacity with the community, be it their parents/guardian, community members, or elected officials. Who better to foster a critical conversation and interrogations of intent, desire, and purpose to combat homophobia and heterosexism than students who have begun the process of critical exploration themselves. Similarly, opportunities to develop nuanced understandings of the intersections and interdependencies of gender, sex, poverty, race, and sexuality can be presented in ways that invite the community, parents, students, and teachers into an open-ended dialogue that might allow for complicating the issues in productive ways. This type of development is constant and repeated, not a single day when a speaker comes in to workshop controversial issues. Another prong of this capacity building plan is ongoing curricular discussions of the role of power/privilege in school culture, pedagogies, and curricula within classrooms, teacher development, and community meetings. Normativity relies on the status quo, and ways for a local school to work within its own context may open up avenues to discuss differences in such a way that disagreement can occur, as well as an acceptance of difference. Study groups and opportunities to engage with the issues in a systemic manner foster curriculum development and pedagogical change. Towards this, relationships between university teacher education programs, community leaders and elders, and school faculties, as well as the time to engage in such work, are key. The move to the language of safer schools acknowledges that there is no utopian community within which all students will be free of fear and harassment at all times, nor will each member of the larger civic community agree as to what that community ought to look like or take as its goals. It is the drive to build a particular set of arenas where discussions occur, programs and policies are fluid but where students and teachers who exceed the prevailing gender and sexual norms are not in danger. That is, a place where the position of dominancy moves and is reshaped to decenter those whose privilege goes unmarked. This may mean discarding the language of zero tolerance, which often leads to a particular type of silence in the classroom but prevalent harassment when outside earshot of school personnel. Difficult interrogation of dominance and normalcy relies on students and faculty to have the tools, support, and desire to address the harassment and heterosexism each time it comes up. A plan to build civic capacity such as this requires multiple and repeated entry points for discussion and engagement. How might schools and school boards invite parents and other community members into the process? How do we invite the community into the schools to
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Page 160 be a part of the professional development and learning as it occurs in meaningful ways? In what ways can the schools go to the community rather than the communities come to the schools? We do not have a model of civic capacity that fosters long-term capacity building across stakeholders; yet, to alter school culture necessitates capacity building across groups with long-term, inter-group engagement. Within these overlapping workshops, classes, community forums, et cetera, it is important to think about how can the place of disagreement be fostered and encouraged, always with the goal of safer schools in mind? This means considering how teachers, students, and community members might be offered spaces within which to engage with the discomfort of looking at notions such as privilege and assumption. The suggestions offered above are not a recipe for a safe school but a move toward safer schools that can embrace change on multiple levels and always take as their goal the development of capacity that questions prevailing norms and involves community, school, classroom, and individual. These are preliminary possibilities to explore what a plan might look like and how it might be developed. To build civic capacity in this way is not without difficulty or conflict. Yet, that does not render it impossible; rather, a multi-pronged plan for the building of capacity across myriad stakeholders must be developed. What could not be in question in such a plan is whether anti-homophobia and anti-normativity ought to be part of the discussion. That is the goal around which civic capacity needs to be built. Notes 1 For more thorough-going discussions of the distinctions and interrelationships between gender and sexuality see Butler, 1993; Loutzenheiser, 2005; Loutzenheiser & MacIntosh, 2004. 2 Or, those perceived to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. Throughout the chapter, when talking about youth impacted by homophobic or heterosexist harassment we are always including those who might not be LGBT but are perceived by others as “gay.” 3 The focus here is on youth identified as lesbian, gay, and bisexual as few studies gather data on transgender or intersex youth. References Aaron Fricke v. Richard B. Lynch, in his official capacity as principal of Cumberland High School , 491 F. Supp. 381 (R. I. 1980). Anyon, J. (1995). Race, social class, and educational reform in an inner-city school. Teachers College Record , 97 (1), 69–94. Apple, M. (1995). Education and power (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Arnot, M. (2002). Reproducing gender? New York: Routledge/Falmer. Board of School Trustees of School District No. 44 (Vancouver) v. Jubran, et al . 4 B.C.L.R. 153 (B. C. 2005). Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2007). Social justice 12 . Retrieved from http://www.bced.gov. bc.ca/irp/drafts/sj12_draft.pdf Broverman, N. (2008). Mixed messages [Electronic Version]. Advocate. Retrieved from http://www. advocate.com/print_article_ektid52689.asp Bryson, M., & De Castell, S. (1993). Queer pedagogy. Canadian Journal of Education , 18 (2), 285–305. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge. Carlson, C. (2008, April 20). Defense in boy’s killing seeks juvenile justice . Ventura County Star . Retrieved from http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/apr/20/defense-in-boys-killing-seeksjuvenile-justice Cathcart, R. (2008, February 28). Boy’s killing, labeled a hate crime, stuns a town. New York Times. Retrieved February 24, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23oxnard.html
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Page 161 Center for Disease Control. (2004). HIV infection statistics . Atlanta, GA: Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control. Clarksean, L., & Pelton, M. H. (2002). Safe schools: A reality check. Leadership , 32 (1), 32–35. Cloud, J. (2008). Prosecuting the gay teen murder [Electronic Version]. Time Magazine . Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1714214,00.html Cochran, B. N., Stewart, A. J., Ginzler, J. A., & Cauce, A. M. (2002). Challenges faced by homeless sexual minorities. American Journal of Public Health , 92 (5), 773–776. Cohen, D. K. (1991). Revolution in one classroom. In S. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.), The politics of curriculum and testing (pp. 103–124). London: Falmer Press. Cohen, D. K., & Ball, D. L. (1996). Instructional capacity (Internal memo). Philadelphia, PA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Crocco, M. S. (2001). The missing discourse about gender and sexuality in the social studies. Theory into Practice , 40 (1), 65–72. Darling-Hammond, L. (1997). The quality of teaching matters most. Journal of Staff Development, 18 (1), 38–41. Day, D. M., & Golench, C. A. (1997). Promoting safe schools through policy. Journal of Educational Administration , 35 (4), 332–347. Department of Justice in Canada. (2002). Together we light the way . Retrieved October 39, 2007, from http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2002/doc_30284.html Dwyer, J. G. (1998). Religious schools v. children’s rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dwyer, K., Osher, D., & Warger, C. (1998). Early warning, timely response . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network. (2003). The 2003 National School Climate Survey. Washington, DC. Godfrey, T. (2007, November 22). Teen bullied to death. Toronto Sun, p. 3. Goldstein, T., Russell, V., & Daley, A. (2007). Safe, positive and queering moments in teaching education and schooling. Teaching Education , 18 (3), 183–199. Harbeck, K. (1995). Addressing the needs of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth and their advocates. In G. Unks (Ed.), The gay teen (pp. 125–134). New York: Routledge. Holmes, S., & Cahill, S. (2004). School experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education , 1(3), 53–66. Independent Gay Forum. (2008). The Lawrence King Tragedy [Electronic Version]. Independent Gay Forum [blog]. Retrieved from http://www.indegayforum.org/blog/show/31487.html Kimmel, M. S. (2000). Masculinity as homophobia. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfeld, R. Castaneda, H. W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peteres, & S. Zuniga (Eds.), Readings for diversity and social justice (pp. 213– 219). New York: Routledge. Kourany, R. (1987). Suicide among homosexual adolescents. Journal of Homosexuality , 13 (4), 114–117. Kumashiro, K. (2001). “Posts” perspectives on anti-oppressive education in social studies, English, mathematics and science classrooms. Educational Researcher, 30 (3), 3–12. Leck, G. M. (2000). Heterosexual or homosexual? Reconsidering binary narratives on sexual identities in urban schools. Education and Urban Society , 32 , 324–348. Loutzenheiser, L. W. (2005). Queering social studies. In C. Cherryholmes, Segall, A., & Heilman, E. (Ed.), Social studies . New York: Peter Lang. Loutzenheiser, L. W., & MacIntosh, L. B. (2004). Sexualities, citizenships and education. Theory into Practice , 43 (2), 151–159. Lugg, C. A. (2003). Sissies, faggots, lezzies, and dykes. Educational Administration Quarterly , 39 (1), 95– 134. MacIntosh, L. B. (2007). Does anyone have a band-aid? Educational Studies , 41 (1), 33–43. Malen, B., & Fuhrman, S. (1991). The politics of curriculum and testing. In S. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.), The politics of curriculum and testing (pp. 1–10). London: Falmer Press. Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. (1993). Making school safe for gay and lesbian youth. Boston, MA. Massell, D. (1998). State strategies for building local capacity . Philadelphia, PA: Center for Policy Research in Education.
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Page 162 McCready, L. (2004). Understanding the marginalization of gay and gender non-conforming Black male students. Theory into Practice , 43 (2), 136–143. Nabozny v. Podleny , 92 F.3d 446 (7th Cir. 1996). O’Day, J., Goertz, M. E., & Floden, R. E. (1995). Building capacity for education reform. CPRE Policy Briefs , (18), 1–10. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. (2006). From our house to the school house . New York City: PFLAG. Perrotti, J., & Westheimer, K. (2001). When the drama club is not enough. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Pinar, W. (1999). Introduction. In W. Pinar (Ed.), Queer Theory in Education (pp. 1–47). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Porter, A., Archbald, D., & Tyree, A. (1991). Reforming the curriculum. In S. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.), The politics of curriculum and testing (pp. 11–36). London: Falmer Press. Poteat, V. P., & Espelage, D. L. (2005). Exploring the relation between bullying and homophobic verbal content. Violence and Victims , 20 (5), 513–528. Pringle, P., & Sailant, C. (2008, March 8). A deadly clash of emotions before Oxnard shooting . Los Angeles Times [Electronic edition], from http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-oxnard8mar08,1,3632085, full.story Rau, K. (2007, December 6). Gay Ajax student kills self . Xtra. Retrieved December 22, 2007, from http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=4020&PUB_TEMPLATE _ID=1 Remafedi, G., Rarrow, J. A., & Deisher, R. W. (1991). Risk factors for attempted suicide in gay and bisexual youth. Pediatrics , 87 (6), 869–875. Shipps, D. (2003). Pulling together: Civic capacity and urban school reform. American Educational Research Journal , 40 (4), 841–878. Smith, M. S., & O’Day, J. A. (1991). Systemic school reform. In S. H. Fuhrman & B. Malen (Eds.), The politics of curriculum and testing (pp. 233–268). New York: Falmer Press. Spillane, J. P., & Thompson, C. L. (1997). Looking at local district’s capacity for ambitious instructional reform. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , 2, 185–203. Stone, C. N., Henig, J. R., Jones, B. D., & Pierannunzi, C. (2001). Building civic capacity . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. The British Columbia Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils. (2003). Call it safe. Victoria, BC: British Columbia Ministry of Education. Document Number) Walton, G. (2004). Bullying and homophobia in Canadian schools. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education , 1(4), 23–36. Warner, M. (1993). Introduction. In M. Warner (Ed.), Fear of a queer planet (pp. vii–xxxi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Page 163 12 Masculinity and Education Marcus Weaver-Hightower Introduction In recent years, masculinity has been of central concern in education as crises over boys in many countries—Canada, Australia, the United States, England, Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, among others— have captured media, practice, and research attention (Weaver-Hightower, 2003b). These crises, though, are actually not new; Forbush (1901/1907) was already on the bestseller lists for The Boy Problem at the beginning of the last century (see also Cohen, 1998). This historical, material, and discursive permanence of masculinity and masculinity politics (Bourdieu, 1998/2001) is a foundational underpinning of the educational project in most (if not all) societies. Masculinity is always a concern in schools, whether explicitly or implicitly. In this chapter, I want to explore the contours of masculinity as a structuring principle of education. I start with an examination of masculinity itself, defining the concept as it has evolved through critical inquiry and theory. Second, I review literature specific to education. Finally, I discuss the limitations of current thinking—both popular and scholarly—on masculinity and education, giving possible directions for a critical progressive project that resists the dominant momentum of recuperative masculinity politics and boy crises (e.g., Lingard, 2003; Lingard & Douglas, 1999). Throughout I provide one possible way of understanding the origins, form, and direction of critical masculinity scholarship in education. Masculinity Defining masculinity is notoriously difficult, for it has been variously seen as essentialist, positivist, normative, and semiotic (Connell, 1995/2005, pp. 67–71). Some see masculinity, in other words and respectively, as what men are at their cores, as what they do as a bloc and on average, as what they ought to do or be, or as the set of symbolic differences they have from the not-masculine other. Further complicating it, each of these is inflected by various political, economic, and religious ideologies to form yet more understandings of masculinity, such as conservative, profeminist, men’s rights, spiritual, socialist, and group-specific (for example, gay or African-American) masculinities (Clatterbaugh, 1990). Research and rhetoric on males and masculinity have used all of these, and many continue to combine these categories in their conceptual frameworks.
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Page 164 Despite the difficulties of defining masculinity, it is helpful to outline major defining characteristics and implications of masculinity that have influenced contemporary research in education. This list is not exhaustive, but it represents foundational understandings. Body/Reproductive Connection/Disconnection Connell (1995/2005) posits that gender is inextricably caught up in the social interpretation of bodies and sexual reproduction. This is not to say that gender is literally about bodies and their functions; rather, what social actors make of gender—what consequences they ascribe to it—is key. The social “arrangement between the sexes” (Goffman, 1977) always already foregrounds gender as integral to the smooth functioning of institutions and events; in other words, treating the biological differences between the sexes as if they are important is the mechanism by which the status quo of gender relations is made to seem natural. To illustrate, women are thought to be better early childhood educators because of their caring capacities, assumed to be connected to biological capacity for sexual reproduction. What this does not explain, of course, is either the status and remunerative differences connected to early childhood education, or the numbers of males who do such work successfully despite the absence of the biological reproductive apparatus. That is where society has taken over for the biological difference. Indeed, it is important to remember that masculinity is not solely connected to male bodies (or femininity to female bodies). As Halberstam (1998) has argued, female masculinity is a crucial component of maintaining societies’ larger gender projects, legitimating and challenging and highlighting the contours of male masculinity as well as the oppression of female and queer individuals. In schools, for example, tomboys and the eventual suppression of them in schools (by both peers and adults) signal the workings of the gender order to restrain and put femininity “in its place.” Importantly, too, many female educators participate in the reproduction of masculine domination through their embodiment of masculinity, masculinist behaviors, and discursive endorsements of the interests of men and boys. Relationality and Opposition Precisely because biological difference cannot account fully for the social and material differences ascribed to the sexes, those differences that do exist must be highlighted and emphasized. Particularly those characteristics that are dichotomous and opposed take on social salience; this is core to understanding that masculinities are relational and oppositional. To be masculine, one must reject things feminine. This is powerfully implicated in the division of labor between males and females, a point to which I return below. Hegemony Recognition that the gender system might not be predictably beneficial to all biological males powerfully recommends an analysis of masculinity as a hegemonic project. As R. W. Connell (1987; 1995/2005) first formulates it, based on Gramsci (e.g., Gramsci, Hoare, & Nowell-Smith, 1971), various masculinities compete for social dominance. Connell outlines four general categories of social relations of masculinities. The dominant (or in Connell’s words “culturally exalted”) form in any particular context is hegemonic. Crucially, though, this hegemonic version must have related and oppositional subordinated masculinities (gay masculinities, for example) against which it defines and legitimates its social dominance; these subordinated masculinities are also symbolically and materially dominated, whether through discrimination or even violence. Still other masculinities are marginalized . Classed, raced, rural, and disabled masculinities, despite any apparent similarity to the behaviors of hegemonic masculinity, receive less material reward and cultural exaltation because of their otherwise marginal status (Martino & Pallotta-Chiarolli,
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Page 165 2003; Way & Chu, 2004). Still other masculinities exist in the liminal spaces between hegemonic, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities, not actively working toward the hegemonic project of the dominant group but still receiving what Connell terms the “patriarchal dividend.” These are complicit masculinities, men (perhaps the majority) who, rather than meeting the tight strictures of the hegemonic version, “respect their wives and mothers, are never violent toward women, do their accustomed share of the housework, [and] bring home the family wage” (p. 80), but who also tacitly benefit socially and materially from the overall subordination of women. Some recent theorists have challenged the use of hegemonic masculinities (for a summary of these see Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Demetriou (2001), for example, notes that Connell’s original formulation neglects some of the ways in which internal hegemony (the contest between men) ultimately allows for the continuance of external hegemony (men’s dominance over women). Hegemonic masculinity does this, Demetriou shows, by incorporating elements from challenging forms of masculinity, particularly varied semiotic practices of gay masculinities. A more direct challenge to Connell’s hegemony theory of masculinity comes from Wetherell and Edley’s (1999) critical discursive psychology of masculinity. They suggest that Connell’s theory fails to provide a psychological mechanism for the take up of hegemonic masculinity by individuals. They argue, instead, that masculinity might better be conceptualized as a series of self-presentations in which men actively use “discursive strategies involved in negotiating membership of gender categories” (p. 335). These strategies are available to men as widely distributed scripts from which they select—“a kit-bag of recognizable ways of self-presentation”—and the “momentary and sustained use,” or repetition, of these provides the underlying “vocabulary” of masculinity to men (p. 353). While it is an increasingly popular and productive theoretical framework, the discursive approach to masculinity has some serious limitations, including an over-reliance on the discursive while ignoring the material consequences of masculinity (discussed below); limited acknowledgment that masculinities are embodied (Connell, 1995/2005), too, not just created through talk; and overlooking that, while “membership” in certain masculinities can in some circumstances be “negotiated,” to suggest that one is free to choose any discourse is naive at best, for not all masculinities are open to everyone. Perhaps most importantly, Wetherell and Edley’s (1999) theory cannot adequately account for social power and change—the bedrock of Connell’s contribution. How, for instance, is one discourse more appealing as a strategy than another, and how do these discourses transform over time if people are simply reiterating these discourses until they have incorporated them as identity? It is worth noting, too, as Connell (2000; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) and others (e.g., Skelton, 2001) have, that the concept of hegemonic masculinity, rather than being fundamentally flawed, is often misused or poorly understood. First, often in undertheorized work, the Marlboro Man, Rambo, and John Wayne often serve in some way as avatars of the kind of men who “have” hegemonic masculinity. Some present masculinity as if it is a concrete noun, synonymous with brutish, violent, domineering or stoic men. Second, hegemonic masculinity is sometimes also used as a proxy term for white, heterosexual, middle-class males. While males in these categories are more likely to inhabit the hegemonic position in many contexts, using hegemonic masculinity in such a thin way hides a great deal of nuance in the relations between men with these characteristics, elides the potential for women to succeed in particular contexts using the characteristics of hegemonic masculinities, and ignores the workings of hegemony where white, heterosexual, or middle-class males are not present. Hegemony is more about the process of seeking and maintaining dominance than it is about the characteristics of “bad” masculinity. Historical/Cultural Inflection A key to understanding the value of masculinity as a hegemonic project is that this project is always already ongoing. It is never settled. Historical studies of masculinity bear this out
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Page 166 (e.g., Kidd, 2004; Kimmel, 1996b). Similarly, no version of masculinity is dominant across cultures and national boundaries. The hegemonic project of masculinity is contested site by site, though almost always referencing larger, external masculinity projects, including varied forms of international, colonial, and globalized masculinity (Connell, 1998; 2000, Chapter 3; Connell & Wood, 2005). The main reason for this unsettledness—what Connell (1995/2005, pp. 81–86) calls “crisis tendencies”— is that other masculinities continue to vie for hegemony themselves against hegemonic groups. Hegemonic groups, thus, must adapt and incorporate the characteristics of the other masculinities to maintain their dominance (Demetriou, 2001). African-American appropriations of gangster iconography and embodiment, for example, in part challenge the economic and social marginalization for males of color, but white middle-class males have appropriated many of the signs and symbols of this masculinity, thus recapturing the dangerous and resistant qualities of them. Institutionalization Masculinity, like most social relations, evinces tensions between structural transmission and individual agency. In terms of the former, masculinity resides in and is produced by institutions (for schooling, particularly, see Connell, 1989, 1996; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Mac an Ghaill, 1994), primarily at the level of symbol and structure. From pedagogy to curriculum to disciplinary regimes, particular hegemonic forms of masculinities are forwarded, exalted, rewarded, and ultimately reproduced while subordinated forms are sanctioned, marginalized, or punished. The “Masculinity in/as/of/within/and Education” section below expands on this crucial point. Agency/Identity The importance of student agency to the construction of gender is perhaps best exemplified in Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labor (and a “response” focusing on girls in McRobbie, 1978). Though manifestly a study of social class, showing how working-class youth ensure through their own agency, ironically, that they can get nothing other than working-class jobs, Learning to Labor has also contributed heavily to the study of masculinity. The “Lads” that are the focus of the study are boys who enact a particular type of masculinity that seeks to dominate both girls and the feminine-valenced, academically achieving “Ear ’Oles” (a subordinated masculinity), which ultimately serves the same purpose: to ensure that the Lads do not attain anything beyond their original status. Important to remember, the Lads are to some extent choosing the masculinities they present, so it is partly their own agency that, in time, constrains them. Students do have some amount of choice in the masculinities they take up. Institutionalization and agency should not be seen as separate or obverse, but rather these levels of analysis work in tandem. Such interplay of constraint and participation goes beyond learning and the academic disciplines, encompassing the social and normative functions of schooling, too. Further, the relation of any individual to the institution’s masculinity project may change over time. One year you’re “out”; the next you may be “in.” Material Consequence Masculinity is not primarily important because one group is simply “exalted” over others. As I suggested in discussing gender’s take up of biological difference, there are material consequences to the successful acquisition of the patriarchal dividend. This is perhaps best seen in the well-noted economic and political subordination of women around the world, but this also extends to educational and health indicators that show the material cost of men’s power on others
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Page 167 (e.g., World Economic Forum, 2005). It is also apparent in the relegation of subordinated and marginalized males (men of color, working-class and impoverished men, and “third world” men) to dirty or dangerous jobs with low pay and poor conditions. Beyond the purely economic impact, though, certain masculinities have material impact on the social and physical state of males, for (particularly subordinated and marginalized) males are also overrepresented in incidences of incarceration, drug abuse, homelessness, suicide, mental illness, violence, and failing or dropping out of school. Depending, in part, upon your position within the relations of the hegemonic project, masculinity can be a blessing or a curse. Masculinity in/as/of/within/and Education Though I have tried thus far to contextualize the major facets defining masculinity with educational examples and research, I want in this section to be far more specific about the locations of masculinity within education. Just where do we situate masculinity within the normal workings of schools at all levels? Understanding the transmission and workings of masculinity in this light uncovers the mechanisms of a major strand of social domination and, simultaneously, provides moments and locations for disruption and resistance. Pedagogy Perhaps the most obvious place to look for masculinity in education is the primary interface of teaching and learning: pedagogy. As numerous scholars of educational sociology have shown (e.g., Bernstein, 1990; Delpit, 1995; Heath, 1983), pedagogy in both its form—whether visible or invisible—and content, is aligned to the strengths and advantages of particular class fractions and racial groups. Certainly this is also so with gender. The approaches, activities, and interactions of delivering content favor a particular masculinity (or certain relations to it) in any setting. Some feminist work has argued that pedagogy is qualitatively geared toward the advantage of males. Sadker and Sadker (1994), for instance, conducted influential studies of classroom interaction and concluded that boys get more and better attention from the teacher, on average, than girls do. Feminist work in higher education, too, has long described a “chilly climate” (e.g., Hall & Sandler, 1982) for women that devalues and marginalizes them. Generally speaking, such studies establish the mechanism for upholding particularly male modes of communication through the pedagogic act. Other work has persuasively shown how pedagogy delimits the participation of certain students based on their gender and simultaneously constructs students’ understandings of academic disciplines in a way that forwards particular masculinities. Ivinson and Murphy (2003), for example, demonstrate how two teachers’ classroom management and organization, pedagogy, stereotypes of low-achieving boys, and systems of rewarding and legitimating various types of, and relations to, language arts knowledge reproduced a particular masculinity that rejects romance and defines English as “for girls” (see also Martino, 2001). The low-achieving boys in the study were shown a model of romance as a valued genre, but only the girls were held up as examples of good writing, and the boys’ writing was often shut down or literally torn up for fear that they would write pornographically. In this way, one version of masculinity was reinforced. Curriculum Both form and content are key to understanding curriculum as a site of masculinity, as well. Feminist studies of textbooks, for example, have long found that curriculum materials are generally aligned to the traditional relations of dominance between men and women (e.g., Women on
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Page 168 Words and Images, 1972); women are shown in limited, traditionally female occupations while men are shown as leaders and active shapers of the world. More recent studies of textbooks (e.g., Kuzmic, 2000) suggest that this pattern still exists, though in a more nuanced fashion given the successes of early feminist interventions into textbooks. It is important to consider, though, that the images and representations in textbooks and the curriculum in general are not simply and straightforwardly to the benefit of, or representative of, all men. Boys generally are portrayed in stereotypical ways much as girls are (Evans & Davies, 2000). More crucially, a particular kind of masculinity (a hegemonic version) is instantiated in, and exalted by, the curriculum. As Kimmel (1996a) argues, only dominant men, such as politicians and industrialists, and only particular exploits, for instance, war waging and exploration (really, colonization), make their way into the history curriculum. Men of color, queer men, working-class men, and feminine men are largely invisible across the curriculum. In terms of the broader curriculum, there continues to be stratification in the course-taking patterns of males and females. In U.S. high schools, in non-core subjects where students can make choices, males on average take more computer classes, while girls take more foreign languages and arts classes and slightly more English (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2007). Furthermore, these patterns of segregation are exacerbated in postsecondary education, with females being a lower proportion in the physical sciences, computing, and engineering fields, and males taking fewer degrees in the humanities, education, and social sciences (Freeman, 2004). While in some senses these patterns represent a detriment to boys by narrowing the breadth of their understandings of the humanities and social sciences, the economic results of these course-taking decisions do not suggest that boys are disadvantaged by them in all respects (Collins, Kenway, & McLeod, 2000). Particular masculinities, in fact, are reproduced and legitimated through such patterns. Extracurricular Domains Partly by their presence or absence, males define what is appropriately masculine within the extracurricular aspects of schools and colleges. Sporting prowess often defines the hegemonically masculine in schools. Whether a part of how students police themselves (e.g., Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998), the way schools and teachers legitimate athletics and athletes as exalted (e.g., Lesko, 2000; Martino & Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2003), or the way nations train young men to protect the state (Crotty, 2001), athletics as both curricular and extracurricular is crucial to the masculinity construction project in education. Athletics is not the only extracurricular activity in K-12 schools and universities, of course. Others, though, perhaps because they are less involved in the project of masculinity construction and hegemony than athletics, are more poorly attended and receive far fewer funds. Here, too, particular versions of masculinity are holding sway in the extracurricular domain. Interpersonal Interaction Even outside of the acts of formal pedagogy, teachers, students, administrators, and the community interact in ways that establish appropriate masculinities and limit the challenges to these masculinities (Kenway & Willis, 1998). In acting and speaking, males and females instantiate similar patterns of domination and negotiation that characterize the larger gender relations of society (Gerson & Peiss, 1985). Bullying and harassment (e.g., Espelage & Swearer, 2004), violence (e.g., Mills, 2001), homophobia and heterosexism (e.g., Friend, 1993), and gendered use of language (e.g., Johnson & Meinhof, 1997) often characterize these interactions and concretely demonstrate, re-enact, and privilege particular configurations of masculinity and femininity.
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Page 169 Disciplinary Regimes Part of the normative function of education involves exercising disciplinary control over students. It stands to reason that if masculinity is one of the norms that this function aims to instill, then school disciplinary regimes would reproduce particular forms of masculinity. Punishments can take on particularly gendered forms, of course, ranging from physical violence to exclusion. Punishable acts can also be thought of as specifically gendered, too, laying out what forms of interaction are appropriate by gender. Boys in some schools, for instance, can be disciplined for wearing their hair long where girls are not; this defines a particular masculinity through de jure policy. The punished can utilize their behavior (and other expressive means) as a way to establish or assert a particularly gendered identity (e.g., Gilbert & Gilbert, 1998, Chapter 7). Punishers, too, can take up gendered positions and behaviors, for males more frequently are given (or take) the “masculine” task of meting out discipline and females adapt masculine modes of discipline in an attempt to demonstrate control (Askew & Ross, 1988; King, 2000; Sargent, 2001). Discipline might also be conceived broadly, as also the maintenance of ongoing, ever-present control, including the formal and informal methods that teachers use to separate and control students by gender. This includes explicit marking of gender through language (“Boys and girls, please turn to page …”) alongside relative location, such as forming separate boys’ and girls’ lines (Thorne, 1993) and seating boys next to girls to control the boys’ behavior (Ivinson & Murphy, 2003). It is crucial to note, too, that disciplinary regimes can be exponentially more repressive to subordinated and marginalized masculinities, another sign that particular kinds of masculinity are being produced through discipline (e.g., Ferguson, 2000). The Use of Time and Space The disciplinary application of space referred to above reflects a larger production of gender distinctions and hierarchies through the instrumental use of space and time. While some patterns of gendered use of space originate in the home context, with girls more sequestered and boys more mobile (e.g., Lopez, 2003, Chapter 6), schools present special cases of spatio-temporal control as a gendered practice. Nespor (2000) theorizes such uses as “gender topologies,” the “kinds or forms of spaces [that] constitute and are constituted by masculinities and masculinist practices” (p. 32). The arrangement of desks, the separation of bathroom and locker room spaces by gender, the access to technology, and the regimes of inclusion and exclusion from programs and classes (including tracking or single-sex classes) all fall within the gender topologies created and/or maintained by schools and their personnel. One of the school’s maintenance functions includes supporting the divisions and appropriations that students themselves make in space and time. As Thorne (1993) shows, children enact rituals of separation in informal spaces (lunchroom tables and playgrounds), with boys tending to take more and better spaces, and the school and teachers reinforce this separation tendency through their verbal marking of gender, their separation of boys and girls into different teams, and their complicity with or enforcement of boys’ domination of space. Divisions of Labor and Responsibility The social arrangement of the sexes operates on sex- and gender-based divisions of labor both in and out of schools. Out of school, modern, Western schooling is underpinned by the decidedly class-based assumption that parents will perform the unpaid labor of supplementing their children’s educations through homework supervision, funding for necessary materials, and utilization of social and cultural capitals (e.g., Ball & Vincent, 2001; Lareau, 1987). This unpaid labor generally falls to women (D. E. Smith, 1987), thus reproducing the existing economic relations that favor males and public-sphere work (see also Apple, 2006, Chapter 8).
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Page 170 Within schools, similar patterns are evident. As Lingard and Douglas (1999) show, the emotional labor of schools, for example, is inequitably distributed, with women tasked with roles that require caring and social connection, such as nursing and counseling. Men, on the other hand, are put on a “glass escalator” (Williams, 1992) that funnels them away from the classroom toward administrative, disciplinary, or sports-related roles (ones that, not inconsequentially, receive extra pay). On the macro scale, these differing movements toward and away from certain gendered roles rearticulate the alreadyestablished masculinity order. This division of labor suppresses the participation of males in teaching because of its low pay and status, and it ultimately leads to the growing control exerted over women’s teaching work (Apple, 1986). Economics of Education In thinking through the material consequences of the masculinity projects of schools, it is helpful to analyze the explicitly economic functions that schools serve and are subject to. Money, materials, and staffing are utilized in distinct ways to accomplish the creation and valorization of certain forms of masculinities. For example, the remediation and special education of students is one of the most expensive undertakings of modern U.S. education, and boys overwhelmingly dominate—and thus reap the benefits of—these services (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, 2005). We might consider these compensatory programs as normalizing functions that produce masculinities of an “acceptable” kind, whether affirmatively or by negation (disabled masculinities are often subordinated or marginalized). The social provisions of schooling associated with “feminine” roles similarly show the economic machinations of masculinity in school funding; sports coaches never have caseloads of 500 students, but guidance counselors often do. Recent policy and practitioner work on boys’ education in Australia demonstrates well the political implications of economies within and around education (Weaver-Hightower, 2008). In the build-up to, and wake of, the report Boys: Getting it Right (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training, 2002), encompassing 2000 to 2006, the Australian federal government spent just under 30 million Australian dollars (US$26.6 million) on boys’ education, including grant programs, conferences, professional development, and research funding; this is far and away more than girls’ education concerns received during that period. There is also a burgeoning semi-formal economy (underwritten in large part by the infusion of the federal cash) of consultants and materials that drives the focus on boys. Such funds and programs have come to articulate and promote a particular, mainly conservative vision of what boys should be and do. Policy and Governance While policy and the governance of schools have always been gendered (more males are policymakers and school administrators), it has become explicitly more so in recent years as the boys’ education movements have become ascendant. The Australian policy noted above is a large-scale example. In England and the United States, though, policy has been more local and diffuse. In England, a raft of local education authorities have published their own plans for boys’ education (e.g., Arnot & Gubb, 2001; Bleach, 1998) because there is as yet no national framework, though the national government’s educational department and inspectorate have published and advocated a great deal on boys’ education (Department for Education and Skills, 2007; Office for Standards in Education, 2003). In the United States, only one state, Maine (Maine Task Force on Gender Equity in Education, 2006), has attempted to develop policy on boys’ education—which was redirected to “gender” and education (Wack, 2006)—and there is little chance that national level policy would be structurally feasible in the United States (Weaver-Hightower, in press). Whatever
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Page 171 these contextual differences are, though, the policies and governance structures of schools generally work—as have the other components of education—to forward particular forms of masculinity as legitimate and valued. In part this is accomplished through utilizing these components of education as policy levers—that is, using money to direct education in specific ways or allotting teachers to particular labor divisions. Media Representations of Schooling Media representations of masculinity and schooling in newspapers (Hearn et al., 2003), in magazines, and on radio and television have a formative effect on what actually happens in schools. This is because communities, policy-makers, parents, and even some teachers and students view education primarily through these filters. Mary Lee Smith (2004, especially Chapter 4) shows this compellingly about racial desegregation policies. She theorizes that: As the public adjusts its expectations to media formats, it comes gradually to think about the social world differently. The world that mass media presents to the public is a world that appears to be in constant crisis, threatening chaos at every turn. Policy makers too are changed, more often addressing the symbolism rather than the substance of policies. … When policies are framed in terms of images, perceptions, sound bites, and headlines, then media images themselves stand in place of tangible evidence about the tangible workings and benefits of a program. (pp. 126–127) This is certainly true of the media images of boys’ education, as well. Backlash politics is more apparent in news coverage than feminist politics (Faludi, 1991). Articles decrying the educational ascendance of girls to the detriment of boys have been the dominant storyline in newspapers and magazines all over the United States (Titus, 2004) and around the world (see Alloway & Gilbert, 1997). The impact of these media presentations is crucial to understanding masculinity within education. As Smith suggested above, politicians and policy-makers and educators base their decisions about what programs, pedagogies, and curricula are enacted in schools on these media presentations. Importantly, these presentations are generally conservative, traditional, and often anti-feminist, presenting particular kinds of masculinity as appropriate and the particular means by which to accomplish them. This is the mechanism through which media representations become masculinity makers in schools. Summary In cataloging the sites for masculinity within and around education, I have frequently stated that these sites present “particular kinds of masculinity” as valid, legitimate, desirable, and remunerable. This is my principal argument, for it underscores that saying “males” as an undifferentiated group are “advantaged” (or “disadvantaged”) is, at its core, an ahistorical, atheoretical, and apolitical argument. Instead, any analysis, particularly from critical theoretical frameworks, must view pedagogy, curriculum, extracurricular activity, interpersonal interactions, disciplinary regimes, uses of time and space, divisions of labor, economic systems, policy and governance, and media representations, as both instrumental and incidental means by which particular masculinities (hegemonic as well as non-hegemonic) are produced and reproduced in society. This is, again, not to say that this masculinity or those who hold it are already determined; domineering, stoic, muscle-bound men are not always hegemonic. Rather, the key understanding of masculinity in education is that the relations between people are a process—an enactment—where some men
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Page 172 will achieve dominance over, and more social goods than, women and other men, but this dominance is never complete or total. It must constantly be defended, and it must adapt to outside threats. The Field and the Frontiers of Critical Masculinity Studies in Education These core understandings of masculinities’ places within and around education have come from applying the work of various fields, an amalgam or “blurring” (Geertz, 1983) of disciplines most often called “masculinity studies.” The work on masculinities has multiplied exponentially over the two decades before this writing. “The Men’s Bibliography” (Flood, 2007), for example, a well-respected and comprehensive online collection of references to books, articles, and other works on men and masculinities, has grown to nearly 17,300 entries. There are now several journals devoted to masculinity studies, both in print and online, such as Men and Masculinities; THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Stories; the Journal of Men’s Studies ; and the Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality . Entire conferences have even focused on men and masculinities. While education research has played a significant role in this growth, much of the research on masculinities has come from other disciplines, such as cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, criminal justice, anthropology, and sociology. Educational research, too, has experienced its own explosion in work on boys and masculinity, what I have called a “boy turn” in gender and education research (Weaver-Hightower, 2003b). This turn has come about because of media panics and boys’ violence in the media, feminist explorations of gender roles, narrow initial indicators of gender equity, conservative and neoliberal reforms in education, explicit backlash politics, economic and workforce changes, parental concerns and pressures, and the “thrill of the new” for researchers and educators. Depending on the ideological or vocational perspective of the authors (whether popular-rhetorical, theoretically oriented, practice-oriented, or (pro)feminist responses; see also Weaver-Hightower, 2003a), this work has concentrated mainly on academic achievement, social dominance by boys, social problems for boys, the supposed limitations of feminism, and the processes of masculine identity development and corresponding typologies of boys. Still, with all of these productive areas in process, I want to delineate just a few areas for growth and exploration, some new directions and undiscovered trajectories. This is by no means a complete list. For one thing, as yet there has been a dearth of large-scale, comparative studies of masculinity in most contexts. Hearn and colleagues’ (2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2003) studies of masculinity in Europe are a stellar exception. Similar studies in other contexts would help move the field toward understanding both the cultural differences between masculinities and the policy distinctions that inflect these. It would also provide the necessary empirical basis for a globalized, transnational masculinity, as Connell (1998, 2000; Connell & Wood, 2005) has suggested. The place of education, both formal and informal, in producing and reproducing these masculinities could also be a fertile area for study. A similar need exists for studying the individual life course longitudinally. Most studies of masculinities in schooling focus only on the moment of identity formation, looking at what beliefs boys cobble together at the time to project an identity (as in Wetherell & Edley, 1999, discussed above). What these overlook or are unable to gauge are the long-term processes of changing masculinities and the implications for these choices. Connell’s (e.g., 1995/2005) life history approach solves some of this difficulty, but life histories, too, call for a snapshot in time (even though it reflects over a life course) rather than tracking the shifting sands of masculine identity and its material implications through time.
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Page 173 Educational practice also has a great deal with which to grapple. Practice-oriented research has mainly focused on “tips for teachers” (Lingard, Martino, Mills, & Bahr, 2002) to better engage or instruct boys. This is an obvious goal for practice-oriented work, but much of this research has been small scale, often anecdotal, conducted solely by those connected to the pedagogical site, and often based on popularized brain research or stereotypes about what “boys” (usually implying all boys) respond well to. Large-scale evaluations conducted by scholars have been absent, but this is necessary to test the efficacy and equity of so-called “boy-friendly” pedagogies. Perhaps most importantly, practice research has largely ignored the question “Who is responsible for changing?” Educators are quite naturally drawn to doing those things that they think are within their own power to fix. These things are limited, though; changing topics frequently, doing hands-on activities, providing father-son experiences, and so on are what pedagogues and administrators have control over. This is all the popular-rhetorical and practice-oriented literature suggests, too. The materials that are available to educators do not ask them to challenge socializing institutions, policy making, parents, and even boys themselves. I argue that we do not have a “ boy problem” in schools; we have a masculinity problem in society that can be seen in, and is partly created by, schools. Teacher activism and professionalism in boys’ education has been short-circuited by a restrictive discourse that constantly asks teachers to attempt only technicist changes in their classrooms rather than changing the system of power and privilege that creates the larger problem. Concluding Remarks As I have attempted to show in this chapter, masculinity is a crucial component in a critical theory of education. It structures and inflects nearly every aspect of the educational project because one of the things we are educating people for is their relationship to the system of masculine dominance (Bourdieu, 2001). We must not overlook, however, that the inertia of educational understanding is against such critical perspectives. The concern for gender and education has taken a decidedly masculinist turn alongside the “boy turn,” and teachers are increasingly assured that boys are the victims of schooling and that their distinct brains require a remasculinization of the curriculum and pedagogy. This requires serious thought by critical educators, teacher educators, and researchers. More importantly, though, it requires interventions at all levels, particularly “in the trenches” of schools and teacher education programs, if we are to ensure that social justice is not swept away by the tides of conservative, recuperative masculinity politics. References Alloway, N., & Gilbert, P. (1997). Boys and literacy. Gender and Education , 9(1), 49–59. Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and texts . New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (2006). Educating the “right” way (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Arnot, M., & Gubb, J. (2001). Adding value to boys’ and girls’ education . West Sussex, England: West Sussex County Council. Askew, S., & Ross, C. (1988). Boys don’t cry . Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press. Ball, S. J., & Vincent, C. (2001). New class relations in education. In J. Demaine (Ed.), Sociology of education today (pp. 180–195). New York: Palgrave. Bernstein, B. (1990). The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge. Bleach, K. (Ed.). (1998). Raising boys’ achievement in schools. Stoke-on-Trent, England: Trentham Books. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine domination (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1998.) Clatterbaugh, K. (1990). Contemporary perspectives on masculinity . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Page 174 Cohen, M. (1998). “A habit of healthy idleness.” In D. Epstein, J. Elwood, V. Hey, & J. Maw (Eds.), Failing boys? (pp. 19–34). Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Collins, C., Kenway, J., & McLeod, J. (2000). Factors influencing the educational performance of males and females in school and their initial destinations after leaving school . Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth Department of Education, Training, and Youth Affairs. Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R. W. (1989). Cool guys, swots and wimps. Oxford Review of Education , 15 (3), 291–303. Connell, R. W. (1996). Teaching the boys. Teachers College Record , 98 (2), 206–235. Connell, R. W. (1998). Masculinities and globalization. Men and Masculinities, 1(1), 3–23. Connell, R. W. (2000). The men and the boys. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1995). Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity. Gender & Society , 19 (6), 829– 859. Connell, R. W., & Wood, J. (2005). Globalization and business masculinities. Men and Masculinities, 7(4), 347–364. Crotty, M. (2001). Making the Australian male. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: The New Press. Demetriou, D. Z. (2001). Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity. Theory and Society , 30 (3), 337– 361. Department for Education and Skills. (2007). Gender and education. Nottingham, England: Department for Education and Skills. Espelage, D. L., & Swearer, S. M. (Eds.). (2004). Bullying in American schools. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Evans, L., & Davies, K. (2000). No sissy boys here. Sex Roles, 42 (3/4), 255–270. Faludi, S. (1991). Backlash . New York: Anchor Books. Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad boys. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Flood, M. (2007, September 24). The men’s bibliography. Retrieved September 30, 2007, from http://mensbiblio.xyonline.net. Forbush, W. B. (1907). The boy problem (6th, rewritten ed.). Boston, MA: The Pilgrim Press. (Original work published 1901). Freeman, C. E. (2004). Trends in educational equity for girls and women (No. NCES 2005–016). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Friend, R. A. (1993). Choices, not closets. In L. Weis & M. Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices (pp. 209– 235). Albany: State University of New York Press. Geertz, C. (1983). Local Knowledge . New York: Basic Books. Gerson, J. M., & Peiss, K. (1985). Boundaries, negotiation, consciousness. Social Problems, 32 (4), 317– 331. Gilbert, R., & Gilbert, P. (1998). Masculinity goes to school . London: Routledge. Goffman, E. (1977). The arrangement between the sexes. Theory and Society , 4(3), 301–331. Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Nowell-Smith, G. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci . New York: International Publishers. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, R. M., & Sandler, B. R. (1982). The classroom climate. Washington, DC: Project on the Status and Education of Women, Association of American Colleges. Haywood, C., & Mac an Ghaill, M. (1996). Schooling masculinities. In M. Mac an Ghaill (Ed.), Understanding masculinities (pp. 50–60). Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Hearn, J., Pringle, K., Müller, U., Oleksy, E., Lattu, E., Chernova, J., et al. (2002a). Critical studies on men in ten European countries. Men and Masculinities, 4(4), 380–408. Hearn, J., Pringle, K., Müller, U., Oleksy, E., Lattu, E., Chernova, J., et al. (2002b). Critical studies on men in ten European countries. Men and Masculinities, 5(1), 5–31. Hearn, J., Pringle, K., Müller, U., Oleksy, E., Lattu, E., Tallberg, T., et al. (2002c). Critical studies on men in ten European countries. Men and Masculinities, 5(2), 192–217. Hearn, J., Pringle, K., Müller, U., Oleksy, E., Lattu, E., Tallberg, T., et al. (2003). Critical studies on men in ten European countries. Men and Masculinities, 6(2), 173–201. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words . Cambridge University Press.
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Page 175 House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training. (2002). Boys: Getting it right. Canberra, Australia: The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. Invinson, G., & Murphy, P. (2003). Boys don’t write romance. Pedagogy, Culture & Society , 11 (1), 89– 111. Johnson, S., & Meinhof, U. H. (Eds.). (1997). Language and masculinity . Oxford, England: Blackwell. Kenway, J., & Willis, S. (1998). Answering back. London: Routledge. Kidd, K. B. (2004). Making American boys. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kimmel, M. S. (1996a). Integrating men into the curriculum. Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy , 4, 181–195. Kimmel, M. S. (1996b). Manhood in America. New York: Free Press. King, J. R. (2000). The problem(s) of men in early education. In N. Lesko (Ed.), Masculinities at school (pp. 3–26). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kuzmic, J. J. (2000). Textbooks, knowledge, and masculinity. In N. Lesko (Ed.), Masculinities at school (pp. 105–126). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lareau, A. (1987). Social class differences in family–school relationships. Sociology of Education , 60 (2), 73–85. Lesko, N. (2000). Preparing to teach coach. In N. Lesko (Ed.), Masculinities at school (pp. 187–212). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lingard, B. (2003). Where to in gender policy in education after recuperative masculinity politics? International Journal of Inclusive Education , 7(1), 33–56. Lingard, B., & Douglas, P. (1999). Men engaging feminisms. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Lingard, B., Martino, W., Mills, M., & Bahr, M. (2002). Addressing the educational needs of boys. Canbarra: Australia: Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. Lopez, N. (2003). Hopeful girls, troubled boys. New York: Routledge. Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The making of men. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Maine Task Force on Gender Equity in Education. (2006). Draft report. Augusta, ME: Maine Department of Education. Martino, W. (2001). Dickheads, wuses, and faggots. In B. Comber & A. Simpson (Eds.), Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms (pp. 171–187). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Martino, W., & Pallotta-Chiarolli, M. (2003). So what’s a boy? Maidenhead, England: Open University Press. McRobbie, A. (1978). Working class girls and the culture of femininity. In Women’s Studies Group (Ed.), Women take issue (pp. 96–108). London: Hutchinson & Co. Mills, M. (2001). Challenging violence in schools. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. National Center for Educational Statistics. (2007). America’s high school graduates . (No. NCES 2007467) Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Nespor, J. (2000). Topologies of masculinity. InN. Lesko (Ed.), Masculinities at school (Vol. 11, pp. 27– 48). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Office for Standards in Education. (2003). Yes he can. London: Office for Standards in Education. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. (2005). 25th annual (2003) report to Congress on the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Vol. 1.). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness . New York: Touchstone. Sargent, P. (2001). Real men or real teachers? Harriman, TN: Men’s Studies Press. Skelton, C. (2001). Schooling the boys. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic . Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Smith, M. L. (2004). Political spectacle and the fate of American schools . New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Titus, J. J. (2004). Boy trouble. Discourse, 25 (2), 145–169. Wack, K. (2006, March 29). Thorny politics drive panel studying gender . Portland Press Herald. Way, N., & Chu, J. Y. (Eds.). (2004). Adolescent boys. New York University Press. Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2003a). Crossing the divide. Gender and Education, 15 (4), 407–423. Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2003b). The “boy turn” in research on gender and education. Review of Educational Research , 73 (4), 471–498. Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2008). The politics of policy in boys’ education: Getting boys “Right.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Page 176 Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (in press). Issues of boys’ education in the United States: Diffuse contexts and futures. In W. Martino, M. Kehler, & M. B. Weaver-Hightower (Eds.), The problem with boys’ education: Beyond the backlash. New York: Routledge. Wetherell, M., & Edley, N. (1999). Negotiating hegemonic masculinity. Feminism & Psychology , 9(3), 335–356. Williams, C. L. (1992). The glass escalator. Social Problems, 39 , 253–267. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor . New York: Columbia University Press. Women on Words and Images. (1972). Dick and Jane as victims. Princeton, NJ: Women on Words and Images. World Economic Forum. (2005). Women’s empowerment. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum.
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Page 177 13 The Inclusion Paradox The Cultural Politics of Difference Roger Slee Introduction Despite its appropriation by neoconservative education agendas inclusive education originated as, and struggles to remain, a fundamentally critical project. Confusion surrounding the nature and aspirations of inclusive education is ubiquitous. For many inclusive education is default vocabulary for special education or more specifically for the education of that part of the school population that has come to be known as students with Special Educational Needs (SEN), a term first delivered to the British education community in the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People chaired by Mary Warnock and entitled Special Educational Needs (DES, 1978). In the United States inclusive education seems to have replaced the use of the term mainstreaming and refers to an array of educational provisions for disabled students. In-built in this usage is a notion of a continuum of educational provision from separate settings to the regular classroom. The continuum of provision derives from the surprisingly controversial work of traditional special education researchers Lloyd Dunn (1968) and Evelyn Deno (1970) who provoked “rancorous debate” (Fuchs, Fuchs, & Fernstrom, 1993; Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995) which pales against more recent and shrill exchanges between traditional special educators and those such as Brantlinger (1997) and Gallagher (2004) who have earned the pejorative title of full-inclusionists from those described by Fuchs et al. (1993) as “conservationists” (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995; Kauffman & Sasso, 2006a, 2006b; Kavale & Mostert, 2004). Elsewhere, in education jurisdictions across Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, inclusive education and special education are used interchangeably and/or alongside of each other. Accordingly inclusive education may refer to part-time attendance in the regular classroom, the establishment of special units within the perimeter of the regular school, the payment of salary loadings to teachers who take “behavior students,” or the placement of a de facto teacher or assistant next to the disabled child. People can be particularly inventive. For example, the Executive members of the Queensland Association of Special School Administrators used involvement in a curriculum reform initiative—The New Basics Project (Education Queensland, 2001)—to declare their credentials as inclusive educators. While deployment of such a shop-front device was a convincing screen for many, disability activists in organizations such as Queensland Parents of People with a Disability were of the view that on the question of inclusion, nothing had changed. It is now common to hear of reverse integration where regular
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Page 178 school children visit the segregated special school for classes. This is variously described as an educational or community service experience. This distorted view of inclusion lays bare an assumption that the sole beneficiaries of inclusive education are those students who have been permitted to enter as inclusion students. The field is itself confused and confusing for others. The international appropriation of the rhetoric of inclusion is perplexing. While there has been exponential growth in fiscal commitments to inclusive education reforms (Parish, 2001, 2005), tangible increases in the number of reports, policy statements, and dedicated programs by education jurisdictions internationally to inclusive education (Barton & Armstrong, 2007; Mitchell, 2006; UNESCO, 1994, 2007), there has also been a simultaneous growth in special education referrals (Bennett & Wynne, 2006), categories for special needs (Graham & Slee, 2006) and exclusions from school (DfES, 2005). Confused? The refractive capacity of the Academy intensifies rather than dispels confusion and paradox. There are numerous Faculties of Education worldwide whose websites direct us to single Departments of Inclusive and Special Education. Teacher education programs have handed responsibility for professional training in inclusive schooling over to special education faculty. For many there is no apparent tension (Ashman & Elkins, 2005), for others there is recognition that the epistemic traditions of special education and inclusive education are irreconcilable (Allan, 2005). Moreover, if we set aside this division between those claiming status as either special or inclusive educators for a moment, there are other important contests to recognize. Inclusive education, maintain some researchers and activists, should concentrate on issues pursuant to disability and education. Others disagree, suggesting that inclusive education provides a necessary platform for collaboration across a range of constituencies who are marginalized by, or excluded from, education. In this configuration we invite discussions of the differential and deleterious impacts of schooling on a range of identity groups that includes, but is not limited to, students of color, economically disadvantaged students, geographically isolated or itinerant children, refugee and immigrant children who are forcibly relocated from sites of war or disaster, children who speak a different language to that which is dominant in their place of schooling, gay, lesbian and trans-gendered students, and so the list proceeds. This brief essay aims to affirm inclusive education as a critical education project committed to the identification and dismantling of educational and social exclusion. This aim will be pursued by first outlining the origins and traditions of critical, as opposed to conservative, renditions of inclusive education. And, second, by suggesting a pervasive reform agenda that moves beyond the traditional antimony of special and regular schools to suggest new institutional and cultural requirements for new times. Inclusive Education as a Critical Education Project Writing in 1996 Basil Bernstein “announced” the conditions and interrelated rights for an effective democracy in general and democratic education in particular. Foregrounding the rights and conditions is the understanding that citizens should feel that they have a stake in society; the existence of give and take or reciprocity, and that the structures of schooling enable students to realize this stake (Bernstein, 1996, pp. 5–6). The first right is that of enhancement. Enhancement “is the right to the means of critical understanding and to new possibilities” (Bernstein, 1996, p. 6). This right, he argues, is the condition for confidence (1996, p. 7). Second is “the right to be included, socially, intellectually, culturally and personally” (p. 7). Importantly, inclusion is distinguished from “absorption.” Therein, the right of inclusion as the condition of communitas suggests more than presence and the blending of identities. The third right, proceeding elegantly from the second, is that of participation, whereby
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Page 179 individuals can engage in “the construction, maintenance and transformation of order” (p. 7). The right of participation is a requirement for the condition of civic practice . Bernstein’s propositions allow us to order and evaluate our theories and practices of inclusive education. Inclusion is not an unqualified end point; it is an essential element of establishing schooling as an apprenticeship in democracy (Knight, 1985) . Reflecting upon the destructive and dismissive media reportage, the discourse of derision (Kenway, 1990), of public education, Mike Rose (1995) asserted a determination to reinstate public schooling as our “boldest democratic experiment.” Recognizing inclusion as constitutive to the larger project of democratic schooling, we are pressed to interrogate the nature and structure of that which is described as inclusive education. That said, let us consider the intellectual and political origins of inclusive education as a precursor to understanding its recent manifestations and subversions. Inclusive Education as a Political Imperative The conceptual influences for inclusive education attach broadly to critical theory and to what was, in the 1970s, referred to as the new sociology of education (Apple, 1979; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Whitty, 1974; Whitty & Young, 1976; M. F. D. Young, 1971). More specifically, inclusive education stems from the protest registered against the dominance of segregated special education as a means for calibrating, codifying, and treating disabled students (Barton & Tomlinson, 1984; Oliver, 1985; Tomlinson, 1982). Inclusive education grew out of a struggle against the dominance of understandings of disability based on defectiveness, charity, and medical discourses (Fulcher, 1989) that legitimized the calibration and categorizing of students into segregated special education and the regulation of the lives of disabled children and their families. Accounts from disabled people of their experience of segregation in institutions (Humphries & Gordon, 1992; Potts & Fido, 1991) and of special schooling (Armstrong, 2003; French, 1993; Swain & French, 2008; Walsh, 1993) provide compelling rationales for the profound struggles that they, their families, and advocates entered into by testing at law their place in the community and in their neighborhood schools (Cook & Slee, 1999; Minow, 1991). At issue was their right to secure for their children a “desk with their name on it” (Slee, 1993). In this way disabled researchers have established the importance of voice and narrative in building insider knowledge of disability (Moore, 2001) to challenge powerful medical discourses that typically frame and fortify social and education policy. The epistemological incubus for inclusive education was not therefore based exclusively on the technical question of the location of the disabled child’s schooling. It raised first-order questions about the value and entitlement of different identities (Nussbaum, 2006; I. M. Young, 1990). Challenged were the conceptual foundations of a defectiveness-based medical model upon which special education was built and practiced. In question are the very conceptions of ability, disability, and disablement, and the patterning of power and social relations attendant with these varying conceptions (Oliver, 1996). Rejecting traditional accounts of disability as incomplete identities, inclusive education asserted the right of disabled children to join their siblings and non-disabled peers in the neighborhood school, against the professional interests and benevolent humanitarianism (Tomlinson, 1982) of education workers including psychologists. The claim was not for assimilation, or absorption into the mainstream, but for the reconstruction of schools to reflect and represent the diverse identities within their communities. Inclusive education enlisted feminist and poststructural analyses to critique the treatment of disabled students in education (Allan, 1998, 2008; Fulcher, 1989; Gallagher, 2006; Graham & Slee, 2008; Slee, 1996). Following Foucault’s genealogies of power as played out through the modernist knowledge projects of the “psy” sciences, writers such as N. Rose (1989, 1999) examined the way in which the drive for governmentality fueled the need to produce ways of
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Page 180 knowing diverse populations that would establish an authority to which the polity would defer, and in turn submit to their own categorization and calibration. Official knowledges proscribed the normative boundaries of ability and disability, morality and deviance, sanity and madness. The ultimate achievement of the modernist knowledge project was to have people situate themselves within the regimes of truth and self-submit to liturgies of treatment. Not so “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1979) in schools, when reassigned as attention disorders, become more respectable, treatable, and governable. That parents form themselves into self-help or self-policing organizations enables institutions such as schools to move away from the spectacle of punishment, to assist in the administration of chemical interventions and thereby retain institutional equilibrium. Governance and order are elegantly secured and sustained. The question may then be reframed: In whose interest do diagnosis, categorization and treatment work? If the goal is absorption and assimilation, then it might well be in the interest of the recipient of this intense scrutiny. If the goal is the recognition of difference as legitimate and valuable, then the answer forms a potent critique of the catechism and ceremonies of special education. Power and voice are particularly important links in the theoretical chain. Relationships between disabled people and those who assert professional authority and seek to define their social geography (Armstrong, 2003; Gleeson, 1999; Harvey, 1996) are central to disability studies. How people are known, described, and situated—whose story dominates the script and the consequent social and educational trajectories—are central to the development of inclusive education thinking, writing, and practice. Put simply, inclusive education, according to this conception, becomes a field of cultural politics with the objective of social reconstruction. In effect, inclusive educators become cultural vigilantes. Traditional special education knowledge and practices are functional rationales (Mannheim, 1936) for the sustenance of a given social order. To be sure, the edges are polished and there are growing degrees of tolerance, but impacts are not respectful of the requirement for recognition and agency in the lives of disabled people. This is confronting for many special education researchers, teachers, and administrators. It challenges them to reconsider the professional/client relationship and to consider the voice of disabled people in new ways (Barnes, 1997). From Adoption to Backlash At this point it is important to observe that the history of the field of inclusive education is not a linear narrative of progress toward enlightenment. Over time there has been a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of inclusive education by the special education community. The framing of disability discrimination acts under human rights legislation such as the Americans with Disability Act (U.S.A., 1990), the Disability Discrimination Act (Commonwealth of Australia, 1992), and Disability Discrimination Act (England, 1995, amended 2005), and challenges to segregated educational provision at law internationally (Francis & Silvers, 2000; Jones & Marks, 1998; Minow, 1991; Norwich, 2008) strengthened the claim for an inclusive education and affected a repositioning of some within the special education sector. It must also be said that there have been very positive moves by some within the special education community to recognize the legitimacy of the claim for inclusive rather than segregated schooling. This is certainly manifest in the global agreements reached under the auspices of UNESCO at meetings in Jomtien, Thailand (1990), Salamanca, Spain (1994), and Dakar (2000). Education jurisdictions have directed significant resources to research, policy, programs, and professional development in inclusive education. An example of this is the system-wide distribution of the Index for Inclusion (Booth et al., 2002) across England and Wales. This is accompanied by numerous accounts such as that by Carrington and Robinson (2004) of localized transformations of schools.
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Page 181 And the downside, you ask? As Brantlinger (2006) observes, there has been frenetic activity in publishing houses as the traditional special education textbooks, the “big glossies” as she calls them, adjust to new political exigencies. Obligatory chapters on inclusion, and in some cases education policy, are added devoid of any acknowledgment of the epistemological tension between the pervasive categorical approaches to human difference that they adopt. Largely ignored by these texts are questions of racial over-representation, poverty and class, and disability studies or rights (Brantlinger, 2006, p. 53). Similarly, education jurisdictions that self-describe as inclusive and point to their expenditures on capital alterations, equipment procurements, program innovations, and professional training as confirmation, fail to acknowledge the disconnection and opposition between their espoused inclusivity and other policy imperatives. Examples such as increasing the provision of Pupil Referral Units and the growth of suspensions and formal exclusions are obvious. Not so obvious are the impacts of the commodification of schooling according to the logic of the unrestricted marketplace, narrow backward-looking national curriculum supported and protected by high-stakes minimum standards summative testing, school inspection regimes, and reductive school attainment league-tables. Inclusive education may now be described as a travelling theory (Said, 2000). It has been popularized, “tamed,” and “domesticated.” Said (2000, p. 426) discusses the way in which “theories sometimes travel to other times and situations, in the process of which they lose some of their original power and rebelliousness.” He provides the example of Georg Lukacs’ theory of reification. In its original offering, reification was a powerful critique of hegemonic discursive instruments of oppression. At the time of writing, Lukacs delivered a set of conceptual tools for better understanding historically specific sets of social relations as a lever for political agency and change. the first time a human experience is recorded and then given a theoretical formulation, its force comes from being directly connected to and organically provoked by real historical circumstances. Later versions of the theory cannot replicate its original power; because the situation has quieted down and changed, the theory is degraded and subdued, made into a relatively tame academic substitute for the real thing, whose purpose in the work I analyzed was political change. (Said, 2000, p. 436) Said follows the pathway of the theory of reification: The point I made about all this was that when they were picked up by late European students and readers of Lukacs (Lucien Goldmann in Paris, Raymond Williams in Cambridge), the ideas of this theory had shed their insurrectionary force, had been tamed and domesticated. (Said, 2000, p. 437) Stretched to adhere to changed political circumstances, the new-found elasticity subverted the original intent. Add to this the fact that, as theories such as reification are “picked up” and popularized, inside and outside the Academy, they attract respectability and prestige. Subsequently, there arises a clamour for orthodoxy and dogma. Where established epistemological authority and professional interest are at play, appropriation is not surprising. The recent and widespread acceptance of inclusive education as a research and policy imperative might well prove to be its greatest obstacle. While some sectors of the special education community have incorporated a discourse of inclusion to pursue their professional practice (practices that are sometimes adjusted, sometimes
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Page 182 not), others have continued to directly challenge changing policy directions. In 1995 American special educators, Kauffman and Hallahan edited a collection of essays under the title, The Illusion of Full Inclusion: A Comprehensive Critique of a Current Special Educational Bandwagon . A robust analysis of that text by Brantlinger (1997) was published in Review of Educational Research. Employing the criteria for rigor professed by Kauffman and Hallahan, she demonstrated serious shortcomings in their critique. This debate endures to this day with new combatants stepping up to the bloodied plate. Crossing the Atlantic, there has been a recent and powerful backlash against inclusive education in England. Having authored the extremely influential report: Special Educational Needs: Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People (DES, 1978), Baroness Warnock reconsidered the impact of her committee’s report in a pamphlet published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (Warnock, 2005). “Inclusion,” she declares, “though it springs from hearts in the right places” (p. 40), is the “most disastrous legacy” of the 1978 Special Educational Needs report (Allan & Slee, 2008). The Baroness’s recantation has attracted sustained and influential attention including mention in the House of Commons (see Hansard, June 22, 2005) and invitations for her to write book forewords (Cigman, 2007; Farrell, 2006). Ainscow (2007, p. 128) observes that her pamphlet, “Unfortunately, … had a negative impact, in the sense that it has tended to encourage some in the field to retreat into traditional stances.” Baroness Warnock employs a language for the pamphlet driven by traditional notions of disability as the embodiment of individual pathological defects. Examples of children with asthma, epilepsy, autism, and Down’s syndrome are offered to argue for the reconstitution of small, maintained schools employing stringent coding statements as a “gatekeeper to build anxiety amongst parents.” Heightened anxiety would lead parents to regard it as a privilege for their child to have access to such a school (p. 49). Warming to her topic in her Foreword to Michael Farrell’s (2006) text entitled Celebrating the Special School , Baroness Warnock contends: I profoundly believe that for many children, not only those with the most severe or multiple disabilities, special schools are their salvation. They can trust their teachers to understand their difficulties and they can be free from the teasing and bullying that they fear from their fellow pupils (and this fear is more intense for those children who are not visibly or obviously disabled, such as those with autism in its various degrees). One of the huge advantages of a special school for such children is that it is small. In a small school, a child knows everyone and is known by all the staff. The staff, too, know one another and work in a collegiate atmosphere, where they can share their insights and their problems. Special schools are of course not cheap. But the policy of inclusion in mainstream schools should not be cheap either if it is to provide enough support for individual pupils to enable them to flourish. It is not enough that children with special needs in mainstream schools should be supported by teaching assistants; they need expert, trained teachers, who can teach them in small groups, or one-to-one. This is something that few mainstream schools can offer. What has been wrong with the policy of inclusion has been the idea that if some children with special needs can flourish in mainstream schools they all can. (Warnock, 2006, pp. viii–ix) This extract may present critical discourse analysts with an irresistible challenge to deconstruct the images of salvation and the presentation of disabled children as incomplete students, but let’s press on. Farrell (2006, pp. 1–2) asserts that “at the heart of calls for the ultimate closure of special schools, lies a diminution of the importance of providing the best education possible for children, including children with SEN.” For Farrell, “The danger is that inclusion will come to be seen
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Page 183 as more central to the work of schools than education.” To illustrate this proposition he supplies the risible metaphor of a fire department committed more to multi-ethnic, sexuality, and gender representation than to the requirement for fire-fighting knowledge and skills. Much of Farrell’s critique of inclusive education and its attachment to a human rights agenda rests on the problem of what economists might refer to as bracket creep or the inflation of the number of groups identified as excluded and oppressed. A glance at the ever-expanding entries in DSMIV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) compendium of mental disorders that frequently governs the criteria for children’s achievement of SEN “status” and/or their disqualification from neighborhood schools, invites an element of irony in his derisive adjudication of the human rights lobby. Inflation strains credibility, leading people to ask how many oppressed groups can be found in a society before the bizarre situation is reached where everyone is oppressed or excluded and there is nobody left to oppress or exclude them. Given this increasing lack of credibility, it can be argued that it is not being educated in a special school that might oppress pupils. The main oppression and exclusion that pupils in special school and their parents have to fear is that of political correctness seeking to force an over-zealous inclusion agenda even if it means denying the child a good education (Farrell, 2006, pp. 16–17). Like Baroness Warnock and many others including Kaufman and Hallahan (1995), Kauffman and Sasso (2006a), Kavale and Mostert (2004) and Mostert, Kavale and Kauffman (2007), the correct observation that children who transferred from special schools to their neighborhood school too frequently experience marginalization within the mainstream, is proffered to abandon the principle and practice of inclusion. Farrell dismisses the life stories from the voices of former special school students in Armstrong’s (2003) research in large measure because the deleterious experience of students in regular education is not considered within his report. In her collection of essays responding to the “overheated debate” following the Philosophy of Education Society (Warnock) pamphlet, Ruth Cigman (2007, p. xvii), another to enlist the foreword-writing services of Baroness Warnock, sets out to correct an “inexcusable state of affairs” wherein “the inclusion debate is mired in confusion” and devoid of solutions. Her careful introduction to the collection of chapters is genuinely helpful to those interested in this debate. Commencing from the view that “included and excluded” represents a false dichotomy when set against empirical evidence in schools, she suggests a series of analytic questions: • Included in what? • Excluded from what? • Excluded by whom? (Cigman, 2007, p. xvii) These are, indeed, essential questions that provide a lead into an option beyond Low’s (2007) call for “moderate inclusion.” They also build on Ainscow’s (2007, p. 138) observations concerning the generative potential of the innovative practices of some special school leaders. Just as Ainscow (2007, p. 138) quite correctly concludes that the “distinction between ‘SEN’ and ‘non-SEN’ children is a largely outmoded one,” so might we have to confront the proposition that special and regular education is reductive and redundant. This might encourage us to see school reform not so much as a choice for the sake of efficacy (Lindsay, 2007) between two evils where we rebrand the segregated enclave (a practice realized in many jurisdictions around the world), but as an opportunity to reflect seriously on the “into what” question. This set of highly irregular institutions that we call regular schools is itself in deep trouble and in need of reforms that reflect thinking beyond high-stakes training and testing to show overall improvement. Previously I have enlisted Pierre Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu & Nice, 1998) declaration that, “Between
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Page 184 two evils, I refuse to choose the latter,” to contest compromise that negates foundational principles . To suggest that a fall back to segregation, or even the presentation of the binary of special and regular because of discrimination and inadequacies in present forms of schooling is regressive. Barton’s (2005) succinct and incisive response to Baroness Warnock’s New Look pamphlet is noteworthy in the context of Cigman’s question, excluded by whom? At the outset Barton acknowledges “important historical insights” within the treatise and underscores the complex and contested nature of debates around segregated and inclusive education. While not wanting to give Warnock’s propositions a prominence they do not deserve, he was moved to respond to a pamphlet that was a “reflection of naivety, arrogance and ignorance” (Barton, 2005, p. 1). In summary Barton is affronted by the sententious tone and lack of reflexivity effected in the pamphlet. The absence of sustained attention to the growing research and literature on inclusive education that is multi-pronged and cognizant of a complexity far beyond that suggested by many of its critics reflects poor scholarship and naive policy analysis. Particularly offensive to Barton is the lack of reference or response to the work of disabled researchers and scholars in this field. This exchange in England both demonstrates the resilience of a traditional special education episteme that would have us close down the discussion of equality as a red herring that derails the consideration of a good education, and indicates the pervasiveness of such debates. More specifically the positive reception to Baroness Warnock’s reliance on the “common-sense” (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 323–325) understandings of disability as deficiency in her pamphlet echoes my suggestion that inclusive education is a troubled research and policy field and that vigilance is required. The Pervasive Project Inclusive education research has not only aligned itself with the interrogation and amelioration of the exclusion of disabled students. Indeed, exclusion, forgive my expression, is far more embracing. Researchers in disability studies and inclusive education have long identified strong links with the experience of other vulnerable student identities. Research in fields such as antiracist education (Gillborn, 1995; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Gilroy, 2000; Troyna, 1993) proved useful in distinguishing between assimilation and transformative approaches to research, curriculum, pedagogy, and school reform. Raciology has saturated the discourses in which it circulates. It cannot be readily resignified or designified, and to imagine that its dangerous meanings can be easily re-articulated into benign, democratic forms would be to exaggerate the power of critical and oppositional interests. (Gilroy, 2000, p. 12) The link is far more than a gesture of political solidarity given the established racialization of special education globally (Parish, 2005; Tomlinson, 1981). In Australia the most reliable predictors of educational failure and exclusion are Aboriginality and poverty (Connell, 1993; Land & McCollow, 2001). The intersection of a range of shifting student identities and educational exclusion has required the field of inclusive education to act as a political and cultural conduit, providing a platform for, and expansive research program to identify, analyze, and dismantle, the complex institutional and social relations of exclusion. We return to Bernstein and the project of democratic schooling. Where rights of enhancement, inclusion, and participation are routinely denied there is a critical project for inclusive educators. The first element of this project is that of demonstrating where the appropriation of inclusive
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Page 185 education discourse occludes our perception of that which is counter-democratic. In other words, are cultures, policies, and practices of schooling, including the constantly expanding diagnostic requirements for additional school support that are increasingly described drawing from the lexicon of inclusion, enabling or disabling, democratic or undemocratic, inclusive or exclusionary? Young is instructive to this end: Our democratic policy discussions do not occur under conditions free of coercion and threat, and free of the distorting influence of unequal power and control over resources. In actually existing democracies there tends to be a reinforcing circle between social and economic inequality and political inequality that enables the powerful to use formally democratic processes to perpetuate injustice and preserve privilege. One means of breaking this circle, I argue, is to widen democratic inclusion. (I. M. Young, 2000, p. 17) In his provocatively entitled work, Can We Live Together? Alain Touraine concluded that this could only be achieved “through a school that democratizes” (2000, p. 283). “In a world of intense cultural exchanges,” he argues, “there can be no democracy unless we recognize the diversity of cultures and relations of domination that exist between them” (p. 195). The project of inclusive education, therefore, is multi-dimensional. How else might we approach the expansive reform agenda? Recently Norwich (2008) has drawn on political philosophy and the work of Isaiah Berlin to frame a “dilemmatic approach” to apply to the tensions that emerge in making regular education inclusive. Such an approach, it seems to this reader, is reasonably pragmatic and suggests judicious compromises over a range of dilemmas that confront inclusive education researchers, policymakers and schools. Each of the dilemmas ought to be approached individually with an eye to specificity and context. Norwich does seem to have commenced beyond the starting-line and reveals a strong functionalist vein. There is a core issue of entitlement and distribution (Rawls, 1971) or, more precisely, redistribution. Governments in Australia historically have disbursed funds from public taxation revenue to the incorrectly named private education sector (Marginson, 1997). A perceived and actual comparative advantage of this sector is reflected in the drift from public to private education. The differential funding of education and the specific impacts of present differences on students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an essential element of an inclusive education strategy. Redistribution is but one element in the equation. As Bernstein demonstrates, power and privilege are relational and as such are transmitted through the key message systems or cultural conveyor-belts of schooling: pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Herein lies a link to Fraser’s (1997) work on redistribution and representation. Enhancement is dependent not just on access to schooling and material resources therein, but also on the character of participation and ensuring the possibility for success. In other words the first items on the agenda for inclusive education pursuant to democratic schooling comprise: • The enlistment of alternative understandings of different student identities. • The review of education funding. • The review, adaptation, and engagement of innovative reform projects such as New Basics (Queensland) and Essential Learnings (Tasmania) that address curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, school organization, and professional learning. The perverse impacts of fiscal models are illustrated by brief reference to the workings of redistributed funds to “SEN pupils.” In Queensland, Australia, students who have problems in accessing the curriculum or, indeed, the school because of their unique or different physical, sensorial, cognitive, or emotional characteristics must submit to “ascertainment.” The level of
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Page 186 disability is calculated according to a 6-tiered scale of additional funding entitlement. Minimal funds commence at Level 4 of disability. More appropriate funding is received when children are diagnosed at Level 5 or 6. The gravitational pull of policy is therefore the creation of a more disabled population. Knowing the global force of the logic of the marketplace in schooling (Apple, 2005; Ball, 2007, 2008), there is little wonder that schools and their communities use inclusion as a means for differentiation to purchase a basic entitlement to schooling. Students who were formerly ejected from schools to take up jobs in the unskilled labor market are now staying on at school. As the futility of their schooling becomes more apparent and their behavior and achievement worsen, schools use the levers of inclusion to move them into holding paths. Off-site units, alternative programs, remediation, special needs facilities, and “inclusion units” safeguard institutional equilibrium and mask the failure of schooling. Here I am not describing the pathological category of the “failing school,” I am describing economic, political, and cultural crises, for which schools are expected to compensate heavily (Bernstein, 1970). This question of funding mechanisms that intensify the calibration and differentiation of the school population precedes an interrogation of the nature and impacts of the deployment of those funds. The provision of unqualified personnel as minders of an increasingly residual element of the school community fails the test of democracy. Indeed, the inclusive project for our schools that were never originally meant for everyone is a pervasive task. For so long as inclusive education is tied to notions of special and regular education its critical capacity is compromised. I am not demonizing segregated special schools and their teachers. Regular and special schools exist in a symbiotic and problematic relationship. Special schooling is a function of shortcomings in the architecture and grammar of regular schooling for some students. Special education is an afterthought to mitigate the democratic failure of regular schools for some students. Achieving inclusive cultures, policies, and practices suggests that we move beyond this crude bifurcation to elaborate new forms of democratic schooling consistent with new times and this requires us to eschew incremental adjustments to exercise what M. Rose (1995) calls our “civic imagination.” References Ainscow, M. (2007). Towards a more inclusive education system. In R. Cigman (Ed.), Included or excluded? London: Routledge. Allan, J. (1998). Actively seeking inclusion: Insiders, outsiders and deciders . London: Falmer Press. Allan, J. (2005). Incusion as an ethical project. In S. Tremain, Foucault and the government of disability (pp. 298–328) . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Allan, J. (2008). Rethinking inclusive education. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. American Psychiatric Association & American Psychiatric Association Task Force on DSM-Iv. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: Dsm-iv-tr (4th Ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Apple, M. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. (2005). Educating the “right” way (2nd Ed.). London: Routledge. Armstrong, D. (2003). Experiences of special education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Ashman, A., & Elkins, J. (2005). Educating children with diverse abilities (2nd Ed.). Sydney: Pearson Education Australia. Ball, S. J. (2007). Education plc. London: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2008). The education debate. Bristol: The Policy Press. Barnes, C. (1997). Disability and the myth of the independent researcher. In L. Barton & M. Oliver (Eds.), Disability studies . Leeds, England: The Disability Press. Barton, L. (2005). Special educational needs. Unpublished paper. Barton, L., & Armstrong, F. (Eds.). (2007). Policy, experience and change. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
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Page 187 Bennett, S., & Wynne, K. (2006). Report of the co-chairs of the working table—Special education transformation. Toronto: Ministry of Education. Bernstein, B. (1970, February). Education cannot compensate for society. New Society , 26 , 344–347. Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. London: Taylor & Francis. Booth, T., Ainscow, M., Black-Hawkins, K., Vaughan, M., & Shaw, L. (2002). The index for inclusion (2nd Ed.). Bristol: Centre for Studies in Inclusive Education. Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. W. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture . London and Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Brantlinger, E. (1997). Using ideology: Cases of nonrecognition of the politics of research and practice in special education. Review of Educational Research , 67 (4), 425–459. Brantlinger, E. (2006). Who benefits from special education? Remediating (fixing) other people’s children. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Burrows, B. (1994). Life, liberty and the pusuit of parents. The Boycott Quarterly , 2(1), 33. Carrington, S., & Robinson, R. (2004). A case study of inclusive school development: A journey of learning. International Journal of Inclusive Education , 8(2), 141–153. Churchill, W., & Morris, G. (1992). Table: Key Indian cases. In M. A. Jaimes (Ed.), State of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance. Boston, MA: South End Press. Cigman, R. (2007). Editorial introduction. InR. Cigman (Ed.), Included or excluded? London: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (1993). Schools and social justice. Leichardt, Sydney: Pluto Press. Cook, S., & Slee, R. (1999). Struggling with the fabric of disablement: Picking up the threads of the law and education. In M. Jones and L. A. Basser Marks (Eds.), Disability, diversability, and legal change. The Hague, Netherlands and Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. deLauretis, T. (1989). The essence of the triangle or taking the risk of essentialism seriously: Feminist theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain. Differences , 1(2), 37. Deloria, V. Jr. (1999). For this land: Writings on religion in America . New York: Routledge. Deloria, V. Jr., & Lytle, Clifford, M. (1984). The nations within: The past and future of American sovereignty . Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Deno, E. (1970). Special education as developmental capital. Exceptional Children, 36 , 229–237. Department of Education and Science (DES). (1978). Special educational needs. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. di Leonardo, M. (1998). Exotics at home: Anthropologies, others, and American modernity . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Donald, F. (1998). The invasion of Indian country in the twentieth century: American capitalism and tribal natural resources. Boulder, CO: The University of Colorado Press. Dunn, L. M. (1968). Special education for the mildly retarded. Exceptional Children, 35 , 5–22. Ebert, T. (1991). Writing in the political: Resistance (post)modernism. Legal Studies Forum , 15 (4), 291– 304. Ebert, T. (1996a). “For a Red Pedagogy: Feminism, Desire, and Need.” College English 58, no. 7 (November): 795–819. Ebert, T. (1996b). Ludic feminism and after: Postmodernism, desire, and labor in late capitalism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Farrell, M. (Ed.). (2006). Celebrating the special school . London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Fraser, N. (1997) Justice interruptus . New York: Routledge. French, S. (1993). Out of sight, out of mind: The experience and effects of a special residential school. In J. Swain & The Open University (Eds.), Disabling barriers—enabling environments . London: Sage Publications in association with The Open University. Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., & Fernstrom, P. (1993). A conservative approach to special education reform. American Educational Research Journal , 30 (1), 149–177. Fulcher, G. (1989). Disabling policies? A comparative approach to education, policy, and disability . London and New York: Falmer Press.
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Page 188 Gallagher, D. (Ed.). (2004). Challenging orthodoxy in special education . Denver, CO: Love Publishing. Gallagher, D. (2006). If not absolute objectivity, then what? Exceptionality , 14 (2), 91–107. Gillborn, D. (1995). Racism and Anti-racism in real schools. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education. Buckingham, England and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000). Against race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gleeson, B. (1999). Geographies of disability. London: Routledge. Graham, L., & Slee, R. (2006, April). Inclusion? Paper given to the Disability Studies in Education SIG, American Educational Research Association Conference, San Francisco. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003832/01/3832_1.pdf. Graham, L., & Slee, R. (2008). An illusory interiority: Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 40 , 277–293. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from prison notebooks. Southampton, England: Camelot Press Ltd. Grande, S. (2000). American Indian geographies of identity and power: At the crossroads of Indigena and Mestizaje. Harvard Educational Review , 70 (4), 467–498. Hansard (2005, June 22). Debate on special schools and special educational need s. Retrieved December 4, 2007, from http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/vo050622/debtext/50622–11.htm Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature & the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Humphries, S., & Gordon, P. (1992). Out of sight: The experience of disability 1900–1950. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House. Jones, M., & Basser Marks, L. A. (1998). Disability, diversability, and legal change. The Hague, Netherlands and Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Kauffman, J., & Hallahan, D. (Eds.). (1995). The illusion of full inclusion: A comprehensive critique of a current special education bandwagon. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed. Kauffman, J., & Sasso, G. (2006a). Toward ending cultural and cognitive relativism in special education. Exceptionality , 14 (2), 65–90. Kauffman, J., & Sasso, G. (2006b). Rejoinder. Exceptionality , 14 (2), 109–120. Kavale, K., & Mostert, M. (2004). The positive side of special education . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Education. Kenway, J. (1990). Hearts and minds: Self-esteem and the schooling of girls (J. Kenway & S. Willis Eds.). London and New York: Falmer Press. Knight, T. (1985). An Apprenticeship in Democracy. The Australian Teacher, 11 , 7–11. Land, R., & McCollow, J. (2001). Report of the strategic staffing review. Unpublished Ministerial Report: Brisbane, Education Queensland. Lindsay, G. (2007). Rights, efficacy and inclusive education. In R. Cigman (Ed.), Included or excluded? London: Routledge. Low, C. (2007). A defence of moderate inclusion and the end of ideology. In R. Cigman (Ed.), Included or excluded? London: Routledge. Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology & Utopia. New York: The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. Marginson, S. (1997) Educating Australia. Cambridge University Press. Minow, M. (1991). Making all the difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, D. (Ed.). (2006). Contextualizing inclusive education . London: Routledge. Mitchell, K. (2001, Spring). Education for democratic citizenship: Transnationalism, multiculturalism, and the limits of liberalism. Harvard Educational Review , 71 (1), 51–78. Moore, M. (Ed.). (2001). Insider perspectives on inclusion. Sheffield, England: Philip Armstrong Publications. Mostert, M., Kavale, K., & Kauffman, J. M. (2007). Challenging the refusal of reasoning in special education. Denver, CO: Love Publishing. Norwich, B. (2008) Dilemmas of difference, inclusion and disability . London: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. C. (2006). Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press; Harvard University Press. Oliver, M. (1985). Discrimination, disability and social policy. In C. Jones & M. Brenton (Eds.), The yearbook of social policy in Britain 1984–5. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Oliver, M. (1996). Understanding disability . Basingstoke, England: Macmillan.
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Page 189 Parish, T. (2001). Who’s paying the rising cost of special education? Journal of Special Education Leadership , 14 (1): 4–12. Parish, T. (2005). Racial Disparities in the Identification, Funding, and Provision of Special Education. In D. J. Losen & G. Orfield (Eds.), Racial Inequality in Special Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Potts, M., & Fido, R. (1991). A fit person to be removed. Plymouth, England: Northcote House. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Oxford University Press. Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis (2nd Ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon. Rose, M. (1995) Possible lives. New York: Penguin Books. Rose, N. (1989). Governing the soul. London: Routledge. Said, E. (2000). Reflections on exile. London: Granta Books. Slee, R. (Ed.). (1993). Is there a desk with my name on it? Lewes, England: Falmer Press. Slee, R. (1996). Disability, social class and poverty. In D. Christensen & F. Rizvi (Eds.), Disability and the dilemmas of education and justice. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Sleeter, Christine E., & McLaren, P. (1995). Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference. New York: State University of New York Press. Stiffarm, L. & Lane Jr., P. (1992). The demography of Native North America: A question of American Indian survival. In M. A. Jaimes (Ed.), State of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance . Boston, MA: South End Press. Swain, J., & French, S. (Eds.). (2008). Disability on equal terms . London: Sage Publications. Tomlinson, S. (1981). Educational subnormality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tomlinson, S. (1982). A sociology of special education . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Troyna, B. (1993) Racism and education. Buckingham, England: Open University Press. Touraine, A. (2000) Can we live together? Cambridge: Polity Press. UNESCO (1994). The UNESCO Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Educational Needs . Paris: UNESCO. Retrieved July 7, 2007, from http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/SALAMA_E. PDF UNESCO (2007). Education for all global action plan. Paris: UNESCO. Walsh, B. (1993). How disabling any handicap is depends on the attitudes and actions of others. In R. Slee (Ed.), Is there a desk with my name on it? London: Falmer Press. Warnock, M. (2005). Special educational needs. London: The Philosophy Society of Great Britain. Warnock, M. (2006). Foreword. In M. Farrell (Ed.), Celebrating the special school. London: Routledge. Warnock, M. (2007). Foreword. In R. Cigman (Ed.), Included or excluded? London: Routledge. Whitty, G. (1974). Sociology and the problem of radical educational change. In M. Flude & J. Ahier (Eds.), Educability, schools and ideology. London: Croom Helm. Whitty, G., & Young, M. (1976). Explorations in the problem of school knowledge. London: Nafferton Books. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, I. M. (2000). Inclusion and democracy . Oxford: Open University Press. Young, M. F. D. (Ed.). (1971). Knowledge and control. London: Collier-Macmillan.
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Page 190 14 Red Pedagogy Indigenous Theories of Redistribution (a.k.a. Sovereignty) Sandy Grande As an Indigenous scholar in the academy, I am often consumed by thoughts of how to construct space for Native intellectualism in an institution historically designed for its evisceration. Embedded in the collective consciousness of most Native peoples is the memory of school as a site of cultural genocide. My work is thus guided by the moral imperative to reimagine school as a site of revolutionary struggle and in this way, reclaim the sovereignty and self-determination of all Indigenous peoples. This chapter examines the ways in which Native intellectualism and the issues of sovereignty and selfdetermination have been denied and impeded by the dominant discourses of educational theory, particularly those related to identity formation. Indeed, questions of who or what is an American Indian,1 who should be allowed to speak from the authority of that voice, who can conduct research on behalf of American Indian communities, and what counts as the “real” history of Native North America, dominate the discourse in a manner that suggests to the non-Indigenous world that the primary struggle of American Indians is the problem of forging a “comfortable modern identity.” While such theories provide a means of navigating the complicated terrain of American Indian identity, they ultimately fail to account for the paradigmatic and constitutional difference of Indigenous North Americans as tribal peoples of distinct nations with sovereign status and treaty rights. On the contrary, as dominant modes of identity theory are wantonly employed to explain the conditions of all “marginalized peoples” the particularity of Native sovereignty is erased, laying the seedbed for the continued assault on Indigenous social, political, and economic rights. The central argument of this chapter is that the discourse of identity politics not only displaces the actual sites of struggle— sovereignty and self-determination—but also obfuscates the real sources of oppression—colonialism and global capitalism. My primary concern is, thus, to systematically reveal how the dominant modes of Western identity theory have contributed to the deeply marginalized status of Indigenous intellectualism and to explore ways in which Native scholars can work to dismantle the choke-hold of Western theory. Elsewhere (Grande, 2004), I have termed this broader political project as the development of a new Red Pedagogy. This discussion begins with an examination of the legal and political forces that have shaped the historical formation of American Indian identity in the United States. Then, a contemporary model of “tribal identity” is articulated as a by-product of these historical forces. Next, the dominant modes of Western identity theory—essentialist and postmodern—are examined in terms of their intersection with current formations of American Indian identity. This analysis reveals
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Page 191 how such theories of identity have not only failed to interrogate and disrupt the project of colonization but also have provided the theoretical basis and intellectual space for its continuance. More specifically, the colonialist forces of corporate commodification, identity appropriation, and cultural imperialism are discussed as the consequences of a geographic and political terrain that works to absorb Indigenous peoples into the broader “democratic” project. Next, theories of identity that emerge from critical pedagogy—specifically the construct of mestizaje and other models of hybridity—are examined as potential tools for developing a counter-discourse of Amer-ican Indian subjectivity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the need for an Indigenous theory of identity; one historically grounded in Indigenous struggles for self-determination, politically centered in issues of sovereignty and spiritually guided by the religious traditions of American Indian peoples. The aim is to develop an emancipatory theory—a new Red Pedagogy—that acts as a true counter-discourse, counter-praxis, counterensoulment2 of Indigenous identity. The Historical Formation of American Indian Identity Hayden White (1976) notes that the so-called discovery of Native peoples in the “New World” created a crisis of category for Western philosophers and their understanding of humanity, igniting a fierce debate about the nature of Indians: On the one hand, natives were conceived to be continuous with the humanity on which Europeans prided themselves; and it was this mode of relationship that underlay the policy of proselytization and conversion. On the other hand, the natives could be conceived as simply existing contiguously to Europeans, as representing either an inferior breed of humanity or a superior breed, but in any case being essentially different from the European breed; and it was this mode of relationship that underlay the policies of war and extermination which the Europeans followed throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century.3 At stake for the colonizers was not only the prospect of acquiring religious converts, but also of defining the terms of political engagement: if the Natives were considered human they would have to be considered under the prevailing rights paradigm but if they were determined to be less than human, they could be denied equal rights. Such questions were critical for the United States; a young democracy working to build its notion of democratic citizenship on the supposed truths of individualism and private property. The bloody encounter came to a head in 1887 with the passage of the General Allotment Act. Through this legislation, Senator Henry Dawes spearheaded a campaign to rid the nation of tribalism through the virtues of private property, allotting land parcels to male heads of family. Before allotments could be dispensed, however, the government had to determine who was eligible, igniting the first official search for a federal definition of American Indian-ness. The Dawes Commission (a delegate of White men) took up the task, choosing to abide by the prevailing racial purity model, expressing Indian-ness in terms of blood-quantum. Following this logic, the Dawes Commission published the first comprehensive tribal rolls with subjects’ names neatly listed in one column and blood quanta in another; designating F for “full-blood” and ½, ¼, or ⅛ for “mixed bloods.” Land parcels were then dispensed according to the rolls. “Full-blooded” Indians (considered legally incompetent) received relatively small parcels of land deeded with trust patents over which the government retained complete control for a minimum of 25 years. “Mixed-blood” Indians were deeded larger and better tracts of land, with “patents in fee simple” (complete control) but were also forced to accept U.S. citizenship and relinquish tribal status (Churchill & Morris, 1992; Stiffarm & Lane, 1992). Finally, and in,
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Page 192 perhaps, the most controversial turn, Indians who failed to meet the established criteria were effectively “detribalized,” deposed of their American Indian identity and displaced from their homelands, discarded into the nebula of the American “otherness.”4 Its myriad indiscretions render the Dawes Act among the most destructive U.S. policies in American history. All told, it empowered the U.S. government to: (1) legally preempt the sovereign right of Indians to define themselves; (2) implement the specious notion of blood-quantum as the legal criterion for defining Indians;5 (3) institutionalize divisions between “full-bloods” and “mixed-bloods”;6 (4) “detribalize” a sizable segment of the Indian population;7 and, (5) legally appropriate vast tracts of Indian land. Indeed, so “successful” was this aspect of the “democratic experiment” that the federal government decided to retain or, rather, further exploit, the notion of blood-quantum and federal recognition as the means for dispensing other resources and services within Indian Country, such as health care and educational funding. An Operational Definition of American Indian-ness While five centuries of imperialist strategies may have decimated the traditional societies of pre-invasion times, modern American Indian communities still resemble traditional societies enough so that, “given a choice between Indian society and non-Indian society, most Indians feel comfortable with their own institutions, lands and traditions” (Deloria & Lytle, 1983, p. xii). Despite the persistent divide between “Indian” and “non-Indian” societies, however, defining tribal America has remained curiously difficult.8 To tease out, name, and assign primacy to certain aspects of Indian-ness as “the definition” would not only grossly oversimplify the complexity of American Indian subjectivity (forcing what is fundamentally traditional, spatial, and interconnected into the modern, temporal, and epistemic frames of Western theory) but also re-enact the objectification of Indians set in motion by the Dawes Commission over a century ago. Accordingly, the following rubric merely calls attention to the “difference” of tribal identity as conceived through some of the legal indicators of what it means to be American Indian in U.S. society.9 It is not meant to represent some mythic view of a unified Indigenous culture or objectified view of American Indian identity. American Indian Tribal Identity • Sovereignty vs. democracy : American Indians have been engaged in a centuries-long struggle to have what is legally theirs recognized (i.e., land, sovereignty, treaty rights). As such, Indigenous peoples have not, like other marginalized groups, been fighting for inclusion in the democratic imaginary but, rather, for the right to remain distinct, sovereign, and tribal peoples. • Treaty rights: These rights articulate the unique status of Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations.” A dizzying array of tribal, federal, and state laws, policies, and treaties creates a political maze that keeps the legal status of most tribes in a constant state of flux. Treaties are negotiated and renegotiated in a process that typically reduces tribal rights and erodes traditional structures (Deloria & Lytle, 1984; Fixcio, 1998). • Dual citizenship : The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 extends the rights of full citizenship to American Indians born within the territorial United States insofar as such status does not infringe upon the rights to tribal and other property. It is a dual citizenship wherein American Indians do not lose civil rights because of their status as tribal members and individual tribal members are not denied tribal rights because of their American citizenship (Deloria, 1984).10
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Page 193 • Federal recognition : Federal law mandates that American Indians prove that they have continued to exist over time as stable, prima facie entities to retain federal recognition as tribes. Acknowledgment of tribal existence by the Department of the Interior is critical, as it is a prerequisite to the protection, services, and benefits of the federal government available to Indian tribes by virtue of their status as tribes. Therefore, a tribe’s existence is contingent upon its ability to prove its existence over time, to provide evidence of shared cultural patterns, and to prove “persistence of a named, collective Indian identity” (Bureau of Indian Affairs, USD, 83. 7). • Economic dependency: American Indians continue to exist as nations within a nation wherein the relationship between the U.S. government and Indian tribes is not the fictive “government to government” relationship described in U.S. documents, but, rather, one that positions tribes as fundamentally dependent on the federal government.11 • Reservations: Almost two-thirds of American Indians continue either to live on, or remain significantly tied to, their reservations and, as such, remain predominantly “tribally oriented” as opposed to generically Indian (Joe & Miller, 1997). The above indicators position American Indians in a unique and paradoxical relationship to the United States. They also illuminate the inherent contradictions of modern American Indian existence: the paradox of having to prove “authenticity” to gain legitimacy as a “recognized” tribe while simultaneously having to negotiate a postmodern world in which all claims to authenticity are dismissed as essentialist (if not racist). This reality not only conscripts American Indians to a gravely dangerous and precarious space but also points to the gross insufficiency of models that treat American Indians as simply another ethnic minority group. Specifically, the identity paradox of American Indians deeply problematizes the postmodern insistence that we move beyond concretized categories and disrupt the “myth” of prima facie indicators of identity. For American Indians, such notions only reflect Whitestream12 reality. For instance, it currently remains a fundamental truth of what it means to be Indian in the United States—no matter how you define it— that the titles to American Indian land remain in the hands of the U.S. government. Moreover, the U.S. government—not tribes—retains the right to confer “federal recognition” and therefore the power to enable self-determination. Indeed, the criteria required for federal recognition are constructed to protect the rights and interests of the government and not those of Indian tribes. According to the Indian Definition Study (1980), the inner contradictions of the current criteria create the following impossible paradox for tribes: 1. An American Indian is a member of any federally recognized tribe. To be federally recognized, an Indian tribe must be comprised of American Indians. 2. To gain federal recognition, an Indian tribe must have a land base. To secure a land base, an Indian tribe must be federally recognized.13 So, 500 years after the European invasion, “recognized” and “unrecognized” American Indian communities repeatedly find themselves engaged in absurd efforts to prove (in Whitestream courts) their existence over time— as stable and distinct groups of people. Thus, contrary to postmodern rhetoric, there are in fact, stable markers and prima facie indicators of what it means to be Indian in American society. Within this context, Indigenous scholars cannot afford to perceive essentialism as a mere theoretical construct and may, in fact, be justified in their understanding of it as the last line of defense against capitalistic encroachment, and last available means for retaining cultural integrity and tribal sovereignty. The question, therefore, remains whether contemporary theories of identity are able to provide any valuable insights to the paradox of American Indian identity formation.
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Page 194 Essentialism and American Indian Identity The notion of who is an “authentic” American Indian is underwritten by essentialist theories of identity. That is, theories of identity that treat race (and other aspects of identity) as a stable and homogeneous construct; as if members of different racial groups possessed “some innate and invariant set of characteristics” that set them apart from each other as well as from Whites (McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993, p. xviii). While such theories of identity keep intact the “difference” of American Indian identity, they ultimately fail to account for the ways Indigenous peoples are forced to negotiate incoherent and other conflicting pressures on identity formation. And, perhaps most importantly, the complete lack of any sort of explanatory critique of the persistent colonialist forces that undermine tribal life means that essentialist theories offer no potential to provide the transformative knowledge needed to disrupt their hegemonic effects. Thus, as Native scholars struggle to map the terrain of American Indian identity, it is important to keep in mind that domination is no longer only signaled by overt exploitation and legal discrimination, but has become increasingly codified in the systems of global capitalism. As Sleeter and McLaren (1995) note, “the motor force of capitalist domination rests on the tacit collusion of the oppressed in their own lived subordination” (p. 9). For example, the fact that the practice of dividing indigenous peoples according to their status under colonial law (e.g. full-blood, mixed-blood) is replicated within, and legitimated by, American Indian communities speaks to the insidious power of the broader legitimating structures of colonialist society. It is incumbent upon Indigenous intellectuals to assist communities in overcoming the dilatory effects of essentialism. In short, they must be careful, in their own assertions of what constitutes American Indianness, to avoid re-enacting the divisive logic of colonialist domination, one that not only pits Indian against non-Indian but, also, Indian against Indian and tribe against tribe. Thus, while the clearly defined categories of essentialism provide the necessary protection against cultural encroachment and colonialist absorption, it is important to recognize that they also confine American Indians to narrowly prescribed spaces, ossifying Indigenous subjectivity to the chasms of the Whitestream imagination. Postmodernism and American Indian Identity In response to the multiple aporias of essentialism, postmodernists abandon the notion of a rational, unified subject in favor of a socially decentered and fragmented subject. Instead, they maintain that “identity” is shaped and determined by social and historical contingencies, not by some checklist of innate, biological, or primordial characteristics (De Lauretis, 1989). Identity, in other words, is viewed as a highly relative construct, one resembling “a theater of simulation marked by the free play of images, disembodied signifiers, and the heterogeneity of differences” (Ebert, 1991, p. 15). Within this “theater” identity is viewed as both fluid and shifting, fed by multiple sources and embodied in multiple forms (Kumar, 1997). Insofar as postmodern theories have stripped away the “epistemological scaffolding” used to prop up essentialist claims to authenticity—peeling away the shroud of legitimacy that once protected positivist assertions of truth and objectivity—it has had an emancipatory effect. Thus, through its rejection of origin and authenticity, postmodernism provides a theoretical path away from the parochial and limiting effects of essentialism, mapping instead the hidden trajectories of power within the politics of identity. That being said, postmodern constructions of identity as “free-floating” also create a new set of problematics for American Indians. As previously articulated, American Indians are not like other subjugated groups struggling to define their place within the larger democratic project. They do not seek greater “inclusion” but, rather, are engaged in perpetual struggle to have their
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Page 195 legal and moral claims to sovereignty recognized. The duration and severity of this struggle for American Indians removes the question of identity from the superficial realm of cultural politics to the more profound arena of cultural survival. Thus, contrary to postmodern analyses, American Indians do not exercise essentialist tactics in order to establish hierarchies of “authenticity” but, rather, as a means of resisting wholesale appropriation of Indian culture and identity. Specifically, they work to fend off the global capitalist forces that crave Indigenous cultures at the same time they operate to destroy all that sustains them (i.e., land bases, natural resources).14 Therefore, while it is important to recognize the way essentialism works to undermine the emancipatory project, it is also important to be aware of the dangers of postmodern constructions of identity as they interface with American Indian realities. To facilitate better understanding of the specific ways postmodernism and cultural imperialism work together to undermine the integrity and viability of American Indian communities, the experience of cultural imperialism is articulated below as a global force that emanates from the political project of colonization, the social project of postmodernism, and the insatiable, if not cannibalistic, desire of capitalism to consume all that it produces. Cultural Imperialism “Indian Country” persists both as a metaphoric space and geographic place, one that profoundly shapes the subjectivities of those who traverse it. Specifically, the relationship between American Indian communities and the surrounding (White) border towns not only shapes the ways Indians perceive and construct the Whitestream but also their views of themselves. Thus, while reservation borders exist as vestiges of forced removal, colonialist domination, and Whitestream greed, they are also understood as marking the defensive perimeters between cultural integrity and wholesale appropriation. They are the literal dividing lines between “us” and “them,” demarcating the borders of this nation’s only internal sovereigns. Though the power of this status is continually challenged, American Indians have retained enough of their plenary powers to establish tribal courts, tribal governments, and tribal police forces; the borders of such communities are thus material realities and not simply “signifiers” of Indian Country. That being said, tribal sovereignty remains deeply fettered by the fact that most reservation economies are only sustainable with the infusion of outside capital (Deloria & Lytle, 1984). This dependency on outside capital generates a subordinating effect, often leaving American Indians at the mercy of venture capitalists and Whitestream do-gooders. Emissaries of White justice, private entrepreneurs, and New Age liberals thus descend on reservation communities, forging lucrative careers at the same time they engage in “charitable” practices. Indeed, most of the business people, teachers, principals, doctors, and health care professionals in reservation communities are White and most of the laborers, minimumwagers, underemployed and unemployed are American Indian. Safely bivouacked in their internal and external compounds, they wield power and broker services by day and, by night, retreat back into the comforts of their bourgeois border towns. Though the social and political impact of “do-gooders” is significant, culture vultures and venture capitalists wreak even more damage as they aim to sell everything Indian from Native art and music, to spirituality and DNA. Indigenous scholar, Laurie Ann Whitt (1998) faults late capitalist views of ownership and property for sustaining cultural imperialism, which she views as “the central historical dynamic mediating Euro-American/indigenous relations.” In particular, she identifies the following two central assumptions of property and ownership are underlying relations of imperialism: (1) the belief that ownership is individually held; and (2) the belief that individual owners have the right to privacy, in both the maintenance and economic management of their property. Whitt maintains that these “politics of property” have provided the premise
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Page 196 under which U.S. imperialists have seized everything from American Indian lands to spiritual traditions and cultural practices (Whitt, 1998, p. 148). Specifically, the first assumption—that ownership is individually held—is used to negate tribal (collective) “ownership” over Indian lands, spiritual practices, and cultural traditions: If (a) ownership of such “goods” cannot be traced back to a single individual; then, (b) no “one” must own them. This logic is insidiously and explicitly employed by Whitestream proprietors to transfer commonly held Indigenous “property” to the realm of public domain. Once American Indian “property” is reclassified as material of the public domain, the second assumption of U.S. property law comes into effect. That is, that any individual can claim property formerly in the “public domain” and that such claim bestows private and exclusive ownership thereafter, with all the privacy rights inherent to such ownership. In other words, once the music, art, spiritual, and cultural traditions of American Indians are deemed to be part of the “public domain,” they become fair game to anyone seeking to pilfer, copy, and recreate such goods and practices, reaping considerable profits in a capitalist marketplace that craves the exotic and authentic. Therefore, the Whitestream politics of property not only fails to discourage the commodification of American Indian goods and traditions, but actively encourages it. The latest and perhaps most egregious form of capitalist profiteering to impact Indigenous communities is the quest for genetic materials set in motion by the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). Burrows (1994) reports that Indigenous opposition to the project has been extensive and emphatic and, that in 1993, the Annual Assembly of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples unanimously resolved to “categorically reject and condemn HGDP as it applies to our rights, lives, and dignity” (p. 33). In addition, Whitt (1998) reports that Indigenous representatives at the 1993 session of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) called for a stop to the HGDP. After being subjected to ethnocide and genocide for 500 years, delegates questioned why the only alternative being discussed was the collection and storage of Indigenous DNA. They argued that such a strategy was just a more sophisticated version of how the remains of Indigenous peoples have been collected and stored in museums and scientific institutions for centuries. They argued: Why don’t they address the causes of our being endangered instead of spending $20 million for five years to collect and store us in cold laboratories. If this money will be used instead to provide us with the basic social services and promote our rights as indigenous peoples, then our biodiversity will be protected. (Tauli-Corpus, 1993, as reported in Whitt, 1998) Whether it is land, spiritual practice, or genetic material that is being mined, appropriated, and sold, the logic of domination remains the same—in the eyes of U.S. law and policy the collective rights and concerns of Indigenous peoples are considered subordinate to individual rights. Thus, the extension of marketplace logic to the realms of cultural and intellectual property not only extends the power of the Whitestream but also diminishes the power of Indigenous communities, continuing the project of cultural imperialism that began over 500 years ago. In view of the above, it is clear to see how postmodernism—the notion of fluid boundaries, the relativizing of difference, and negation of grand narratives—primarily serves Whitestream America. The multiphrenia of postmodern plurality, its “world of simulation” and obliteration of any sense of objective reality, has given rise to a frenetic search for the “authentic” led by culture-vultures and capitalistbandits fraught with “imperialist nostalgia.”15 In response, American Indian communities have restricted access to the discursive spaces of American Indian culture and identity and the non-discursive borders of American Indian communities. In short, the notion of fluidity has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples. Federal agencies have invoked the language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for dismantling the structures of tribal life.
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Page 197 Whitestream America has seized upon the message of relativism to declare open season on Indians, and Whitestream academics have employed the language of signification and simulation to transmute centuries of war between Indigenous peoples and their respective nation-states into a “genetic and cultural dialogue” (Valle & Torres, 1995, p. 141). Thus, in spite of its “democratic” promise, postmodernism and its ludic theories of identity fail to provide Indigenous communities the theoretical grounding for asserting their claims as colonized peoples and, more importantly, impede construction of transcendent emancipatory theories. Despite the pressures of cultural encroachment and cultural imperialism, however, Indigenous communities continue to evolve as sites of political contestation and cultural empowerment. They manage to survive the dangers of colonialist forces by employing proactive strategies that emphasize education, empowerment, and self-determination, and defensive tactics that protect against unfettered economic and political encroachment. Thus, whatever else the borders of Indigenous communities might or might not demarcate they continue to serve as potent geographic filters of all that is non-Indian— dividing between the real and metaphoric spaces that differentiate Indian Country from the rest of Whitestream America. A postmodern theory of difference that insists on impartiality masks the power and privilege that underpins Whitestream culture and perspectives. In other words, American Indians do not enter into a social space in which identities compete with equal power for legitimacy but, rather, are infused into a political terrain that presumes their inferiority. As such, Native peoples are neither free to “reinvent” themselves nor able to liberally “transgress” borders of difference but, rather, remain captive to the determined spaces of colonialist rule. As such, they experience the binds of the paradox inherent to current modes of identity theory and it becomes increasingly evident that “neither the cold linearity of blood quantum nor the tortured weakness of self-identification” (both systems designed and legitimated by the state) will provide them any relief (Alfred, 1999, p. 84). Thus, while postmodern theorists rightly question the whole notion of origins and work to disrupt the grand narrative of modernism, its hyperelastic and all-inclusive categories offer little to no protection against the colonialist forces of cultural encroachment and capitalist commodification. Critical Theories of Subjectivity: Postcolonial Constructs Meet Colonized Bodies A cost-benefit analysis of both essentialist and postmodern discourse indicates the dire need for a revolutionary theory and praxis that address the political need for sovereignty and the socioeconomic urgency for building a transnational agenda. In these efforts, it is critical that American Indians work to maintain their distinctiveness as tribal peoples of sovereign nations (construct effective means of border patrolling) while, at the same time, move toward building political solidarity and coalition (construct effective means of border crossing). Such is the promise of critical or “revolutionary” formations of subjectivity. In a postmodern world where “everything is everything” critical scholars critique the practice of framing questions of “difference” exclusively in terms of the cultural and discursive (e.g. language, signs, tropes), cutting them off from the structural causes and material relations that create “difference.” They argue that reducing political struggles to discursive arguments not only displaces explanation— knowledge for social change—with resignification but also authorizes a retreat from social and political transformation. According to McLaren (1998) such postmodern tactics promote “an ontological agnosticism” that not only relinquishes the primacy of social transformation, but also encourages a kind of “epistemological relativism” that calls for the tolerance of a wide range of meanings without advocating any single one of them (McLaren, 1998, p. 242). Therefore, critical scholars contest the over-blurring of boundaries, the reduction
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Page 198 of difference to matters of discourse, and emphasis of local over grand narratives, contending that such “tactics” serve to obfuscate and, in effect, deny the existing hierarchies of power. In response critical scholars advocate the postcolonial notion of mestizaje as a more effectual model of multisubjectivity (Darder, Torres, & Gutierrez, 1997; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997; McLaren & Sleeter, 1995; Valle & Torres, 1995). While incorporated into wider usage by the academic Left, the counterdiscourse of mestizaje is rooted in the Latin-American subjectivity of the mestízo/a —literally a person of mixed ancestry, especially of American Indian, European, and African backgrounds (Delgado Bernal, 1998). More recently, critical education scholars searching for a viable model of multisubjectivity have incorporated the spirit of the Chicana mestíza , viewing it as the postcolonial antidote to imperialist notions of racial purity (di Leonardo, 1994). The emergent discourse of mestizaje embodies the mestíza ’s demonstrated refusal to prefer one language, one national heritage, or one culture at the expense of others, asserting instead a radically inclusive construct that “willfully blurs political, racial, [and] cultural borders in order to better adapt to the world as it is actually constructed” (Valle & Torres, 1995, p. 149). McLaren articulates mestizaje as: the embodiment of a transcultural, transnational subject, a self-reflexive entity capable of rupturing the facile legitimization of “authentic” national identities through (the) articulation of a subject who is conjunctural, who is a relational part of an ongoing negotiated connection to the larger society, and who is interpolated by multiple subject positionings. (McLaren, 1997, p. 12) In other words, mestizaje crosses all imposed cultural, linguistic, and national borders, refusing all “natural” or transcendent claims that “by definition attempt to escape from any type of historical and normative grounding” (McLaren & Giroux, 1997, p. 117). Ultimately, the critical notion of mestizaje is itself multifunctional. It not only signifies the decline of the imperial West but also decenters Whiteness and undermines the myth of a democratic nation-state based on borders and exclusions (Valle & Torres, 1995). Insofar as the notion of mestizaje disrupts the jingoistic discourse of nationalism it is indeed crucial to the emancipatory project. As McLaren notes: “Educators would do well to consider Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) project of creating mestizaje theories that create new categories of identity for those left out or pushed out of existing ones” (McLaren, 1997, p. 537). In so doing, however, he cautions, “care must be taken not to equate hybridity with equality” (McLaren, 1997, p. 46).16 Coco Fusco (1995) similarly notes: “The postcolonial celebration of hybridity has (too often) been interpreted as the sign that no further concern about the politics of representation and cultural exchange is needed. With ease, we lapse back into the integrationist rhetoric of the 1960s” (p. 46). In the wake of transgressing borders and building post-national coalitions, these words caution us against losing sight of the unique challenges of particular groups and their distinctive struggles for social justice. In taking this admonition seriously, it is important to consider the ways in which transgressive subjectivity—mestizaje —both furthers and impedes Indigenous imperatives of self-determination and sovereignty. The Postcolonial Mestizaje and Indigenous Subjectivity Though the postcolonial construct of mestizaje —rooted in the “discourses of power”—differs from “freefloating” postmodern constructions of identity, an undercurrent of fluidity and displacedness continues to permeate, if not define, mestizaje . As such, it remains problematic for Indigenous formations of subjectivity and the expressed need to forge and maintain integral connections to both land and place. Consider, for example, the following statement on the nature of critical subjectivity by Peter McLaren (1997):
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Page 199 The struggle for critical subjectivity is the struggle to occupy a space of hope—a liminal space, an intimation of the anti-structure, of what lives in the in-between zone of undecidedability—in which one can work toward a praxis of redemption … A sense of atopy has always been with me, a resplendent placelessness, a feeling of living in germinal formlessness … I cannot find words to express what this border identity means to me. All I have are what Georges Bastille (1988) calls mots glissants (slippery words). (pp. 13–14) Though McLaren speaks passionately about the need for a “praxis of redemption,” the very possibility of redemption is situated within our willingness to not only accept but also flourish in the “liminal spaces,” border identities, and postcolonial hybridities inherent to postmodern life. In fact, McLaren perceives the fostering of a “resplendent placelessness” itself as the gateway to a more just and democratic society. In other words, the critical project of mestizaje maintains the same core assumption of the “politics of property.” That is, in a democratic society, human subjectivity—and therefore emancipation—is conceived of as inherently a rights-based as opposed to land-based project. While Indigenous scholars embrace the anti-colonial aspects of mestizaje , they require a construct that is both geographically rooted and historically placed. Consider, for example, the following commentary by Deloria (1992) on the centrality of place and land in the construction of American Indian subjectivity: Recognizing the sacredness of lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiment. Instead of denying this dimension of our emotional lives, we should be setting aside additional places that have transcendent meaning. Sacred sites that higher spiritual powers have chosen for manifestation enable us to focus our concerns on the specific form of our lives … Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibility to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation. (pp. 278, 281) Gross misunderstanding of this connection between American Indian subjectivity and place, and, more importantly, between sovereignty and land has been the source of myriad ethnocentric policies and injustices in Indian Country. Consider, for example, the impact of the Indian Religious Freedom Act (IRFA, 1978). Government officials never anticipated that passage of this Act would set up a virtually intractable conflict between property rights and religious freedom. But, American Indians viewed the Act as an invitation to return to their sacred sites. Since several sites were on government lands and being damaged by commercial use, numerous tribes filed lawsuits under the IRFA, alleging mismanagement and destruction of their “religious” sites. At the same time, Whitestream corporations, tourists, and even rock climbers filed their own lawsuits accusing federal land managers of illegally restricting access to Indian sacred sites. They argued that since such restrictions were placed on “public sites” the IRFA violated the constitutional separation of Church and state. This history alone points to the central difference of American Indian and Whitestream subjectivity, whether articulated through the theoretical frames of essentialism, postmodernism, or postcolonialism. To be clear, Indigenous and critical scholars do share a common ground. Namely, they envision an antiimperialist theory of subjectivity; one free of the compulsions of global capitalism and the racism, classism, sexism, and xenophobia it engenders. But where critical scholars ground
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Page 200 their vision in Western conceptions of democracy and justice that presume a “liberated” self, Indigenous scholars ground their vision in conceptions of sovereignty that presume a profound connection to place and land. Thus, to a large degree, the seemingly liberatory constructs of fluidity, mobility, and transgression are perceived not only as the language of critical subjectivity but, also, as part of the fundamental lexicon of Western imperialism. Deloria (1999) writes: Although the loss of land must be seen as a political and economic disaster of the first magnitude, the real exile of the tribes occurred with the destruction of ceremonial life (associated with the loss of land) and the failure or inability of white society to offer a sensible and cohesive alternative to the traditions, which Indians remembered. People became disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to learn were in a constant state of change because they were not part of a cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites were making to the technology they invented. (p. 247) Thus, insofar as American Indian identities continue to be defined and shaped in interdependence with place, the transgressive mestizaje functions as a potentially homogenizing force that presumes the continued exile of tribal peoples and their enduring absorption into the American “democratic” Whitestream.17 While critical scholars clearly aim to construct a very different kind of democratic solidarity that disrupts the sociopolitical and economic hegemony of the dominant culture around a transformed notion of mestizaje (one committed to the destabilization of the isolationist narratives of nationalism and cultural chauvinism), I argue that any liberatory project that does not begin with a clear understanding of the difference of American Indian-ness will, in the end, work to undermine tribal life. In this light, the very notion of transgression runs deeply counter to the roots of Indígena. So while there may be support for the notion of coalition within the Indian community there is also a great deal of expressed concern over the potential for its mediator—transgressive subjectivity—to ultimately mute tribal differences and erase distinctive Indian identities. The above tensions indicate the dire need to develop a language that operates at the crossroads of unity and difference that defines this space in terms of political mobilization and cultural authenticity,18 expressing both the interdependence and distinctiveness as tribal peoples. The above analysis points to the need for an Indigenous theory of subjectivity, one that addresses the political quest for sovereignty, the socioeconomic urgency to build transnational coalitions and creates the intellectual space for social change. In these efforts, as I stated earlier, it is critical that American Indians work to maintain their distinctiveness as tribal peoples of sovereign nations (construct effective means of border patrolling) while at the same time, move toward building inter- and intra-tribal solidarity and political coalition (construct effective means of border crossing). Such a Red Pedagogy would not only view the personal as political but the political as deeply informed by the structures of colonialism and global capitalism, transforming the struggle over identity to evolve, not apart from, but in relationship with, struggles over tribal land, resources, treaty rights, and intellectual property. A Red Pedagogy also aims to construct a self-determined space for American Indian intellectualism, recognizing that survival as an Indigenous scholar not only depends on one’s ability to navigate the terrain of the academy but, to theorize and negotiate a racist, sexist, marketplace that aims to exploit the labor of signified “others” for capital gain. Finally, a Red Pedagogy is committed to providing Indigenous peoples the social and intellectual space to reimagine what it means to be Indian in contemporary U.S. society, arming them with a critical analysis of the intersecting systems of domination and the tools to navigate them.
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Page 201 Red Pedagogy: Implications for Education From the standpoint of Red Pedagogy the primary lesson in all of this is pedagogical. In other words, as we are poised to raise yet another generation in a nation at war and at risk, we must consider how emerging conceptions of citizenship, sovereignty, and democracy in the United States will impact the (re)formation of our national identity, particularly among young people in schools. As Mitchell (2000, p. 5) notes, “the production of democracy, the practice of education, and the constitution of the nationstate” have always been interminably bound together. The imperative before us as citizens is to engage a process of un-thinking our colonial roots and rethinking democracy. For teachers and students this means that we must be willing to act as agents of transgression, posing critical questions and engaging dangerous discourse. Such is the basis of Red Pedagogy. In particular, Red Pedagogy offers the following seven precepts as a way of thinking our way around and through the challenges facing American education in the twenty-first century and our mutual need to define decolonizing pedagogies: 1. Red Pedagogy is primarily a pedagogical project. In this context, pedagogy is understood as being inherently political, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual. 2. Red Pedagogy is fundamentally rooted in Indigenous knowledge and praxis. It is particularly interested in knowledge that furthers understanding and analysis of the forces of colonization. 3. Red Pedagogy is informed by critical theories of education . A Red Pedagogy searches for ways it can both deepen and be deepened by engagement with critical and revolutionary theories and praxis. 4. Red Pedagogy promotes an education for decolonization . Within Red Pedagogy the root metaphors of decolonization are articulated as equity, emancipation, sovereignty, and balance. In this sense, an education for decolonization makes no claim to political neutrality but, rather, engages a method of analysis and social inquiry that troubles the capitalist-imperialist aims of unfettered competition, accumulation, and exploitation. 5. Red Pedagogy is a project that interrogates both democracy and indigenous sovereignty . In this context sovereignty is broadly defined as “a people’s right to rebuild its demand to exist and present its gifts to the world … an adamant refusal to dissociate culture, identity, and power from the land” (Lyons, 2000). 6. Red Pedagogy actively cultivates praxis of collective agency. That is, Red Pedagogy aims to build transcultural and transnational solidarities among indigenous peoples and others committed to reimagining a sovereign space free of imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist exploitation. 7. Red Pedagogy is grounded in hope. This is, however, not the future-centered hope of the Western imagination but, rather, a hope that lives in contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors, the power of traditional knowledge, and the possibilities of new understandings. In the end, a Red Pedagogy is about engaging the development of “community-based power” in the interest of “a responsible political, economic, and spiritual society.” That is, the power to live out “active presences and survivances rather than an illusionary democracy.” Vizenor’s (1993) notion of survivance signifies a state of being beyond “survival, endurance, or a mere response to colonization,” and of moving toward “an active presence … and active repudiation of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” In these post-Katrina times, I find the notion of survivance—particularly as it relates to colonized peoples— to be poignant and powerful. It speaks to our collective need to decolonize, to push back against empire, and reclaim what it means to be a people of sovereign mind and body.
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Page 202 Notes 1 In recognition of the diversity of terminology currently in use, the terms Native American, Indigenous, and American Indian are used interchangeably. However, when referencing issues specific to the tribal peoples of the United States who hold treaty rights and sovereign status, the term American Indian is used. 2 American Indian scholar, Greg Cajete defines “ensoulment” as the expressed affective-spiritual relationship Indigenous peoples extend to the land. 3 Hayden White (1976, p. 33), cited in Scott Manning Stevens (2003, p. 127). 4 It is important to note that this category included Indians who refused to accept the terms established by the government, regardless of “blood-quantum.” 5 Insofar as blood quantum has been retained as the legal marker of “legitimacy” it has been used to not only undermine the unity and cultural integrity of American Indian communities but to further extend and embolden the power of the federal government. 6 The contrived division between “mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods” has not only served to threaten unity within Indian communities but also to prevent the likelihood of political solidarity emerging between tribal and detribalized, and/or reservation and non-reservation Indians. 7 Though the Dawes Act is typically recognized as the primary instigation of divisions between tribal and detribalized Indians, the history of detribalization actually precedes Dawes. This discussion focuses exclusively on American Indian “tribal” identity and does not include the history of detribalized Indians. Though I recognize the historically contrived and arbitrary nature of this division, to be a member of a federally recognized tribe remains an important legal distinction in the United States as well as carrying a particular legal status, warranting special consideration. The eventual aim, however, is to reveal the colonizing effects of such “traditional” categories of Indian-ness and to propose a more comprehensive and complex understanding of American Indian identity. 8 Pre-eminent American Indian scholar, Vine Deloria Jr., has written over 18 books and 100 articles in an effort to delineate the political, spiritual, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of American Indian tribal life. His expansive body of work alone testifies to the complexity of defining tribal life and suggests the impossibility of encompassing its multiple dimensions in a single work. 9 It should also be noted that these “legal indicators” exist as a consequence of colonization, each representing numerous treaties, legislative acts, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions. 10 It should be noted that the “protection” proffered by citizenship rights (i.e., civil liberties) worked to erode traditional structures of tribal life, sometimes pitting Indian against Indian and tribe against tribe. For a more complete discussion of the distinction between that which is civic and that which is tribal see Deloria & Lytle (1984), and Denis (1997) . 11 As presently constructed, tribal governments retain many powers of nations, some powers greater than those of states, and some governing powers greater than local non-Indian municipalities (Deloria & Lytle, 1984). In spite of their “sovereign” status, Indian tribes currently rely on the federal government for their operating funds, for the right to interpret and renegotiate their own treaty rights, and for access and control of natural resources on their own lands. 12 Adapting from the feminist notion of malestream, Claude Denis (1997) defines Whitestream as the idea that while American society is not “White” in socio-demographic terms, it remains principally and fundamentally structured on the basis of Anglo-European, “White” experience. 13 Native American Consultants, Inc., Indian Definition Study, contracted pursuant to P. L. 95-561, Title IV, Section 1147, submitted to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC, January 1980, p. 2. 14 For further insight to the marketing of Native America, see Whitt (1998). 15 Renato Rosaldo uses the term “imperialist nostalgia” to refer to the paradoxical condition of deliberately altering forms of life, only to nostalgically long for the past, regretting that things have not remained the same. Rosaldo writes, “in any of its versions imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity (in the) brutal domination” (Rosaldo, 1993, p. 70). 16 Critical scholars Cameron McCarthy (1988, 1995), John Ogbu (1978), Chandra Mohanty (1989), and Henry Giroux (1992) similarly caution against equating hybridity with equality.
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Page 203 17 The notion of mestizaje as absorption is particularly problematic for Indigenous peoples of Central and South America where the myth of the mestizaje (belief that the continent’s original cultures and inhabitants no longer exist) has been used for centuries to force the integration of Indigenous communities into the national mestizo model (Van Cott, 1994). According to Roldolfo Stavenhagen (1992), the myth of mestizaje has provided the ideological pretext for numerous South American governmental laws and policies expressly designed to strengthen the nation-state through the incorporation of all “non-national” (read: Indigenous) elements into the mainstream. Thus, what Valle and Torres (1995) describe as “the continent’s unfinished business of cultural hybridization” (p. 141), Indigenous peoples view as the continents’ long and bloody battle to absorb their existence into the master narrative of the mestízo. 18 In contrast, McLaren and Gutiérrez (1997) admonish educators to develop a concept of unity and difference as political mobilization rather than cultural authenticity. References Alfred, T. (1999). Peace, power, righteousness . Oxford University Press. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands, la frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lutte Books. Darder, A., Torres, R., & Gutiérrez, H. (Eds.). (1997). Latinos and education. New York: Routledge. Delgado Bernal, D. (1998). Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Harvard Educational Review , 68 (4), 555–582. Deloria, V. Jr., & Lytle, C. (1983). American Indians, American justice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Deloria, V. Jr., & Lytle, C. (1984). The nations within. Austin: University of Texas Press. Denis, C. (1997). We are not you. Toronto: Broadview. Fusco, C. (1995). English is broken here. New York: New Press. Giroux, H. (1992). Border crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. New York: Routledge. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Joe, J. R., & Miller, D. L. (1997). Cultural survival and contemporary American Indian women in the city. In C. J. Cohen (Ed.), Indigenous women transforming politics (pp. 137–150). New York University Press. Kincheloe, J., & Steinberg, S. (1997). Changing multiculturalism . Bristol, PA: Open University Press. Lyons, S. R. (2000). Rhetorical Sovereignty. College, Composition and Communication , 51 (3), 447–468. McCarthy, C. (1995). The problem with origins. In P. McLaren & C. Sleeter (Eds.), Multicultural education, critical pedagogy and the politics of difference , (pp. 245–268). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. McCarthy, C., & Crichlow, W. (1993). Race and identity and representation in education. New York and London: Routledge. McLaren, P., & Giroux, H. (1997). Writing from the margins. In Revolutionary multiculturalism , (pp. 16– 41). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stavenhagen, R. (1992). Challenging the nation-state in Latin America. Journal of International Affairs, 45 (2), 421–440. Stevens, S. M. (2003). New World contacts and the trope of the “naked savage.” In E. Harvey (Ed.), Sensible flesh: On touch in early modern culture (p. 127) . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Tauli-Corpus, V. (1993). We are part of biodiversity, respect our rights. Third World Resurgence , 36 (25), 25. Valle, V., & Torres, R. (1995). The idea of Mestizaje and the “race” problematic. In A. Darder (Ed.), Culture and difference. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Van Cott, D. L. (1994). Indigenous peoples and democracy in Latin America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Vizenor, G. (1993). The ruins of representation. American Indian Quarterly , 17 , 1–7. White, H. (1976). The noble savage: Theme as fetish. In F. Chiapelli (Ed.), First images of America (p. 33). Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitt, L. A. (1998). Cultural imperialism and the marketing of Native America. In D. A. Mihesuah (Ed.), Natives and academics (pp. 139–171) . Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.
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Page 204 15 Foucault’s Challenges to Critical Theory in Education Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer (translated by Lisa Gertum Becker) In this chapter, I discuss the critical perspective of Michel Foucault’s thinking in the field of education, focusing on his original approach to dealing with the concepts of subject, power, and discourse. The theoretical discussion will be complemented by examples gathered from recent research, conducted in Brazil, about the relationship among youth, culture, and the media; research in which I have used Foucauldian tools of analysis. Those tools have proven highly effective, as they cause a revolution of sorts in the way we approach critical theory in the field of education. The goal of this chapter is to examine to what extent Foucault subverts, questions or, rather, expands and advances the critical work on ourselves, so crucially necessary in our time, and particularly in the daily life of schools, universities, and in academic life as a whole. Since the mid-1990s, as Bernadette Baker (2004) aptly pointed out, Foucault’s name has been significantly present in the Human Sciences, even though his early writings date as far back as the 1950s. The marginalization of the philosopher in the field of the so-called “humanities,” according to Baker, is related to a discomfort caused by Foucault’s somewhat “negationist” performance—as a thinker who constantly destabilizes us, pulling the ground from under our feet, leaving us “adrift,” putting on hold our ambitions for freedom, political intervention, for struggling for emancipation and autonomy; our desire to see “a light at the end of the tunnel”—very dear objects especially to critical scholars. In 1986, Edward W. Said wrote an instigating chapter in the book Foucault: A Critical Reader, edited by David Couzens Hoy, where he addresses the issue of the minimization of the possibilities of resistance, attributed to Foucault, with all care and consequence of someone who thinks without losing the ties to his own heritage. Said positions Foucault alongside the philosophers of the School of Frankfurt and relates them to Gramsci and Raymond Williams, saying that all these authors devote ample space to ideological questions and to critical thought and action—each in his own way, each with his own emphases. And he shows us that the crucial difference between them is the fact that, in the case of Gramsci and Williams, for example, the (positive) emphasis is placed on the vulnerability of the organization of culture and society, susceptible to be dismantled by certain kinds of social action, whereas in Foucault the emphasis is different. Edward Said shows us that, in his own way, Foucault has a vigor, a problematizing force that we must not overlook, particularly when he discusses the production of subjectivities and the category of aesthetics as negation of power, and in relation to the choice of a genealogical and critical history, as a form of intervention in the webs of discourse and knowledge. For Said, already in the 1980s, Foucault’s imagination of power showed unquestionable potency, opening
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Page 205 the doors to a series of research initiatives and studies that had not yet been contemplated (Said, 1986, p. 155). More than 20 years after Edward Said’s provocation, we find ourselves wishing to contribute to the debate on critical theories in education, with Foucault as the starting point. As Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan aptly remark, in the Introduction to the book Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education , it is not a matter of blindly accepting a scholar like Foucault (or any other), but, rather, of working with him, from him, and if necessary against him (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), understanding that the philosopher himself taught us that something inherent to philosophical practice is the attitude of accepting to think differently from the way we usually think, rather than simply legitimating the things we already know and which are already established for us. “What is philosophical activity today … if not the critical work of thought on itself?”—writes Foucault (1990b, p. 13). The author thus claims the right to permanent change, the right of individuals to exercise force on their own intellectual work, to face what is foreign to them, to undergo, through study and inquiry, a “transforming experience of oneself in the play of truth, and not as a simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication” (1990b, p. 13). Foucault invites us to undertake research without it being entirely pre-determined by theoretical or political partisanship. For him, critical thought is directly related to questioning any closed schemes of creating, making history, investigating: he sought the plurality of theoretical and political questions, as well as a broad crossover of different fields of knowledge and widely different social practices in the analysis of the social. For Foucault, it would not be very productive to use a political doctrine as basis for thinking about the problems of education, for example; whereas opening up to a plurality of problems focused on pedagogic and academic practices would seem to him much richer, with greater possibilities of offering new ways of thinking about this institutional and knowledge field. For him, the great challenge was precisely to investigate the intercrossing of fields in relation to a particular problem or object, as he believed that political issues are never dissociated from moral and ethical issues; according to this view, specific themes of education, as learning or discipline in school, for example, would have to be seen in terms of political strategies, of the emergence of certain kinds of knowledge and also of moral attitudes, of modes of knowledge, especially modes of subjection and subjectivation in culture. This way of appropriating a theory and making history is related to what he insistently called devoting oneself to dealing with “problematizations” (Foucault, 2004b). In the interview “Polemics, politics and problematizations,” given to his friend Paul Rabinow in 1984, the year of his death, Foucault explains: What distinguishes thought is that it is totally different from the set of representations implied in a certain behavior: it is also totally different from the field of attitudes that can determine it. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, and present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object and reflects on it as a problem. (Foucault, 2004b, pp. 231–232)1 To reflect on things as problems. To step back from what we do and what we know. To turn ordinary statements into problems to be considered. To investigate what made possible certain forms of knowledge, power, forms of existing and being in the world—in particular aspects of our life. That motion has to do with the work of critical analysis, which helps us investigate and expose how it was possible to construct different solutions for particular problems we posed
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Page 206 ourselves at different times and places; we must consider that those solutions did, in their turn, result from the way in which certain problematizations were put to us. That is the task of thought; that is the task of critique. In view of this proposition for the exercise of critique, Foucault explains the work of thinkers, articulating the three great axes of his work—power, knowledge, and subject—as follows: What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form. (Foucault, 2000c, pp. 350–351)2 This text is organized in three sections, examining the three Foucauldian axes, to show approximations and divergences of Foucault’s thinking in relation to some perspectives of the critical theory in education. As a matter of fact, several of these scholars have devoted themselves to studies and research centered on debates about the issues of culture, audiovisual images, technologies, and information and communication; hegemonic discourses linked to the great themes of education, in different countries. I argue here, that all those themes embraced by critical theorists have, in Foucault, an outstanding source for analyses that potentialize and, at the same time, challenge the classic reference framework adopted. The Discursive Construction of the Social and the Rejection of Facile Interpretations Let us start with the theme of discourse and knowledge. Foucault’s central question was, from the outset: what forms of rationality has our society been historically constructing? And which of these forms of rationality has the subject taken as his, applying them to himself, making them his own? How did we construct truth within certain schemes of rationality, and become the subject of these discourses? How did we come to define who is the mad subject and who is the “sane” subject, or the criminal citizen and the “normal” citizen? How was it possible to construct what we call Human Sciences and analyze the speaking subject, the working subject, the living subject? Finally, how can the subject tell the truth about himself? What is the price of these modes of constructing truth about ourselves? What is important to highlight here is how close these questions are to problems posed by classical critical theorists, such as the philosophers of the School of Frankfurt. This is clearly recognized by Judith Butler. In the book Giving an Account of Oneself, she points to the dialogue of Foucault with Critical Theory present in the interview given by Foucault to the magazine Telos , one year before his death. The interview was published with the suggestive title “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism” (Foucault, 2000b). Foucault himself recognizes that many doors had already been opened by the Frankfurtians, with regards to making a critique of reason: for him, since Weber, through the School of Frankfurt, and science historians such as Canguilhem and Bachelard, much was done in terms of investigating which forms of rationality become dominant at certain times and places, and which of those are effectively given the status of “reason” (Foucault, 2000b, pp. 315–316). How does Foucault move onward with this critique? First, he shows us the importance of investigating the multiple and incessant bifurcations of reason, the profusion of ramified forms of rationality experienced by Western society. Hence, for him, it is not enough to talk about the moment when reason becomes technical
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Page 207 or instrumental, something that Frankfurtians so effectively taught us, therefore helping us to formulate our critical theories in education. It is necessary to go further. Hence, he was interested in multiplying (through the meticulous investigation of historical documents) the different forms of rationality in Western culture. Foucault was also interested in the different ways of creating those rationalities, or the ways in which one form of reason blends with another, as, for instance, in the constitution of the deviant subject. What are the rationalities that construct murderers, insane persons, prostitutes, or heretics as “abnormal”? Are they all moral deviants? Or subjects not endowed with “reason”? When he analyzed the discursive construction of these figures, the historian paved the way for a description of the different forms of rationality at play in these processes. The question was: how could these objects (madness, discipline, sexuality) become possible in our culture, as objects of knowledge, in different fields of knowledge? For Foucault it was a matter of investigating “the order of discourse”—the title of his famous inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, in 1970. There he exposed the multiple strategies to control discourse —that dangerous “thing.” In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1986), the author goes even further in elucidating the task of those who propose to describe discourses and work with modes of constitution of knowledges ( savoirs). Here we meet a fierce critic of analyses that he considered too simplistic: e.g., analyses satisfied with the opposition between truth and ideology; or analyses founded exclusively upon linguistic and semiotic facts, on the language and signs model; or even logical analyses, based on the logic of dialectic contradiction. Foucault’s attacks on these choices—many of them taken seriously by thinkers in the Critical Theory tradition—distanced him, for a long time, from many education scholars. But they also led to brilliant analyses, such as the one by Nikolas Rose, who, inspired by Foucault, wrote Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Rose, 1998). My interest here is to show that analyzing discourse, in Foucault’s perspective, has to do, primarily, with a rejection of univocal explanations, of facile interpretations. He rejected the quest for the ultimate meaning or the hidden meaning of things. For Foucault, it is necessary to be at the level of the existence of words, things effectively said at a specific time and place. That means that one must work hard on discourse itself, letting it emerge in its own peculiar complexity. And the first task is to break free from a long and effective learning process that still makes us view discourse merely as a set of signs, as signifiers that refer to specific contents, bearing that meaning, almost always hidden, dissimulated, twisted, intentionally distorted, full of “real” content and representations. This is the first aspect, which, in my view, subverts certain analyses that see within every discourse, or in the period of time preceding it, the possibility of finding, untouched, the truth that we should “awaken.” For Foucault, there is nothing “behind the curtains.” There are, instead, statements and relations that discourse itself sets in motion. To analyze discourse means to realize precisely this: the existence of historic relations, of very concrete practices that are “alive” in the discourse. For example, to analyze official texts about children’s education or about digital media in the life of teenagers and young people means to try to escape from the facile interpretation of what would be “behind” the documents or the words spoken by the students, which could “denounce” the media’s manipulation, the commercial intentionality of TV programs or TV advertisements aimed at the young. That is not enough, as it is preconceived knowledge. The idea is to try to make the most out of the empirical material, since it is a historical and political production, words are also constructions, and language is constitutive of practices. But does the author, then, declare the full autonomy of discourse? Does discourse organize itself, including social practices? Perhaps the Foucauldian works from the 1960s—The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge—as Hoy (1986) points out, suggest that idealist conception of language, which was indeed even admitted by Foucault. However, the idea of universally constitutive categories, peculiar to structuralism and philosophical idealism, never fitted
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Page 208 into the philosopher’s larger project. According to Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), he wanted to demonstrate precisely the opposite, i.e., the inexistence of permanent structures, responsible for constituting reality. The conceptualization of discourse as a social practice—already presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge , but exposed much more clearly in Discipline and Punish and in the famous lecture The Order of Discourse— underlines the idea that discourse is always produced in connection with power relations. And, later, in the three volumes of his History of Sexuality , Foucault explicitly shows us that there is a dual and mutual conditioning between discursive practices (knowledges, truths, and statements) and non-discursive practices (different institutional practices). But the basic idea remains that discourse is constitutive of reality, and produces, as power does, countless knowledge. As mentioned earlier, it is virtually impossible to separate the three axes—knowledge, power, and subject—of the Foucauldian proposition. It is impossible to analyze, for instance, in what way Brazilian adolescents from all social classes consume a magazine such as Capricho ,3 which provides them with a catalogue of rules and norms on how to live their love life and sexuality, how to deal with their bodies, use beauty products, study, relate with their family or with current environmental problems—without dealing with the power issue or without mentioning what is produced in those subjects, as effects of truth and morality. My research of the past 15 years4 has shown the extent to which this type of publication is used by Brazilian teenage girls as a “self-help manual.” With regards to female sexuality, to name but one of the topics analyzed, the magazine suggests that girls should, first and foremost, get informed. To get informed means, according to Capricho , getting to know herself, looking inside herself, examining and identifying her own body and her desires, plunging into a learning process about sex. The discourse of pleasure is accompanied by a scientific discourse that gives names, offers detailed explanations, justifies sensations, in such a way that the former (pleasure) is pulverized and takes a subsidiary role. This process has the participation of a competent, authorized expert—a gynecologist (generally a man), the person who “is most knowledgeable about the female body,”—with whom she should be docile and who she should allow to examine her, in the name of health. Doubts, fears, and shame must be talked about—and for all those ills the magazine provides comforting words and offers very concrete and specific forms of “treatment.” This rather brief analysis demonstrates the appropriation of the Foucauldian conceptions of discourse, truth, and power strategies—in this case, regarding the production, circulation, and consumption of discourses; at the same time, it refers to contemporary modes of subjectivation—i.e., the ways in which Brazilian girls become “subjects” of the truths enunciated by a magazine. Today, guidance about how to experience one’s sexuality has become increasingly more present in the media, particularly television, which proliferates the number of programs targeted specifically at young people. With the growing access to the Internet in Brazil, the digital spaces of information on sexuality are proliferating, which requires us to undertake new investigations. In a recent study (Fischer, 2008), with groups of Secondary School students in the city of Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, we observed how much teenagers are interpolated by different media, in the sense that they become subjects of a discourse about the beauty of the body and about a sexuality that focuses precisely on the status granted by perfect bodies. Foucault’s insistent rejection of totalizing theories to explain the social reality, as well as his rejection of a vision of scientific “progress” or the progress of reason, led him to “revolutionize history,” as Veyne (1982) puts it. And it certainly challenges the methodological propositions of critical theorists. It is important to emphasize that this has to do with the position he takes, assuming himself as a historian of the present. His work shows us how important it is to focus on what is happening today. And that is what he did when he studied the genealogy of the great constituent themes of the Western tradition, through a detailed description of the social practices related to the confinement of “abnormal” individuals, the control and disciplining of bodies, techniques of confession, and exposure of the self.
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Page 209 Power and the Relevance of Practices Foucault became known mainly for his formulations about power—a theme which, in his work, was always connected with the production of knowledge and truth, and with the construction of subjects in culture. Our struggles, as education scholars, always have to do with language and power, since we are permanently involved in discursive disputes; similarly, the facts and statements with which we work refer to practices—discursive and non-discursive—which constitute the raw material of our investigations and have to do with power relations and modes of constitution of individual and social subjects. I dare say that one of the main difficulties faced by Foucault’s readers has to do with the power issue. Foucault rejected binary, vertical, and global oppositions for understanding power (dominant and dominated, structure and superstructure, government and governed) and he showed us the strictly relational character of power. Hence, he always preferred to talk about multiple, horizontal, microscopic, daily “power relations,” even though he discussed them in documents about strong institutional schemes, such as prisons and hospitals. He also made a very clear distinction between power and violence, emphasizing that power can only be exercised over free men and stating that wherever there is power, there is also resistance. Because resistance is not something external to power, it is part of it. Like power, resistance is mobile, transient, and unstable, it exists within relations, within practices and it even permeates the individuals themselves (Foucault, 1990a). In other words, Foucault taught us to not see power as something negative but, rather, as something that produces, incites, is exercised. For him, power works in a complex, productive, and subtle web that sets in motion other webs of discourses, knowledge, and daily and institutional practices—which are, in turn, related with the production and circulation of truths. Considering this position, how can we make a critique of reason in our time without resorting to the binary oppositions mentioned above? How do we think about ourselves within power relations? How can we not regard resistance as something external to power? I think that Foucault’s contribution to the thinking of critical theorists is precisely in that he urges the production of studies that deal with the micro processes of the exercise of power, disseminated on the surface of things and bodies; processes that expose that exercise, that disseminate it in daily practices, in reality, that incite subjects to speak and to do something, to constantly tell “the” truth. In political terms, Foucault’s proposition is that intellectuals are not in the world to tell the oppressed what the “real truth” of facts is, but to fight in the micro spaces, to render power apparent in the spaces where it is most insidious; and also to learn to look at marginal problems, where specific power foci materialize. From Nietzsche, Foucault learnt that history inscribes itself in bodies (Foucault, 2000b). And that is perhaps one of his most meaningful contributions to Human Sciences and Education: to reflect about power relations in micro spaces, in the smallest practices, the places of dissemination of truths about how to exist in the condition of man, woman, child, poor, rich, as a First World or Third World citizen, homosexual, Black, Eastern, Western, Indigenous. The idea of a pulverized power, present in every relation and in every place, led to the labeling of Foucault as the herald of persecution, hopelessness, imprisonment with no way out. Towards the end of his life, he explained the importance of fighting against all forms of subjection, against the “submission of subjectivity” (Foucault, 1983b). If we must always be subjected, then let us fight for forms of subjection that do not submit us so radically in that which is most dear to us—our subjectivity. However, he believed that the greatest difficulty in this struggle was to consider the specific form of power that our society has, so effectively, learnt to exercise and to improve in the course of three centuries: a power concerned with the well-being of the population as a whole and the health of individuals in particular, a power coated with a veneer of “generosity”
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Page 210 and sincere dedication to the whole community, but still a power that cannot be exercised if it does not possess every piece of information about each group, about what every individual thinks and feels and about how individuals can be steered most effectively. He showed us that, in the late eighteenth century, life enters history, the body becomes the object of knowledge and power, the historical and the biological intertwine. And that power and resistance are, thus, exercised in the daily life of the subjects. Our role is to investigate the movements, the transformations, the ruptures in discourse, examining precisely the micro practices—be they discursive or non-discursive—of the exercise of power, which also implies, always, forms of resistance. In that sense, in my studies about media and youth,5 I see how important it is to deal with the different practices at play in the complex process of communication that goes from creators and producers to daily viewers. That means exposing the statements of the discourses that circulate in our time and are constituted as true, in this case, discourses that have to do with the proposition of certain modes of existence for the life of young people, teenagers, and children in Brazil (Fischer, 2008). As Veyne (1982) taught us, practices are not mysterious instances, they are not hidden motors, they are simply practices, they are historical multiplicities, be they institutional or not, full of surprises, not always immediately visible to us, multiplicities that we have grown used to ignoring due to an understandable economy that leads us to receive things, people, words, and actions as if they were obvious, given, natural, unequivocal, and full of rationality. What is important to highlight here is that, in the Foucauldian perspective, our analysis will have to consider the small struggles, struggles for imposition of meanings, for the power of the word, in a specific focus of power relations; well, these struggles are not only vertical, they exist side by side, everywhere, and they are not linearly understandable. In other words, if women in our culture are achieving more visibility, if they are learning how to take better care of themselves, and are becoming more the owners of their bodies, they are also having to deal with new appeals, such as those that appear in countless items in the media, such as the aforementioned Capricho magazine. In our studies, we have observed that girls are encouraged, from a young age, to be in permanent contact with physicians, in the name of caring for themselves. If we accept the “indefiniteness of the struggle,” or the idea that “for each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by the other” (Foucault, 1992, p. 147), this information from the analysis helps us to see the complexity of the struggle between the hegemonic powers that seek to control women’s lives, and the strength shown by feminist groups, which, in Brazil and in many other countries, become stronger as they question the real need for so much and such early exposure of the body to medical examination. For Foucault, there are no natural objects, only constructed ones: “each practice, as determined by history as a whole, engenders its own corresponding object … Things, objects are only the correlatives of practices. The illusion of a natural object … conceals the heterogeneous character of practices” (Veyne, 1982, p. 163).6 So, according to Veyne and Foucault, we could say that the problems of young sexuality “through times,” the medicalized woman since the early twentieth century, the plebs manipulated by the “bread and circus” rule from Roman times to the reality shows of today, do not exist . Thus we deny the existence of natural objects, of fixed units such as woman , youth rebellion , and so on. Instead of the illusory place of natural objects, we learned from Foucault to think in terms of a philosophy of relations; we also learned to deal with theoretical problems through practices, discourses, events, describing the moment when certain “things” were objectified in one way and not another. The regimes of truth of a given social formation, produced through several discourses and places of power, produce certain practices that update (transform in act) the virtualities of a time—things that are possible at a certain point in time. However, at the same time, these practices are submitted to the forces of other, neighboring, practices that can, in turn, transform them (Veyne, 1982, p. 166). A more detailed analysis might show, in this case, the extent to which the discourse of the medicalization of girls is not a general rule, the extent to which it collapses in face of the precariousness of many health services in Brazil.
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Page 211 To deal with discourse and power relations in micro daily and institutional practices, following what Foucault taught us in his research, is a way of making history, the history of our present, casting a highly critical look at all forms of subjection, which are visible in the different institutional fields and in the countless, historically constructed techniques, procedures, strategies, discourses, and architectures. It is to study power relations, understanding that power always exists in action, it is never exercised one-sidedly: at both ends there are agents, and there is always space for responses, rebellion, reaction, results, since power can only be exercised over free men (Foucault, 1990a, p. 91). Foucault was a restless researcher of the culture of his time. However, his gaze was never benevolent or condescending; of the kind that sees the verticality of relations, the moral dignity of the oppressed in opposition to the perversion of the powerful. The tendency of Western society—as he discovered, especially after the extensive research he did for Discipline and Punish— has been to improve, polish, sophisticate the power strategies, creating ever more complex devices ( dispositifs ), in which individuals get involved to such an extent that they assume as their own the truths and actions that most constrain them and control their subjectivity. The challenge for critical researchers in education is to make a detailed exposition of those practices and devices, in the complexity and in the movements that are inherent to the processes, seeking to break free from vertical conceptions of power and resistance. On Subject, Subjectivity, and Modes of Subjectivation In the essay “The Subject and the Power” (Foucault, 1983b), Foucault states that the general theme of his work is not power, but the subject—and the different forms of subjection. And what was the driving element in that quest? First, the perception that the mechanisms of subjection of the individual do not constitute a final moment, a product of political and economic exploitation, but, instead, a process that is circularly related to other forms of domination, so that one kind of domination or another prevails, according to the specific historical moment. Second, the idea that the modern Western state has achieved something never seen in the history of human societies before—a complex combination of techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures. In other words, the form of power prevailing today is the kind of power that affects primarily people’s immediate daily lives: “This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it” (Foucault, 1983b, p. 214). When critiquing the work of traditional historians, in the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge (1986), Foucault says that “making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought” (p. 15). According to him, all attempts at decentering the subject—with Marx, Nietzsche, the Language Sciences—were gradually transformed with the aim of protecting the “sovereignty of subject.” Thus, Marx was anthropologized and turned into a historian of totalities, even though his analysis was strictly historic and indicated the discontinuity of social processes. But how can we abandon the idea of historic development ( devenir), of the “synthetic activity” of the subject, when it is the idea of development ( devenir) that gives the sovereignty of the subject its “safest shelter” (p. 17)? Some of Foucault’s toughest challenges to critical theorists were those related to “the sovereignty of the subject,” as many of those researchers seem to be strongly convinced of the centrality of the subject, i.e., the idea of the subject as “master of his own history.” In this section, I will follow Foucault’s footsteps and point out the different modulations in his thoughts on the subject, showing the wealth of his contributions to critical educational theories. Foucault is very
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Page 212 clear: “There are two meanings to the word ‘subject’: a subject subjugated to another by control and dependence, and the subject attached to his own identity by consciousness or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and subdues” (Foucault, 1983b, p. 212). In other words, the idea of the subject as master of his own history, or the idea of an emancipated and emancipating subject, seems to be denied, or at least to be put totally on hold. But Foucault went further. For him there was an urgency, regarding the theme of the subject, of a study that could answer the questions: how did a knowledge of the self institute itself, or how did this long history of turning the subject into an object of knowledge happen? Furthermore, how did making the subject knowable become not only possible, but also desirable or even indispensable for us (Foucault, 1989, p. 133)? In his last course at the Collège de France, titled The Hermeneutics of the Subject , he answered that question brilliantly, as we will see later. It is important to say that the issue of the subject in Foucault’s work goes well beyond the cliché of him having decreed the “death of the subject” or the “death of man.” When, in The Order of Things, he stated that man did not exist before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he was referring to a rupture in the history of Western society, to the moment when man became the object of knowledge, constituting himself as “that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known” (Foucault, s.d., p. 448).7 Distinct modes of objectivation transform human beings into subjects: speaking subjects, economic and producing subjects, biological subjects, and henceforward we have the Language Sciences, Economy, or Natural History. Man set himself apart from ancient beliefs and “philosophies” and became “object.” Foucault concludes The Order of Things suggesting that man, therefore, was “invented” and, just as he appeared, he could, perhaps, disappear within some time, fading away like “a sand face by the sea.” Foucault made it clear that he always devoted himself to investigating the subject: if in The Order of Things he made man appear as someone apart from what is outside him (for example, the productive man separated from the product of his work), in Discipline and Punish (1987) he exposed the subject classified in relation to other human beings and divided within himself. Once more, men as objects, divided into mad and sane, sick and healthy, criminals and “honest citizens.” The author also sought to answer: how did man come to recognize himself as “subject of ‘sexuality’?” Again, the insistence here is to learn how a human being turns into a subject. Finally, in his last course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject , he goes further: he makes us think about the classic precept of the “care for the self,” and the relations with practices and knowledge of the “self.” In a way, he challenges us to review all his prior research. Here we see a Foucault who, while still preoccupied with the critical and political reading of the power devices that so strongly marked his academic and existential journey, concentrates on the ethical and aesthetical questions of the production of the self. He seeks, in the philosophers of GrecoRoman classical antiquity, the sources to examine no longer primarily the problem of the different forms of subjection but, rather, the theme of modes of subjectivation. These, in his reading, pointed to practices of the self and practices of truth, in which forms of freedom of the subject would be more evident than processes of imprisonment. That is a new dimension of his work: letting the political also be impregnated by ethical questioning and, thus, considering the possibility of a new work on the self, beyond subjection, towards an aesthetics of existence. In Foucault, the theme of the subject does not present a clear and definite unity. On the contrary, at each new investigation, he made the discussion more complex. In my research on media and youth, I have sought to adopt this rather creative method of problematizing the subject. Hence, for example, the analysis of the testimonies of Brazilian students about their relationship with highly popular TV shows such as Big Brother , highlighted the great problem, in a country such as Brazil, represented by the constant production and affirmation of social inequality. The interviewees revealed that they often feel diminished in the face of what they see on TV. They are overcome by feelings expressed through phrases such as “I don’t have
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Page 213 anything,” or “I’m nothing,” when confronted with so many beautiful and desirable mediatic figures. Here is a very clear example of how our society has become increasingly more sophisticated in improving the mechanisms that produce divisions between subjects. To perceive oneself as demeaned, less than, humiliated, reveals not only a form of division between “better” and “worse” subjects, but also a form of subjection. The young interviewees stated that, even if they do not believe in that classification, they still “feel” that way. They are, in some way, subjectified. Obviously, here, we are neither talking about a psychological subject, nor seeing subjectivation and subjectivity as processes or states of the “soul,” the unique and individual experience of each person, since the Foucauldian conceptions of subject of discourse and of subjectivity have a very specific scope. In other words, to say that the students “feel” diminished in the face of mediatic celebrities does not mean, from Foucault’s perspective, that they are simply expressing a psychological feeling. Rather, it is a process that brings into play discourses such as those used by advertising or by the media, which are not separated from political discourses, and which have had a long history in Brazil, dividing very clearly the rich and the poor. These discourses are neither unified nor harmonious. They wrestle with other discourses, which are related to very specific struggles, such as those of different social movements, for instance, those of Afro-descendants, women, homosexuals, Indigenous peoples. Foucault’s proposal is precisely that our investigations should be able to show the greater or lesser power of specific discourses, particularly the intersections between them, in the constitution of subjects and subjectivities. It is important to make it clear that the term “subjectivity,” according to the author, refers to the way in which a subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself (Foucault, 2004a). He is referring to practices, techniques, exercises, in specific institutional fields and in specific social formations—through which the subject observes himself and recognizes himself in a place of knowledge and production of truth. As I have verified through my own research, the media is an undeniable space of production of subjectivities (i.e., ways of being that we assume as truth to ourselves), as it is constantly offering us recipes of how to live life, how to behave in our smallest daily actions. It is important to emphasize, as Deleuze shows us, that for Foucault the processes of subjectivation are absolutely diverse in different historical periods, producing modes of existence and lifestyles that are very particular to those periods. But we must not forget that in his last writings Foucault questioned himself more clearly about the possibilities of resistance, and stated that in the interstices of the dynamics of power and knowledge, there was a place of “intensities,” an ethical-aesthetic possibility for each person to produce for himself an “artist existence,” as suggested by classical philosophers such as Seneca (Deleuze, 1992, p. 142). In the research I am currently involved with, I intend to carry out a survey of the cultural consumption of young students in the Teacher Education Program, and then expose them to a selection of films. My goal is to examine the possibilities, in the field of education, of expanding the ethical and aesthetic repertoire of young people. In this study I use, as theoretical reference, Foucault’s writings on the exercises of transformation of oneself—not to be confused with self-help practices—the objective of which is to take care of oneself in order to act more effectively in the social and political spheres. I would like to highlight the fact that Foucault offers us, from a methodological point of view, a different way of researching, which challenges critical theories, as it is committed neither to ideas and behaviors, nor to visions of the world or “ideologies,” but to problematizations and practices. In his last course, for instance, the three axes (discourse, power, and subject) are harmonically present. As an archaeologist, he examines the discourse of classical antiquity, where man is questioned in different ways as a being that can and must be thought; as a genealogist, he takes the practices and powers that he infers from the discourses, and observes them in their movements and transformations, in their discontinuities. As a thinker of the ethics of the subject, he discovers in the classical texts a set of rules, opinions, and advice, that citizens should resort
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Page 214 to for guidance for their daily practices—a set of “practices of the self”—towards an “art of the existence.” Here, we have an analysis that examines the device ( dispositif ) in its complexity: a cluster of relations of knowledges, institutional practices, modes of subjection, and modes of subjectivation in the form of “vanishing lines” (Deleuze, 1999); a kind of existence that has to do with the ethical transformation of oneself, beyond individualist practices such as we know today, but directly related to an action in the public space of the Greek polis. The power issue is also clearly present. The “relation with oneself” involves basically a relation of power over oneself, exercised through the “practices of the self”: the permanent work of improving the self, which affects the whole life of the individual, determines the life of the classic Greco-Roman citizen in every daily practice: how he sleeps, eats, makes friends, marries or procreates. It is an intense turning to oneself and finding the truth in oneself, in the name of a stylization of life. The Greeks, according to Foucault, having invented the relationship of power between free men, invent the relationship of power with oneself: in other words, exerting force upon the “self,” they invent “subjectivation.” The question was “What to do with oneself, to achieve a life that is aesthetically more beautiful?” However, in the last texts studied by Foucault in The History of Sexuality—The Care of the Self (1985), we already see a preoccupation with a stricter control over the life of men, a more austere ethics. Deciphering the self, confessing to the other, self-examination and self-sacrifice will be Christian ethics par excellence, borrowing the Socratic maxim “know thyself,” for the greater honor and glory of God. The guilty man emerges, the subject that essentially fails and needs to confess his sins, pays for his errors, gets relief and, one day, comes to rest in the arms of the Lord. The Christian morals penetrated the Western body and soul, going through scientific discourses, hiding here and there and reappearing silently in the daily practices of us all. TV programs such as talk shows and reality shows are here to prove it. Certainly, as Foucault suggested, the history of the techniques of the self constitutes a huge and complex domain, about which many studies still need to be undertaken, from the genealogical point of view (Foucault, 1984). It is true, nevertheless, that there are some authors that have dealt with this issue, such as Rose (1998). The most important lesson in Foucault’s trajectory of the subject is that, in order to investigate any theme, it is crucial, first and foremost, to consider the historical perspective. To describe the practices of the self, as they appear in the texts produced by the media, pedagogy, or medicine, today, means to make a description of the historical figures of constitution of subjectivity, which certainly present interferences and crossovers with other figures. From Foucault, we learned that the contemporary culture of the self is founded on the Christian idea of a self that must be renounced, in the name of the relationship with God. In other words, through a whole psychological knowledge and psychoanalytical practice, we discover our real self, renouncing everything that produces alienation in us and that obscures what we are. The classical culture of the self, on the contrary, proposed the idea that each individual created himself, as a true work of art (Foucault, 1984, p. 339). In an interview about his History of Sexuality , Foucault denied that he was seeking alternatives or solutions for the present, based on a supposed life model found in classical antiquity. He stated, on the contrary, that he wished to make a genealogy of Western problematizations. However, to deny that he was seeking alternatives does not mean that he was giving in to apathy; his position, as he himself put it, would possibly lead to a “pessimistic hyperactivity.” My point is not that everything is bad, but everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do … I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger. (Foucault, 1983a, pp. 231–232)
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Page 215 Conclusion If it is true that power increasingly informs our daily lives, our interiority and our individuality; if it has become individualizing; if it is true that knowledge itself has become increasingly individuated, forming the hermeneutics and codification of the desiring subject, what remains for our subjectivity? There never “remains” anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend each power. (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 112–113) Deleuze’s words, referring to Foucault’s thinking, summarize concerns that we share, when we seek to achieve a better understanding of the present, in the field of education. What is the mode of existence of the practices of turning to oneself today? How do the production and circulation of texts and documents (in education, psychology, and, more widely, in the media and on the Internet) concerning a self necessarily conscious of himself, eager to learn increasingly more about himself, to find all kinds of explanations for his desires, to conform his acts to a harmonious and “spiritually correct” life model, take place? What are the effects of truth of discursivities that define a body, a look, and a behavior as ideal for the individuals? What techniques correspond to those goals of physical and spiritual improvement? How does this “self-government,” today, deal with sexuality, a theme that has always been rooted in the formation of the individual? In what way does our “unfortunate intimacy” get exposed on public screens and in different institutional spaces? Finally, what type of ethics are we proposing to ourselves through these discourses and practices? Foucault’s contribution to Critical Theory in Education scholars has to do with the questions above. In order to examine them it is necessary, first and foremost, to assume that there is no separation between theory and methodology, between theory and practice. For Foucault, the one who acts and speaks is always involved in multiple actions: theory action and practice action, taking turns, forming a web. Theory is not there to “express” something, translate something, or to enable us to apply a specific knowledge to a practice: theory is itself a practice—never totalizing, always local and regional. Equally, the scientific concepts and elaborations we make or appropriate will, in one way or another, be related to a struggle—not for raising the awareness of intellectuals (or those with whom they interact), but to allow those intellectuals to inscribe themselves alongside those who struggle against what constrains us, what limits us, today, in this historical moment, especially against what in this society limits our subjectivities and the possibilities of making ourselves “better,” making ourselves beautiful, works of art—why not? Foucault’s thinking suggests that we should do the exercise of thinking differently than how we are used to thinking, and inscribe ourselves in a regional system of struggles, where we can make a little of the history of the present. Instead of the ultimate struggle, the ultimate goal, so prevalent in some proposals based on critical theories, Foucault invites us to investigate power in its microphysics, to accept smaller, more localized struggles. Rather than examining the idea of a sovereign subject, master of his own history, the philosopher invites us to study the discourses and practices that constitute the subject and make him speak and act in specific ways, in a given historical moment. Rather than the idea of a power that only represses and constrains, he urges us to think about a power that is productive, that establishes practices and discourses. Rather than the promise of a coming redemption of the oppressed, Foucault invites us to research the micro practices—daily school practices, for example—showing us that they carry within them the living devices of knowledge and power, but also something that escapes those devices. To describe the micro resistances, to point them out in our investigations, is a fundamental part of the work of any critical theorist today.
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Page 216 The problematizations posed by Foucault challenge the critical researcher to move away from ideological explanations, conspiracy theories of history, mechanicist causalities of all kinds. This means to examine how we become subjects of certain discourses, how certain truths become natural, hegemonic. It calls for a discussion of how certain truths become truths for each subject, through micro practices, minimal enunciations, daily and institutionalized rules, norms, and exercises. To undertake research based on those historical and philosophical presuppositions represents, finally, to consider possible escape or vanishing lines, to take into account what evades knowledge and powers, no matter how well mounted and structured they may be for individuals and social groups. That requires work, dedication, detailed study of practices, and creative appropriation of a solid theoretical framework. After all, as Wittgenstein (1996, p. 14) tells us: “each morning it is necessary to go through, once again, the inert pebbles, in order to reach the living, hot seeds.” Notes 1 Translated by Lydia Davis (1997), “Ethics” of “Essential Works of Foucault” (Vol. 1). The New Press. Retrieved from http://foucault.info/foucault/interview.html 2 English version was published as What is Enlightenment? in P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 32–50). 3 In the United States there is a very similar magazine, Seventeen (Hearst Communications), catering to teenage girls, with the same structure as the Brazilian Capricho . 4 See Fischer, 1996, 2002, 2008. 5 I refer to two research projects funded by CNPq—Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, in two periods: from 2002 to 2005 (“Media and Youth Re-invention of the Public Space”) and from 2005 to 2008 (“Alterity and Mediatic Culture: Youth Memory”). In both studies the team recorded testimonies of young people between 15 and 24 years old, secondary school and university students in the city of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. See Fischer, 2008. 6 English translation by Catherine Porter, available in the book Foucault and his Interlocutors , edited by A. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 7 English translation retrieved from http://www.illogicaloperation.com/textz/foucault_michel_ the_order_of_things.htm References Baker, B. (2004, January/June). Avessos. Educação & Realidade, 29 (1), 99–138. Butler, J. (2006). Critica della violenza etica . Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Deleuze, G. (1991). Foucault. São Paulo: Brasiliense. Deleuze, G. (1992). Um retrato de Foucault. In G. Deleuze Conversações, 1972–1990 (pp. 127–147). Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34. Deleuze, G. (1999). ¿Que és un dispositivo? In E. Balbier, G. Deleuze, H. L. Dreyfus, M. Frank, A. Glücksmann, G. Lebrun, et al . (Eds.), Michel Foucault, filósof (pp. 155–163). Barcelona: Gedisa. Dreyfus, H., & Rabinow, P. (Eds.). (1983). Michel Foucault (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Fischer, R. M. B. (1996). Adolescência em discurso (Tese de Doutorado). Porto Alegre: PPGEDU/UFRGS. Fischer, R. M. B. (2002). A paixão de trabalhar com Foucault. In M. V. Costa. (Org.), Caminhos investigativos (2nd ed., pp. 39–60). Rio de Janeiro. Fischer, R. M. B. (2008). Mídia, juventude e educação. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 16 , 1–20. http:// epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v16n2. Foucault, M. (1983a). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed., pp. 229–252). The University of Chicago Press.
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Page 217 Foucault, M. (1983b). The subject and the power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed., pp. 208–226). The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1984). A propos de la généalogie de l’éthique. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault (pp. 322–346). Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1985). História da sexualidade III (4th ed.). Rio de Janeiro. Graal. Foucault, M. (1986). A arqueologia do saber. Rio de Janeiro: Forense. Foucault, M. (1987). Vigiar e punir . Petrópolis: Vozes. Foucault, M. (1989). Résumés de cours (1970–1982) . Paris: Julliard. Foucault, M. (1990a). História da sexualidade I (10th ed.) . Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Foucault, M. (1990b). História da sexualidade II (6th ed.). Rio de Janeiro. Graal. Foucault, M. (1992). Microfísica do poder . Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Foucault, M. (2000a). Estruturalismo e pós-estruturalismo. In M. Foucault, Arqueologia das ciências e história dos sistemas de pensamento (pp. 307–334). Ditos & escritos II. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (2000b). Nietzsche, a genealogia e a história. In M. Foucault, Arqueologia das ciências e história dos sistemas de pensamento (pp. 260–281). Ditos & escritos II. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (2000c). O que são as Luzes? In M. Foucault, Arqueologia das ciências e história dos sistemas de pensamento (pp. 335–351). Ditos & escritos II. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (2004a). A hermenêutica do sujeito. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. Foucault, M. (2004b). Polêmica, política e problematizações. In M. Foucault, Ética, sexualidade, política (pp. 225–233) . Ditos & Escritos V. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária. Foucault, M. (2005). A ordem do discurso . São Paulo: Loyola. Foucault, M. (n. d.). As palavras e as coisas . Lisbon: Portugália. Hoy, D. C. (Ed.). (1986). Foucault. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Popkewitz, T., & Brennan, M. (Ed.). (1998). Foucault’s challenge. New York: Teachers College. Rabinow, P. (Ed.). (1984). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Rose, N. (1998). Inventing our selves. New York: Cambridge University Press. Said, E. W. (1986). Foucault and the imagination of power. In D. C. Hoy (Ed.). Foucault: A critical reader (pp. 149–155). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Veyne, P. (1982). Como se escreve a história . Brasília: UNB. Wittgenstein, L. (1996). Cultura e valor . Lisbon: Edições 70.
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Page 219 Part IV The Freirean Legacy
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Page 221 16 Fighting With the Text Contextualizing and Recontextualizing Freire’s Critical Pedagogy Wayne Au Criticism creates the necessary intellectual discipline, asking questions to the reading, to the writing, to the book, to the text. We should not submit to the text or be submissive in front of the text. The thing is to fight with the text, even though loving it, no? (Paulo Freire in Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 11) Introduction In this chapter I explore the core conceptions and the frayed edges of Freire’s liberatory, critical pedagogy as part of an analysis of how it has developed over the last 40 years. In particular, I examine how Freire’s work has been transcontextualized and interpreted outside of Freire’s original political work in Brazil, including a summative review of the various critiques of Freire’s critical pedagogy. Here, I argue that by looking at the heart of Freire’s pedagogic conception, particularly its indebtedness to dialectical materialism, we can see how several critiques of Freirean pedagogy by those seeking to use it in the context of countries such as the United States are based on a fundamental misreading and misunderstanding of Freire’s epistemological stance. Finally, working within Freire’s own epistemological framework, I point out some internal contradictions that exist in his conception of critical pedagogy. Freire in Context Freire’s critical, liberatory pedagogy was originally developed within the specific sociopolitical contexts of Brazil and Chile (Holst, 2006). In Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s he became involved in popular literacy campaigns among the poor there, and ultimately he ended up coordinating the National Literacy Program. This literacy program sought to both increase literacy rates among the population, and also to politicize the masses of Brazil in the process, by creating new voters who could participate in electoral politics there. The literacy program came to be seen as a way for the implementation of popular change in Brazil, as the bulk of the new voters would come from the poor, and thus represented a threat to the Brazilian power structure. The military government in Brazil, feeling threatened by the prospect of popular resistance, (resistance nurtured through Freire’s literacy program) ended the program in 1964. After being arrested by
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Page 222 the government twice, Freire eventually felt compelled for his own safety to seek exile outside of Brazil (A. M. A. Freire & Macedo, 1998). While in exile in Chile, and based on his experience working in literacy programs with the poor in Brazil, Freire penned the now famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1974). The subsequent publication and distribution of Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a defining moment in the development of critical education. Seemingly in concert with the growing revolutionary movements taking place around the world at the time, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was imbued with the postcolonial theories of Frantz Fanon (1966), Amilcar Cabral (1969), and Albert Memmi (1967) as well as the radical egalitarian vision of Marx (Au, 2007a)—the spirit of which are all present in the transformative pedagogy conceived by Freire. Freirean Pedagogy Freire’s critical, liberatory pedagogy works to achieve two goals generally. First it is a pedagogy that enables both students and teachers to develop a critically conscious understanding of their relationship with the world (Davis & Freire, 1981). Second, and intertwined with the first, is that this pedagogy, in developing consciousness, helps enable both the teacher and the student to become people who “become consciously aware of [their] context and [their] condition as a human being as Subject … [and] become an instrument of choice” (P. Freire, 1982a, p. 56). In becoming Subjects in the Freirean sense, then, both teachers and students become “critical agents in the act of knowing” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 33). For Freire (1998a) such critical agency means that, “all educational practice requires the existence of ‘subjects,’ who while teaching, learn. And who in learning also teach” (p. 67). As we will see later in this chapter, these two goals extend directly from Freire’s epistemology. The above goals frame the “liberatory” aspect of Freirean pedagogy, which stands on the assertion that to take away a Subject’s right to conscious awareness, to remove their “right to transform the world,” is oppressive. Consequently, within Freire’s pedagogy, “To be authentic [education] must be liberating” (P. Freire, 1982c, p. 148), and liberation relies on conscious action in order to “transform the reality in which we find ourselves” (Freire in, Davis & Freire, 1981, p. 59). Freire’s liberatory pedagogy thus revolves around the central idea of “praxis” (conscious action), where students and teachers become Subjects who can look at reality, critically reflect upon that reality, and take transformative action to change that reality based upon the original critical reflection. Freire predominantly makes use of two different approaches to develop praxis: problem posing and dialogue. Problem posing, in the Freirean sense, is the process of students and teachers asking critical questions of the world in which they live, asking questions of the material realities both experience on a day-to-day basis, and critically reflecting on what actions they may take to change those material conditions (P. Freire, 1974, 1982b; Shor & Freire, 1987). Functionally, problem-posing happens through a process of coding and decoding reality where a “problem-situation” is presented to, or raised by, the students. In this moment the “problem-situation” represents a coded totality to be decoded by the students, who, after critically reflecting on their material conditions, generate themes for analysis and action (P. Freire, 1974; Shor, 1992). Dialogue is another fundamental manifestation of Freire’s critical, liberatory pedagogy, and it would be difficult to overemphasize its importance in his conception. In a general sense, Freire sees dialogue as part of the history of the development of human consciousness, where he explains that, “Dialogue is a moment where humans meet to reflect on the reality as they make and remake it” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 98). It is through dialogue that human beings both know what they know and know what they don’t know, and in reflection of this imperfect knowledge, human beings can then improve their knowledge and therefore improve their ability to transform reality (Shor & Freire, 1987). Further, because dialogue entails active reflection in relation to
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Page 223 other human beings, it is fundamentally social, grounded in the material world (society included), and therefore requires critical thinking. The social nature of education in turn outlines the pedagogical foundation of dialogue and Freire’s (1974) now-famous reference to the “banking method” of education. He explains: And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “depositing” ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants … Because dialogue is an encounter among [humans] who name the world, it must not be a situation where some [humans] name it on behalf of others. (P. Freire, 1974, p. 77) Hence, if we are in dialogue, we cannot “deposit” our ideas into other people. This would be to treat them as object, determined and manipulated. To learn through dialogue means to name the world together with others in a social act, a process which, in turn, helps you understand it for yourself. Freire (1974) states that, “I cannot think for others or without others, no one can think for me … Producing and acting upon [our] own ideas—not consuming those of others—must constitute [this] process” (p. 100). In this way, both students and teachers enter into a dialogic relationship as Subjects where both learn (P. Freire, 1998a), where “the flow is in both direc-tions” (P. Freire, 1982c, p. 125). Freire’s conception of dialogue, then, also speaks to the particular relationship between students and teachers within his conception of critical, liberatory pedagogy. Within his framework, students and teachers are not automatically “equals” in that their relationship is not completely horizontal. Rather, within Freirean pedagogy, the teacher in fact maintains authority and directiveness in the learning process. For the teacher this means being an authority in the classroom but not authoritarian (Shor & Freire, 1987). This understanding means being neither completely hands-off or “laissez faire,” nor authoritarian and dictatorial. Rather, as Freire puts it, liberatory educators have to be “radically democratic” in their pedagogy, which translates into being “responsible and directive” in the classroom while respecting the students’ rights and abilities to come to their own conclusions (P. Freire & Macedo, 1995). In order to more fully understand and apply his pedagogy, however, it is important to grasp his epistemological commitments, especially his Marxist dialectical materialism.1 Freire’s Epistemology of the Oppressed In order to explain Freire’s application of dialectical materialist epistemology, some brief explanations of both dialectics and materialism are required. At the heart of dialectics is the idea that all “things” are actually processes, that these processes are in constant motion or development, and that this development is driven by the tension created by two interrelated opposites acting in contradiction with each other (Gadotti, 1996; Ollman, 2003). These two opposites require each other to exist, for together they make up a unified whole. Hence they are deeply integrated even though they are considered to be “opposites” (Allman, 2007). A dialectical conception sees a world as a layered, interrelated system, a totality, a chain of relationships and processes. Dialectical philosophy is thus distinctively different from the rational logic of the Enlightenment because in dialectics things can only be understood in relation to each other and cannot be analyzed as independently existing pieces (Gadotti, 1996; Sayers, 1990). Further, to be “materialist,” in a philosophical and epistemological sense, means fundamentally that consciousness or ideas spring from, and are a reflection (albeit imperfect) of, the material world (Allman, 2007). For Freire,
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Page 224 as well as for Marx, dialectics and materialism require each other to make sense because the point is to: (1) understand the interrelated processes happening in the material world; and (2) provide a space for human intervention in those processes to change that world for the better. As we will see with Freire’s conception of liberatory pedagogy, dialectical materialism provides a framework for analyzing objectively existing conditions in the world (i.e., socioeconomic systems and various forms of oppression), for understanding that humans can become actively conscious of both the conditions themselves and their sources, and for changing these conditions through human (social) intervention and action. In terms of his epistemological underpinnings, Freire was a materialist. Throughout his work, Freire regularly expressed his belief that there was a world that existed objectively outside of human consciousness (see, e.g., P. Freire, 1974, 1992, 1998b; P. Freire & Macedo, 1987; Shor & Freire, 1987), that the world was “an objective reality, independent of oneself, capable of being known” (P. Freire, 1982a, p. 3). To be clear, Freire’s materialism was not mechanical or simple. Instead he posited a dialectical relationship between the objective world and our subjective understanding and knowledge of that same world. As Freire (1998b) explains: Consciousness and the world cannot be understood separately, in a dichotomized fashion, but rather must be seen in their contradictory relations. Not even consciousness is an arbitrary producer of the world or of objectivity, nor is it a pure reflection of the world. (p. 19) Philosophically, then, Freire did indeed see an objective world outside of our consciousness, but he recognized that it was a world that we learn through our subjective lenses as human beings (Roberts, 2003). Freire’s conception of human consciousness springs directly from his dialectical materialist epistemology. For Freire (1982a) human consciousness is distinct because humans, “are not only in the world, but with the world” (p. 3) and have “the capacity to adapt … to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and transform that reality” (p. 4). Freire illustrates this in his concept of conscientização : Only when we understand the “dialecticity” between consciousness and the world—that is, when we know that we don’t have a consciousness here and the world there but, on the contrary, when both of them, the objectivity and the subjectivity, are incarnating dialectically, is it possible to understand what conscientização is, and to understand the role of consciousness in the liberation of humanity. (P. Freire in, Davis & Freire, 1981, p. 62) It is this core Marxist conception of human consciousness in dialectical relation with material reality (Gilbert, 2003; Marx, 1978; Marx & Engels, 1978) that we see shaping Freire’s earlier work (P. Freire, 1974, 1982a, 1982c), and it is one that continued into his last writings (P. Freire, 2004). Keeping within the Marxist tradition, and echoing both Vygotsky’s (1987) and Lenin’s (1975) conceptions of consciousness (Au, 2007b), Freire sees “consciousness as consciousness of consciousness” (P. Freire, 1974, p. 107), and that “ Consciousness is intentionality towards the world” (Freire in, Davis & Freire, 1981, p. 58, original emphasis). Freire also recognized that because humans are part of the world, and because our consciousness comes from dialectical interaction with that world (other humans included), ultimately our consciousness is, first and foremost a social consciousness (P. Freire & Macedo, 1987, 1995; Roberts, 2003). Thus, for Freire (1982c) “Subjects cannot think alone” and there “is no longer an ‘I think’ but ‘we think.’” (p. 137). Freire unites these conceptualizations to find that, because we are in constant, dialectical, critical reflection with the world (a world that is also social), and
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Page 225 because we as humans have the capacity to act with volition on our critical reflection to change that world, we are not totally “determined beings” since we can “reflect critically about [our] conditioning process and go beyond it” (P. Freire, 1998b, p. 20). This process of human critical reflection on the world and taking conscious, transformative action on that world is how Freire conceives of “praxis” (Davis & Freire, 1981; P. Freire, 1974, 1982a, 1982c), which is the core of both his pedagogy and epistemology.2 Thus we see how problem posing and dialogue extend from Freire’s epistemology, as the overarching goal is to develop critical consciousness and critical action (praxis) vis-à-vis the critical reflection Freirean pedagogy invites. Criticizing Freire’s Critical Pedagogy Since its original publication and subsequent translation into many languages, Freire’s work has influenced millions of people worldwide, selling over 750,000 copies (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005). A review of the literature would find that an entire subfield of educational theorizing and inquiry has sprung up around the work of Paulo Freire (Apple, 1999; Schugurensky, 1998) as educators from all over the world interested in social justice have attempted to put Freirean pedagogy to use in a variety of contexts. As we will see, such transcontextual uses of Freire’s ideas have produced mixed results, and created a degree of tension among critical educators around the globe. In this regard, “fighting with the text” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 11) of Freire’s work has proved crucial to the development of Freirean pedagogy, and a number of criticisms have been leveled at Freire and his conception of liberatory pedagogy. To be clear, the natures of the critiques of Freire differ dramatically. Some come out of a serious engagement with Freire’s political goals and ideas, while others represent simplistic, baseless attacks on Freire’s politics and pedagogy. These attacks include assertions that Freirean pedagogy is grounded in Enlightenment philosophy and individualism (Bowers, 2005; Rasmussen, 2005; Robinson, 2005; Vasquez, 2005), subscribes to a linear development of culture (Rasmussen, 2005; Siddhartha, 2005), has a conception of teacher student relations that is patronizing (Ellsworth, 1989) and elitist (Bejarano, 2005; Esteva, Stuchul, & Prakash, 2005; Rasmussen, 2005), does not recognize the role that schools play in social reproduction and maintaining oppression (Esteva et al., 2005), plays a colonizing role when used with Indigenous cultures (Vasquez, 2005), does not value Indigenous knowledge (Rasmussen, 2005; Siddhartha, 2005), is anthropocentric and non-environmental (Bowers, 2005; Rasmussen, 2005; Siddhartha, 2005), and doesn’t recognize the subjectivity of individual experience (Ellsworth, 1989). Unfortunately, these critiques represent poor scholarship and are not justifiable if one studies the depth and breadth of Freire’s work (Au & Apple, 2007). As I outlined here in my explanation of Freire’s pedagogy and epistemology, Freire vehemently opposed teachers imposing their knowledge on students and discussed the importance and value of the culture and knowledge that students bring to the pedagogical relationship (see, e.g., P. Freire, 1974, 1982c, 1992; P. Freire & Macedo, 1995), thus challenging any claims of Freire’s elitism or cultural imperialism. Additionally, Freire dealt specifically and quite eloquently with the relationship between schools and social reproduction in works that extend beyond that of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (see, e.g., Shor & Freire, 1987, pp. 35–36, 129, 134), and, as I’ve discussed here, Freirean “consciousness” exists in dialectical connection with the world and thus recognizes human interaction with the environment. Further, all claims that Freire promotes individualism do not grasp Freire’s dialectical conception of the relationship between the individual and the social, which does not allow for individuals to exist as isolated and independent. Likewise, all claims that Freire does not recognize subjectivity and advances a positivistic conception of universal truth fail to recognize that Freire’s epistemology explicitly acknowledges that humans perceive the world subjectively, even if he also believes that an objective world does exist.
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Page 226 Other, more substantive critiques point to significant issues to raise within Freire’s conception of critical pedagogy. These critiques include assertions that Freire: uses discriminatory language, including the “universal man” and general terms such as “oppressor” and “oppressed” (Weiler, 1991), doesn’t adequately address issues of race (Haymes, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1997; Leonardo, 2005), doesn’t adequately deal with feminist and gender issues (Ellsworth, 1989; Weiler, 1991), assumes that critical consciousness moves people to action in progressive ways (Fine, 1997), and neglects overlapping forms of oppression (Glass, 2001; Scapp, 1997; Weiler, 1991). Freire has addressed these more substantial critiques of his work in his books and later essays. For instance, in Pedagogy of Hope, Freire (1992) talks about how as soon as Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published, he started receiving letters from around the world from women criticizing his use of the “universal man” in his writing. He explains that he had no intention of alienating women, and it did not occur to him he was doing so in his use of the term “man” to mean all of humanity. So, while it is true that in his use of the “universal man” in his writing Freire was guilty of upholding patriarchal norms through his language, he also immediately committed himself to changing his language from then on. In response to other criticisms regarding race and gender, Freire (1997) reflects: [W]hen I wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I tried to understand and analyze the phenomenon of oppression with respect to its social, existential, and individual tendencies. In doing so, I did not focus specifically on oppression marked by specificities such as color, gender, race, and so forth. I was more preoccupied then with the oppressed as a social class. But this, in my view, does not at all mean that I was ignoring the many forms of racial oppression that I have denounced always and struggled against even as a child … Throughout my life I have worked against all forms of racial oppression, which is in keeping with my desire and need to maintain coherence in my political posture. I could not write in defense of the oppressed while being a racist, just as I could not be a machista either. (p. 309) Although not a complete defense, the above quote explains Freire’s overall paradigm as that of being anti-oppression, in whatever forms oppression takes (race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, etc.), and overarching framework for understanding how education can contribute to liberation generally, even if he did not focus on the nuances of how, for instance, race or gender manifest in that process. Still, many critical scholars, while upholding their specific critiques, ultimately align themselves with Freire and his work. For instance, some feminist scholars still maintain an affinity between Freire and feminism (see, e.g., hooks, 1994; Stefanos, 1997; Weiler, 1991). Further, critical race scholars in education have not only critiqued Freire on this issue, but have also, in turn, used Freire’s work to build robust theoretical frameworks for understanding how to achieve racial justice in education (see, e.g., Allen, 2005; Solorzano & Yosso, 2005). These instances of critical educators interested in achieving social justice by pushing on the boundaries and edges of Freire’s liberatory pedagogy, represent an ideal engagement with Freire’s pedagogic conception as well as a fruitful route towards the growth of critical pedagogy more generally (Apple & Au, in press; Au & Apple, 2007). No matter how important or inconsequential, all critiques of Freire’s pedagogy do point to an important issue: The origins of Freire’s work—culturally, historically, politically, and philosophically—affect how we read his words and understand his conceptualizations. In this regard Freire (1997) saw himself as providing “the possibility for the educator to use my discussions and theorizing about oppression and apply them to a specific context” (p. 309), which he felt could be applied to deal with racism and women’s oppression in other contexts such as the United States (P. Freire & Macedo, 1995) and Guinea-Bissau (P. Freire & Macedo, 1987).
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Page 227 Remarking on the difficulties that some have had in recontextualizing his work, Freire (1997) posits that: [O]ne of the reasons that many progressive and liberal educators in the United States have difficulty in comprehending [my] concept … is not necessarily because they are incapable of understanding the concept. It is perhaps because they have only absorbed the substance of my ideas to a certain degree, while remaining ideologically chained to a position that is anti-Freirean. Thus, by only partially accepting my ideological aspirations, they then develop doubts and questions with respect to specific methods and techniques. In this way they rationalize their total movement away from critically embracing what I represent in terms of theoretical proposals for change and for radical democracy and for history as possibility and for a less discriminatory society and a more humane world. (p. 328) One particularly good example of an educator absorbing “the substance of [Freire’s] ideas to a certain degree, while remaining ideologically chained to a position that is anti-Freirean” (P. Freire, 1997, p. 328) is provided by Ellsworth (1989), who elicited a critical academic controversy (see, e.g., “Letters,” 1990) when she wrote about how she attempted to use critical pedagogy, and found that it only worked to strengthen the structures of oppression and dominance in her college classroom. I would argue that Ellsworth carried into her practice ideas and beliefs that were in deep ideological opposition to Freire’s epistemology and pedagogy, and that this difference with the foundations of Freire’s pedagogy led Ellsworth’s attempt at its application in her classroom to fail. Ellsworth’s ideological opposition to Freire’s dialectical materialist position becomes clear, for instance, when in her article she strongly states her belief that the world outside of our individual experience cannot be known, specifically declaring that she could not understand the racism her students of color were facing because she herself is White. This belief led Ellsworth to conclude that she could not develop any real knowledge or understanding of her students, their experiences, and various aspects of their identities and thus led her into difficulties implementing an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her college classroom. Fundamentally, and as I’ve explained above, this is an epistemological stance that is in direct opposition to Freire’s, which acknowledges that a material world exists and that we, as humans, have the ability to understand that material world. Ellsworth’s (1989) fundamental difference with Freirean epistemology and pedagogy thus ended up subverting her classroom dynamics in several ways. Ultimately it kept Ellsworth from being authoritative (in the Freirean sense) in the classroom because, as she asserts, she could not teach her students about racism since, as a White person, she cannot know or understand it. This in turn forced her to take a hands-off, laissez-faire approach to classroom relations, pedagogy, and content, because, from her own pedagogic perspective, she was then not in a position to direct the learning process. Research has found that such laissez-faire pedagogy actually increases status quo inequalities (Sharp & Green, 1975), and is one that Freire himself has specifically critiqued for reproducing oppression in the classroom (see, e.g., Shor & Freire, 1987). Indeed, I would argue that Ellsworth’s denial of the material realities of her classroom (Horner, 2000), directly extends into her hands-off pedagogy. Consequently, Ellsworth (1989) goes on to recount how her application of critical pedagogy, her version of Freirean pedagogy included,3 did not work, and concludes that Freirean pedagogy upholds universal truths, is based in the rationality of Western logic, does not recognize subjectivity, does not recognize that knowledge is socially constructed, does not ask teachers to be critically reflexive of their own identities in relation to their students, upholds “repressive myths,” and perpetuates “discourses of dominance” in the classroom. Thus, in Freire’s (1997) words, Ellsworth was able to: “rationalize [her] total movement away from critically embracing [Freire’s] theoretical proposals for change and for radical
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Page 228 democracy and for history as possibility and for a less discriminatory society and a more humane world” (p. 328). Simply put, Ellsworth’s failure to implement Freirean pedagogy arose because she was fundamentally “chained to a position that is anti-Freirean” (P. Freire, 1997, p. 328), a position that other critics of Freire share as well (see, e.g., Bowers & Apffel-Marglin, 2005).4 A Radical, Reconstructive Critique of Freire’s Pedagogy My defense of Freire against his critics here does not mean that Freire’s critical pedagogy was infallible. For instance, in a speech he delivered in Geneva in 1974, Freire himself admitted that he had mistakenly assumed that developing critical consciousness would necessarily move people to action. There, he remarked: “[M]y mistake consisted in not having addressed these poles—knowledge of reality and transformation of reality—in their dialecticity. I had spoken as if the unveiling of the reality automatically made for its transformation” (P. Freire, 1992, p. 88). Freire’s mistaken assumption, one that essentially equates literacy development with politically progressive development, has also been noted by others. For instance, Fine (1997), a supporter of Freire’s work, raises the specter of reactionary transformative actions coming from the development of certain forms of critical consciousness when she observes that: [F]rom white working-class communities we can hear a different kind of liveliness. A “critical” energy brews a felt, critical consciousness, which is performed often through Othering, that is racial/ethnic assault. White identity formation is being organized opposi-tionally, sustained as a binary conflict, sautéed in hatred. Indeed, as you say, understanding leads to action. This time it’s segregation, racism, and violence; State sponsored and community narrated violence toward immigrants, Affirmative Action, teen mothers, women on welfare. We may claim their consciousness is insufficiently critical, or misdirected. But they wouldn’t. Critique surfaces from economic dislocation, loss of community, xenophobic and racist fears of invasion, and violence. Their critical consciousness … surfaces collectively and loud. (p. 93, original emphasis) Glass (2001), also a supporter of Freirean pedagogy, raises a similar critique, although from a different angle. He observes that Freire’s ontology assumes humanization is defined by praxis, or critical reflection and action taken to progressively change reality (i.e., liberation) and not dehumanization (i.e., oppression). What Freire’s ontological assumption neglects is that what it means to be more progressively human cannot necessarily be universalized because such designations (humanized/dehumanized) are relative to specific cultural and historical configurations. What it means to be “human” now will be different from what it meant to be human in the past or what it will mean to be human in the future. Whether looking at it from Fine’s (1997) political perspective, Glass’s (2001) ontological perspective, or the epistemological perspective I provide in this chapter, Freire’s assumption about the progressive development of humans and human consciousness is a substantial issue to deal with, even if it isn’t an explicit critique of Freire’s liberatory pedagogy per se. Empowered subjects can act to transform the world in oppressive ways, particularly if they are learning within a general context of hegemonic oppressive ideologies, as is the case in the United States and other parts of the world (Apple, 2006; Apple & Au, in press). Admittedly, it is absolutely true that Freire advocated for liberatory teachers to struggle against hegemonic ideologies of inequality in their classrooms, but, as Freire also recognized, the reality of implementation in any context means that oppressive forces are also at play in the battle over ideologies. Often, as is currently the case in the United States, these other forces are more powerful than liberatory ones. Given the material
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Page 229 realities of increasing inequities being created through globalization of capital through privatization, liberalization, and “free trade” (see chapters by Robertson & Dale, McCarthy et al., this volume), it would seem that the continued development of Freirean pedagogy is certainly needed now just as much as it was in the late 1960s when he originally developed it (Apple, 1999; Glass, 2001). Notes 1 The fact that Freire drew heavily on Marxism is indisputable (Allman, 1999; Mayo, 2004; Roberts, 2003; Schugurensky, 1998), even if, as Macedo (2004) observes, many educators in the United States and elsewhere have attempted to turn a blind eye to Freire’s use of it as they have appropriated his work. 2 While this chapter does not take them up as a point of focus, in essence, the summaries of Freire’s dialectical materialist epistemology and pedagogy I offer here are explications of Freire’s humanism. For Freire, to be human is to be able to both understand the world and take action to change that world. It is in taking that action, in the movement from being object to subject, where we become full human beings. It is this sense of humanization through praxis that defines Freire’s ontology (Glass, 2001; Roberts, 2003) and underlies his epistemology and pedagogy. Freire develops his more traditionally humanist sensibilities in his later works where he takes up the role that love and hope, among others, play in liberatory pedagogy (see P. Freire, 1992, 1998a, 2004). 3 I’ve made this distinction here because, in addition to implicating Freirean pedagogy, Ellsworth also implicates the critical pedagogy of Henri Giroux. 4 I would like to note that my critique here of Ellsworth is strictly professional, and I do not wish to engage in (or condone) the long, often personal attacks of Ellsworth that some critical education theorists have undertaken. References Allen, R. L. (2005). Whiteness and critical pedagogy. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), Critical pedagogy and race (pp. 53–68). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Allman, P. (1999). Revolutionary social transformation (1st ed.). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Allman, P. (2007). On Marx . Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Apple, M. W. (1999). Power, meaning and identity . New York: Peter Lang. Apple, M. W. (2006). Educating the “right” way (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Au, W. (in press). Politics, theory, and reality in critical pedagogy. In A. Kazamias & R. Cowen (Eds.), International handbook of comparative education. New York: Routledge. Au, W. (2007a). Epistemology of the oppressed. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 5(2). Retrieved November 2, 2007, from http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageID=article&articleID=100 Au, W. (2007b). Vygotsky and Lenin on learning. Science & Society , 71 (3), 273–298. Au, W., & Apple, M. W. (2007). Freire, critical education, and the environmental crisis. Educational Policy , 21 (3), 457–470. Bejarano, B. L. S. (2005). Who are the oppressed? In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 49–67). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Bowers, C. A. (2005). How the ideas of Paulo Freire contribute to the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 133–150). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Bowers, C. A., & Apffel-Marglin, F. (Eds.). (2005). Rethinking Freire . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Cabral, A. (1969). Revolution in Guinea. New York: Monthly Review Press. Continuum International Publishing Group. (2005). Retrieved July 16, 2005, from http://www.continuum books.com
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Page 230 Davis, R., & Freire, P. (1981). Education for awareness. In R. Mackie (Ed.), Literacy and revolution (pp. 57–69). New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Harvard Educational Review, 59 (3), 297–324. Esteva, G., Stuchul, D. L., & Prakash, M. S. (2005). From a pedagogy of liberation to liberation from pedagogy. In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 13–30). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Fanon, F. (1966). The wretched of the earth (1st Evergreen ed.). New York: Grove Press. Fine, M. (1997). A letter to Paulo. In P. Freire, with J. W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, & W. T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor (pp. 89–97). New York: Peter Lang. Freire, A. M. A., & Macedo, D. (1998). Introduction. In A. M. A. Freire & D. Macedo (Eds.), The Paulo Freire reader (pp. 1–44). New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1974). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1982a). Education as the practice of freedom (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). In Education for critical consciousness (pp. 1–84). New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Freire, P. (1982b). Education for critical consciousness . New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Freire, P. (1982c). Extension or communication (L. Bigwood & M. Marshall, Trans.). In Education for critical consciousness (pp. 93–164). New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of hope (R. R. Barr, Trans. 2004 ed.). New York: Continuum Publishing Company. Freire, P. (1997). A response. In P. Freire, with J. W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, & W. T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor (pp. 303–329). New York: Peter Lang. Freire, P. (1998a). Pedagogy of freedom (P. Clarke, Trans. 2001 ed.). New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Freire, P. (1998b). Politics and education (P. L. Wong, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Latin American Center Publications. Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy (D. Macedo, Trans.). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1995). A dialogue. Harvard Educational Review , 65 (3), 377–402. Gadotti, M. (1996). Pedagogy of praxis (J. Milton, Trans. 1st ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gilbert, G. (2003). Marx, Wittgenstein, and the problem of consciousness. In M. Peters, C. Lankshear, & M. Olssen (Eds.), Critical theory and the human condition (pp. 101–113). New York: Peter Lang. Glass, R. D. (2001). On Paulo Freire’s philosophy of praxis and the foundations of liberation education. Educational Researcher, 30 (2), 15–25. Haymes, S. N. (2002). Race, pedagogy, and Paulo Freire. Philosophy of Education Yearbook, 151–159. Holst, J. D. (2006). Paulo Freire in Chile, 1964–1969. Harvard Educational Review , 76 (2), 243–270. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge. Horner, B. (2000). Terms of work for composition . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (1997). I know why this doesn’t feel empowering. In P. Freire, with J. W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, & W. T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor (pp. 127–141). New York: Peter Lang. Lenin, V. I. (1975). What is to be done? Peking: Foreign Language Press. Leonardo, Z. (2005). Foreword. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), Critical pedagogy and race (pp. xii–xv). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Letters. (1990). Harvard Educational Review , 60 (3), 388–405. Macedo, D. (2004). Foreword. In P. Freire (Ed.), Pedagogy of indignation (pp. ix–xxv). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Marx, K. (1978). Theses on Feuerbach. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed., pp. 143–145). New York: W. W. Norton and Company Ltd. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1978). The German ideology. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (pp. 146–200). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Mayo, P. (2004). Liberating praxis. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Memmi, A. (1967). The colonizer and the colonized . Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ollman, B. (2003). Dance of the dialectic (1st ed.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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Page 231 Rasmussen, D. (2005). Cease to do evil, then learn to do good … (a pedagogy for the oppressor). In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 115–131). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Roberts, P. (2003). Knowledge, dialogue, and humanization. In M. Peters, C. Lankshear, & M. Olssen (Eds.), Critical theory and the human condition (pp. 169–183). New York: Peter Lang. Robinson, P. (2005). Whose oppression is this? The cultivation of action in dissolving the dualistic barrier. In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 101–114). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Sayers, S. (1990). Marxism and the dialectical method. In S. Sayers & P. Osborne (Eds.), Socialism, feminism, and philosophy (pp. 140–168). New York: Routledge. Scapp, R. (1997). The subject of education. In P. Freire, with J. W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, & W. T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor (pp. 283–291). New York: Peter Lang. Schugurensky, D. (1998). The legacy of Paulo Freire. Convergence , 31 (1/2), 17–29. Sharp, R., & Green, A. (1975). Education and social control . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education (1st ed.). The University of Chicago Press. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation . South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Siddhartha. (2005). From conscientization to interbeing. In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 83–100). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Solorzano, D., & Yosso, T. (2005). Maintaining social justice hopes within academic realities. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), Critical pedagogy and race (pp. 69–92). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Stefanos, A. (1997). African women and revolutionary change. In P. Freire, with J. W. Fraser, D. Macedo, T. McKinnon, & W. T. Stokes (Eds.), Mentoring the mentor (pp. 243–271). New York: Peter Lang. Vasquez, G. R. (2005). Nurturance in the Andes. In C. A. Bowers & F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Rethinking Freire (pp. 31–47). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech (N. Minick, Trans.). In R. W. Rieber & A. Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1, pp. 37–285). New York: Plenum Press. Weiler, K. (1991). Freire and a feminist pedagogy of difference. Harvard Educational Review , 61 (4), 449–474.
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Page 232 17 Un/Taming Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed Gustavo E. Fischman By now, it goes without discussion that very few in the commercialized scene of contemporary academia can make a greater claim to political, pedagogical, and spiritual efficacy than the late Brazilian teacher and intellectual, Paulo Freire. A decade after his death, all his books are still in print, some of them among the best-selling titles for educators, in more than 60 languages; a simple web-based search gives significantly more references than any other author in the field of education (“Paulo Freire” has 1,800,000 pages and “John Dewey” 1,600,000, for example); and his name has been used to identify public and private schools, research centers, NGOs, and pre-schools in more than 45 countries. There is no doubt about his impact, yet it seems that his legacy is less consensually accepted. Celebrated and attacked with equivalent passion by religious and secular intellectuals, Marxists, feminists, postmodernists, and critical scholars,1 Freire has been endlessly quoted and misquoted, and yet, his ideas seem to symbolize and retain a unique appeal, that almost guarantees that somewhere at this very moment, an educator in a classroom, in a school playground, or university hall will say, proudly, that she/he is implementing a Freirean project inspired by the reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (PO). Almost since its publication PO, Freire’s most famous book, has generated a quite energetic debate, not only about the content and orientation of Freire’s work but also about how to understand his ideas.2 Joe Kincheloe, among several authors (Glass, 2001; McCowan, 2006), has noted that around PO’s ideas there has always been a taming process, expressed in conflicting efforts to use Freire to achieve opposite ends of a so-called critical pedagogy curriculum. On one end some teachers attempt to depoliticize his work in ways that make it simply an amalgam of student-directed classroom projects. On the other end of the continuum some teachers have emphasized the political dimensions but ignored the rigorous scholarly work that he proposed. These latter efforts have resulted in a social activism devoid of analytic and theoretical sophistication. Academic work that cultivates the intellect and demands sophisticated analysis is deemed irrelevant in these antiintellectual articulations of Freire’s ideas. With these problems in mind the struggle to implement a Freirean critical pedagogy should never seek some form of “purity” of Freirean intent. Indeed, Paulo insisted that we critique him and improve upon his ideas. Living up to many of his pedagogical principles without sanctifying and canonizing him and his work is a conceptual tightrope. (http://criticalpedagogyproject.mcgill.ca/drupal-5.1/?q=node/37)
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Page 233 What sets Freire apart? What can explain such persistence, influence, and, above all, taming contest? Perhaps the simplest answer is that if we are still discussing his ideas, it is because they were produced by a “unique” man who belonged to that special group of intellectuals, who with words and actions confer meaning and suggest directions to a society. I am sure that Freire was a gifted educator and thinker, and, without doubt, he was one of the best models of committed intellectual (Fischman & McLaren, 2005) that I can find, but this still does not explain what characteristics confer him his “uniqueness.”3 In this text I will present and discuss some of the “reasons” elaborated by my students as they engaged in the process of reflecting about the usefulness and appropriateness of studying PO and other texts by Paulo Freire in a graduate program in the USA.4 What follows are several reasons proposed by the students as their answer to the question: Why do you think that Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed lasted so long and generated so much debate? I will introduce each of the reasons using the words provided by one of the students and then elaborate on the explicit/implicit rationale framed in the students’ suggestions. Reason 1: Big Ideas We are always reading books and articles full of big words, or about big problems, but in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire is presenting a very, very, very big IDEA. (Claudia, 26 years old, Chicana, finishing her Masters in Educational Foundations) The notion that PO is relevant because it contains grand ideas, concerning teachers, students, schools, societies and communities, was frequently noted by the seminar participants, because, they argued, Freire interpellated them: “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations … or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom’” (Freire, 1993, p. 15). Its ambitious epistemological nerve—its massive commitment to understanding and explaining everything related to education—seductively appeals to the optimist and the pessimist, convoking those who are inside and outside classrooms, giving generously to all of them the “authority” to simultaneously criticize and reinvent models, practices, institutions, experiences, and dreams. In the Freirean pedagogical universe, ideas are not merely helpful: they produce a sense of control and empowerment, qualities sorely missed in contemporary schools and universities. As an educator, I believe that this sense of empowerment relates to the much-debated idea of conscientização in Freire. If generations of intelligent teachers and educators were willing to commit with the PO project, it was not just because they were deceived into ideological confusion by a seductive tale of educational change and redemption. It was because they identified and made their own, the fundamental ethical message and the moral seriousness of Freire’s conviction that the destiny of our world was tied up with the condition of the poorest and most oppressed members of society. Reason 2: Getting It You get Freire … even when you don’t understand all the words in the book. Reading Freire makes me feel something about the power of teaching. (Rosa, 37 years old, Ph.D. student from Mexico) The empowerment and sense of control noted before and taken up again in Rosa’s words appear to be related to the fact that although PO was written in a complex language, dense with scholarly
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Page 234 and political references (hard even for specialists), teachers and educators reading Freire often feel that they understand the main ideas and that these ideas can be put into practice immediately.5 PO was, since its publication, perceived as a heterodox and hybrid text.6 In clear challenge to orthodox positivistic pedagogical models, including many Marxist and so-called critical and popular models, Freire’s pedagogical and political ideas offer strong resistance to be reduced to a model or method easily applied to any context. As Adriana Puiggrós has aptly noted: “The subjects of Freirean pedagogy are not reduced to an essentialist existence, or to immutable categories—they are complex subjects, determined by multiple factors, and they have diverse languages and histories” (1999, p. 123). Freire used a theoretically complex, yet poetically engaging language which, contrary to a common practice in academic circles, was often presented using straightforward words. Being conceptually “simple,” he said, did not imply abandoning consistency through the use of theoretical categories, but avoiding simplistic perspectives. Freire argued that the language through which one presents demands and claims, through which one proposes to change or maintain the order of the world, is always packed with explicit intentions and with multiple possibilities of interpretations, yet, instead of lamenting the multiplicity of readings that his work has provoked in the last 40 years, he welcomed heterodoxy, carnivalesque readings, and the reader’s appropriation of his words. In a way Freire’s concern with communication was not reduced to his writing but also with the recognition that he was influential: “Deep down, this must be every author’s true dream—to be read, discussed, critiqued, improved, and reinvented by his/her readers” (1998, p. 31). Reason 3: Quilting Words Freire was a scholar, a professor, but he was also an artist, or perhaps an artisan … like my grandmother that by quilting, she told stories that interpreted the world, using selectively (and this is the key word) whatever was available, Freire quilted with ideas. (Brian, 35 years old, African American and future school psychologist) The image of the quilt brought by Brian was associated to the notion of “hybridity” that the group discussed on several occasions. In this case, the hybrid character of the PO project relates to the intellectual model developed by Freire that displaced by absorbing the older Deweyan, pragmatic, spiritualist, and, more importantly, the Marxist and Christian modernizing utopian dreams about education. Marxist and Christian language, or a language rooted in Marxist and Christian categories, gave form and an implicit coherence to PO by providing the deep emotional “structure” of much of the progressive politics contained in Freire’s book. PO was, like them, a strand in the great progressive and redemptive narrative about schools of our times. In Freire’s words: In the last instance, I have to say that both my position as a Christian and my approximation to Marx, in both cases were not at an intellectual level, but at the concrete level. I didn’t approach the oppressed because of Marx; I went to him because of the oppressed. My encounter with the oppressed sent me to search for Marx, and not the other way around. (Freire & Faundez, 1979, pp. 74–75) The quilting hybridity noted by Brian and some of his colleagues relates also to the fact that PO both shares and antagonizes with other classical narratives of schooling an optimistic, rationalistic account of modern society and its possibilities. The Freirean distinctive twist—the
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Page 235 assertion that the good education to come would be an exercise in freedom, through the praxis, of the oppressed in which educators would be key actors in the process—may appear hard to believe for those who are always denouncing the crisis of education, the rotten state of schools and teachers, but it still generates more enthusiasm among educators and activists than any other pedagogical model. Reason 4: Belonging To PO is like a badge, a banner, something that helped me to establish a connection with other people, no matter where are you coming from, what’s your race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, even if you like kimchi or tacos, if you see somebody reading Freire, you know that you belong to the same group, you are on the same side. (Kim, 27 years old, is from Korea and studying early childhood education) Kim’s words highlight two salient and distinctive characteristics of PO. Firstly, reading and discussing PO has functioned as a sort of symbolic “badge” indicating the willingness of educators to commit to the ideas of the wide movement of “popular education/critical pedagogy.” As a grassroots movement (especially in Latin America) the popular education/critical pedagogy movement is identified with Freire, but such strong identification did not prevent variations that developed in dialogue with practitioners, academics, and scholars. Freirean/Popular education has been implemented with all types of groups (children, the elderly, women, migrant, Indigenous, incarcerated) and settings (rural, urban, poor, schools, universities, jails, hospitals, etc.) thus, it has an enormous repertoire of styles, practices, and strategies. In sum, Freirean/Popular education is a good example of unity in diversity, because it is quite diverse in approaches, methods, and populations, yet it aspires to be unified in the development of nonauthoritarian directivist pedagogy with the goal of consciousness raising as the pre-condition of liberation.7 Secondly, and intimately related to the symbolic unifying characteristic of Freire’s ideas in PO as well as the diversity of approaches emerging from this book, is the debate about the “taming of Freire.” Countless popular educators, classroom teachers, and university professors have claimed to be reinventing Freire, and undoubtedly some of them do so from perspectives that are commonly identified as “commonsense” or “domesticated.” Labeling an approximation as “commonsense” or domesticated usually implies that the educators have washed away the political goals and the notion of transformation and praxis, or reduced the ideas of PO to the application of group activities and paternalistic practices.8 Nevertheless, it is important to recognize two possibilities: (a) that in the multiplication of voices claiming to be doing “Freire” there are good chances of increasing the opportunities of those educators to recognize the importance of being open to criticisms and challenges; and (b) Freire’s own perspective was that you cannot “overcome” commonsense without going through it: In order to get beyond “common sense,” you had to use it. Just as it is unacceptable to advocate an educational approach that is satisfied with rotating on an axis of “common sense,” so neither is an educational practice that sets at naught the “knowledge of living experience” and simply starts out with the educator’s systematic cognition … This means, ultimately, that the educator must not be ignorant of, underestimate, or reject any of the “knowledge of living experience” with which educands come to school. (Freire, 1997, p. 47)
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Page 236 Reason 5: Feeling Power I cannot fully explain what it felt like to have a real education issue in a context like India, teaching in a colony with women … Where theoretical ideals met reality and I could be what I knew I wanted to be. I am probably not explaining this well but just know that it was, in my career, a real turning point. Freire’s idea about teachers and students learning and the power of developing educational models powered by the knowledge of those with the least “power” (but plenty of knowledge) turned out to be liberating for everyone. It was the most organic and uplifting experience. (Elizabeth, White student, mother of two with a lengthy experience as a qualitative researcher) PO’s insistent claim about the political nature of education is not an abstraction, an “empty signifier” that can be filled with any type of orientation. The need to exercise radical democratic forms of education implies to reject both authoritarian and empty laissez-faire practices. Freire and many teachers see such dual perspective as an expression of a false option: Just because I reject authoritarianism does not mean I can fall into lack of discipline, nor that rejecting lawlessness, I can dedicate myself to authoritarianism. As I once affirmed: One is not the opposite of the other. The opposite of either manipulative authoritarianism or lawless permissiveness is democratic radicalism. (1998, p. 64) The feeling of power noted by Elizabeth also relates to the fact that PO is adamantly eloquent in its opposition to the ideological straightjacket of teaching and learning as emotionally neutral: “It is impossible to teach without the courage to love” (1998, p. 4). However, for Freire, love should not be understood as a form of paternalistic coddling that leads to indulgence and accommodation, but it is based on his radical perspective about the relationship between educators and learners. The teacher is at the same time a student, the student is at the same time a teacher; the nature of their knowledge might differ but as long as education is the act of knowing and not merely transmitting facts, students and teachers share a similar status as producers, and are linked together through a pedagogical dialogue characterized by horizontal and dialogical relationships. Reason 6: Real Hope What is so beautiful about Freire’s vision is that he always reminded us that even though circumstances are dreadful, they could be worse, but also they could be improved … We see hope and spaces for transformation at the university. We know our history. The Revolt and the youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina require justice and truth. On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: Either you will reach a point higher up today, Or you will be training your powers so that You will be able to climb higher tomorrow. (Friedrich Nietzsche) Those were the closing remarks of Ivana, who left Bosnia when she was 15 and since then has been living in the United States, but quite often reminded the group that she is maintaining her
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Page 237 heart and hopes close to her native country. Ivana mentioned in her paper that she identified with the following statement in Pedagogy of Freedom: I like being human because I know that my passing through the world is not predetermined, preestablished. That my destiny is not a given but something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility. I like being human because I am involved with others in making history out of possibility, not simply resigned to a fatalistic stagnation. (1999, p. 54) Since the publication of PO, the Freirean political/pedagogical discourses propose a notion of “hope” that demands changes for a future that is already “in” the present. In the Freirean discourse, insisting to hope for an education that is worthy of that name must contribute to the creation of fairer and better societies today: the Freirean demand of changing the oppressive aspects of everyday life in schools and society by engaging in the common struggles of the “here and now.” PO provides a framework for the present. Better education does not need to wait for a magical situation that will make utopian consciousness emerge among the oppressed, exactly at the moment when the ideal objective circumstances are to be realized. Rather, Freire’s utopia is realizable, but only in reading the word and the world in an ever-evolving process of conscientization, emerging from the concrete conditions of everyday struggle within capitalist society (Freire, 1993). In Freire’s utopian vision of schools, the main task is not to liberate others by applying ready-made recipes, but to develop solidarity with the others, by struggling together in classrooms, in schools, and in the streets. PO tells teachers that even short-lived experiences of democratic schooling—in a single classroom or through district-wide efforts—are worth pursuing. These experiences teach us not only to expect more from schools, but also that improving education is also connecting individual and community participation with goals of equality and solidarity, as well as providing access to socially and scientifically relevant knowledge, and the improvement of individual and social educational outcomes. I think that the words of Anita, another of my students capture those complex feelings quite well: What I think that makes Freire unique among the people we usually read is that he surprises the reader, because with him there is a place for smiles as well as anger but not in the ways we usually expect. For example, I remember that I was being enthralled by an investigation of Indianness,9 the abuse of the “model minority” myth, and the examples of South Asian American activism, I found myself crying at the last two sentences of the book: “The taxi workers show us how immigrants and their children can be radical within the belly of the beast. Theirs is a pedagogy of hope” (p. 203). I’m not sure why I cried, but I think Freire would have smiled. Conclusions Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed to denounce the multiple shortcomings of the banking system of education, and the often proclaimed but never achieved equality of opportunities of the liberal tradition. It is worth remembering what distinguishes the banking model for Freire: Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. (1993, p. 72)
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Page 238 Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. (p. 62) If his seminal work and the others that follow PO are still inspiring teachers, educators, and administrators, it is in large measure because the shortcomings of the banking system are the norm and not the exception; and because even today there are more teachers willing to commit and affirm that other school experience, more democratic, more open, more tolerant, and even more creative, is not only achievable, but necessary. Freire’s political-pedagogical discourse provides simultaneously ideal and achievable goals that allow teachers and students, schools and communities to reflect about situations, words, feelings, and institutions, and to consciously act to build institutionally fair and exciting educational spaces as part of a new civic utopian vision of democratic life. A renewed commitment to justice and fairness in society and schooling is a welcoming movement for socially relevant knowledge, for respecting different perspectives on sciences and arts, for encouraging schools where disagreement is not punished, where love and a desire to know thrive, and where a passion for radicalizing democracy and creating more just alternatives is welcomed. Notes 1 In an interview with Moacir Gadotti Paulo Freire recalled the reception of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Some Marxists—and also non-Marxists—who thought in purely mechanist terms, criticized me in the 1970s, of being at worst an idealistic Kantian, or at best a neo-Hegelian, because of my proposals of conscientização that challenged the idea that the superstructure conditions the conscience.” 2 It is relevant to reflect about the “controversy around Freire. How many authors can generate this type of debate and questions: Was he a Marxist? Humanist? Conservative? Was Freire the author of a method, a methodology , a theory , a pedagogy, a philosophy , a program, or a system ? When asked which of those denominations he felt most comfortable with. ‘ None of them ,’ he answered. ‘I didn’t invent a method, or a theory, or a program, or a system, or a pedagogy, or a philosophy. It is people who put names to things’” (Torres, 1997, p. 2). 3 Holst (2006) notes: “By not understanding the development of a pedagogy such as Freire’s as a sociohistorically situated collective process, we fail to see the multifaceted process at work and we merely fuel the unnecessary and distorting mystique that has developed around Freire” (p. 265). 4 More than 60 students participated in the graduate seminar Re-Thinking Paulo Freire and the Politics of Education: Combining the Language of Critique with the Language of Possibility between 2002 and 2007, and although it is an elective class, that does not fulfill any specific requirement, it has been the most popular class of all the classes I teach. 5 In this quality there are risks of reducing Freire’s complex ideas to a problem of finding the right methods, transforming the political goals of social justice into crude instruments and slogans that gave the sensation of mastering the political economy of education and the pedagogical foundations for schooling without actually having to study either. 6 The hybrid character was also a source of a frequent criticism. As Daniel Schugurensky has noted in a review of Freire’s contributions: In the writings of Freire we find, for instance, elements of Socratic maieutics, philosophical existentialism, phenomenology, Hegelianism, Marxism, progressive education and liberation theology. Together with Marx and the Bible are Sartre and Husserl, Mounier and Buber, Fanon and Memmi, Mao and Guevara, Althusser and Fromm, Hegel and Unamuno, Kosik and Furter, Chardin and Maritain, Marcuse and Cabral. Even though Freire was influenced by these and other authors, his merit was to combine their ideas into an original formulation. (1998, p. 23)
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Page 239 7 With time, popular education has been adopted and incorporated into state initiatives, public policies (specially in the areas of adult education) and multiplied in countless educational practices in union halls, Indigenous populations, NGOs, community organizations, feminist groups, universities, schools. The examples of the pedagogical experimentation of the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil (Landless movement), the Zapatistas popular education initiative in Chiapas (Mexico, the escola cidadã initiative in Porto Alegre (Brazil) the Universidad Popular Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), the Universidad indigena Tupak Katari (Indigenous university in Bolivia) are all good examples of a Freirean inspired popular/critical education. I’m not claiming that these organizations are “pure” examples of Freirean practices, just that it is impossible to isolate them and their emergence as pedagogical models from the Freirean ideas and debates. 8 Leslie Bartlett provides an example of such situation: Freire was a powerful symbol among the educators I met. Freirean aphorisms such as “teaching within students’ reality” or teaching students to read “the word and the world” were frequently invoked during training sessions. On one occasion, the prize for a contest held during teacher training was a short booklet by Freire. And I was told by “teachers” and “students” involved that the adult literacy programs in these three organizations were deeply shaped by Freire’s ideas. It is important to note, however, that the NGO teachers with whom I worked did not have an exhaustive knowledge of Freire’s corpus. Practitioners tended to be familiar with only a small segment of his early opus, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Few of the teachers, other than those at university, had read more than a chapter from one of Freire’s books. (Bartlett, 2005, p. 351) 9 Prashad, V. (2000). The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.The title is a play on Du Bois’ (1903) powerful The Souls of Black Folk. References Bartlett, L. (2005). Dialogue, knowledge, and teacher-student relations. Comparative Education Review , 49 (3), 344–364. Fischman, G., & McLaren, P. (2005). Rethinking critical pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean legacies. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies , 5(4), 1–22. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (New rev. 20th-Anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving the pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1999). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P., & Faundez, A. (1979). Por uma pedagogia da Educação e mundança . Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Glass, R. D. (2001, March). On Paulo Freire’s philosophy of praxis and the foundation of liberation education. Educational Researcher, 30 (2), 15–25. Holst, J. D. (2006). Paulo Freire in Chile, 1964–1969: Pedagogy of the Oppressed in its sociopolitical economic context. Harvard Educational Review , 76 (2), 243–270. McCowan, T. (2006) Approaching the political in citizenship education. Educate , 6(1), 57–70. Puiggrós, A. (1999). Neoliberalism and education in the Americas. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schugurensky, D. (1998). The legacy of Paulo Freire. Convergence , 31 (1–2), 26. Torres, R. M. (1997). The Million Paulo Freires. Convergence (A Tribute to Paulo Freire), 31 (1–2).
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Page 240 18 What Type of Revolution Are We Rehearsing For? Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed Ricardo D. Rosa The politics of performance and the possibilities embedded within radical performance pedagogies is intensely intriguing as one site for thinking through possibilities of intervention into the exploitative agenda of schooling and beyond. Social action theater, radical theater, transformative theater, and Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), although all diverse in their political praxis may be too easily dismissed as feel-good spectacles unless we are fully receptive to engage the lessons they bring. “Theater,” to me, signified a bourgeois world of leisure that could not deal with the immediacy of the assault that working-class, Black and Brown people faced. My skepticism peaked while working as program coordinator for the National Conference for Community and Justice. The organization secured a grant from the Massachusetts Governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes for the purpose of constructing a project to counter the rising tide of hate crimes in various Massachusetts public high schools. The structuring of the project was placed in my hands. I saw the task before me as incredibly difficult on multiple levels. There existed a myopic ideological investment in “hate crime” as a notion bounded in legal discourse and individualized to the degree that the institutional, social, political, and economic conditions that give rise to waves of hate were totally abstracted. The parameters of the project would not allow us to envision the rampant attack and demolition of bilingual/bicultural education as hate motivated. The fact that Boston landlords are not proactively penalized for renting apartments with lead paint levels high enough to permanently damage the nervous system of children could not be articulated as a hate crime, for example. After presenting my curricular proposals for the project I was told that the exercises were too transgressive. Too great a focus was placed on institutional realities and not enough on interactions between people. One member of the task force stated that there were theater exercises developed by a Brasilian that engaged a third-party spectator into a hate crime scene. In his words, “it would be a great way to get kids to solve interpersonal conflicts that bring on hate crimes.” Boal became, for me, just another name associated with techniques that sought to digest human misery and solve it through a vomiting of de-contextualized human relations work. I began to truly analyze the constraints and possibilities of TO through my work with a group of activist students on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, through my work with students in a social studies methods course, and as a U.S. history teacher at the middle school level, where I returned to teach while working on a dissertation. It was through these experiences that I was placed, as Maxine Greene (1995) eloquently put it, “in the presence of a work from the border … from a place outside the reach of my experience.”
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Page 241 The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate the value of Boal’s work in challenging the established and dominant institutional epistemologies in schooling and beyond. First, I explore the very development and historicity of TO. Second, I highlight aspects of TO centralized in this chapter, offer a brief description of the respective praxis,1 my own encounters and process of using the techniques, and explore their possibilities and constraints in critical education. More specifically, I interrogate the value of TO in the production of knowledge through critical and democratic dialogues while simultaneously claiming throughout that the development of subaltern counter-publics, in an era of deep anti-democratic impulses in the United States, requires more than dialogue. Lastly, the frame will be expanded to look at the possibilities and constraints of TO in rupturing boundaries between “normative” educational structures and the social, political, and economic context against and within which schools exist. A Partial Exploration of the Formation of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed The most important lesson to be learned does not exist in the techniques themselves but in Boal’s process (and others) of charting different cartographies of political praxis while moving through and beyond dominant culture. Furthermore, his work exemplifies a pliable pursuit with significant potential for cross-contextual engagement coming out of an inverse type of globalization. Bogad (2006) explains how TO can be utilized as a modular form of resistance, given that there are organizations all over the world that are actively re-articulating the work and the translations of Boal’s books into a number of languages. Bogad explains that modular resistance forms like multiple strikes launched against subsidiary firms worldwide help to keep corporate power in check. Yet, he rightly cautions against ritualization of TO in this pursuit, which would ultimately limit its power of pliability and capacity to morph as states and centers of power reposition for more effective forms of repression. In quoting Naomi Klein (2002), he also considers the power of TO in fashioning open protest spaces as opposed to an “occupying space model which controls space for unified dissent” (Bogad, 2006, p. 52), reflecting a coalition of diverse agendas/decentered unity (Apple, 2000) which is often the case in anticorporate social action. Boal’s early praxis and theories of performance remain a serious example of a flexible and transformative critical pedagogy. So much so that his work has certainly been a turning point, along with other forms of grounded political theatre2 surfacing in the 1960s and 1970s, in expanding the dialogue of what constitutes theater and performance. Who decides what theater/performance is? What qualifies as theater/performance content? In what service is theater/performance to be placed? The work of Boal and other radical artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s, along with more theoretical developments such as the work of Brecht (1964) and Artaud (1970), significantly challenged the knowledge/power nexus (Foucault, 1972) in the orbit of theater. In doing so, they significantly helped to shape a relationship between performance and critical transformative pedagogy. TO praxis is indebted to intellectuals of various disciplines, histories, ideological trajectories (most of the Marxist persuasion), and geographies. In the space of a materialist poetics, the work of German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht figures prominently (Schutzman, 2006). Brecht’s central project concerned the integration of several counter-routines in his aesthetics in the effort to deconstruct the dramatic forms’ apolitical3 anti-intellectualism through its appeals to the spectator’s emotions and the positioning of social relations as historically inevitable. For Brecht, aesthetics was capable of reconfiguring “feelings [which] are private and limited … against reason [which is] fairly comprehensive and to be relied on. [He goes on] Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to introduce sordid intoxication, or create fog, has got to be given up” (Brecht, 1964, pp. 15, 38). This radical transformation of intellectually engaged spectators
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Page 242 would, according to Brecht, be the vanguard for social action. Brechtian methods of distancing appealed to Boal given their centering of social, political, and class conflict and contradiction on center stage.4 Early in his development, while director of the Arena Theater5 (1956–1971), we can note two central tendencies in his work—both of which contributed to the birth of TO. First, he was shaped by, and, in turn, helped shape, the countercultural/anti-imperialist movement(s) characteristic of “Cannibalism” and “Tropicalism.” Britton summarizes the spirit of the times by highlighting three main tropes: (1) the definition of a national cultural identity in form and content; (2) the collapsing of boundaries between artist and viewer; and (3) the raising of public consciousness in the service of socioeconomic transformation. Having been educated in the United States and inspired by American playwrights (Britton, 2006), Boal’s entry into Arena provided him with unique insights from which to launch a discourse and practice seeking to destabilize the dominant aesthetic. At the same time, such aesthetic and geographical crossings would place his work at a controversial crossroads. Second, he repositioned Brecht’s praxis a bit in the attempt to fashion new techniques of distancing. Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz (1994) account for several unique introductions to theatre: (1) “the blurring of fact and fiction”; (2) the “use of standardized ritual masks that signify social habits”; (3) the “shifting of roles within the play so that all actors played all characters”; and (4) the “introduction of the [early form of] Joker,” that is problematizing of actor/narrator and the intent to collapse distinctions. Yet, early on we can also note traces of deviation from Brecht as Boal is clearly resistant to mechanized interpretations, for which Brecht and many other Marxist theorists that followed were criticized. By the time of his publication of Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979), one could note an indexing of Freirean language and a more developed praxis, seeking dialogical engagement rather than the one-way transmission approach characteristic of “normative” theater, even the radical methods of Brecht. During the Arena years, the early Boalian inclination to navigate controversial tensions was already emerging (a clear example would be his navigation of the dialectical relationship between social structure and individual agency). His work may easily be incorrectly dismissed as the type that enacts too great a connection to the enterprise of psychology and idealism, rather than the socialist inclinations which he claims (O’Sullivan, 2001). Dispositions such as these, of which this serves as an example, in his work are what have made/make TO so alluring and it is what makes his praxis (TO in particular) so arguable. Although I do find these critiques to be relevant in relation to projects such as Rainbow of Desire, I find them less accurate in the case of TO for two reasons: (1) the tensions that surface through his work have not been sufficiently analyzed; and (2) distinctions are not made with regards to the variant ways in which his work has been taken up. His lean on Brecht’s assault of the Aristotelian production of “catharsis” is particularly strong. Boal’s position on Aristotelian theater can be summarized in his insistence that Aristotle abstracts politics from poetry. Dwyer (2005) and Milne (1992) question Boal’s interpretation of Aristotle. Dwyer’s main contentions are that: a) he hardly distinguishes between, on the one hand, Aristotle’s ideal model of tragedy and, on the other hand, the evidence we have of plays as actually written and performed; b) he glosses over the very significant differences between Aristotle and whatever “Aristotelianisms” have followed. (p. 637) He further claims that “Boal, like Brecht, first constructs—and then demolishes—the ‘Aristotle’ he needs in order to suit his own theoretical purposes” (p. 635). Yet, all readings are constructions to serve a certain purpose. Interpretations are always partial.6 Dwyer, too, inflects an
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Page 243 “authoritative” reading that symbolically asserts “you’re not reading it right, so let me tell you how it should be read.” Whether or not one agrees with how Boal restores Brecht’s critique of Aristotelian poetics in the critique of “carthartic”/politically conservative theater, the reality remains that the majority of spectacles, although always a locus of ideological struggle, encode greater “rightist” tendencies or produce various forms of omission so as to exclude anti-establishment political agitation. This is surely the case given the obvious connections between the arts and market mechanisms and the arts and sponsorship by the state. Boal’s intervention was, and continues to be, important in decentering elite interests, despite the flaws in his critique of political philosophers. Dwyer (2005) is correct in claiming that the critique of Aristotle is underdeveloped given its broadness, lack of nuance, reductive readings of notions of justice, the collapsing of various aesthetic philosophies discussed in the poetics, and so on. His most forceful critique is reserved for the actual production of catharsis in the spectator. He states that Boal is not able to adequately explain the dramaturgical mechanism that functions to keep spectators complacent, and sees the linearity of a rightist state and theater and duped public as problematic. One would have difficulty imagining, for example, a totally passive reading of such visual texts as Birth of a Nation (1915). The film led to riots in some cities upon its release, inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and opened up a space for prominent racists (Woodrow Wilson, a case in point) to openly and violently articulate their views (Lowen, 1995). Indeed, one would have a difficult time suggesting that Ancient Greek audiences were passive spectators, since the historical evidence actually points to the contrary. Stuart Hall (1981) correctly points to the notion of a “margin of understanding,” which speaks to negotiated readings particularly likely when the social position of an audience member differs from that of the producer of the text. Although Dwyer is correct in his critique, to be fair, Boal has also claimed that TO suffers from a deep theoretical base. It should come as no surprise that issues of reception are underdeveloped given the publication of Theatre of the Oppressed in 1979 and the rise of reception theory, arising out of literary theory, in the 1970s and 1980s. This criticism is certainly one that can be applied not only to Boal but to many aesthetic theorists, including Brecht and Adorno. Boal would have been better off in an analysis of the sphere of theater and media generally, rather than constructing a theater of the oppressed by way of an Aristotelian critique. TO, his later contribution, moves beyond Brecht and is guided heavily by his reading of Freire.7 Thinking through Freire’s “anti-banking” and dialogical philosophy of education, Boal was able to construct a praxis that moved beyond Brecht in blurring the distinctions between audience and stage altogether. As Cohen-Cruz & Schutzman (2006) put it, “as Freire broke the hierarchical divide between teacher and student, Boal did so between performer and audience member” (p. 3). It’s important to note, however, that Boal wasn’t the first to do this. Taking the Freirean cue, Boal only differed in the manner in which he articulated the interruption and the degree to which he blurred the boundaries. In doing so, he not only introduced a significant shift in the orbit of theater, but also a valuable contribution to critical education. As Darder, Baltodano, and Torres (2003) point out: Boal’s contribution was to mark a significant turning point for those critical educators and artists who had become frustrated with what they perceived as, on one hand, the deeply theoretical nature of critical pedagogy and, on the other, the absence of more practical and affective strategies to enliven their work. (p. 6) Yet, we must also not lose sight of the fact that Boal’s work has been taken up in contradictory ways and has been put to uses that are problematic, beginning with the reduction of his work to a static methodology.
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Page 244 There are other sources that need to be credited. Some scholars have written of how the influence of Carnival and anticolonial theory has also impacted the work of Boal. In this regard, I’m invoking the work of Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon as critical theoretical figures on which aspects of TO rest. One would have to also credit the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement of the United States and the various forms of political aesthetics that arose out of the African American and Chicano experience(s). All of these connections are important points of exploration. To explore the context(s) in which TO was produced is critical. It is only through such an analysis that we are able to create a space where respect is given to his contributions and yet we refuse heroification and clinging to the work religiously so as to feed our own “methods fetish” (Bartolomé, 1994). Rather, we reconstruct the work to suit different landscapes and to inspire the articulation of new repertoires of contention (Tarrow, 1998). An Introduction to Theatre of the Oppressed and Its Possibilities and Constraints in Critical Education At a time of increased neoliberalization, which seeks the erasure of public space, the call to (re)create and protect spaces for critical dialogue as a fundamental requirement of the sustaining of a deep democratic life is of monumental importance. The rehearsal for revolution in this context, however, must have different contours. Clearly there are social movements on the ground. In the United States, significant work exists in relation to transnational and global movements as the WTO protests of 1999 surely indicated. TO and other forms of cultural engagement hold promise in relation to these movements. However, critical cultural praxis such as TO remains heavily confined to institutions, placing limits to their edge. In this context, one of the encouraging areas of TO engagement would be in its ability to interrogate and (re-)forge what Michael Apple (2000) has called a decentered unity or communities of struggle. Progressive political action can flow out of a search for common ground despite divergent ideologies. This common ground can only be accessed through critical dialogue. TO is capable of accessing these spaces as the work is perfectly suited to bring about attention to the limitations of respective positions, thus assisting in the (re-)constructing of more viable alternatives that function not through a politics of “homogeneity” but one of solidarity. Various interventions that attempt to create these spaces often fall along one of two lines, either they are deeply theoretical or very mechanistic. Theoretical rigor is certainly necessary. However, too often these interventions are laced with unnecessary language that may actually function to steer away teachers who might see it as impractical. This has certainly been a major critique of critical pedagogy. On the other hand, there are those interventions that are excessively mechanistic. Spaces for dialogue may be structured around certain discursive rules that actually function to revictimize the victim even if the dialogue centers on social issues that examine subordination. A classic practice is that of the teacher as facilitator. That is, an assumption of an “objective” overseer of the process pervades the discursive space. Diana Hess (in personal conversation) has pointed out that what students, particularly youth, learn from experiences such as this is that mature, professional, adults should not have political opinions. Even though a space may be created for critical articulations by students, the hidden curriculum speaks to different pedagogical inclinations. Furthermore, the very parameter of what constitutes valid dialogue may have been designed in ways that insulate emotional responses by not allowing for spaces that connect to positive political projects. Boal’s work is certainly not the panacea that will cure all authoritarian spaces. Yet, the menu that Boal has offered is certainly one that critical teachers will find nourishing given the space(s) that it enters.
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Page 245 There are three main techniques that constitute the arsenal of TO: Image Theater, Forum Theater, and Invisible Theater. Normally, TO practitioners infuse various short theater exercises to stimulate a critical presence of mind prior to engaging in the more elaborate techniques. These exercises offer a great deal in themselves. However, given that these exercises exist outside of the corpus of everyday institutional activity and their sometimes extreme interactive nature, it becomes easy to translate them into “icebreakers” that ultimately serve the function of comforting those already privileged in institutions. In our elementary social studies methods course, for example, we were engaged by a very simple exercise called Columbian Hypnosis (Boal, 1992). Students were divided into pairs and one student placed her hands six inches from the face of another student. With her arm stretched, and constantly maintaining the original distance, she had to lead the other student anywhere in the room while following any trajectory she so desired. After a few minutes, just enough time to frustrate the person being led, students then had to switch roles. We then proceeded to have a conversation about their experiences leading, being led, and more complex configurations. Thoughts on this simple experiential activity led to deeper dialogues regarding power relations. Many of the pre-service teachers saw, prior to the exercise, these dialogues with youth as inadmissible given their age. Exercises such as this one helped to open up insights on possibilities of constructing critical spaces where students are not only engaged pedagogically, but where they deeply analyze power relations. Image Theater involves explorations of relationships of power through the sculpting of the body or bodies in interaction. Boal (1992) relates several methods and within the methods he suggests “dynamisations”—that is, ways to provoke deeper reflections from a respective exercise. Of course, TO matters only when one mutates the praxis so as to anchor it to the specific context of its use, and positions it to serve deeper political functions. In an attempt to problem-pose differences in our conceptualizations of “multiculturalism,” pre-service teachers were broken up into groups of five, asked to turn their backs to each other, and to represent the term in visual form utilizing their bodies only. After the initial body positioning with backs turned, students then turned towards each other and positioned their bodies in the same way. Each student in the small group then had an opportunity to circle around the group and resculpt anyone in the image of their choosing. Students were then asked to enter their original positions while facing each other. At this point they could position themselves not in a static circle, but in relation to any other body or bodies in the group. We then moved into a discussion of the positions, transitions, and the act of sculpting and being sculpted by others. I wanted students to also have the opportunity to verbally express themselves outside of the context of the Image Theater. It’s important to note, however, that the dialogue began before any words were spoken. In relation to anxieties about “covering the material,” that is, in being able to relate to students the ideological signposts behind the different camps of multiculturalism, I was not surprised to see that the different principles (i.e., liberal position, critical, feminist, etc.) arose out of the exercise itself. Indeed, another potential of TO is its capacity of generating theory from within. Of course, such exercises should never force the “ dificultador ” into a position of facilitator—that is, one who pursues an “objective” stance. In the end we should share our own political positions regarding the themes treated. To do otherwise would be ethically irresponsible. Although Image Theater can be performed in a variety of ways (and should always be translated in consideration of specific contexts), the organizing principle behind this praxis is that it deliberately privileges the body as a site of ideological inscription. Furthermore, Image Theater privileges the complex systems of meaning traveling between how the sign is produced by the sender and received by the interpreter. Certainly an area where this technique can be advanced by further research is in its relation to Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of class habitus and the intersection of other identity markers and their inscription on the body.
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Page 246 Forum Theater involves the sharing of stories of social and political significance, the staging of those stories under the assistance of a “ dificultador ” and the subsequent intervention by spect-actors in the effort to find solutions to eradicate the oppression and to inspire spect-actors to action. Solutions are not always found (yet, we shouldn’t think in terms of reductive linearities but, rather, focus on the process). Boal (1992) has stated that Forum Theater was developed in Latin America under conditions where “a core group of homogeneous social origin, whose common interest was the resolution of relatively immediate problems” (p. 253) formed the association of Forum praxis. In different contexts, Boal cautions that one needs to reconsider “all the forms, structures, techniques, methods and processes of this kind of theatre. Everything is once again open to question” (p. 253). The only aspect of this practice not open to question, according to Boal, is the “intention to transform the spectator into the protagonist of the theatrical action and, by this transformation, to try to change society rather than contenting ourselves with merely interpreting it” (p. 253). Yet, I find Boal’s position here to be problematic. He presupposes homogeneity as an inevitability given certain structural economic conditions. If this were truly the case in the contexts in which he worked, then there would be no need for Forum Theater. Very often these differences will be marked by the intersection of multiple identity markers (not just class, but race, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and so on). The transposition of any political praxis into a different context needs to be reconsidered. It is important to note, however, that the very engagement of spectators would always automatically recontextualize the practice. Recontextualization of Boal’s practice in the North American context is too often theorized in ways that speak to a recentering of hierarchical imposition. That is, the “joker,” the “ dificultador ,” the practitioner of TO is responsible for reading the context and implementing a flexible praxis that speaks to the realities of “the people.” Certainly, one needs to consider the population with which one works, yet there are always negotiations that take place as the work touches down. And if these negotiations are silenced, the work can no longer be considered TO. Recently, teachers at a rural Florida middle school, where I currently teach United States history, were instructed to extend homeroom to an hour so as to teach the first in a series of character education topics. The topic of the day was harassment. As Kohn (1998) correctly pointed out, such programs rest “on three ideological legs: behaviorism, conservatism, and religion” (p. 33). All three positionalities intersected through the airing of a video on the school’s closed circuit video system. A progressive colleague spoke to me later about the disjointed nature of the program. Yet, it was clear that the integration of multiple discourses, and the transitions between these discourses, were, in effect, an effort to win over the various ideological positions moving through the institution and recontextualize it into a religious discourse. We discussed the important question of whether or not programs such as this should be mandatory to a captive audience of youth in a public institution such as school. The discussion was certainly lively. Many saw the video as unrelated to the topic of harassment. It was at this point that we transitioned into a dialogue about the structure of the lesson I was given and my basic objections to the inclinations behind the lesson. I asked my students if it would be permissible to experiment with an alternative methodology. Many were excited about decentering the planned lesson. We moved into small groups to share stories about our own experiences with harassment, being witness to a harassment type incident, or thinking about more complex structural formations of harassment. Most of my students shared individualistic stories, given that the discursive parameters around the issue had already been set by their experiences of how such topics should be talked about in schools. The architecture was firmly in place and it was my intent to scaffold students into institutional and cultural connections by zooming out of their own individual stories and into the conditions that cause such stories to be commonplace. Each group had to nominate one story for performance, exploration, and dialogue. Our first story involved a Cuban student in our classroom, three White male students in her agriculture
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Page 247 class, and a number of student witnesses. The first act was executed as the protagonist told her story. In the second act, the spect-actor could take the place of the protagonist with the expressed goal of overcoming the oppressive power relationship. In the third run-through the spect-actor could take the place of any character except for the antagonist. The story unfolded in a strawberry field across the street from the school and maintained by the class. One of the three boys confronted the girl and stated, “We shouldn’t be picking this shit! This is your job.” The girl proceeded to engage the comment in argument, when a Sheriff’s cruiser passed by the street with siren blasting. One of the boys cut her short and stated, “You better run before they take your illegal ass in.” The story ended with the agriculture teacher intervening by reorienting the students to the work. As the audience entered the role of the protagonist, they found that virtually all efforts to resolve the problem failed. In dialogue with students after the Forum, all agreed that some type of education project around immigration was necessary, given not only the lack of such discussions in the school, but the outright hostility towards immigrants marked heavily by public comments made by the Principal regarding “Latin gang behavior” and how the school would not become a “ghetto school.” They saw such positions as common with adults in the school and noted that from their perspective there really isn’t a gang problem in the school—a perception confirmed by an African American deputy stationed in the school. A number of the students returned to discuss possible projects. They were interested in the creation of t-shirts to be sold to interested students in the school and the proceeds were to be funneled to an immigrant rights organization. I suggested purchasing t-shirts from the Northland Poster Collective with a quote that read Fight Ignorance, Not Immigrants. In connection with the t-shirt we discussed creating an immigrant day where students and faculty would be exposed to a traditional theater piece on immigration where the common themes on the topic would be subject to a pedagogical satire.8 Following this we discussed having the audience break out into small sessions where several “ dificultadors ” would lead a Forum Theater session. Realizing the impediments of creating projects that were not sustained, I suggested connecting interested participants with the same organization to which students had decided to donate the proceeds, so that they could have a channel not only to continue their consciousness raising, but also to be connected to grounded action. Students agreed, but some admitted that the project was far too transgressive for the school and wondered if the Principal would approve. Asked if they wanted to rethink the project, they agreed that they preferred to present the structure of the project as is to the Principal. A few days later, the Principal visited to discuss the project. He had no knowledge of the project prior, as I wanted students to have the opportunity to sense the tension that emerges when creative political/pedagogical projects brush up against a managerial class invested in maintaining the existing condition. Of course, I could have been proven wrong, in which case a different lesson would have arisen for myself and my students. After the students disclosed their plans, the Principal immediately objected on several grounds. The message on the t-shirts was seen as too conflictual. He particularly disliked the word fight, and stated “why not a t-shirt that reads we’re all a family here .” He acknowledged the situation that the female student faced with the three male White students, and yet proceeded in a circuitous discourse that functioned simultaneously through acknowledgment and erasure of the very body before him.9 Continuing his restraint, he related that he did not see a need for an immigrant day since he decided to combine African American history month and “Hispanic” history month into one multicultural day. He then patronized students by requesting that they perform the “actit-out” harassment lesson on closed circuit television for the entire school in the morning program. I was informed by students that he had scheduled an “act-it-out” towards the end of the week and that he wanted the students to rehearse scenes in connection to points he wanted to make. Towards the end of the period, they decided that given the option of either co-option or shut
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Page 248 down, they would choose shutting down and write a letter expressing why. Initially, it was disappointing to see the project suffocated. I later reflected on how my students, in fact, articulated a different dimension of power. They had an option and they exercised the power to not act, thereby expressing a major theme in the structuring and restructuring of resistance, so eloquently captured by Piven & Cloward (1977): “the opportunities for defiance are structured by features of institutional life” (p. 36). That is, they read their context and the possibilities embedded in the site. They attempted to implement a course of action which was countered and resisted by thinking through new possibilities given the conditions. More importantly, they remain active in sharing their grievances and in thinking about action-oriented projects. In further reflection, perhaps I could have taken an additional step to avoid the fate of the project. Prior to meeting the Principal, I could have dialogued with students about creating another Forum Theater problematizing the administration’s response and devising counter-discourses. Through this second forum, we could have proceeded in a deep ideological mapping of the school where resources and deeper solidarities could have been imagined. For example, several immigrant rights organizations in the area are affiliated with religious organizations. Given the ideological inclinations of the Christian Right at the school, perhaps we could have appealed to the sensibilities of a number of teachers. The brilliance of TO is that the possibilities seem to open up and the constraints are made transparent under the direction of critical imagination. The exercises can constantly flow from reflection, to action, to further reflection. Invisible Theater can also be engaged in a variety of forms. Generally, it involves a performance in nontraditional theater spaces and is characterized by more intense political engagement. This technique is less used in the arsenal of TO, and I suspect the reason is that it is more likely to position people on dangerous grounds. What TO offers is a variety of forms of political engagement, allowing critical educators to effectively meet students at various points of their political clarity. Invisible Theater has been critiqued for its intent to impose ideology and manipulate people. However, as Counts (1932) and others have put it, all education involves a large element of imposition. Indeed, the pervasive marketing characterized by advanced capitalist economies speaks to a constant pedagogical project of manufacturing desires. Furthermore, any human interaction involves moves to manipulate. Invisible Theater is a useful tool in entering spaces that are often under threat of democratic closures, particularly under the weight of neoliberalism. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, a student group invited Action Dialogues to intervene in the face of several African American students who were harassed by a dining hall manager. The students demanded that the administration reprimand the employee and became frustrated with the bureaucratic response of a long drawn out investigative process. The students decided to force the administration to resolve the matter quickly by exposing the matter to students. Several students were provided with a script and the dramatization involved six actors standing at the register lines at strategic locations throughout, holding a variety of shelf food products, and proceeding to hold a conversation about the incident loud enough for several spectators to hear. Upon reaching the register, the actors resolved to not buy the food and place it on the counter in protest of the manager’s actions. Throughout the night, several spectators decided to do the same in hearing the story and the rationale behind the boycott. Similar dialogues ensued with actors strategically stationed throughout the cafeteria. By the third day, hundreds of students were mobilized and active not only in support of the African American students (as most were), but also in resistance to both the accuracy of the stories brought forward by those students and the protest itself. Realizing the deep dialogue going on in the cafeteria between students and the potential for conflict, the negative media attention, and the impact on the university’s bottom line, the administration resolved to solve the matter quickly. The power behind the project wasn’t in the final outcome but, rather, in the powerful dialogues that followed regarding the structure of the institution, its cultural formations, and the historical marginalizations of students of color.
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Page 249 Both Forum Theater and Image Theater are very effective in drawing out the lived experience, “thematic universe” (Freire, 1970) of participants in visceral ways. Forum Theater stimulates the sharing of personal stories while avoiding “risk-free zones of biographical discourses that suggests that experience somehow speaks for itself and is a transparent window on the world or guarantees a certain political purity” (Giroux, cited in Macedo and Bartolomé, 1999).10 Too often personal stories are sidelined yet we cannot connect to the lived experience of others and simultaneously construct rigid terms through which these experiences are shared or fail to create those spaces all together. Such positions engender regressive practices that speak to a politics of “giving voice to the voiceless” and/or discourses of “empowerment”; so common in the critical literature. The reality is that “voice” is never a gift. Too often what is articulated as a problem-posing dialogue reinscribes the very project that such a discursive space sought to decenter. That is, if the decision to reframe the “ordinary themes” (Shor, 1992) articulated by students in an “extraordinary” way is an act solely resting on the shoulders of the teacher, a discursive frame is set that in part already speaks to a working out of the problem on the part of the teacher. Forum Theater opens up a territory where diverse solutions are sought to social problems, but allows these solutions to arise from within the group through discursive struggles. These interventions, when resting on ahistorical individualized forms of agency, are normally contested and/or its limitations are exposed, if not by the spect-actors themselves, then surely by the problem-posing efforts of the “ dificultador .” The point, however, is that the solutions are tried internally and the limitations are exposed through the very process of rehearsing interventions. The teacher does not readily enter to set the discursive parameters in the form of questions, but also does not pretend a disassociation through an affinity with a laissez-faire facilitation type engagement. Forum and Image Theaters are powerful in delineating the complex ways in which identities are produced and reproduced. One of the deepest pedagogical forces behind this praxis, indeed behind TO as an overarching menu of social action theater praxis, is the notion so eloquently captured by the Japanese playwright Akira Kurosawa (1982) that “human beings are not capable of being honest with themselves about themselves.” Thoughts are subjected to a “communicative democracy” (Habermas, 1979) in that different ways of seeing reality and transforming it are exposed allowing the individual to step outside oneself and constantly problem-pose one’s own trajectory. Indeed, TO is effective in helping us think beyond reductive notions of “self-reflection” as the exercises are designed to establish resonance not only in terms of the ways we imagine the social condition, but also in terms of developing selfless and more refined collective political interventions. As Boal (1992) expresses well, “we cannot live in isolation, under arrest inside ourselves. We can learn enormously when we recognize ourselves in alterity” (p. 2). TO is potent in its ability to channel the emotions that surface in the space of dialogues that seek to analyze human suffering. Too often, as bell hooks (1995) has pointed out, these dialogues are structured in ways where deep emotions such as rage and guilt surface and yet spaces to connect those emotions to positive political projects are not made available. TO is a body of work that is ultimately geared towards action in a dual sense. TO is political resistance in itself (given the “rehearsal for revolution”) and a scaffold into more concrete forms of political and social action. TO is exceptional for its saliency. It often travels a fine line between entertainment and critical education and begs the question: why not infuse pleasure, spectacle, and humor while simultaneously asking deeper questions concerning human suffering and liberation? The San Francisco Mime Troupe is one group that has been staging entertaining public spectacles since the late 1950s and yet remained/remains committed to powerful political analysis. TO makes similar moves and yet deepens the engagement by democratizing participation. Furthermore, like the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers, El Teatro Campesino, and Amiri Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theatre (BRT), TO is pliable culturally. Certainly, I am not advocating that TO
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Page 250 serves as a replacement for these important contributions. I am saying, however, that it is a potent contribution to the social action theater repertoire. The biggest set of limitations of TO do not revolve around the structure of the work itself but, rather, the ways in which it is often taken up. In my work with Action Dialogues, the tendency towards steering the work along certain lines by delineating absurd expectations with regards to efficacy was made especially clear in meetings with the administration. In hearing that the group was scheduled to provide a workshop for SOAR (Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration) guides, the administration made certain to send me warning not to engage in these types of workshops with incoming freshmen. One administrator remarked, “We don’t want to mess with their minds.” The financial reliance on the university already speaks to a co-option of sorts in that it restricts the possibility of certain movements. Unfortunately, TO and other radical forms of cultural intervention, in the North American context at least, are constantly subjected to such pressures given their existence and dependence on the institutions in which they are housed. One notable exception to this was Amiri Baraka’s important intervention in the establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BARTS) in 1965. The program was funded by Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity (Elam, 1997) and yet remained politically charged. Of course, this intervention rode on the waves of a significant social movement, which current social action theater doesn’t benefit from. The likelihood of institutions sustaining work that contributes to the subversion of its very hierarchical structure is slim. The work exists, therefore, for the most part, for the purpose of consciousness raising —a necessary engagement, although limited given that little social action flows from it. Boal has demonstrated how the work may be appropriated along more critical lines. As Martin (2006) has written, “Boal’s understanding of how to conjoin theatrical engagement with concrete strategies of political organizing remains exemplary” (p. 27). His work has not been incarcerated in institutions exclusively, but has been connected to wider social movements such as mobilization efforts through the Workers’ Party, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, literacy movements in Latin America, an engagement in “ordinary” political structures. Likewise, to be of any political consequence in schools, TO’s boundary must be made porous. It must be imagined and practiced as a flexible political aesthetics that crosses boundaries in order to forge alliances with wider movements, and organic relations with the community (Counts, 1932) capable of applying pressure on the institution so as to rupture the center. In the North American context, the work has also been taken up in a manner where new protective barriers are erected around the work, ultimately affecting the force behind the work. When the work is housed in university contexts, for example, where competition for funding is intense, there is also a certain competition for cultural distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), so as to rarefy and project the work into exclusive domains. These types of barriers strangle the pedadogical and political strength of the work. Sharing it and transferring the basic knowledge of its workings so that others may utilize it becomes problematic. Conclusion The creative impulse behind the work and its ability to open avenues for the concretization of deep theoretical language into a flexible political praxis that travels within, between, and beyond the “black box” is liberating. TO helps us think beyond the language of “reform” and supplant it with a language of transformation through a “rehearsal for revolution” that grounds action on a decentered unity (Apple, 2000) moving beyond the institution. Like all political praxis, it does have its flaws. As bell hooks (1994), in relating the flaws of Freire, has claimed:
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Page 251 to have work that promotes one’s liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. (p. 50) Furthermore, let’s remember that TO exemplifies just one move in an oasis of social action theaters and subversive poetics. Anna Deavere-Smith’s (1997) work, for example, is also powerful. There are other powerful examples, some outside of the Euro-American epistemological tradition (Ladson-Billings, 2000) that deserve engagement. Indeed, Boal’s work needs to be understood and engaged in terms of its function as it relationally speaks to the context of its use. There are certain contexts in which TO is ideal and there are others in which other forms of political aesthetics are more appropriate. Furthermore, TO exists in a long narrative of cultures of resistance. Examples of movements entering dominant space so as to remake it abound. This example is an invitation to push the boundaries in new directions not only through consciousness raising, but through political action forged in solidarity with wider social and political movements. Notes 1 TO remains obscure in the field of education with the exception of the critical work embodied in the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Network out of Omaha, Nebraska, the Mandala Center for Change, and the Theatre of the Oppressed Laboratory in New York City. It’s common that critical educators have encountered the term TO, but unlikely that they have knowledge of the process. 2 I am using the term “grounded political theater” to signify work that is marked by different levels of oppositional ambitions against the “normative” (i.e., dominant) construct of theater (the effort to declass and de-race theater and the decentering of stage and audience being critical components) and work that is explicit in centering the deconstruction of oppressive social conditions and the contestation of negative power relations as a goal. I do realize that all theater is political. As Fuoss (1997) has put it: the status quo—whether in socio-political matters, the literary canon, or the discipline of performance studies—does not passively maintain itself. Rather, it is actively maintained by social agents whose interests are served by the current distribution of power. These agents actively attempt to maintain the status quo against other agents with different interests. Performances that explicitly or implicitly maintain status-quo relations of power are no less contestatory than performances that, openly or covertly, aim at overturning the status quo. (p. 8) Although Fuoss’ reading of power relations is a bit binaristic here, I do appreciate the resistance to view dominant aesthetics as “normative” and as rigid structures. Certainly this type of engagement helps us to construct projects that are not blind to how hegemony is an ongoing project marked by continuous power struggles. 3 By “apolitical,” Brecht was actually referring to rightist tendencies. 4 Brecht’s service continues to be important given mainstream media’s inflection of emotional and individualistic readings in the face of catastrophes whose roots are clearly political and economic. A clear example in our day and time is to found in the various racialized narratives of Hurricane Katrina and the people of New Orleans and the indexing of the event as a “natural catastrophe” rather than a system of exclusion and economic repression structured by the state. Another example involves the various media mechanisms of focusing on the stories of individual lives lost in the Minnesota bridge collapse while veiling the rampant assault on working people through reductions in government spending and services and the neoliberalization of U.S. infrastructure. Of course, we should push for more accurate production of news while concurrently resisting frameworks that position readers as passive victims.
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Page 252 5 The Arena Theater was founded in 1953 by José Renato. The Arena Theater’s main contribution to Brasilian theater was that it attempted to shorten the physical distance between the audience and stage, introduced themes that resisted “outside” cultural sensibilities, and rather resonated with what was thought to be a unique “Brasilian” experience. 6 Note—the title of the section of this reflection is “A Partial Exploration of the Formation of Boal.” 7 Darder, Baltodano, and Torres (2003) incorrectly claim that Theatre of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of the Oppressed were released in the same year (1971). This would make the developments parallel rather than one marked by an appropriation of sorts. 8 That is, the institutionalization of drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants and public safety, gangs and immigration, restrictionist language policies, the building of a fence, and the removal of illegal immigrants from the strawberry fields of Plant City and the realities that would ensue. 9 This was certainly an act that adds to the already heavy policing of young women’s bodies in an institution structured by phallocentric imaginations and impositions. 10 I am not suggesting that Giroux silences these experiences as he has written about not silencing it, but moving beyond it. References Apple, M. (2000). Official knowledge (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Artaud, A. (1970). The theatre and its double (V. Corti, Trans.). London: Calder and Boyars. Bartolomé, L. (1994). Beyond the methods fetish. Harvard Educational Review , 64 (2). Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed (A. Charles & M. L. McBride, Trans.). London: Theatre Communications Group. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors (2nd ed.). Routledge. Bogad, L. M. (2006). Tactical carnival. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion (pp. 46–58). New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinctions (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brecht, B. (1964). Theatre for pleasure or theatre for instruction. In J. Willett, Brecht on theatre. London: Eyre Methuen. Britton, C. (2006). Politics and performance(s) of identity. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion. New York: Routledge. Cohen-Cruz, J., & Schutzman, M. (Eds.). (2006). A Boal companion. New York and London: Routledge. Counts, G. (1932). Dare the school build a new social order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Darder, A., Baltodano, M., & Torres, R. (2003). The critical pedagogy reader. London: Routledge Falmer. Deavere Smith, A. (1997). Fires in the mirror. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Dwyer, P. (2005, Winter). Theoria negativa. Modern Drama, 48 (4), 635. Elam, H. J. (1997). The Social Protest Theatre of Luis Valdez & Amiri Baraka . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge & the discourse on language . New York: Pantheon Books. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Fuoss, K. W. (1997). Striking performances/Performing strikes . Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society . Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hall, S. (1981). Notes on deconstructing “the popular.” In S. Raphael (Ed.), People’s history and socialist theory. London: Kegan Paul-Routledge. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. London: Routledge. hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage . London: Henry Holt and Company. Kohn, A. (1998). What to look for in a classroom and other essays . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Klein, N. (2002). The vision thing. In R. Hayduk & B. Shepard (Eds.), From ACT UP to the WTO. London: Verso. Kurosawa, A. (1982). Something like an autobiography (A. E. Bock, Trans., 1st ed.). New York: Knopf. Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln, Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed.) (pp. 257–277). London and New Delhi: Sage Publications.
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Page 253 Lowen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me. New York: Simon and Schuster. Macedo, D., & Bartolomé, L. (1999). Dancing with bigotry . New York: St. Martin’s Press. Martin, R. (2006). Staging the political. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion (pp. 23–32). New York: Routledge. Milne, D. (1992). Theatre as communicative action. Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal , 14 , 111– 134. O’Sullivan, C. (2001, March). Searching for the Marxist in Boal. Research in Drama Education , 6(1), 85– 97. Piven, F., & Cloward, R. (1977). Poor people’s movements. New York: Vintage. Schutzman, M. (2006). Jok(er)ing. Joker runs wild. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion. New York: Routledge. Schutzman, M. & Cohen-Cruz, J. (Eds.). (1994). Playing Boal. New York: Routledge. Shor. I. (1992). Empowering education. University of Chicago Press. Tarrow, S. (1998). Power in movement. New York: Cambridge University Press. West, C. (1993). Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times. Common Courage Press.
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Page 254 19 Against All Odds Implementing Freirean Approaches to Education in the United States Pia Lindquist Wong In 1987, I visited Brazil for the first time. I spent eight months in the least Brazilian of all cities, Brasilia, and still was thoroughly enchanted by the people, the culture, and the language, and intrigued by the politics and the economics. Several years later, I returned to Brazil to undertake the project of a lifetime —researching an aspect of Paulo Freire’s tenure as municipal Secretary of Education in São Paulo.1 Of the many research questions to pursue, I opted to look at school and teacher factors affecting the implementation of an ambitious curriculum reform called the Interdisciplinary Project. The Inter Project, as it was known by its Brazilian practitioners, has been subject to critical analysis elsewhere (Freire, 1993, 1997; O’Cadiz, Wong & Torres, 1998; Wong, 1995). As part of my introduction to this text, I would simply like to report that this experience gave me a profound sense of “democracy envy.” For all its shortcomings—both conceptual and in terms of implementation—the Inter Project, and its subsequent iteration, the Citizen School (see Gandin & Apple, 2004) was an audacious, complex and serious education reform that was both grounded in the realities of public school teachers and public school students in Brazil, and insistent that teachers and students together transform those realities to make another school and another world possible (Forum Social Mundial, 2002). The conceptions of participatory governance embedded in the Project reveal the disappointing limitations of decentralization reforms here in the United States. The reorientation of the curriculum—accomplished through teacherled community studies that generated significant themes around which instructional units were developed—mock the puny, conservative, and narrow conceptions of curriculum that form the basis for the current federal educational legislation (rhetorically identified as reform) here in the United States: the No Child Left Behind Act. The coherence between Freire’s educational policies and the other public policy initiatives put into place by Luiza Erundina’s Workers’ Party mayoral administration is something almost unimaginable for those of us attempting to implement social justice educational policies in the context of pervasive neoliberal politics and policies. When I compare the Inter Project to educational reform efforts here in the United States, during the same time period and after, I am overwhelmed by inadequacy and, again, democracy envy. But such feelings are, ultimately, self-indulgent. The many inequities and injustices that run rampant in our U.S. educational system do not permit despair but demand ever more serious, persistent, and strategic responses. Even if Paulo Freire is not leading our education system, we don’t have a Workers’ Party or anything close to it, and we are not in the midst of a democratic renaissance (all important factors in the
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Page 255 São Paulo experience), those committed to equal and equitable educational opportunities for all children must pursue this work whatever the context and conditions. The focus of this text, then, is to describe three efforts to implement Freirean-based educational projects, against all odds. Each project emerged from a school–university partnership (DarlingHammond, 1994; Holmes, 1990, 1995; NCATE, 2001) that was formed to pursue the interrelated goals of improved student achievement, enhanced preparation of teachers, and continual professional development for all involved educators (K-12 teachers and university instructors). Each of the schools serves a predominantly low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse school community in the city of Sacramento, California (dubbed by Time as the “most diverse” city in the country). The first project involves the development of science/math/technology co-curriculum that educates both student teachers and junior high school English Learners in a self-contained classroom. The second project focuses on a science education/science methods course collaboration that eventually evolved into a community health intervention. The third project centers on the development and implementation of curriculum crafted around significant community themes revealed through an extensive community study. Before delving into the details of the three projects, a few important contextual variables should be explained. First, I will provide some background on teacher preparation programs in the United States and the model of school–university partnership that our efforts utilized: the professional development school. Though an examination of the history of teacher preparation in the United States is outside the scope of this chapter, I will share a few key observations from the literature. For the majority of programs in America, teacher preparation occurs as part of a baccalaureate degree program and couples coursework with field experiences in a range of educational settings where the candidates complete increasingly more complex and independent assignments related to teaching students and classes. California offers a different pathway to licensure with the majority of its programs offering fifth year, post-baccalaureate credentials via a program that includes pedagogy coursework and field experiences. In the early 1990s, a series of publications by Darling-Hammond (1994), Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik (1990), Sarason (1993) and the Holmes Group (1995), among others, presented a set of significant critiques of teacher preparation programs which they found to be fragmented, disconnected from the field (e.g., schools and communities), and isolated from the core functions of the university, especially the academic disciplines. These publications spurred many university-based teacher preparation programs to rethink fundamentally the curriculum and structure of their programs. For our university, we pursued vigorously partnerships with four local districts organized around four objectives that the partners agreed to pursue using their own unique resources as well as those generated by the collaboration. These objectives were: (a) improve pupil learning; (b) enhance candidates’ field experiences; (c) engage in ongoing and objectives-based professional development; and, (d) participate in collaborative governance structures that operated on an inquiry-based approach to decision-making. Moreover, each of our partner districts served urban communities that were ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse and predominantly low-income. These demographic characteristics required that our efforts focus squarely on educational equity concerns. The four partnership objectives represented a fundamental change in perspective and focus for each of the entities in our partnership. For the university partners, the focus on pupil learning required significant changes to the underlying values and defining actions and products of our programs. While we at the university certainly were never opposed to pupil learning, we had nothing concrete to show for how our candidates, our coursework, or even our own efforts as faculty members related in any direct way to the schools’ central focus: improving pupil learning. In fact, one might have argued that our presence in the schools could have even detracted and distracted from that primary focus. For example, during the early stages of initiating our partnership, if one was to have asked a candidate at the conclusion of a lesson, “what did the pupils learn?” the likely response would have been confusion. The candidates were focused
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Page 256 on their own performance, as were we as the university supervisors and instructors. The pupils and their classrooms were merely the practice ground for fine-tuning this performance. Shifting the orientation of our coursework, our field experiences, and the instructors and candidates to take seriously the notion that we were obligated to advance the learning of children in the schools, required considerable effort. In order to be a true partner to our local schools, however, this shift was imperative. While our candidates spent more time than was officially required for field experiences, these experiences had been designed primarily by university faculty members and did not include systematic content or activities to help our candidates be successful in an urban context. The partnership provided exciting opportunities to work with experienced urban teachers in designing field experiences for our candidates so that they could develop attitudes, values, practices, and habits needed for effective teaching in urban schools. The dialogue around this particular effort was instructive. While the university partners certainly gained insights and perspectives from our field partners, they too became more knowledgeable about the theoretical basis for their work as teachers and about new professional standards for teaching. Our field partners engaged in this collaborative work because they wanted to ensure that our candidates added value to their classrooms. In addition, they wanted to be sure that their efforts—in designing curriculum and field experiences with the university and in working as mentor teachers—resulted in future novice teacher colleagues that would enter the profession with fewer initial challenges and, more importantly, stay in the profession as active, innovative colleagues. Some important changes were made that not only strengthened candidates’ preparation for their mentor teachers’ classrooms, but enabled them to understand their classrooms within the complex and dynamic interdependencies of the entire school and beyond, into the community. The changes included: (a) partner teachers conducting miniworkshops at the beginning of the term so that candidates and faculty members were familiar with curriculum used at the school, discipline policies, parent relations practices, and other important norms at the school; (b) candidates completing a set of “co-curricular” activities such as shadowing a bilingual aide, observing in the Special Day Class,2 participating in an event with parents, and so on; and, (c) the creation of a list of “experts” at a school that candidates could observe if they wanted to see demonstration of particular strategies or activities. Clearly, these collaborative efforts produced new activities for our candidates; they also required important and needed revisions to the university curriculum such that these new experiences and perspectives could be seamlessly incorporated into coursework. The final two objectives of our partnership—professional development and inquiry-based, collaborative governance—have proven the most challenging to implement. Both require more resources than our partnership had, particularly for the professional development component. As a result, we engaged in smaller, more organic professional development efforts such as: (a) university professors providing training to school partners on new standards for the teaching profession; (b) university professors and school partners engaging in collaborative action research projects and lesson study;3 and, (c) when possible, university professors and candidates participating in district- or school-sponsored professional development activities. In addition, we found it challenging to coordinate across the complex, often highly political, and occasionally conflicting internal governance structures of each of the partners, which all operated according to distinct and idiosyncratic norms and, typically, resisted initiatives for change, collaboration, or coordination. Small details—coordinating across five institutional academic calendars, for example—often required more effort and created more barriers than anticipated. Moreover, at times, the amount of political capital expended to resolve these small details left very little for other more substantial and potentially more controversial articulation. A final challenge to our efforts to pursue the goals of ongoing professional development and the use of inquiry-based governance strategies came from the political and policy context in which
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Page 257 our partnership emerged. All of the projects unfolded during the early years of the twenty-first century, a period of intense centralization in the urban California K-12 school context. State curriculum standards, defined learner outcomes, and the sorting and ranking of schools based on standardized test scores led to hyper-monitoring in our local schools. This was achieved through the adoption of scripted curriculum, the creation of “pacing” schedules, and the provision of curriculum “coaches” who ensured that teachers used the scripts as indicated and maintained the brisk schedule of teaching lessons. These practices bear some additional elaboration. A scripted curriculum includes a teacher’s manual with explicit instructions for what to teach and how to teach. The manual contains an actual script that, in many districts, teachers are expected to read verbatim when teaching. The curriculum materials are usually expected to be used exclusively—that is, only those materials provided by the curriculum publishers can be used in the classroom. Teacher-created materials or other commercially produced materials that teachers had found to be effective with past pupils were often prohibited, even as supplements to the main, scripted curriculum. A pacing schedule indicates to teachers the number of lessons that must be completed within a certain timeframe. These schedules are usually geared to the standardized tests administered in the spring and are designed so that content on the test is “covered” before the testing dates. In some districts, a system of “coaches” was also put into place; these coaches worked with individual schools to ensure “fidelity” to the curriculum (reading the script, using the materials exclusively) and adherence to the pacing schedule. In addition, all of our partner schools pared back to a “basics” curriculum in which reading (and much less so writing) and mathematics dominated the curriculum. Our partner schools also included a mandated block of English language development. Because a high proportion of students in our local schools are English Learners (primarily from immigrant families who do not speak English at home), and since we use monolingual instruction almost universally, daily instruction must include explicit teaching of English language to these pupils. The reorientation of the curriculum around reading and math meant that social studies and science were featured once a week, if at all, or appeared as the subject of reading selections in the language arts text. The basics curriculum was enhanced only by the test prep curriculum, which appeared in the spring to get students ready for the standardized testing season. The introduction of this highly standardized curriculum system reveals a particular conception of the teaching and learning enterprise. It is a system that relies heavily on the curriculum to “deliver” instruction; it is a system that appears to distrust teachers and their ability to develop curriculum, serve their pupils’ needs, and make independent decisions. As this particular orientation became more pervasive in our local districts, we increasingly struggled to develop locally based professional development or to engage in inquiry to inform our governance and policy decisions. Moreover, the one-size-fits-all mentality that underlies this now-pervasive approach to “improving education” seems an inappropriate response to the calls to provide a high-quality education to California’s students, particularly those in its urban schools. In the three schools featured in this chapter (two elementary schools and one middle school), the demographic data reveal tremendous diversity, not singular conformity. The majority of students in our partner schools are Latino, Asian, and African American; in the two elementary schools, White students are truly a minority making up less than 10% of students in one school and less than 5% of students in another. All three schools have large populations of English Learners, over 50% in both elementary schools and 20% in the middle school. These English Learners come from a range of family backgrounds and speak over 25 home languages including Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese. Family income is also a significant factor. In one elementary school, 90% of the students qualify for the federal subsidized food program, in the other 75% qualify, and in the middle school 60% of students are eligible. Such data would suggest that these learners would arrive at school with diverse needs and interests; nevertheless, the schools offer
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Page 258 them a standardized curriculum with no deviations allowed. Moreover, this approach to teaching and learning conflicted at theoretical and ethical levels with the kind of educational experiences that we were committed to creating for pupils in our partner schools and for our candidates. While being a critical educator always requires political commitment and struggle, our efforts to implement a classroom and university pedagogy that addressed the issues facing the K-12 pupils and their communities faced higher than typical odds. Local mandates for extreme standardization of the curriculum were strengthened by state and federal monitoring practices, and failure to comply with mandates resulted in real, concrete consequences for the schools. Perennial underfunding of public education left few resources for implementing our innovative projects. Deprofessionalization of teaching —which reduced our partners’ decision-making authority over instructional and curricular domains— hampered our efforts, as did the routine scapegoating of teachers who were publicly blamed for the low test scores of their pupils. And at the university level, our partnership was demanding commitments to some of the region’s poorest communities as well as recognition for faculty practices that fell outside the standard domain of “publish or perish.” These were the odds that stacked against our efforts to create and implement collaborative critical education projects. Our stories begin with several junior faculty members who were hired at Sacramento State University between 1998 and 2002. These faculty members came to the university with experience in school– university partnerships and with commitments to becoming activist faculty members whose teacher education practice would be firmly rooted in local schools, especially those serving low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse students. As the local educational context became more narrowed and rigid, these faculty members also became committed to working with partner teachers to create spaces in which meaningful, context-appropriate, and empowering educational experiences could still be offered to children in our local schools, especially children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse families—those who, in our estimation, had the most to lose from the back-to-basics trends. This faculty-teacher group had a second important goal as well—to prepare future generations of teachers to use these approaches with their students. The overarching framework for these efforts was the Equity Network, a network of 12 school–university partnerships that was initiated in 2000 and still functions in 2007.4 In a community adjacent to Sacramento, the students, their parents, teachers, student teachers, and university faculty members at Golden State Middle School engaged in exploring basic science concepts through the outdoor laboratory in which their school (almost unknowingly) sits.5 Golden State Middle School is the only middle school (grades 6–8) in this city of 32,000 diverse residents, a large proportion of which are immigrants from Mexico, Southeast Asia, and the former U.S.S.R. Lorie Hammond, the Sacramento State University faculty member with long roots at this school, first as a teacher and later as a university liaison, initiated a community garden project at the school when she was a teacher there. This community garden provided an important site where immigrant families could continue centuriesold practices and also addressed food security issues that were critical for many of them. In addition, the garden represented a place on the school campus where parents, many of them recent immigrants, could offer deep expertise in a setting where they were typically regarded as knowing very little (e.g., English, about California school curriculum, etc.). Over time and with an appropriate structure developed by Dr. Hammond and several teachers, this parent expertise was woven into the science and language arts curriculum of the school. Experiments with seeds, cuttings, and agricultural practices as well as a cookbook written through interviews and students’ compositions provided valued opportunities for students, parents, and teachers to interact and learn from one another. An added benefit was the exchange between immigrant groups as they learned about each others’ agricultural techniques, and about how each used a common herb or vegetable in their respective cuisines (Hammond, 2001; Merino & Hammond, 2001, 2002).
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Page 259 With this successful project as a foundation, the educators in this partnership developed a collaborative project that involved enriching the curriculum for students (primarily the English Learners in selfcontained classrooms at the school) and preparing student teachers to teach integrated instructional units to low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse students. The school’s natural environment offered an ideal setting for one important initiative. The school is located adjacent to the American River levee. As a result, the school grounds have many natural features not commonly found in an urban school setting. In order to introduce the students to this setting, with which many were unfamiliar due in part to parents’ and teachers’ fears of natural dangers (the river’s swift current, for example), the partnership team developed a sequence of instructional themes. Together with the student teachers, the group developed a set of activities that would be carried out with beginning English learners as a way of teaching their mathematics, science, and English language development curricula and introducing them to an important natural environment in their community. Moreover, the presence of large numbers of student teachers at the school (15–20) allowed the students to learn inquiry-based science. In addition, the student teachers also included technology components in their instruction and in the products that the students developed. This addressed two important equity issues commonly faced by English Learners who too often are in classes where they do not work as scientists and where they also suffer the consequences of the digital divide. Several units of instruction emerged over the course of seven years of this partnership. One particular instructional sequence focused on the science and mathematics of the concept of velocity. Teachers, university faculty members, and student teachers developed lessons to teach the theory of velocity while also creating inquiry activities for students to explore this concept. Student learning culminated with the small boat regatta, in which students’ constructions of small boats, using found materials, were put to the test with a race on the river. A range of data was collected on the boats before, during, and after the regatta. The data were organized into Excel tables and analysis was performed. Students’ conclusions were presented in PowerPoint presentations that imported the Excel data. A number of similar curriculum projects were generated by this partnership, each following the same kinds of principles. At one of the culminating events, focused on a series of “mysteries” designed for students to explore aspects of the river ecosystem and develop creative writing skills, the school district Superintendent and College of Education Dean attended. These two men and others in the audience listened intently as the students described natural features of the river ecosystem, its history beginning with Native American settlements until the present, and admonished all audience members to think carefully about ways to preserve it. They observed firsthand the incredible potential of these beginning English Learners and the fruits of this cross-institutional partnership. In this Golden State Middle School example, we see that students with the least status at the school— beginning English Learners, new to the United States and new to middle school—construct knowledge and share it with those with the most power in the system, a Superintendent and a university Dean. More importantly, they delved deeply into understanding important intellectual concepts and applied their understandings to their own community. The typical school experience for English Learners is that of object, where in order to progress, they must leave the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual knowledge of their community behind. In contrast, these experiences offered a rich environment in which to develop as subjects, constructing knowledge that integrated new content with knowledge the students brought from home—this integrated knowledge base could then be applied in meaningful ways to deepen their understanding of their new community. A similar kind of learning took place for student teachers who were guided in the development of community- and place-based curricula and, through small group instruction, had opportunities to reflect carefully on the elements required for a successful learning experience for students with special needs. As we begin a new millennium still facing many of the inequities of the old
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Page 260 millennium—inadequate resources for schools serving marginalized communities, a Eurocentric curriculum that reinforces transmissionist pedagogies, low expectations, and insufficient support structures needed to ensure high achievement for all students—it is imperative that the next generation of teachers be prepared to engage their profession in ways that liberate students and address social justice, rather than in ways that reproduce historic inequalities. At Golden State Middle School student teachers experienced a distinct set of pedagogical possibilities, allowing them to imagine educational experiences for themselves and their students that could lead to equal educational opportunities for all students. On the other side of the river, in the city of Sacramento, another project emerged at Bowling Green Elementary Charter Complex.6 Picture a large school, with four distinct wings and capacity to serve over 1,000 elementary students. Bowling Green sits in a working-class neighborhood in south Sacramento. The Campbell’s soup factory is nearby as are railroad and light rail yards, several large apartment complexes, and a major freeway. Early in 2002, the Bilingual Department at Bowling Green,7 with the assistance of two faculty members from Sacramento State, hosted a “careers” series in which local professionals came to the school to speak to students about their educational experiences and their careers. One speaker was a nurse who talked about a range of common health issues. She displayed a glucose monitor and asked the students, “Does anyone know what this instrument is?” Her eyes widened as nearly all the students raised their hands to respond. She turned with a look of amazement to the teachers. The teachers and the Sacramento State faculty could tell that diabetes was a significant issue for this community. Troubling neighborhood and demographic health statistics were also confirmed for the nurse—diabetes is a significant health issue in Latino and African American communities like this school’s. This serendipitous moment gave the teachers and university faculty a theme around which to develop school curriculum that would educate students about an important issue facing their community, and offered an opportunity to create a project that would serve the community—both important goals for teachers at the school. And, there was a way to address state standards in several content areas, an important consideration for school administration support of any effort. Over the course of several years, many iterations and countless meetings between teachers and university faculty members, a rich inquiry-based, bilingual (Spanish/English) science curriculum was produced for 4th, 5th and 6th grade students in the Bilingual Department at Bowling Green Elementary. Simultaneously, a praxis- and social justice-oriented curriculum for the teacher preparation program also was put into place. These topics use scientific methods and content from different science disciplines to deepen pupils’ knowledge of diabetes (4th grade), heart disease (5th grade), and brain functions and how they are affected by substances such as alcohol (6th grade). Instructional technology is embedded at each grade level such that the 4th graders produce a PowerPoint presentation, the 5th graders develop a brochure using various word processing and graphic design software, and the 6th graders create a theatrical production that they videotape. For approximately six weeks at the beginning of the university semester, a team of co-instructors (lead teachers and the university science methods course instructor) introduces student teachers to the grade-level themes, the science content connected to them and the principles of inquiry science pedagogy. This team also guides them in planning inquirybased science lessons for each grade. For the remaining nine weeks of the semester the student teachers (between 20 and 25 of them) work with small groups of 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students to teach these lessons and develop the final products. These final products are a critical component of the co-curriculum. Not only do they represent important and revealing demonstrations of the students’ understanding of the student teachers’ science lessons, but they are also key pieces in the capstone event of this co-curriculum; the community health fair. The first community health fair felt very homegrown, as many such school functions do. The enthusiasm was high and many people may have simply felt relieved to have pulled off this initial feat! Today, over 350 people attend. Local health professionals are available
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Page 261 to do basic screening for heart disease and diabetes, with Bowling Green pupils assisting in recording information, providing cotton swabs, and the like. The school’s parent group uses this occasion to raise money—and even they have incorporated the health-conscious message. Their first fundraiser included roasted corn dipped in mayonnaise and salt … now they serve options that are more heart-healthy! The pupil products serve as informational anchors to the fair. All attendees receive a brochure, the PowerPoint plays continuously in a comfortable viewing area, as does the video. The pupils, with support from the student teachers, are present to provide additional information or clarify information when necessary. This co-curriculum project embodies many core Freirean principles for liberatory education. The health risks for this community are myriad and relate to so many factors seemingly out of people’s control. When they have access to it at all, people in this community engage with the health care system as objects. Too often, these experiences are humiliating and do not yield positive results. Moreover, when children only see that the majority of the adults in their lives experience these health problems, they may easily conclude that they, too, are predestined for a lifetime of poor health. Absent accurate information and opportunities to learn new behavior, their conclusions are probably valid. This cocurriculum establishes a context in which pupils engage with these important health issues as subjects and, ultimately, as change-agents. They conduct inquiry and related experiments on the different health issues for their grade level and, if they stay at the school, they are experts on three health issues by the time they conclude 6th grade. Then, they are active participants in presenting their knowledge to the broader community. It is important to note that they do these activities not simply because their school requires it, but because it makes a difference in the lives of people they love—their family members first and, ultimately, themselves. There are important complementary results that this co-curriculum generates. Student teachers have a powerful experience of teaching inquiry-based, social justice-oriented science curriculum. For them, this is often the first time they have experienced an integration of theory and practice in their postsecondary, academic lives. For the teachers, this experience initially was a victory that taught them how to maneuver in the tightly scripted, No-Child-Left-Behind world that had replaced hands-on, inquiry science education with language arts reading selections about science. They have learned the state content standards well and can make a reasonable argument for how their co-curriculum prepares their pupils to meet these standards. Moreover, they have conducted action research on pupil learning related to this curriculum and the strong results add legitimacy to their efforts. (For example, a higher number of pupils now indicate science/math-related careers as personal goals, and pupils taught using this curriculum exhibited better content knowledge and critical thinking skills than did pupils taught using more traditional curriculum (see Lum, Aguirre, Martinez, Campa, & Ultreras, forthcoming). Ultimately, this experience has created teacher leaders who are experts in community- and project-based learning as well as instructional technology. Finally, this experience has helped to anchor the College of Education in a low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse community, thus keeping pressure on the institution to maintain and even expand its commitments to educational equity. The final example focuses on the Language Academy of Sacramento, a charter school in one of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods that offers dual-language immersion in Spanish and English to students in grades kindergarten through 8th.8 The Language Academy itself is a story of a community joining together against all odds to create a school that furthered the dreams it had for its children (Baker, de Leon, Phelps, Martín, & Suarez, forthcoming). A brief history of the school illustrates its compelling history. The Language Academy founders were originally teachers at an adjacent school who operated that school’s bilingual program. As the district became more insistent on the use of scripted, English-only curricula, the teachers and families associated with the bilingual program became more alarmed about the education of the pupils in the program. In 2004, a group of teachers, community members, and faculty members from the
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Page 262 Department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at Sacramento State began work on an independent charter that received district approval a year later. Ultimately, this charter formed the philosophical and educational framework for the Language Academy of Sacramento. Today, through the dual immersion model, this school–community–university partnership remains vibrant and the school celebrates and deepens the rich intellectual, cultural, and linguistic resources of the community and its children. Key to the development of the Language Academy was the creation of processes through which to address a fundamental tenet of the school’s charter: that its curriculum should be based on the community’s goals for the education of its children. During the charter approval process, this particular tenet remained theoretical in nature. During the first years of transforming the charter goals into instructional and governance practices, the real challenge of creating a community school became apparent. A group of school teachers, university faculty members, student teachers, and community members studied the Inter Project in São Paulo (Freire, 1993, 1997; O’Cadiz, Wong, & Torres, 1998) and tools developed by Catholic Relief Services for community empowerment projects (Freudenberger, 1999). Through this research, they designed a process by which they surfaced community issues that were then used to generate curricular themes for grades 3 through 6. The first step in the process was to gather a group of parents together to draw a map of the community noting important places. Little more direction than that was given to the two groups of parents who came to the school to engage in this exercise. The first group consisted of Spanish-speaking parents all of whom were Mexican in origin; the second group was an English-speaking group and was more ethnically mixed with Chicano, African American, and White parents participating. While this division is not ideal, the lack of a common language across the two groups would have likely inhibited the participation of one set of parents. The mapping session proceeded in intriguing ways. Each group was given the open-ended instructions presented above, a set of colored markers, and a large white board. The Spanish-speaking group began drawing almost instantaneously. They placed the Language Academy in the middle of the map and then proceeded to fill it with streets, stores, banks, government agencies, parks, and myriad additional resources. Many people contributed and a man and a woman were the primary illustrators. It is revealing to note that many of the entities on their map had completely escaped the notice of the teachers and faculty members who had been working at this school and in this community for years. These Spanish-speaking parents’ perspective of the community was that it had almost everything that one would need except for more entertainment (a movie theater was mentioned as a desired service) and more security (crime and safety were noted as concerns). The English-speaking group created their map quite differently. They talked for almost nine minutes before they placed anything on their white board. They discussed amenities, but focused more on what was not in the community. One man did all of the drawing, as accuracy and scale were important to the group. They identified all of the schools, including alternative schools, in the community but also created a map that appeared to have very few commercial or service amenities. When pressed for an explanation, they indicated that they went outside the immediate neighborhood, mostly to more up-scale areas, to do their shopping, banking, and the like. While it is not within the scope of this chapter to analyze the differences between the process and product of the two groups, this was the focus of much discussion among the organizers. While language was a factor that distinguished the groups, we also deduced that the English-speaking group had more members that worked as professionals and had higher levels of education than the Spanishspeaking group, many of whose members had recently arrived from Mexico and worked as itinerant or day laborers. Though these differences were striking, we were also struck by the perspective of the Spanish-speaking parents; the abundance of resources that they saw in the community definitely caused the organizing group to reflect on their own biases and lingering deficit perspectives about the neighborhood.
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Page 263 At the conclusion of the community mapping exercise, the participants were asked to recommend community elders that the organizing team could interview to develop a collective history of the community. Their nominations, combined with others gathered from other sources, resulted in a list of about 16 informants that became the subject of our next data collection effort. These informants were long-time residents of the community and represented a range of ethnicities, language groups, occupations, and social positions. While individual experiences differed, some common themes emerged. Most all those interviewed remembered a time when the neighborhood had more cohesion (though they recall it having the same level of diversity), acted as a suburb to the downtown, and enjoyed a landscape beautified by the homeowners’ abundant gardens and fruit trees. The insights of the longtime residents reminded our team of how quickly larger forces can enact change in a local context (urban renewal and racist codes and covenants being the most influential here) but they also identified the next area of inquiry for our group—renters. Interestingly, beyond the common refrain that the current generation needed to be better parents and citizens, the long-time residents felt that “renters” were the major cause of decline in the neighborhood. As we discovered, after identifying a few “renters” to interview, it was usually the absentee slumlord property owners that caused the renters to appear as if they were contributing to the decline of the neighborhood. Further complicating this situation was the neighborhood’s location within unincorporated county lines, thus making it something of a no-man’sland when it came to public policy implementation. Deeper probing of some of the interview responses from all the groups and an analysis of community demographic data also revealed that while the neighborhood had historically included African American, Chicano, and White residents, the recent influx of immigrant groups from the Philippines, Laos/Thailand (the Hmong and Mien), and Samoa was a factor in some neighborhood tension. Lack of structures through which these groups could learn about one another, their cultures, and their practices heightened this tension. Finally, the organizing group interviewed business owners in the neighborhood gaining a final perspective on the history and issues of the community. The original organizing group and all informants in the data gathering process were invited to attend a meeting in which the data were displayed and, through dialogue, key themes were to be identified. There was a sizable group of organizers and of parents interested in being a part of the process of selecting themes for their children’s school curriculum. Safety and learning opportunities (for children and for their parents) emerged as dominant themes. With these identified, the organizing group then began to construct a multi-grade curriculum around the themes, taking care to build in activities and structures that would allow students to deepen their understanding of the issues as they moved from one grade to the next. Eventually, the organizing group identified a number of conceptual structures that framed the curriculum development process. They developed a set of principles for advocacy that were taught explicitly but were also embedded in other content-related activities. For example, in the 3rd grade class, the teacher introduced the steps of advocacy explicitly and then, through several deliberately selected language arts reading selections, used those steps to work with the children to identify the ways in which characters in the readings were advocates, and the results of their advocacy. One theme in the stories they read related to environmental sustainability issues and the benefits of conservation. This prompted the students to engage in a number of conservation efforts, including writing letters to political officials expressing their environmental concerns. In the upper grades, the curriculum more directly mimicked the organizing group’s community study. These students completed their own community maps, identifying parts of the community that they liked (typically their own homes and those of friends) and parts of the community that they did not like (usually vacant lots that had become sites for illegal refuse dumping). The teachers followed the steps in the advocacy process to teach
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Page 264 students about the different jurisdictions with authority over the issues students identified (e.g., the county monitored solid waste disposal, the city determined where speed bumps could be constructed, etc.). Students ultimately organized their concerns into communiqués designed for public officials. As with the preceding example, the process of creating a curriculum development framework for the social justice curriculum at the Language Academy of Sacramento emanated from a commitment to provide the community’s children with an education in which they were subjects, actively creating knowledge that would serve in their own freedom and liberation and that of their community. To accomplish this, it was imperative that the participating community members have a process through which they could articulate concretely their educational goals for their children and identify explicitly the community factors that supported and impeded progress towards these goals. For the participating schoolpeople (Language Academy teachers, university faculty members, and student teachers) it was necessary to critically engage their own biases about the community and to begin to view it through the lenses of the community members themselves. Parents, teachers, university faculty members, and student teachers also gained important knowledge about the community through the oral histories provided by the various stakeholder interviews as well as through research on demographic data, political structures, and formal histories written about the area. Empowered by this knowledge and by the collaboration across the groups, the adults were then able to develop educational experiences and activities that would facilitate pupil learning, knowledge construction, civic engagement, and advocacy. As the pupils engaged with the various assignments, they, like their adult counterparts, found lessons in neighborhood history that explained current conditions and identified possible future actions. Learning about various political structures governing their community increased the relevance and utility of other educational experiences (e.g., curriculum for César Chávez Day) and also helped them to envision a world in which their knowledge and action would create positive change for their community. Moreover, the collaboration that kept this diverse coalition of pupils, parents, teachers, student teachers, and university faculty members united gave rise to a feeling that though future obstacles were sure to emerge, the strength of the group would endure, and the education that it valued for its children would come to fruition. For the moment, our school–community–university partnerships have mostly successes to report. This narrative focused primarily on what was achieved. The various setbacks and deficiencies are not chronicled here, but suffice it to note that fierce political forces often aligned against these efforts, particularly those of the Language Academy of Sacramento, and other challenges inherent in pushing the boundaries of roles, institutions, and traditions also stymied our efforts to implement these projects fully. The title purports that against all odds, these projects came to life. While the odds have been briefly identified—e.g., intense centralization of key instructional decisions related to pedagogy and curriculum resulting in scripted curricula rigidly implemented and closely monitored—what is instructive in these cases is not necessarily the nature of the obstacles, since those will always exist for any educational effort aimed at redistributing resources, opportunities and, ultimately, outcomes towards those communities currently marginalized in our system. Rather, these cases reinforce the lessons of the past: the Inter Project, the current experiences of Porto Alegre’s Citizen School and participatory budgeting process, and the civil rights movements (e.g., see for example Horton, 2003 and Moses & Cobb, 2002) in many contexts. Wherever there is injustice or oppression, there is opportunity for cultural action. Cultural action results in—“uncovering, unmasking and laying bare the sources of oppression and social antagonisms” (Findlay, 1994, p. 118). This process is inherently educative. It liberates individuals and prepares them to act more fully in the collective struggle against injustice. Collective action rooted in cultural action is powerful and becomes sustainable when future generations are educated for freedom. A luta continua !
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Page 265 Notes 1 This chapter is dedicated to Martin Carnoy, my doctoral advisor at Stanford University—he was a supportive and generous mentor and he introduced me to Paulo Freire, thus making a lifetime of personal and professional opportunities possible for me. 2 Pupils who have been identified with particular kinds of disabilities (learning, psychological, emotional, physical, etc.) can be referred to self-contained classrooms with a specially trained teacher who instructs them. It is important for pre-service teachers to understand how the special education system works so that they are able competently to serve their pupils with special needs in the future. 3 Lesson study is a model of inquiry into professional practice developed in Japan and now practiced in the United States. It involves a dialogic and collaborative process in which a group of teachers design a lesson together, observe as one group member teaches the lesson and then use data collected from pupils to modify and improve the lesson. 4 The Equity Network consisted of 12 professional development schools in four local districts, two teachers associations, and a community organizing group, and involved over 18 faculty members in the Colleges of Education and Natural Science and Mathematics. Until 2006 it received support from a federal Teacher Quality Enhancement grant and a state Improving Teacher Quality grant, and it continues to receive some institutional support from Sacramento State University. The author is the director of the Equity Network. A book authored by Equity Network educators, Interrupting Tradition: Prioritizing urban children, their teachers and schools through professional development schools , is forthcoming through SUNY Press. 5 Lorie Hammond, Mike Beus, Paul Winckel, Jane Camm, and Cynthia Perla are the key leaders of this important project and have been working together in some form for over 10 years. 6 Hugo Chacón inspired the science education project at Bowling Green Charter Complex and was a valued colleague—though his social justice commitments and intellectual passions live on, he passed away far too young in 2005. Elizabeth Aguirre, Ricardo Martinez, Mercedes Campa, Rita Ultreras, and Claudya Lum have been instrumental in this project. 7 Bowling Green Charter Complex is a public charter school. Charter schools are distinct especially because they can develop their own instructional program and do not have to adhere to all of the state mandates and regulations followed by non-charter public schools. Because it is a charter school, Bowling Green is able to offer a bilingual program—where students learn in Spanish and English. Bilingual programs were eliminated for the majority of schools when Proposition 227 was passed in California in 1998. 8 The fact that two of the three projects featured here occur in charter schools is not an endorsement of the charter school movement. Both of the charter schools included here were founded with considerable support from the low-income communities that they serve. Both have social justice goals in their mission statements. Future research on the factors that make charter schools conducive to projects like those described here is recommended but is not the focus of this particular effort. References Baker, S., de Leon, E., Phelps, P., Martín, M., & Suarez, C. (forthcoming) Education of the community, for the community and by the community. In P. Wong & R. Glass (Eds.), Interrupting tradition. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (1994). Professional development schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Findlay, P. (1994). Conscientization and social movements in Canada. In P. McLaren & C. Lankshear (Eds.), Politics of liberation (pp. 108–122) . New York: Routledge. Forum Social Mundial. (2002). Cartas de princípios do Forum Social Mundial. Retrieved on September 28, 2007, from http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=1 Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the city. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of hope. New York: Continuum. Freudenberger, K. (1999). Rapid rural response appraisal and participatory rural appraisal. Baltimore, MD: Catholic Relief Services.
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Page 266 Gandin, L., & Apple, M. (2004). New schools, new knowledge, new teachers. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31 (1), 173–198. Goodlad, J. I., Soder, R., & Sirotnik, K. A. (Eds.). (1990). Places where teachers are taught. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Hammond, L. (2001). Notes from California. Journal of Research on Science Teaching, 38 (9), 983–999. Holmes Group. (1990). Tomorrow’s schools. East Lansing, MI: Holmes Group. Holmes Group. (1995). Tomorrow’s schools of education. East Lansing, MI: Holmes Group. Horton, M. (2003). The Miles Horton reader. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Lum, C., Aguirre, E., Martinez, R., Campa-Rodriguez, M., & Ultreras, R. (forthcoming). Science for social responsibility. In P. Wong & R. Glass (Eds.), Interrupting tradition. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Merino, B. J., & Hammond, L. (2001). How do teachers facilitate writing for bilingual learners in “sheltered constructivist” science? Electronic Journal of Literacy through Science , 1(1). Retrieved on April 5, 2006, from http://www.sjsu.edu/elementaryed/ejlts/ Merino, B., & Hammond, L. (2002). Writing to learn. In M. Schleppegrell & M. Colombi (Eds.), Developing advanced literacy in first and second languages (pp. 227–243). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Moses, R. & Cobb, C. (2002) Radical equations. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). (2001). Standards for professional development schools. [Online article]. Retrieved on February 10, 2006, from http://www.ncate.org/ public/standards.asp O’Cadiz, P., Wong, P., & Torres, C. (1998). Education and democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sarason, S. (1993). The case for change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Wong, P. (1995, February). Constructing a public popular education. Comparative Education Review , 39 (1), 120–141.
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Page 267 Part V The Politics of Practice and the Recreation of Theory
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Page 269 20 Flying Below the Radar? Critical Approaches to Adult Education1 Peter Mayo Defining adult education is an impossible task. It is such a multivalent and amorphous field, comprising different traditions, that definitions are bound to be exclusive, often deliberately so. Some types of adult education take the form of “adult schooling” and simply provide adults with a “second chance.” Other forms of adult education do not extend beyond the narrow remit of adult training and there are also forms of adult education which are run on a purely commercial basis with the market playing an important role here. There is, however, an often repressed tradition of adult learning with a broad “social purpose” dimension that extends beyond the restricted domain of welfarism. It often compels its practitioners to fly below the radar for a variety of reasons, depending on context: avoiding surveillance and possible co-optation by the mainstream system; remaining clandestine in those situations marked by extreme repression; keeping close to the grassroots; remaining a subaltern discourse. Rather than simply enabling people to adapt to and reintegrate within the system, this type of adult education is intended to empower groups and individuals to confront the system with a view to changing it. It is often referred to as adult education for social transformation—an educational engagement having a strong social justice orientation. It reflects an alternative vision of society. Similarly, much of the writing, in this regard, is about adult education not as it is now, as evinced by mainstream examples of “best practice,” but as it should and can be. This writing often consists of case studies that provide excellent signposts indicating the way forward. This vision has given rise to forms of adult learning that constitute an important feature of social and political movements struggling for change worldwide. These struggles occur in a variety of contexts. The educational effort involved can easily be identified as a critical approach to adult education which connects with the broader, more encompassing area of critical education. Prominent in this area of critical education is a group of writers involved in what has come to be referred to as “critical pedagogy.” Focusing on schools, McLaren defined critical pedagogy as being “fundamentally concerned with the centrality of politics and power in our understanding of how schools work” (McLaren, 1994, p. 167). This definition would certainly apply to the broader area of critical education and would equally apply to the domain of adult learning, especially of the radical type. Many key writers connected with a critical approach to education, more generally, have been providing concepts and writings relevant to adult education and the broader domain of adult learning. Take, for example, Henry Giroux’s notion of educators as transformative intellectuals,
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Page 270 people who engage in intellectual and cultural activity entailing praxis. They also include socially committed adult educators who avail themselves of the flexibility of non-formal adult education settings to work for social change, or else operate “in and against” the public adult education system. Giroux’s notion of “public pedagogy” has obvious implications for radical adult education practice that extends beyond formal educational sites to incorporate a variety of sites of adult learning. They must be safeguarded as public spaces against the onslaught of privatization and commodification. Likewise, Roger Simon’s notion of redemptive or public transactional memory has obvious implications for adult education work which often involves the use of collective and public memory, for example, among older adults or in community learning. Michael W. Apple’s concept of “Official Knowledge” has implications for the many sites of practice where selections from the many cultures of society are made. This notion has been taken up in the context of Museum adult education as cultural politics (Borg & Mayo, 2000). Like the curriculum, the museum, as a vehicle for learning (see Chadwick & Stannett, 2000), can also be conceived of as a site of cultural struggle, selecting material from the cultures of society and according it a sense of legitimacy, as with “official knowledge” in the curriculum. Antonia Darder produced work on critical bilingual/bicultural education (Darder, 1991), foregrounding subaltern voices, and antiracist education. These works provide inspiration for adult educators working in, and seeking to engage critically with, a variety of areas. These would range from language programs (e.g., TESOL programs) among immigrants, to all types of community-oriented adult education programs in which educators seek to address different power relationships and class–race intersections. She is one of a number of writers who have written a book-length study on Paulo Freire. Darder combines philosophical discussion with the voices of educators operating in different teaching/learning contexts and settings (Darder, 2002). Paulo Freire is the key figure whose influence is strongly felt in the critical education field. He enjoys iconic status among critical educators, and especially critical adult educators, given his approach to critical literacy which originated with his adult education work in Angicos and was also consolidated during his consultancy work with revolutionary governments in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa and in Nicaragua and Grenada. It was further consolidated during his work as Education Secretary in the Municipal Government in São Paulo, Brazil, where, in addition to carrying out school reforms, he and the rest of the Education Secretariat engaged in a partnership with social movements in organizing an important literacy campaign among youth and adults called MOVA São Paulo (Stromquist, 1997). Freire’s focus on “reading the word and the world,” as well as his rendering the concept of praxis the central element in his pedagogical approach and educational philosophy, makes him the most heralded critical popular educator of the twentieth century, and an obvious source of influence in the area of critical education. The organizations in adult education that draw inspiration from Freire are too numerous to mention. Suffice to mention the various Paulo Freire Institutes established throughout the world, with the main institute in São Paulo, Brazil. If one takes Europe as an example, one can mention organizations such as the Center for Social and Educational Research (CREA) in Barcelona, led by an important critical pedagogue and sociologist, Ramon Flecha (2000). Among its many activities, CREA carried out literacy circles among different types of workers lacking a formal education. Spain is also home to another important critical adult education centre, CREC that is closely connected to the Paulo Freire Institute in Spain. A journal called Quaderns d’Educació Continua and several books in the critical pedagogy field, a number written by or focusing on the work of Paulo Freire, feature among the resources, provided by CREC, that are distributed among popular educators working in the Valencia region. Freire’s concept of authentic dialogue, with its implications for a participatory and non-dominative approach to learning, where everyone involved performs the functions of educator and learner, without in any way diminishing the distinction between the recognized educator and students, invites parallels with the ideas of such other important educators as Martin Buber
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Page 271 (a writer and organizer of adult education classes in Palestine and, subsequently, Israel) and German social theorist Jürgen Habermas. The latter is well known for his theory of communicative action and conception of the ideal speech situation. Habermas’s advocacy of the use of critical reasoning against the colonization of the lifeworld (Finger, 2005, p. 167) by the system world, and his articulation of civil society and the public sphere, appealed to adult educators (see Wain, 2004; Welton, 2001). Habermas is an important source of influence in critical education more generally. He belongs to the second wave of the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research, whose key scholars are also very influential in critical education circles and certainly among exponents of critical pedagogy. The critical theory tradition is also engaged, in the adult education literature, by Stephen D. Brookfield (2005) who broadens the theoretical framework to include a host of writers, apart from Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse, and Habermas. Habermas’s influence in adult education can at best be felt in Brookfield’s work and that of Jack Mezirow. They both combined “critical thinking with pragmatism” (Finger, 2005, p. 167). In his elaboration of an epistemology of transformative learning in adult education, Mezirow (2003) recognizes the validity of Habermas’s distinction between instrumental and communicative learning, and the concept of emancipatory learning (pp. 59–61). Raymond A. Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres, who have also written extensively on critical education and on popular education in Latin America, have provided a detailed, book-length comparative study of Freire and Habermas, within the context of critical pedagogy and transformative social change. They underline, among other things, the critical social psychology that lies at the heart of Freire’s and Habermas’s conceptions of the dialogical social subject and of individual and collective learning. These conceptions suggest “strategies for rethinking the relations between education and transformative change” (Morrow & Torres, 2002, pp. 14–15). Freire lends himself to comparative studies involving other key figures in education and social theory for the purpose of a critical approach to education. John Dewey, Ivan Illich, Ettore Gelpi, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and Lorenzo Milani feature among those whose writings are compared to, or are given extended reference, alongside Freire’s. It is interesting to see Freire’s work, in the literature, often associated with that of Michel Foucault, an important source of influence in the critical education literature. Of particular concern are Foucault’s discussion and exploration of the relationship of power and knowledge, the two being interconnected and serving to develop technologies of power. Equally of interest is Foucault’s conception of power as being not necessarily negative but productive, and as being diffuse and capable of being resisted even though the resistance involved is never external to power itself. Quite influential is his related work on moral regulation, his concept of govern-mentality (Olssen, 2006) and his view of history as being nonevolutionary and interrupted. There are also his adoption of the Nietzschean concept of genealogy, his excavation of subjugated histories and knowledge, and his notion of the specific intellectual operating in specific contexts. One of the most prominent authors to draw on Foucault when writing from a postmodern perspective is the British sociologist, Sallie Westwood who, for several years, was a prominent contributor to the critical adult education literature. Westwood’s own use of the French post-structuralist’s ideas is best exemplified in a piece dealing with the politics of transformative research, a very important approach to research in connection with what is often referred to, in the critical tradition of adult education, as transformative adult education. The piece reports on research carried out among mentally ill Black patients. It seeks to shed light on their subjugated knowledge. This knowledge emerges through narratives that indicate the way the patients make sense of their world and their pain as opposed to the kind of “scientific knowledge” deployed as a result of the “interviewee being a case” (Westwood, 1992). Mark Olssen draws on Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and lectures on neoliberalism for an understanding of learning and education and how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each other. In this regard, he explores the all-pervasive notion
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Page 272 of lifelong learning, with its neoliberal underpinning, to see how it can serve alternative ends. Olssen argues in favor of an emancipatory project based on social justice and deliberative democracy. This position differs considerably from that frequently expressed by Foucault regarding “emancipation” and “social justice.” In an earlier piece, Olssen (2003) provides a Foucauldian poststructural reading of neoliberalism. Foucault’s impact can also be found in works concerned with learning and work (e.g., Edwards & Nicoll, 2004), learning and old age (Carroll, 2007), and numerous works concerned with women’s adult education. Quite significant is the work of Leona English (2006) who has been using the lens of Foucauldian poststructuralisms to understand the intersection of knowledge, power, and discourse in feminism(s), in the non-profit world and in the academy. She has studied, in particular, the way in which power is dispersed and negotiated in women’s non-profit organizations, especially feminist organizations, the learning that takes place within them, and their relations with government policymakers. The emphasis in Foucault on power/knowledge brings to mind another important European theorist whose work continues to exert a tremendous influence on critical education, including critical adult education: Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci is well known for his elaboration of the concept of hegemony, of which he never provides a systematic exposition. Hegemony emerged as a powerful conceptual tool to analyze the relationship between power and knowledge. Gramsci has been influential in a variety of areas, within the domain of critical adult education, including: the conceptualization of socially and politically committed adult educators as “organic intellectuals”—this concept has been adopted in the Christian Base Communities in Latin America (Kane, 2002; La Belle, 1986) and has been taken up by contemporary critical theorists of adult education (Brookfield, 2005); the use of “conjunctural analysis” in the theory and practice of popular education in Latin America and such countries as Canada (Barndt, 1989); the theoretical and empirical analysis of workers’ education in light of the Factory Council Theory (Livingstone, 2002); the analysis of adult education and the state (Torres, 1990); adult education intended to enable people to gain control over their own lives—Gramsci’s elaboration of, and formulations with respect to, hegemony are most relevant here (Newman, 2006); the area of adult education and cultural studies, since Gramsci exerted a strong influence on this area (see Raymond Williams, in Mcllroy & Westwood, 1993). Gramsci is a revered figure in that area of non-formal education in Latin America known as popular education (e.g., Kane, 2002; La Belle, 1986; Torres, 1990), a kind of educational practice that takes many forms but which continues to be theorized from a critical, emancipatory perspective. It is particularly in this context that his work is strongly combined with that of Paulo Freire, the two being given iconic status (Allman, 1999; Ledwith, 2005; Mayo, 1999). Gramsci, however, is a key figure in an important aspect of the radical and critical debate on adult education; namely, the debate involving a Marxist approach to adult learning. As with critical education in general, Marxist writings and practice have played a key role in the conceptualization of critical adult education. This influence is particularly strong in the context of independent, working-class education as well as in certain aspects of workers’ education, notably the more radical aspects as manifest, for example, in the work of the Plebs League and the Labour Colleges in Britain (see Simon, 1992). They represented an attempt at creating a break with bourgeois culture. Independent, working-class education manifested itself through classes and schools, workmen’s colleges, alternative libraries, and sporting events. Examples of these can be found in places such as England (McIlroy, 1992), Germany, Australia (Sharp, Hartwig, & O’Leary, 1989), Italy, and Cyprus (see Panayiotou, 2006). The literature on critical adult education abounds with writings from a Marxist perspective with Youngman (1986) providing one of the finest studies in the area that includes a brilliant second chapter focusing on “Marxism and Learning.” In this book, Youngman identifies some of the basic principles of a socialist approach to adult education and uses these principles to examine
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Page 273 the work of Paulo Freire, the main problem being that he runs the risk of decontextualizing and, therefore, abstracting concepts. Two theorists who provide book-length works on a Marxist approach to adult education are Paula Allman (e.g., Allman, 1999) and John Holst (2001), the former rooting her work in a thorough exposition and analysis of Karl Marx’s own writings, and the latter drawing on Marx and other Marxist writings in his analysis of contemporary conceptions of civil society, the state and social movements. In both cases, the influence of Gramsci is strongly felt. These works are part of a steady stream of historical materialist writings in critical education, with Peter McLaren featuring prominently among the authors involved. McLaren’s work highlights a revolutionary aspect of adult education (McLaren, 2000), namely, the kind of non-formal education that occurs within guerrilla movements, as outlined earlier, in the mid-1980s, by Thomas La Belle (1986) in his analysis of non-formal education in Latin America and the Caribbean. McLaren focuses on Ernesto Che Guevara, a revolutionary figure, often shown in photos to be engaged in adult education with guerrillas. McLaren uses Che’s image to discuss revolutionary learning within the context of contemporary guerrilla movements, notably, the Frente Zapatista in Chiapas. The issue of learning in revolutionary contexts brings to mind some of the most important literature on adult education, documenting what went on in revolutionary settings in countries such as Nicaragua in the 1980s (e.g., Arnove, 1994; Barndt, 1991) and Grenada (e.g., Jules, 1993). Concepts relating to popular education in these revolutionary contexts, and also in milder postdictatorial contexts, can enable those committed to a critical approach to adult education to think of radically alternative ways of confronting educational challenges and issues. One of the major challenges facing critical adult educators writing from a Marxist and non-Marxist perspective, or who engage the Marxist tradition, is that posed by neoliberalism which provides the ideological underpinning to the intensification of globalization. This challenge constitutes one of the recurring themes in much of the literature on adult education from a critical perspective, as we have seen from the earlier reference to one of Olssen’s papers. Foley (1999) is one of the most prominent authors to have broached this theme in his writings on capitalist reorganization, drawing once again on a political economy approach. A compendium of essays edited by Shirley Walters (1997), from the University of Western Cape, with articles by a variety of writers including Ove Korsgaard, Michael Welton, and Judith Marshall, tackled the issue of the globalization of adult education and training from a critical perspective. Paulo Freire himself was on the verge of writing a book on neoliberalism at the time of his death, and engaged in several critiques of the effects of this ideology on social programs and education in his later works, analyzing it against the backdrop of the “ideology of ideological death.” The OECD’s and European Union’s distortion of the former humanist, albeit liberal, UNESCO concepts of lifelong education and the learning society, through their advocacy of lifelong learning, and placing the onus on the individual’s personal investment in learning rather than on the state to provide adequate structures for learning, became the target of much criticism. This criticism is often leveled at these institutions because of the neoliberal tenets that underlie the more recent use of this concept as well as that of the “learning society.” Mark Murphy (1997) was among the first to provide such a scathing critique of the EU policies in this regard. John Field (2001) provided a very revealing genealogy of lifelong education/learning and some astute formulations with regard to its pitfalls and possibilities. Other critiques of the way these concepts are now used in the dominant discourse derive from Ettore Gelpi himself, one of the more radical “second wave” writers on Lifelong Education, Kenneth Wain (2004), Carmel Borg & Peter Mayo (2006), Peter Jarvis (2006), and even Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman (2007, pp. 121–126) makes a great contribution to the critical literature on lifelong learning, including adult learning, through his critique of the EU’s lifelong learning programs and the narrow concept of citizenship they promote. Other radical adult educators have taken up this theme as well as the related one of people taking control over their own lives. These include the Australian adult educator Michael
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Page 274 Newman. In a number of his works, especially Defining the Enemy (Newman, 1994, 2002, 2007), Newman tackles one of the major challenges facing organizations in this age of transnational corporations and ever increasing mystifications of structures of oppression. Of course, Defining the Enemy is written in a manner that helps people to identify oppressors of various types, through programs of adult education with women, aboriginals, workers in trade union settings etc. Newman’s books provide a clarion call to social action which, according to the author, should lie at the heart of any genuine engagement in adult education. He writes lucidly and shuttles from theoretical rumination to practical advice and documentation using vignettes from everyday life, each providing an evocative account from daily encounters that serves to illustrate some deeper political and philosophical point. The same applies to his later book (Newman, 2006) which, once again, makes the quest for social justice its main purpose. It is about teaching for defiance but this defiance is not a simple manifestation of petulance or opposition for its own sake but a carefully thought out action born out of anger and a consideration of one’s developed personal morality. The book once again combines theoretical rumination with practical tools including role play, group work, negotiation strategies and forum theater (à la Boal), the last mentioned being a very important and increasingly popular form of critical engagement and learning within community contexts in different parts of the world. Vignettes and story telling are powerful instruments for a critical approach to education, as Newman reveals. This brings to mind, once again, the work of his colleague, Griff Foley (1999). It focuses on learning in social action, owing to the presence of non-formal and informal education in the adult education field. Foley provides us with case studies representing instances of learning through action at the local level (drawn from Brazil, Australia, and Zimbabwe) and these are preceded by three chapters, looking at issues at the macro level, which provide a theoretical framework for analysis. The case studies indicate pockets of resistance to capitalism in its various guises and are characterized by intersections between class issues and issues related to other forms of oppression (White imperialism in the case of Zimbabwe, multinationals in the case of Brazil, environmental degradation in the case of the Terrania Creek campaign in Australia). Griff Foley raises the issue of learning in social movements, a key area for adopting a critical pedagogical approach to adult education. Social movements are often viewed as sites of adult learning in themselves, and as providing the context for adult education work (e.g., Hall & Clover, 2006; Welton, 1993) within organizations connected to the movement. Others refer to adult education as a social movement in itself. One of the oldest movements involved in adult education is, undoubtedly, the Labour Movement whose work comprises trade union education (tool and issue courses) and workers’ education more generally (e.g., Baldacchino, 1997; Fisher, 2005; Livingstone, 2002; McIlroy, 1993; Simon, 1992; Spencer, 1995). There is also the area of adult learning in the cooperative movement (Baldacchino, 1990; Quarter, 2000). The issues of adult education and women strongly make their presence felt in the context of social movements (e.g., Barr, 1999; Butterwick, 1998; Cunningham, 1992; Hart, 1992; Ledwith, 2005; Miles, 1998; Thompson, 1983). The same applies to issues concerning adult education and sexual orientation (Grace & Hill, 2004; Hill, 1996; Schedler, 1996), related to the conception of gender in its broader context, and issues concerning adult education and biodiversity (e.g., Clover, 1998; Hart, 1992; O’Sullivan, 1999). Less visible is literature on adult education and the disability movement (see, for example, Clark, 2006; Petrie & Shaw, 1999). The antiracist and antiethnic prejudice movements make their presence directly felt in the adult education literature (Arshad, 1999; Kelly & Maan, 1999). There are also issues related to adult learning for grassroots democracy (omnicrazia) and here one ought to mention the work of the Italian Aldo Capitini, the antifascist peace educator and activist who organized various educational and mobilizing activities within the context of a peace education movement and his postwar centers for social orientation (COS). Adult education often takes place within the context of religious movements both in Northern and Southern contexts. Religious movements can be conservative and downright reactionary
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Page 275 but they can also be very progressive with a strong radical social justice orientation. Examples are provided by the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America, which has provided the context for some of the most socially progressive popular education; the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, Canada with key figures such as Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins (e.g., Lotz & Welton, 1997); the Cattolici di Sinistra (Catholics on the Left) movement in Italy drawing inspiration from radical educators such as Don Lorenzo Milani (e.g., Borg & Mayo, 2006). As the literature on these figures and the movements they inspired show, there is enough material in the documented ideas and actions to inspire a critical and socially committed approach to adult education. There is also critical adult learning and education occurring within the context of landless peasant movements, particularly Brazil’s Movimento Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra-MST (Kane, 2002), and NGOs, including feminist NGOs (e.g., Stromquist, 2007), in majority world contexts. There are movements of NGOs, in these contexts, that conceive of an alternative development paradigm. The writings of Rajesh Tandon reflect in many ways the strong tradition of grassroots and often anticolonial and ecologically sensitive organizing that exists in India (Tandon, 2000a, 2000b). One ought also to mention in this regard the mobilization of the tree hugging (Chipko) movement inspired by Mira Behn, as well as the Sarvodaya movement (Zachariah, 1986). Here the figure of Gandhi (Kapoor, 2003) looms large. Some of the literature promotes the idea of progressive social movements serving as an alternative to leftist parties, given the perceived growing disenchantment with the latter. Other literature criticizes the romanticization of social movements and “civil society” more generally, presenting them as some kind of a deus ex machina in light of the perceived demise of the left as a result of the fall of the Berlin wall and “actually existing socialism.” Is there room for critical adult education to occur as a result of collaboration between progressive movements and, say, political parties? This discussion on social movements provided due recognition to voices from the majority world. These voices often foreground issues related to anti- or postcolonialism as well as questions concerning indigenous knowledge. The speeches and writings of Julius Kambarage Nyerere (e.g., Nyerere, 1979), with regard to adult education in Tanzania, made an important contribution to critical postcolonial adult education. Embedded in his approach to the development of adult education in the East African context is a logic that runs counter to that of traditional colonial education. The intention was to Africanize African education. This brings to mind a similar term, “to Grenadize Grenadians,” adopted in Grenada by the New Jewel Movement, that best captures the spirit characterizing a change in approach with respect to the previous colonial education, as is well explained by Anne Hickling Hudson (1999) who has contributed to the literature on adult education from a postcolonial perspective. The emphasis, through such notions as the Africanization of African education and ways of knowing, is placed on the valorization of Indigenous knowledge. Revolutionary and postindependence governments emphasized this kind of knowledge in reaction to the “top-down” education provided before the change in political climate took place. Cuba, Tanzania, Nicaragua, Grenada, the Seychelles, Guinea Bissau, and Eritrea are among the contexts that feature prominently in the relevant literature. There is a growing literature affirming the importance of Indigenous, including ancestral and spiritual, knowledge in the education and postcolonial fields, including literature by authors who have been associated with adult education (e.g., Dei, Hall, & Rosenberg, 2000). While on the subject of subaltern forms of knowledge, it would be worth mentioning, in a chapter such as this, the importance of grassroots-based research processes that challenge and serve as a radical alternative to the more conventional and authoritative scientific forms of knowledge. One of the major challenges, in my view, derives from what is known as Participatory Action Research (PAR), which has figured in the literature. It constitutes a form of research that is grassroots oriented, focuses on community problems and issues perceived by the community
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Page 276 members to be directly affecting their lives, and is carried out by the community members themselves. This approach has strong connections with popular education certainly of the type popularized by Paulo Freire. The “Third World” and “Southern” orientation of all these elements probably explains the convergence of the adopted approaches. People are gathering and producing knowledge at the same time, often experiencing, in the process, what Jack Mezirow would call a “perspective transformation.” Needless to say there has been much debate with regard to its credibility as an approach to research (Latapí, 1988) but then such debates occur with respect to any form of learning and research that falls outside the mainstream. It would occur with all sorts of research and knowledge by, from, and about people on the margins. Like Indigenous knowledge PAR challenges received wisdom and constituted authority. Dominant and exclusionary forms of knowledge promote and attempt to consolidate restricted and therefore equally exclusionary forms of citizenship. These forms of citizenship have been contested in the past and continue to be contested at present. For the area of citizenship is very much a contested terrain. Ethnic minorities contest dominant forms of modernity and citizenship, as in the case of the Kurds in Turkey with respect to the legacy of Ataturk (Mustapha Kemal). The dominant neoliberal form of citizenship promoted globally is that of the citizen being a largely two-dimensional person; consumer and producer. The critical education literature promotes the broader concept of citizenship, that of persons as social actors (Martin, 2001; Williamson, 1998), exercising their “right to govern,” as with Lorenzo Milani’s writings. Myles Horton would be one of the key figures in this area of adult learning for critical citizenship. His work, with respect to the mining community in Wilder, the Civil Rights Movement, and the citizenship schools is documented in a variety of papers (e.g., Peters & Bell, 1987) and books (e.g., Horton & Freire, 1990). The conversation involving Myles Horton and Paulo Freire (1990) and his splendid autobiography attest to a life dedicated to the struggle for social justice and the empowerment of oppressed groups. The Horton–Freire book virtually represents Myles Horton’s last testament with respect to his ideas concerning adult education and social change. It constitutes a fitting tribute to him. Although Freire undoubtedly makes his presence felt throughout the conversation, it is Horton who takes up most of the space, encouraged, in this regard, by the third anonymous participant who, at times, makes special efforts to bring the best out of him. The issue of adult learning and citizenship also brings into sharp focus writings in connection with the Participatory Budget (PB) experience in deliberative democracy in Porto Alegre (e.g., Schugurensky, 2002). Daniel Schugurensky, a key author in the area of adult education and citizenship, states, with respect to the PB, that while many “local planners, city officials, community organizers and participants do not perceive the pedagogical potential of participatory democracy,” a number of “active participants” in the Porto Alegre project “understand the Participatory Budget as an educational space,” often referring to it as a “citizenship school” (Schugurensky, 2002, p. 72). The connection between communities and participation is a recurring theme, in most of the critical adult education literature, especially that literature dealing with community development. Community action, learning, and development, together, constitute a contested terrain. It has become fashionable to invoke communities in these times. This invocation can accommodate the current neoliberal discourse that places the emphasis for prosperity on individuals, groups, and communities rather than on the state. The state thus continues to abdicate its responsibilities in consolidating public goods and adopting equity measures. This is all part of a strategy to reduce public spending on education and other social services, while privatization and the role of NGOs are increased. The blame for failure is also placed squarely on individuals, communities, and groups.
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Page 277 Happily, however, there is a literature that exposes community activists and workers to critical approaches to community learning, action, and development. This literature draws heavily on the best critical traditions of popular education and the writings of theorists such as Gramsci, Freire, Alinsky, and people connected with social movements. The works of Tom Lovett (1978), Marjorie Mayo (1997), and Margaret Ledwith (2005) are quite prominent in this critical tradition, together with work in connection with the Adult Learning Project (a reinvention of Freire’s work) in Edinburgh (Kirkwood & Kirkwood, 1989). Ledwith (2005), for instance, seeks to map out a strategy for radical community development that combines cultural and political economic analysis. It is an approach to community development that aspires to be transformative rather than ameliorative in nature. Ledwith combines sophisticated theoretical analysis, especially with regard to the work of Gramsci, Freire, and feminist politics, with reflections on a specific site of practice, Hattersley, where the author had been engaged for several years in community organizing and development. She advocates a holistic and “glocal” radical approach to community development, one that calls for an articulation of efforts carried out at the local level with those of larger and congenial movements operating at the global level. The emphasis is on praxis derived from material and ecological concerns and which comprises the important areas of experience and feeling. Emphasis is here placed on the promotion of life-centered rather than simply market-oriented values. This book also makes a contribution to the current discussion concerning the recuperation and reconstruction of public spaces. These spaces, on the one hand, often fall into decay. On the other, they are often the target of corporatist commodification and encroachment. This type of literature, as with most of the literature on adult education referred to above, has a strong emancipatory element, the most prominent feature of many critical approaches to adult education. Theoretical discussions on the postmodern condition also make their presence felt in the critical literature on adult education, with the emphasis placed, among other things, on avoiding unitary subjects and grand narratives, and underlining the limits of the enlightenment project (e.g., Usher & Edwards, 1994). Some of the contributors to this literature still manage to retain an emancipatory dimension in their view of adult education, while making us rethink some of the popular concepts and narratives that were probably taken on board uncritically in the past. There are also those, however, who exhibit some of the most “clever” but nihilistic and paralyzing features of ludic postmodernism. For the theoretical debates that characterize the domain of critical approaches to adult education reflect many of the debates that have featured in the humanities and social sciences at large. It remains to be seen, however, which of the currents that are strongly felt in these debates are having the greatest impact at the level of grassroots adult education practice. Note 1 I am indebted to Chris Cavanagh and Godfrey Baldacchino for their enthusiastic reactions to earlier drafts of the chapter and to the former for suggesting the “radar” metaphor for the title. I am also indebted to Carmel Borg, Stephen Brookfield, Elizabeth Lange, and Daniel Schugurensky for having commented on the points outline prior to my fleshing them out into a full blown essay. Any remaining shortcomings are my responsibility. References Allman, P. (1999). Revolutionary social transformation. Westport, CT and London: Bergin and Garvey. Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way . New York: Routledge/Falmer. Arnove, R. F. (1994). Education as contested terrain: Nicaragua (1979–1993). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Page 279 Jarvis, P. (2006). Beyond the learning society: Globalisation and the moral imperative for reflective social change. International Journal of Lifelong Education , 25 (3), 201–211. Jules, D. (1993). The challenge of popular education in the Grenada revolution. In C. Lankshear & P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical literacy, politics, praxis and the postmodern. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Kane, L. (2002). Popular education and social change in Latin America. London: Latin American Bureau. Kapoor, D. (2003). Postcolonial developments: Gandhian social thought and popular education in adivasi contexts in India. Journal of Postcolonial Education , 2(1), 69–85. Kelly, E., & Maan, B. (1999). Muslims in Scotland: Challenging Islamophobia. In J. Crowther, I. Martin, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Popular education and social movements in Scotland today. Leicester, England: NIACE. Kirkwood, G., & Kirkwood, C. (1989). Living adult education. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press. La Belle, T. J. (1986). Non formal education in Latin America and the Caribbean: Stability, reform or revolution? New York: Praeger. Latapí, P. (1988). Participatory research: A new research paradigm? Alberta Journal of Educational Research , XXX1V , 310–319. Ledwith, M. (2005). Community development. Bristol, England: Policy Press. Livingstone, D. W. (2002). Working-class learning, cultural transformation, and democratic political education. In C. Borg, J. A. Buttigieg, & P. Mayo (Eds.), Gramsci and education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lotz, J., &Welton, M. (1997). Father Jimmy . Cape Breton: Breton Books. Lovett, T. (1978). The challenge of community education in social and political change. Convergence , X (1), 42–51. Martin, D. (1995). Thinking union. Toronto: Between the Lines. Martin, I. (2001). Reconstituting the agora: Towards an alternative politics of lifelong learning. Concept , 2(1), 4–8. Mayo, M. (1997). Imagining tomorrow. Leicester, England: NIACE. Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and adult education. London and New York: Zed Books. Mayo, P. (2005). Postcolonialism. In L. English (Ed.), International encyclopedia of adult education. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. McIlroy, J. (1992). The rise and fall of independent working class education in the UK. In M. Taylor & R. Bédard (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th annual conference of the Canadian association for the study of adult education. Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan. McIlroy, J. (1993). Tales from smoke filled rooms. Studies in the Education of Adults , 25 (1), 42–63. McIlroy, J., & Westwood, S. (Eds.). (1993). Border country. Leicester, England: NIACE. McLaren, P. (1994). Life in schools. New York and London: Longman. McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Melo, A. (1985). From traditional cultures to adult education: The Portuguese experience after 1974. In K. Wain (Ed.), Lifelong education and participation. Msida: University of Malta Press. Mezirow, J. (2003). Transformative learning as discourse. Journal of Transformative Education , 1(1), 58– 63. Miles, A. (1998). Learning from the women’s movement in the neo-liberal period. In S. M. Scott, B. Spencer, & A. M. Thomas (Eds.), Learning for life. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing Inc. Morgan, W. J. (1998). Classical Marxism and the education of the workers: Exposition and critique (Pt. 1). The philosophy of the revolutionary proletariat. International Journal of University Adult Education , XXVII (3), 38–48. Morrow, R. A., & Torres, C. A. (1995). Social theory and education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Morrow, R. A., & Torres, C. A. (2002). Reading Freire and Habermas. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Murphy, M. (1997). Capital, class and adult education: The international political economy of lifelong learning in the European Union. In P. Armstrong, N. Miller, & M. Zukas (Eds.), Crossing borders breaking boundaries—research in the education of adults. Proceedings of the 27th Annual SCUTREA Conference. Birkbeck College University of London. Newman, M. (1994, 2002, 2007). Defining the enemy. Sydney: Centre for Popular Education UTS. Retrieved from www.michaelnewman.info
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Page 280 Newman, M. (2006). Teaching defiance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Nyerere, J. K. (1979). Adult education and development. In H. Hinzen & V. J. Hundsdorfer (authors/Eds.), The Tanzanian experience: Education for liberation and development. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education; London: Evans Brothers. Olssen, M. (2003). Structuralism, post-structuralism, and neo-liberalism: Assessing Foucault’s legacy. Journal of Education Policy , 18 (2), 189–202. Olssen, M. (2006). Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: Lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism. International Journal of Lifelong Education , 25 (3), 213–230. O’Sullivan, E. (1999). Transformative learning. London and New York: Zed Books; Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Panayiotou, A. (2006). Lenin in the coffee shop: The communist alternative and forms of non-western modernity. Postcolonial Studies , 9(3), 267–280. Peters, J. M., & Bell, B. (1987). Horton of highlander. In P. Jarvis (Ed.), Twentieth century thinkers in adult education. London and New York: Routledge. Petrie, M., & Shaw, M. (1999). The disability movement and the struggle for inclusion. In J. Crowther, I. Martin, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Popular education and social movements in Scotland today . Leicester, England: NIACE. Quarter, J. (2000). The social economy and the neo-conservative agenda. In E. Shragge & J. M. Fontan (Eds.), Social economy . Montreal: Black Rose. Schedler, P. E. (1996). Gay emancipation and the information society. Studies in the Education of Adults , 28 (2), 280–291. Schugurensky, D. (2002). Transformative learning and transformative politics: The pedagogical dimension of participatory democracy and social action. In E. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell, & M. A. O’Connor (Eds.), Expanding the boundaries of transformative learning. New York and Basingstoke, England: Palgrave. Sharp, R., Hartwig, M., & O’Leary, J. (1989, October). Independent working class education. Discourse, 10 (1), 1–26. Simon, B. (Ed.). (1992). The search for enlightenment. Leicester, England: NIACE. Spencer, B. (1995). Old and new social movements as learning sites: Greening labour unions and unionizing the Greens. Adult Education Quarterly , 46 (1), 31–42. Stromquist, N. (1997). Literacy for citizenship . Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stromquist, N. (2007). Feminist organizations and social transformation in Latin America. Boulder CO: Paradigm. Tandon, R. (2000a). Civil society, adult learning and action in India. Convergence , 33 (1/2), 120–137. Tandon, R. (2000b). Riding high or nosediving; Development NGOs in the new millennium. Development in Practice , 10 (3/4), 319–329. Thompson, J. L. (1983). Learning liberation: Women’s response to men’s education . London, Sydney, Dover and New Hampshire: Croom Helm. Thompson, J. L. (1988). Adult education and the women’s movement. In T. Lovett (Ed.), Radical approaches to adult education. London: Routledge. Torres, C. A. (1990). The politics of nonformal education in Latin America. New York: Praeger. Usher, R., & Edwards, R. (1994). Postmodernism and education. London: Routledge. Wain, K. (2004). The learning society in a postmodern world. New York and London: Peter Lang. Walters, S. (Ed.). (1997). Globalization, adult education & training . London: Zed Books. Welton, M. (1993). Social revolutionary learning: the new social movements as learning sites. Adult Education Quarterly , 43 (3), 152–164. Welton, M. (2001). Civil society and the public sphere: Habermas’s recent learning theory. Studies in the Education of Adults , 33 (1), 20–34. Westwood, S. (1992). Power/knowledge: The politics of transformative research. Studies in the Education of Adults , 24 (2), 191–198. Williamson, B. (1998). Lifeworlds and learning. Leicester, England: NIACE. Youngman, F. (1986). Adult education and socialist pedagogy. Beckenham, England: Croom Helm. Zachariah, M. (1986). Revolution through reform. New York: Praeger.
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Page 281 21 Critical Media Education and Radical Democracy Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share Technological innovations, expansion of global media empires, an explosion of new media, and the unrestricted commercial targeting of children have all contributed to an environment where today’s youth are growing up in a mediated world far different from any previous generation. While technological advancements have created new possibilities for the free flow of information, social networking, and global activism, there is also the potential for corporations and governments to increase their control over media, restrict the flow of information, and appropriate these new tools for profit and control at the expense of free expression and democracy. Most children born in the United States in this millennium have never known a time without the Internet, cellular phones, or television.1 Over 98% of U.S. households have at least one television set2 and about one-third of young children live in households where the TV is on “always” or “most of the time” (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003, p. 4). Before most children are six years of age, they spend about two hours per day with screen media,3 something that doubles by age eight, and before they are 18 they spend approximately 6½ hours daily with all types of media (Rideout, Roberts, & Foehr, 2005).4 It is also estimated that nearly all young children in the United States, “have products—clothes, toys, and the like—based on characters from TV shows or movies” (Rideout et al., 2003, p. 4). Since television programs, cellular phones, video games, music, and even toys have become major transmitters of culture, tellers as well as sellers of the stories of our time, it is now, more than ever, that children need to learn how to critically question the messages that surround them and how to use the vast array of new tools available to express their own ideas and participate fully. Carrington (2005) writes that the emergence of new media texts, “situate[s] contemporary children in global flows of consumption, identity and information in ways unheard of in earlier generations” (p. 22). For Carrington, understanding media as a flow is essential to understanding the culture in which today’s youth are growing up. Modleski (1982) describes Raymond Williams’ concept of flow as the complex interactions and interrelations between various television programs and commercials (p. 100). Houston (1984) explains, “The flow of, American television goes on for twenty-four hours a day, which is crucial in producing the idea that the text issues from an endless supply that is sourceless, natural, inexhaustible, and coextensive with psychological reality itself” (p. 82). In the twenty-first century, this flow travels back and forth through old media and new information technologies alike. Houston states that media flow mobilizes desire and consumption in which the structured interruptions enhance the desire for endless consumption.
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Page 282 In the context of continuously expanding technological and economic transformation, critical media literacy is an imperative for participatory democracy because new information communication technologies (ICTs) and a market-based media culture have fragmented, connected, converged, diversified, homogenized, flattened, broadened, and reshaped the world. These changes have been reframing the way people think and restructuring societies at local and global levels (Castells, 2004; Jenkins, 2006). While media education has evolved from many disciplines, an important arena of theoretical work for critical media literacy comes from the multidisciplinary field of cultural studies. This is a field of critical inquiry that began over a century ago in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how popular culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social control. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active makers of meaning, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Applying concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism, a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory has evolved in which media and popular culture can be analyzed as dynamic forces that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives (see Kellner, 1995). Media education that has evolved from cultural studies is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills, and more as a framework of conceptual understandings (Buckingham, 2003). Many people and organizations around the world have generated their own lists of concepts5 that vary in numbers and wording, but for the most part they all tend to coincide with at least five basic elements: (1) recognition of the construction of media and communication as a social process as opposed to accepting texts as isolated neutral or transparent conveyors of information; (2) some type of textual analysis that explores the languages, genres, codes, and conventions of the text; (3) an exploration of the role audiences play in negotiating meanings; (4) problematizing the process of representation to uncover and engage issues of ideology, power, and pleasure; (5) examination of the production, institutions, and political economy that motivate and structure the media industries as corporate profit-seeking businesses (see Kellner & Share, 2005). Critical media literacy is an educational response that expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies. It also deepens the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information, and power. Along with this mainstream analysis, alternative media production empowers students to create their own messages that can challenge media texts and narratives. This chapter explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media education, examines some of the obstacles for implementing progressive pedagogical changes, and provides examples of practical applications. A multiperspectivist approach addressing issues of gender, race, class, and power is used to explore the interconnections of media education, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. A Changing World Many changes in the last couple of decades have contributed greatly to the need for critical media education. A new epistemological framework for media literacy education is now necessary because of the rapid growth of ICT, the expansion of free market global capitalism, and the escalating and vanishing linguistic and cultural diversity that is changing social environments at local as well as global levels.
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Page 283 Looking at the impact of globalization on identity, Castells (2004) asserts that people’s lives are being shaped by the forces of the network society. He suggests that the interconnections between technology, economics, culture, and identity are challenging, conflicting, and impacting upon each other on a global scale. Already in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan argued that many of the characteristics of premodern oral culture will again rise up in importance as the instantaneous and continuous electronic age proves to be more similar to oral cultures of the ancient past than the last five centuries of typographic literacy. He wrote these ideas before the existence of cellular phones, the Internet, and HDTV, yet today as the World Wide Web and wireless communication become commonplace in most “First World” countries, as well as in many parts of the “developing world,” his words ring more true today than when he first wrote them a half century ago. According to McLuhan (1964), before print literacy, humans were hunters and gatherers living in oral societies with tribal cultures that were unified, inclusive, auditory, organic, and had high levels of participation. With the invention of the phonetic alphabet, a new era began. Literacy caused the eye to replace the ear and the cosmic culture became fragmented and separated by a new system of repeatability and uniformity. In the fifteenth century these changes exploded with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press. McLuhan calls this the “mechanical age” and attributes the arrival of individualism, rationalism, and nationalism to this new literate culture of homogeneity and lineal organization. The next great change for humanity, according to McLuhan, came with the discovery of electricity and the invention of the telegraph. The new electronic age has caused, and continues to cause, an implosion within society that is returning humans to their earlier oral roots. This latest age of automation and cybernation takes us back to a more participatory, integral, decentralized, and inclusive way of living. McLuhan asserts that electricity, with its speed and constancy, is the medium that created simultaneity, it is an extension of our central nervous system, “instantly interrelating every human experience” (1964, p. 358). He suggests that all media are extensions of ourselves; the print is an extension of the eye as the wheel is an extension of the foot. Now, more than ever, we are seeing the transformation of societies into what McLuhan coined, the “global village,” and the electronic age that he spoke of is in full force, reshaping societies and identities across the globe. For today’s literate society to keep pace with the age of information, education must let go of curriculum that is separated by subjects and “changeover to an interrelation in knowledge,” asserts McLuhan (1964, p. 35). He asks: Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and photographic world as they get in the typographic? In fact, they need more training in graphics, because the art of casting and arranging actors in ads is both complex and forcefully insidious. (p. 230) Adding economic and technological determinist perspectives to McLuhan’s technological determinism, Friedman (2005) argues that at the turn of this millennium, humans entered the third major shift in globalizing change. He writes that the first great era of globalization began in 1492 when Columbus opened trade between the New World and the Old. During what Friedman calls Globalization 1.0, imperialism and religion drove global integration through brute force as colonizing countries deployed the labor power of exploited peoples until about 1800. The second era, Globalization 2.0, ran from about 1800 to 2000 and involved multinational companies expanding their markets and labor forces as industrialization reshaped the world. This second era benefited first from the decrease in transportation costs and later from the decrease in telecommunication costs, and was marked by the inventions of new hardware. Yet, in the
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Page 284 twenty-first century, Friedman claims that Globalization 3.0 is driven by innovative software and a global fiber-optic network, and asserts that the unique character of this era is “the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally” (2005, p. 10). His claim that the world is now less hierarchical, with a more level playing field than ever before, is overly ideological and optimistic; Friedman is too uncritical of inequalities and injustices of neoliberal globalization (Klein, 2007). However, his assertion that “the world has been flattened by the convergence of ten major political events, innovations, and companies” (p. 48) is highly provocative and highlights many recent changes in society that are having a global impact. We do not agree with his utopian conclusion that the world is now flat and there is more equal opportunity, since one-third of the world’s population still lives without electricity. Yet, Friedman’s discussion of the major forces that have changed the world in just the last couple of decades makes it clear that the twenty-first century is a different world and will continue to change due to the influences of new ICTs and global economic systems. The examples he describes of transformations in technology, society, and economy provide strong reasons for the need to change education and especially literacy practices. We believe that the type of changes that would best accommodate a globalized world perpetually transformed by technology include multiple literacies, of which critical media literacy is essential, as we argue below. The diversity of ideas and people is increasing in countries, cities, and classrooms as escalating amounts of information become available and larger numbers of people travel and migrate across the globe. At the same time there is a reduction of diversity as cultural colonialization and commercial homogenization spread throughout the global markets with the ease of new ICTs. One example of the loss of diversity can be seen in UNESCO’s warning that, “over 50% of the world’s 6000 languages are endangered” with one disappearing almost every other week.6 Lo Bianco (2000) states that: “During this and the next decade there will be the greatest collapse of language diversity in all history” (p. 94). He attributes these changes to an emerging global system being generated by three principal forces: “The first is the almost universal phenomenon of market deregulation; the second is the advanced integration of international financial markets; and the third is the critical facilitating force of instantaneous communications” (p. 93). One of the common themes running through many analyses of the changes in the relationship between media and society is a high degree of convergence that is occurring in numerous ways (Considine, 2003; Gutiérrez, 2003; Jenkins, 2006; C. Luke, 2006). Jenkins (2006) insists that we are now living in a convergence culture , in which our sociocultural practices are changing because of the influences of technology and economics, and convergence of old and new media. He explains: “Media convergence is more than simply a technological shift. Convergence alters the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences” (p. 15). Jenkins highlights two major, and often contradictory, trends, one in which large media corporations threaten democracy by their concentration of ownership, giving fewer people a greater ability to push and amplify their limited content out to the masses, while new media technologies have made it easier on a grassroots level for more people to pull, create, and distribute much more diverse media content, thereby offering new opportunities for democracy. This dynamic push and pull of media is a key aspect of convergence and something Jenkins states: represents a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture. (p. 243) These changes in technology and society are shaping the way people think and relate to media. Jenkins asserts that the larger problem for educators today is not the old notion of a digital divide
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Page 285 that separates people based on limited access to the tools of communication, since more people have access today than ever before, but the larger problem today is a participation gap : “the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow” (Jenkins et al., 2007, p. 3). Jenkins (2006) writes, “We need to rethink the goals of media education so that young people can come to think of themselves as cultural producers and participants and not simply as consumers, critical or otherwise” (p. 259). Framing the changes in technological and social terms, C. Luke (2006) argues for an expanded form of media literacy because of three increasingly growing levels of media convergence. One level of convergence is the functional ability of hardware devices to perform multiple tasks, such as a cell phone that can take and send pictures (still and moving images), play music, send and receive text messages, upload and download content online, play games, and can still be used for chatting. A second level of media convergence entails provider convergence which has been greatly enhanced by deregulations of media ownership and the numerous mergers and acquisitions of multinational media corporations. The horizontal and vertical integration of media companies allows fewer corporations the ability to control more different types of services and content (Bagdikian, 1997; McChesney, 2004). The ability of ICTs to perform more functions and the integration of media providers are creating what Marsha Kinder (1991) labels transmedia intertextuality . According to C. Luke (2006), the third level of media convergence is a consequence of the two previously mentioned which have had the effect of creating “a much tighter synergy between previously disparate industries, between knowledge and information, consumerism, popular culture, entertainment, communication, and education” (p. 5). As politics, news, and entertainment converge into new forms of media, an entire spectator culture is evolving. Spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life (Kellner, 2003, 2007). In order to grab larger audiences and increase profit and power, the culture industries aggressively create and promote a synthesized spectacle-centered media culture. Gee (2000) suggests that technological innovations and hyper-competitive global “fast capitalism” are creating a new type of individual whom he calls the “portfolio person” (p. 43). Gee explains that the idea of “expertise” has moved “away from ‘disciplinary’ or academic expertise to a broader notion more compatible with the new capitalist world view” (p. 48). He writes that this business orientation, much like Friedman’s flat world perspective, emphasizes: efficient problem solving, productivity, innovation, adaptation, and non-authoritarian distributed systems … In the new capitalism, it is not really important what individuals know on their own, but rather what they can do with others collaboratively to effectively add “value” to the enterprise. (Gee, 2000, p. 49) A problem with this education of the portfolio person is that it is based on a cognitive notion of knowledge workers who have the facility of “higher order thinking” but lack the ability to think critiquely. Gee describes critiquely as the ability “to understand and critique systems of power and injustice” (p. 62). The inability to understand or empathize with marginalized, poor, and oppressed people is a major problem of this fast capitalism epistemology. Another problem with the model that creates the portfolio person is that it advantages most the children from dominant positions in society (i.e., White, male, middle or upper class), who have easier access to this expertise and “school language” based on their lifeworld experiences and privileges. It is much easier to bridge the home culture to the public school domain for students who have been exposed to White, middle-class values such as reading children’s literature from an early age or visiting museums and art galleries. The common deficit thinking approach that many educators internalize undervalues the cultural assets that minority and poor students
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Page 286 bring to school and often frames those resources as problems to be overcome (Valencia & Solorzano, 2004). Gee (2000) writes: We rarely build on their experiences and on their very real distinctive lifeworld knowledge. In fact, they are often asked, in the process of being exposed to specialist domains, to deny the value of their lifeworlds and their communities in reference to those of more advantaged children. (p. 66) To counteract the problems of inequality and lack of social critique, Gee promotes a Bill of Rights for all students that includes four pedagogical principles: situated practices, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformative practice. He writes: “These principles seek to produce people who can function in the new capitalism, but in a much more meta-aware and political fashion than forms of new-capitalistcomplicit schooling” (Gee, 2000, p. 67). The situated practice can help value the different cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) students bring into the classroom as child-centered experiential practices allow students to discover connections between their lifeworlds and school. A major aspect of these principles is a metacognitive awareness about the interconnections of thinking, knowledge, and power relations. The need for some overt instruction and critical framing assures that students will engage with texts critiquely to understand the interconnections and systems of power. The fourth principle of transformed practice suggests that education must involve acting on learning and empower students to use and transform knowledge. When Gee’s fourth principle of transformative practice is built on critical framing, then Jenkins’ goal of bridging the participation gap can become a reconstruction of education promoting critical media literacy. In a report funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Jenkins and others assert the need for teaching: new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. (Jenkins et al., 2007, p. 4) Approaches to Media Education In spite of the fact that media education in the United States is in its infancy there is already debate about why and how to teach it (Hobbs, 1998). We have divided the field of media pedagogy into four general approaches in order to better explain the necessary elements of critical media literacy (Kellner, 1998; Kellner & Share, 2005). One approach to media education comes out of a fear of media and aims to protect or inoculate people against the dangers of media manipulation and addiction. This protectionist approach posits media audiences as passive victims and values traditional print culture over media culture as exemplified by Postman (1985) in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman warns that TV has attained the power to control education because it dominates the attention, time, and cognitive habits of the youth. Many activists on both sides of the political spectrum come to media education as a way to push their agenda through blaming the media. Some conservatives blame the media for causing teen pregnancies and the destruction of family values while some on the left criticize the media for rampant consumerism and making children materialistic. From her research with
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Page 287 preschool teachers/childcare providers, Seiter (2002) found this fear of media and popular culture greatest at middle and upper socioeconomic levels. She writes: The media are deemed most powerful by those working and living in situations of relative privilege; in the poorest center the media are seen as only one factor—less significant than the part played by poverty, by parental absence, and by violence. (pp. 59–60) While we recognize that media contribute to and, at times, cause many social problems, we take issue with a protectionist approach because of its antimedia bias which oversimplifies the complexity of our relationship with media and takes away the potential for empowerment that critical pedagogy and alternative media production offer. When the understanding of media effects is contextualized within its social and historical dynamics then issues of power and ideology are extremely useful to media education to explore the interconnections between information and power (Ferguson, 2004). Critics of this antimedia approach suggest that it will cause students to either regurgitate “politically correct” responses to media critique or reject the ideas of media literacy altogether (Buckingham, 1994). Aspects of a protectionist approach can be useful when they address the naturalizing processes of ideology and the interrelationships with social injustice, but it is deeply flawed when it does so through dogmatic orthodoxy and undemocratic pedagogy. A second approach to teaching about media can be seen in media arts education, where students are taught to value the aesthetic qualities of media and the arts while using their creativity for selfexpression through creating art and media. These programs can be found most often inside schools as stand-alone classes, or outside of the classroom in community-based or after-school programs. While many of these programs are excellent examples of critical media literacy as we describe later in this chapter, we have concerns with the media arts approach that favors individualistic self-expression over socially conscious analysis and alternative media production. Many of these programs tend to unproblematically teach students the technical skills to merely reproduce hegemonic representations with little awareness of ideological implications or any type of social critique. Feminist standpoint theorists explain that coming to voice is important for people who have seldom been allowed to speak for themselves, but without critical analysis it is not enough (Collins, 2004; Harding, 2004; Hartsock, 1997). Critical analysis that explores and exposes the structures of oppression is essential because merely coming to voice is something any racist or sexist group of people can also claim. Spaces must be opened up and opportunities created so that people in marginalized positions have the opportunity to collectively struggle against oppression, to voice their concerns, and create their own representations. Incorporating the arts and media production into education offers the potential for making learning more experiential, hands-on, creative, expressive, and fun. Media arts education can bring pleasure and popular culture into mainstream education, thereby making school more motivating and relevant to students. When this approach moves beyond technical production skills or relativist art appreciation and is steeped in cultural studies and critical pedagogy that address issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and power, it holds dramatic potential for transformative critical media literacy. A third approach to media education can be found in the media literacy movement in the United States. While the movement is relatively small,7 it has made some inroads into mainstream educational institutions and established two national membership organizations in the United States. According to the definition of media literacy provided by one of the two national media literacy organizations, the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), “media literacy is seen to consist of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE.”8 This approach attempts to
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Page 288 expand the notion of literacy to include popular culture and multiple forms of media (music, video, Internet, advertising, etc.) while still working within a print literacy tradition. While we agree with the need to begin with these ideas of expanding our understanding of how we communicate with more than just printed words, this is not enough to bring about a democratic reconstruction of education and society. Robert Ferguson (1998) uses the metaphor of an iceberg to explain the need for critical media analysis. Many educators working under an apolitical media literacy framework guide their students to only analyze the obvious and overt tip of the iceberg they see sticking out of the water. Ferguson asserts that this is a problem because “[t]he vast bulk which is not immediately visible is the intellectual, historical and analytical base without which media analysis runs the risk of becoming superficial, mechanical or glib” (p. 2). The critical component of media literacy must transform literacy education into an exploration of the role of language and communication to define relationships of power and domination, because below the surface of that iceberg lies deeply embedded ideological notions of White supremacy, capitalist patriarchy, classism, homophobia, and other oppressive myths. Many media educators working from this approach openly express the belief that education can and should be politically neutral and that their job is to objectively expose students to media content without questioning ideology and issues of power. Giroux (1997) writes: “The notion that theory, facts, and inquiry can be objectively determined and used falls prey to a set of values that are both conservative and mystifying in their political orientation” (p. 11). The rejection of the idea that education or information can be neutral and value free is essential for critical inquiry to address social injustice and inequality through transformative pedagogy based on praxis (reflection and action). Giroux (2001) asserts, “Education is not training, and learning at its best is connected to the imperatives of social responsibility and political agency” (p. xxiv). The mainstream appeal of the media literacy movement in the United States, something that it is only just starting to develop, can probably be linked to its conservative base which does not engage the political dimensions of education and especially literacy. While this ambiguous nonpartisan stance helps the dissemination of media education, thereby making some of the ideas available to more students, it also waters down the transformative potential for media education to become a powerful tool to challenge oppression and strengthen democracy. The media literacy movement has done excellent work in promoting important concepts of semiotics and intertextuality, as well as bringing popular culture into public education. However, without critical pedagogy and cultural studies, media literacy risks becoming another cookbook of conventional ideas that only improve the social reproductive function of education. The type of critical media literacy that we propose includes aspects of the three previous models, but focuses on ideology critique and analyzing the politics of representation of the crucial dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality within political economy and social relations of mainstream corporate media production, as well as expanding textual analysis to include issues of social context, control, resistance, and pleasure, and promoting alternative media production. A critical media literacy approach also expands literacy to include information literacy, technical literacy, multimodal literacy, and other attempts to broaden print literacy concepts to include different tools and modes of communicating (Kellner, 1998). In addition to these elements, critical media literacy brings an understanding of ideology, power, and domination that challenges relativist and apolitical notions of most media education in order to guide teachers and students in their explorations of how power and information are always linked. This approach embraces the notion of the audience as active in the process of making meaning, as a cultural struggle between dominant readings, oppositional readings or negotiated readings (Ang, 2002; Hall, 1980). Critical media literacy thus constitutes a critique of mainstream approaches to literacy and a political project for democratic social change. This involves a multiperspectival critical inquiry, of popular culture and the cultural industries, that addresses issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and power and also promotes the production of alternative counter-hegemonic media. Media
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Page 289 and ICT can be tools for empowerment when people who are most often marginalized or misrepresented in the mainstream media receive the opportunity to use these tools to tell their stories and express their concerns. For members of the dominant group, critical media literacy offers an opportunity to engage with the social realities that the majority of the world is experiencing. The new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate, manipulate, or enlighten and it is imperative that educators teach their students how to use and critically analyze these media (Kellner, 2004). The different approaches to media education are not rigid pedagogical models as much as they are interpretive reference points from which educators frame their concerns, goals, and strategies. Calling for critical media literacy is important to identify the elements and objectives necessary for good media pedagogy. Alan Luke and Peter Freebody have been developing a dynamic understanding of literacy as a social practice where critical competence is one of the necessary practices. This framing of literacy as a family of practices in which multiple practices are crucial and none, alone, is enough, fits well into our multiperspectival approach to critical media literacy. A. Luke and Freebody (1999) write that effective literacy requires four basic roles that allow learners to “break the code … participate in understanding and composing … use texts functionally … [and] critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral.” This normative approach offers the flexibility for literacy education to explore and critically engage students with the pedagogy that will work best for each teacher in their own unique situation with the different social and cultural needs and interests of his or her students and local community. When educators teach students critical media literacy, they often begin with media arts activities or simple decoding of media texts in the mode of the established media literacy movement, with discussion of how audiences receive media messages. But critical media literacy also engages students in exploring the depths of the iceberg with critical questions to challenge “common-sense” assumptions and redesign alternative media arts production with negotiated and oppositional interpretations. The goal should be to move toward critical media literacy with the understanding of literacy as a social process that requires breadth and depth, while planting seeds and scaffolding the steps for transformative pedagogy. For example, in her course on critical media literacy at UCLA, Rhonda Hammer has her students work in teams to create their own counter-hegemonic videos and/or web sites that explore issues they feel are underrepresented or misrepresented in the mainstream media (see Hammer, 2006).9 During the short, ten-week quarter, her students produce alternative media productions that challenge the “commonsense” assumptions about a wide assortment of issues dealing with gender, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, power, and pleasure. Through the dialectic of theory and practice her students create critical alternative media while engaging the core concepts of critical media literacy as they apply to audience, text, and context. Radical Democracy Critical media literacy, in our conception, is tied to the project of radical democracy and is concerned to develop skills that will enhance democratization and civic participation. It takes a comprehensive approach that teaches critical skills and how to use media as instruments of social communication and change. The technologies of communication are becoming more and more accessible to young people and ordinary citizens, and can be used to promote education, democratic self-expression, and social justice. Technologies that could help produce the end of participatory democracy, by transforming politics into media spectacles and the battle of images, and by turning spectators into passive consumers, could also be used to help invigorate democratic debate and participation.
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Page 290 Indeed, teaching critical media literacy should be a participatory, collaborative project. Watching television shows or films together could promote productive discussions between teachers and students (or parents and children), with emphasis on eliciting student views, producing a variety of interpretations of media texts, and teaching basic principles of hermeneutics and criticism. Students and youth are often more media savvy, knowledgeable, and immersed in media culture than their teachers, and can contribute to the educational process through sharing their ideas, perceptions, and insights. Along with critical discussion, debate, and analysis, teachers ought to be guiding students in an inquiry process that deepens their critical exploration of issues that affect them and society. Since media culture is often part and parcel of students’ identity and a most powerful cultural experience, teachers must be sensitive in criticizing artifacts and perceptions that students hold dear, yet an atmosphere of critical respect for difference and inquiry into the nature and effects of media culture should be promoted (C. Luke, 1997). A major challenge in developing critical media literacy, however, results from the fact that it is not a pedagogy in the traditional sense with firmly established principles, a canon of texts, and tried-and-true teaching procedures. It requires a democratic pedagogy, which involves teachers sharing power with students as they join together in the process of unveiling myths, challenging hegemony, and searching for methods of producing their own alternative media. Critical media pedagogy in the United States is in its infancy; it is just beginning to produce results, and is more open and experimental than established print-oriented pedagogy.10 Moreover, the material of media culture is so polymorphous, multivalent, and polysemic, that it necessitates sensitivity to different readings, interpretations, perceptions of the complex images, scenes, narratives, meanings, and messages of media culture which, in its own ways, is as complex and challenging to critically decipher as book culture. Teaching critical media literacy involves occupation of a site above the dichotomy of fandom and censor. One can teach how media culture provides significant statements or insights about the social world, empowering visions of gender, race, and class, or complex aesthetic structures and practices, thereby putting a positive spin on how it can provide significant contributions to education. Yet we ought to indicate also how media culture can advance sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice, as well as misinformation, problematic ideologies, and questionable values, accordingly promoting a dialectical approach to media. The core concepts of media literacy are most relevant to progressive and transformative education when taught through a democratic approach with critical pedagogy that follows the ideas of progressive educators such as John Dewey and Paulo Freire. Over a century ago, Dewey (1916/1997) championed education for democracy and placed emphasis on active learning, experimentation, and problem solving. Dewey’s pragmatic approach connects theory with practice and requires students to similarly connect reflection with action. Using a problem-posing pedagogy, Freire (1970) calls for critical consciousness that involves perception of concrete situations and problems, as well as action against oppression. The problem-posing alternative that Freire exercises requires dialogical communication between students and teachers where both are learning and teaching each other. This necessitates praxis, critical reflection together with action to transform society. For this reason, media education should involve both critical analysis and critical student media production. Masterman (1994) declared that the goal for media education should be critical autonomy , so that students will want to critically question media when they are not with their teacher. Ferguson (2001) suggested that students must also learn critical solidarity because one is never truly autonomous and information does not exist in isolation, it is always linked to hierarchical relationships of power. By combining the ideals of critical autonomy with critical solidarity we propose a model for radical democracy that promotes independence and interdependence but moves away from an uncritical dependency on media. When media are seen as merely transparent
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Page 291 windows, the messages become naturalized, we become complacent and democracy ceases to be representative. Our dependency on media surrenders our active participation and civic duties to question, challenge, and correct social injustices. Radical democracy depends on individuals caring about each other, being involved in social issues, and working together to build a more egalitarian, less oppressive society. Many community-based after-school programs such as Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City and REACH LA in Los Angeles offer excellent examples for how media production can be taught as an essential component of critical media literacy. Both programs involve inner-city youth in video production activities in which the students explore their concerns and create their own alternative media to challenge the dominant representations. Founder and Executive Director of EVC, Goodman (2003) writes: This approach to critical literacy links media analysis to production; learning about the world is directly linked to the possibility of changing it. Command of literacy in this sense is not only a matter of performing well on standardized tests; it is a prerequisite for self-representation and autonomous citizenship. (p. 3) Media production at REACH LA is more than just teaching isolated skills, it is part of a structured program based on key pedagogical practices that personalize and politicize the youth and their messages. Combining the analytical skills to deconstruct mainstream media with the artistic and technical skills to construct alternative counter-hegemonic media becomes a natural process. In the Computer-Active and Digital Arts-Active programs, students learn video production, animation, digital arts, web site creation and maintenance, as well as the skills necessary to produce an annual teen magazine called REACH for Me. These technical skills incorporate their poetry, artwork, and short stories in public service campaigns for the larger goal of affecting change in their communities. Consistent with critical pedagogy, the students move from being objects of other people’s research and media representations to becoming subjects empowered to tell their own stories and collectively challenge dominant oppressive myths. Goodman insists that: These possibilities can only be fully realized if the programs’ guiding principles are based on a youth empowerment model; that is, teaching kids critical literacy requires that programs value and engage them as active participants in community problem-solving and as full partners in their own learning and growth. (2003, p. 103) REACH LA follows a Freirean problem-posing philosophy by helping students focus on problematic issues for them such as HIV/AIDS, homophobia, and racism. EVC has a different focus yet a similar approach as Goodman explains: in addition to the myriad individual “life skills” that are typically offered to at-risk kids, they need to be engaged in the study of the systemic roadblocks in their way—such as police brutality, unequal educational resources, substandard housing, and so on—and what sort of collective action they might take to move those roadblocks aside. (p. 3) It is these types of real-world connections that Dewey wrote about almost a century ago. This is the way to make education meaningful to students and empower them to become active participants necessary for radical democracy.
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Page 292 Conclusion Literacy instruction needs to change and media education must come from both the top down and the bottom up. Literacy must be reframed to expand the definition of a text to include new modes of communication and popular culture to enhance our critical analytical processes to explore audience reception, learn to critically read and create media texts, and aim at social justice, as well as grasping the political, economic, historical, and social contexts within which all messages are written and read. Cultural studies and critical pedagogy offer the theoretical background to inform practice that can transform education and society. To move forward with media education based on critical media literacy we need to lobby for better funding for education, especially where it is needed most in the inner cities. We need to challenge the false wisdom of high-stakes testing and deficit thinking, as well as to train teachers in critical pedagogy and empower them to use their creativity more than the scripted curricula. In addition, we need conferences, teacher education, and continuing professional development that teach cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and practical applications for how to engage students in the classroom with critical media literacy concepts. We recommend that media education programs be instituted from preschool to university and that linking media literacy with production become a regular practice. Standards for media literacy programs should include criticizing the ways that media reproduce racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices and encouraging students to find their own voices in critiquing media culture and producing alternative representations. Media education should be connected with education for democracy where students are encouraged to become informed and media-literate participants in their societies. Further, media literacy should be linked with information literacy, technological literacy, the arts, and the social sciences. Critical media literacy should be a common thread that runs through all curricular areas since it deals with communication and society. Currently, media literacy policy in the United States is in its formative years and has advanced little during the Bush–Cheney era. Policy challenges include overcoming the conservative and neoliberal hegemony and coming up with democratic and progressive alternatives. Federal and state grants for experimental projects in media literacy can be extremely beneficial and should be pursued by educators.11 National and state conferences that specifically address the teaching of critical media literacy can provide excellent places for progressive educators and policy-makers to unite and work together, sharing and building a movement. Parent groups should provide their members with resources and discussions to address the concerns they have about media and how they can teach critical media literacy in the home. Parent organizations should also use their collective power to influence school curriculum and lobby congress in support of progressive education. The task for educators and researchers is to engage in a new type of literacy education, from preschool to higher education that incorporates new ICTs, media, and popular culture with critical pedagogy. This work must challenge dominant ideologies and empower youth to unveil the myths through creating their own alternative representations that empower their own voices and struggles for social justice. The goal of this project is to help students transform themselves into socially active citizens and, at the same time, transform society into a less oppressive and more egalitarian democracy. Notes 1 While all people born in this millennium have been alive since the invention of the Internet, cellular phones and television, this does not mean that everyone can access this technology. Since approximately
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Page 293 one-third (about two billion) of the world’s population still live without electricity, it is important to remember that billions of people are being left behind the so-called technological revolution. 2 The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 98.2% of all U.S. households had at least one television set in 2001. Statistics available online: http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/07statab/infocomm.pdf 3 These data are based on random telephone interviews in 2003 with 1,065 parents of children between six months and six years of age. “Screen media” refers to watching TV, watching videos/DVDs, using a computer and playing video games. This research was reported in the Kaiser Family Foundation Zero to Six study. 4 The number of hours spent with media is based on questionnaires from a 2004 national sample of 2,032 students between eight and 18 years of age, as well as 694 media-use diaries, as reported in the Kaiser Family Foundation Generation M study. The figure of 6½ hours per day, includes ¼ of that time spent multitasking with several different media at the same time, thereby increasing media exposure to an estimated 8½ hours per day. 5 Canada’s Ontario Ministry of Education’s Eight Key Concepts, British Film Institute’s Signpost Questions, The Center for Media Literacy Five Core Concepts, Masterman (2001), etc. 6 The quote was found on the official UNESCO web site. Retrieved October 23, 2006, from http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=8270&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html 7 See Kellner & Share, 2005. 8 The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) formerly the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA) posts this definition of media literacy on their web site. Retrieved August 17, 2008 from http://www.amlainfo.org/media-literacy/definitions 9 Hammer’s course web site can be viewed at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/05F/womencm178-1/ 10 Sprinkled across the United States is a relatively small number of educators in schools and outside, teaching critical media literacy to fortunate students from preschool to university. These educators often struggle against many obstacles, have to create their own materials, and work in relative isolation. While support for media education is growing from the two national media literacy organizations (The Alliance for a Media Literate America and The Action Coalition for Media Education) and other teacher associations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Council for the Social Studies, media literacy is still on the fringe with little recognition and even less financial support. For a rich dossier of texts on media education and resources for teaching it, see Stack and Boler 2007, pp. 6– 16. 11 See the doctoral dissertation by Jeff Share (2006). References Ang, I. (2002). On the politics of empirical audience research. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies key works (pp. 177–197). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bagdikian, B. H. (1997). The media monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Buckingham, D. (1994). Children talking television. London: Falmer Press. Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Carrington, V. (2005). New textual landscapes, information and early literacy. In J. Marsh (Ed.), Popular culture, new media and digital literacy in early childhood (pp. 13–17). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Castells, M. (2004). The power of identity: Vol. 2. The information age (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Collins, P. H. (2004). Learning from the outsider within. In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminist standpoint theory reader (pp. 103–126). New York: Routledge. Considine, D. (2003). Weapons of mass destruction? In B. Duncan & K. Tyner, Visions/revisions (pp. 24– 45). Madison, WI: National Telemedia Council. Dewey, J. (1916/1997). Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press. Ferguson, R. (1998). Representing “race.” New York: Oxford University Press.
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Page 294 Ferguson, R. (2001). Media education and the development of critical solidarity. Media Education Journal , 30 , 37–43. Ferguson, R. (2004). The media in question. London: Arnold. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Seabury Press. Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Gee, J. P. (2000). New people in new worlds. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies (pp. 43– 68). Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan. Giroux, H. (1997). Pedagogy of the politics of hope. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giroux, H. (2001). Theory and resistance in education . Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media. New York: Teachers College Press. Gutiérrez Martín, A. (2003). Multimedia authoring as a fundamental principle of literacy and teacher training in the information age. In B. Duncan & K. Tyner (Eds.), Visions/revisions (pp. 12–22). Madison, WI: National Telemedia Council. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson. Hammer, R. (2006). Teaching critical media literacies. InterActions , 2(1). Retrieved February 17, 2006 from, http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol2/iss1/art7 Harding, S. (2004). Rethinking standpoint epistemology. In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminist standpoint theory reader (pp. 127–140). New York: Routledge. Hartsock, N. (1997). The feminist standpoint. In S. Kemp & J. Squires (Eds.), Feminisms (pp. 152–160). New York: Oxford University Press. Hobbs, R. (1998). The seven great debates in the media literacy movement. Journal of Communication , 48 (1), 16–32. Houston, B. (1984). Viewing television. Quarterly Review of Film Studies , 9(3), 183–195. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture. New York University Press. Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. J. (2007). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture. Retrieved December 1, 2007, from http://www.projectnml.org/files/ working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture . London and New York: Routledge. Kellner, D. (1998). Multiple literacies and critical pedagogy in a multicultural society, Educational Theory , 48 (1), 103–122. Kellner, D. (2003). Media spectacle. London and New York: Routledge. Kellner, D. (2004). Technological transformation, multiple literacies, and the re-visioning of education. ELearning, 1(1), 9–37 . Kellner, D. (2007). Guys and guns amok . Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2005). Toward critical media literacy. Discourse, 26 (3), 369–386. The University of Queensland, Australia: Routledge. Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television, and video games . Berkeley: University of California Press. Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine . New York: Metropolitan Books. Lo Bianco, J. (2000). Multiliteracies and multilingualism. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies (pp. 92–105). Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the four resources model. Reading Online. Retrieved February 12, 2006, from http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefreebody.html Luke, C. (1997). Media literacy and cultural studies. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies (pp. 19–49). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. Luke, C. (2006). As seen on TV or was that my phone? Unpublished manuscript. University of Queensland: Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media. New York: Monthly Review Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Masterman, L. (1994). A rationale for media education (1st Part). In L. Masterman & F. Mariet, Media Education in 1990s’ Europe (pp. 5–87). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Masterman, L. (2001). Teaching the media. New York: Routledge. Modleski, T. (1982). Loving with a vengeance. New York: Routledge.
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Page 295 Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death. New York: Penguin Books. Rideout, V., Roberts, D. F., & Foehr, U. G. (2005). Generation M. Washington, DC: Kaiser Family Foundation. Retrieved May 14, 2005, from http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm Rideout, V. J., Vandewater, E. A., & Wartella, E. A. (2003). Zero to six. Washington, DC: Kaiser Family Foundation. Seiter, E. (2002). Television and new media audiences . New York: Oxford University Press. Share, J. (2006). Critical media literacy is elementary. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Stack, M., & Boler, M. (2007). Media and policy in education. Policy Futures in Education , 5(1), 6–16. Valencia, R., & Solorzano, D. (2004). Today’s deficit thinking about the education of minority students. In O. Santa Ana (Ed.), Tongue tied. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Page 296 22 Educating Teachers for Critical Education Ken Zeichner & Ryan Flessner In this chapter, we discuss the goals and practices that have been commonly associated with preservice teacher education programs that emphasize the preparation of teachers who will work in and outside their classrooms for greater educational, economic, and social justice. Following this discussion, we illustrate the ways in which social justice-oriented pre-service teacher education programs have been implemented by presenting brief descriptions of the goals and practices in three teacher education programs in Canada, the United States, and Brazil. Finally, we examine several aspects of current practice that we think need more attention by teacher educators who identify with a social justice agenda. Since the early part of the twentieth century, there have been a number of efforts by teacher educators in a number of countries to prepare teachers as agents of social change who will work with their colleagues and local communities to ameliorate problems of inequity and injustice in schooling and in the broader society.1 Liston & Zeichner (1991) describe a number of examples of these “social reconstructionist” teacher education initiatives in the United States including New College, an experimental teacher education program at Teachers College Columbia University from 1932 to 1939 (Limbert, 1934), the introduction of an integrated social foundations component into the teacher education curriculum in the 1930s (Rugg, 1952), and the National Teacher Corps program (Rogers, 2002). Rodgers (2006) describes a similar attempt to link teacher preparation with broader movements for social justice at the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, Ladson-Billings (1995b) and Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries (2003) analyze specific elements of the multicultural education movement in teacher education in the United States that focus on preparing teachers to work for greater equity and justice in schooling and society.2 Today, the term “social justice teacher education” (SJTE) has come to be used to describe these social reconstructionist-oriented teacher preparation programs. SJTE, like “reflection” in the 1980s and 1990s, has become a new slogan in teacher education among those teacher educators who identify themselves with a progressive agenda. It has come to the point where it is very difficult to find a teacher education program anywhere that does not claim that it has a social justice agenda and that it prepares teachers to work against inequities in schooling and society. One danger of the sloganizing that has emerged around the concept of social justice in teacher education is that the term will lose any specific meaning and will come to justify and frame teacher education efforts that represent a variety of ideological and political commitments, not all of them critical of the current social order or representing a change from the status quo. This
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Page 297 has been the fate of other slogans in teacher education such as reflection and professional development schools (e.g., Zeichner, 2007; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). One example of the proliferation of rhetoric about social justice in current discourse is the explosion of books that have flooded the market in recent years such as Walking the Road: Race Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education (Cochran-Smith, 2004), Learning to Teach for Social Justice (DarlingHammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002), Parallel Practices: Social Justice-Focused Teacher Education and the Elementary Classroom (Regenspan, 2002), Urban Teacher Education and Teaching: Innovative Practices for Diversity and Social Justice (Solomon & Sekayi, 2007), and Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice (Michelli & Keiser, 2005). Despite the frequency with which “teacher education for social justice” has come to be used by teacher educators, most of the scholars who have produced this literature have not articulated or elaborated specific conceptions of social justice toward which teacher preparation is directed in particular programs (see McDonald & Zeichner, in press).3 There are very different notions about the concept of social justice that exist in the philosophical and social science literature (e.g., see Gewirtz, 1998; North, 2006; Sturman, 1997) as well as a number of other theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory and critical multiculturalism (Wiedman, 2002) that have been used as conceptual anchors for social justice work in teacher education. These various conceptions of justice and oppression have different implications for how one would organize a teacher education program and what one would expect teachers to be able to know and learn how to do. For example, a commitment to a distributive conception of social justice (Rawls, 1999) would be mainly concerned with the equitable allocation of material goods and educational resources (e.g., the teacher’s time and attention, the quality of questions asked) among students as individuals, and would not necessarily be as concerned as other conceptions of justice (e.g., Fraser, 1997; Young, 1990) with combating forms of oppression experienced by individuals as members of various ethnic/racial, language, social class, and other groups that are rooted in particular institutional and societal structures (McDonald & Zeichner, in press). The Focus of Social Justice Teacher Education Despite the vagueness in the literature about what is meant by working for social justice, it is possible to identify a set of goals and practices that repeatedly appear in the literature about teacher preparation programs where teacher educators explicitly affiliate with the general goal of preparing teachers to work for social justice. First, with regard to the issue of goals, teacher educators who claim to prepare teachers to work for social justice usually express some vision of the kind of teaching that they hope to promote among their graduates. These conceptions of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that teachers need to enact are usually expressed in terms of some version of culturally responsive teaching and provide a focus for a teacher preparation program (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 1999; Gay, 2000; Irvine, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995a; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). One example of a vision of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that teachers need to teach in culturally responsive ways in order to teach for social justice is the one proposed by Villegas & Lucas (2002) of Montclair State University in New Jersey. They argue that one element of preparing teachers to work for social justice is the development of teachers who embody the following ideals. They should: • be socioculturally conscious—recognize that there are multiple ways of perceiving reality that are influenced by one’s location in the social order; • have an affirming view of students from diverse backgrounds, seeing resources for learning in all students rather than viewing differences as problems to overcome;
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Page 298 • see themselves as both responsible for and capable of bringing about educational change that will make schools responsive to all students; • understand how learners construct knowledge and be capable of promoting learners’ knowledge construction; • know about the lives of their students including the funds of knowledge in their communities; • use their knowledge about the lives of their students to design instruction that builds on what they already know while stretching them beyond the familiar. These visions of the culturally responsive teacher go beyond a celebration of diversity. In their elaborated forms, they explicitly address issues of oppression and injustice that are linked to social class, race, gender, and other markers of difference that are embedded in the institutions and structures in a society as well as in the minds of individuals. They also include an activist component that encourages teachers as agents of change to act within and outside of schooling to combat these injustices. Finally, teaching for social justice goes beyond a rhetorical commitment to social justice and must also include strong preparation in academic content knowledge and the instructional, assessment, and relational and management skills needed to translate that knowledge to students in a way that promotes understanding (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Practices in Social Justice-Oriented Teacher Education Programs Two types of strategies have been reported in the literature on teacher education programs that claim to be driven by social justice goals. First, are the efforts by teacher educators to recruit more students and faculty of color. The other strategies have been concerned with the social relations, instructional strategies, and curriculum within teacher education programs. Recruiting Faculty and Students of Color The goal of recruiting more faculty and students of color into teacher education programs has been defended on several grounds, including: that a more diverse teaching force is needed to provide all students within an increasingly diverse public school population with a high-quality education (Villegas & Davis, 2008), and that diverse cohorts of teacher education students and diverse faculty are needed to create the learning conditions needed to educate teachers to be successful in today’s public schools (Sleeter, 2007). Three general approaches have been used to attempt to recruit more students of color into teacher education programs. One strategy has been to change admissions requirements for college and university-sponsored pre-service programs away from a system that relies exclusively on academic criteria such as grade point averages and test scores to one that maintains high academic standards but that is also more holistic, taking into account a variety of personal factors and life experiences. A second strategy has been to create various types of “alternative” teacher education programs that would be attractive to prospective teachers of color that focus on teaching in high-needs urban and rural schools where it has been hard to attract qualified teachers (e.g., Clewell & Villegas, 2001). A third strategy for recruiting more students of color into teacher education programs is to establish articulation agreements with two-year community and technical colleges which traditionally have enrolled more than one half of all racial/ethnic minority students who are in higher education (Villegas & Lucas, 2004). These agreements have been designed to ease the transition of students from the two-year colleges into teacher education in colleges and universities. Despite these efforts, the teaching force in the United States remains predominately White, and monolingual English speaking (Zumwalt & Craig, 2005).
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Page 299 In addition to recruiting more students of color into teacher education programs, more needs to be done than is the case currently to ensure that these students are supported and complete their programs successfully. The track record of predominately White colleges and universities in retaining students of color is very poor (Villegas & Davis, 2008). Also, there is much evidence that the focus on diversity in teacher education programs in predominately White institutions has been on preparing White students to teach students of color (Sleeter, 2001) and that there has been a neglect of the needs of candidates of color to learn how to teach in culturally responsive ways (e.g., Montecinos, 2004). Finally, many institutions across the United States have instituted policies that attempt to support the recruitment and retention of more faculty of color to college and university faculties. Education schools have utilized these policies to attempt to bring more faculty of color into their teacher education programs. These faculty recruitment efforts have been complemented on many campuses by efforts to improve the institutional climate and structures with regard to issues of equity and diversity (Melnick & Zeichner, 1997). It has been argued that the success of social justice teacher education requires an institutional context that is supportive of this work and that teacher education programs alone, without this larger contextual support, will not have much of an impact on prospective teachers (Zeichner et al., 1998). Curriculum and Instruction Strategies within Programs In addition to recruitment and admissions strategies that are designed to create more ethnically/ racially diverse learning communities of faculty and students in colleges and universities, within which to carry out the work of social justice teacher education and to build a more positive institutional climate for dealing with issues such as racism within teacher education institutions, there are a number of common strategies that have been used within programs to support social justice goals. These include the requirement of courses or parts of courses in programs to go beyond a celebration of diversity and focus explicitly on social justice issues and on the development of teaching practices that promote equitable educational outcomes.4 There is some evidence that the study of multicultural and social justice-oriented concepts and practices is more effective when it is integrated throughout a coherent teacher education program than when it is restricted to specific courses or seen as the responsibility of only some faculty (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2006; Moule, 2005). There is also evidence that pre-service teachers learn more from the study of these issues when their teacher educators exemplify and model the concepts and practices that they advocate to prospective teachers (Sleeter, 2008). Within this coursework, various instructional strategies, case studies, and action research are used to develop the intercultural competence and teaching abilities of prospective teachers with regard to social justice ends.5 It is important to note that these instructional practices can be used to support the development of a variety of visions of teaching and learning and that they are not, in and of themselves, evidence that a program is seeking to prepare teachers to work for social justice. Another important part of preparing teachers for social justice are the field experiences that are required for prospective teachers in schools and communities. There is substantial empirical evidence that traditional models of field-based teacher education that are disconnected from course-based content and pedagogy preparation are ineffective in supporting the enactment of teaching strategies advocated by teacher educators (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Feiman-Nemser, 2001). There is also evidence that merely placing teaching candidates in “high-need” urban or rural schools may support or obstruct teacher educators’ efforts to prepare interculturally competent teachers who can successfully engage in equity pedagogy depending upon the specific nature of these experiences and the quality of support provided to candidates (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). In fact, in some cases it has been shown that field experiences that
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Page 300 were designed to develop intercultural sensitivity and competence actually strengthen and reinforce candidates’ negative stereotypes (Haberman & Post, 2008). In addition to providing prospective teachers with school placements where they can gain experience in teaching pupils from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, in observing and using culturally responsive teaching strategies, and with curriculum and assessment practices that build in positive ways on the cultural resources that exist in students’ families and communities (Banks et al., 2005), it has become increasingly common for teacher educators oriented toward social justice to extend field experiences for prospective teachers into communities. Although some of this work has focused on community field experiences as service learning (Boyle-Baise, 2002) as a way to develop the cultural teaching competence of prospective teachers, many recent examples of community-based learning in teacher education have positioned prospective teachers as learners, and have focused on helping prospective teachers learn about the funds of knowledge and social networks in students’ families and communities and then in learning to utilize that knowledge in their teaching (e.g., Boyle-Baise & McIntyre, 2008; Buck & Sylvester, 2005; Sleeter, 2008). In some cases, teacher education programs have employed people from local communities to teach prospective teachers about their communities (Zeichner & Melnick, 1996). Finally, another way that programs have sought to enact social justice practices in the current climate of accountability and the close surveillance of college and university-based teacher education programs is by sharpening the often very general standards that are used to assess teacher candidates to better reflect social justice goals. Most states mandate that teacher education programs use some version of the INTASC standards6 which, as Peterman (2008) points out, are very general and can be interpreted in many different ways. Some teacher education programs that have articulated a social justice mission have developed standards or assessment rubrics for general standards (like the ones proposed by INTASC) that explicitly focus on social justice goals. Vavrus (2002) and his colleagues at Evergreen State University have developed a set of assessment rubrics that clearly reflect their program’s social justice mission. The explicit incorporation of social justice elements into the assessments that are used in the Evergreen program reinforces the message that these are areas of importance for prospective teachers. Programs that Exemplify Social Justice Teacher Education Because the term “social justice” means many things to many people, it is important that we identify programs that genuinely address issues of equality, difference, and social action in the preparation of teachers for classroom practice. The following sections introduce three teacher education programs that exemplify the type of teacher education highlighted in this chapter. The programs that we highlight are the Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative at York University in Canada, the Center X Teacher Education Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States, and the Landless Workers’ Movement’s Pedagogia da Terra in Brazil. Each of these examples provides an overview of the ways in which social justice teacher education has been actualized in practice and illustrates aspects of social justice teacher education that we think are particularly important but that are often neglected in programs that are described as oriented toward social justice. York University’s Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative (Canada) In 1994, the Ontario Ministry of Education issued a challenge to its teacher education programs. Noting an increasingly diverse population, the ministry charged teacher preparation programs to become more “relevant and responsive to the province’s growing racial and ethnocultural
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Page 301 diversity” (Solomon, 2007, p. 2). In answering this call, York University—located in the Toronto metropolitan area—developed its Urban Diversity (UD) Teacher Education Initiative which attempts to incorporate teaching and learning opportunities that address issues of equity, diversity, and social justice across the program. Rather than designing a program that addressed the ministry’s concerns in name only, the York faculty set for themselves an ambitious agenda that attends to the inequities in schooling and society. For example, as a requirement of the UD Initiative, at least half of the students admitted into each cohort are from culturally or racially diverse backgrounds. These students include “namely, People of Colour, Aboriginal/First Nations Peoples, people of refugee and immigrant backgrounds, and persons with disabilities” (Solomon, 2007, p. 2). This attention to the inclusion of marginalized populations that have typically been excluded from teacher education programs highlights the education faculty’s acknowledgment of its role in instigating change. Similarly, the design of the program shows a dedication to a socially just orientation to teacher education. Components of the UD Teacher Education Initiative include an inclusive curriculum and pedagogy, inter-group dyad partnerships, community development (service learning), ethnoracial identity development and teaching, and creating a community of learners (Solomon, 2007). Each of these components will be discussed in the following sections. Inclusive Curriculum and Pedagogy In preparing educators to enter classrooms ready to teach all students, the faculty supports teachers-tobe in examining the ideological and political influences that shape schooling practices. The program asks students to examine how those ideas have played a role in the construction of curricular materials and schooling practices. Opportunities to engage in this type of reflection take many forms: written and oral assignments, individual and group activities, in-class discussions, online conferencing, and seminar presentations. Future teachers are expected to examine formal and informal curricula in an attempt to uncover hidden messages that may be reinforced through the implementation of such materials. From the program’s perspective, the objective in presenting future teachers with the opportunity to reflect, to share ideas, and to engage in a dialogue of important social issues is to share practical information, resources, and guidance while bringing marginalized knowledge and resources into the “mainstream” curriculum (Solomon, 2007). Inter-group Dyad Partnerships For all practical and community projects, teacher candidates are placed in “cross-race/cultural dyads.” The purpose of the dyad partnership is to promote the development of professional, collaborative, and interdependent relationships through the sharing of experiences, perspectives, and ideas. It is hoped that such experiences will create spaces in which future teachers can engage in a dialogue that examines their roles as educators in a diverse society. Solomon (2007) states: This provision is a response to the need to break down racial/ethnic barriers, own-group cleavages, and create instead a space for teachers of different backgrounds to engage collegially in long-lasting, prejudice-free appreciation for each other’s perspectives, norms, values and traditions. (p. 4) Community Development (Service Learning) Each student that enrolls in the UD Teacher Education Initiative is required to engage in a communitybased service learning project. A minimum of six hours of service per month is
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Page 302 required of each teacher candidate. The purpose of the service learning project is to connect education and schooling with civic responsibility and social action; moving from altruism to social reconstruction in communities. In addition, the education faculty believes that such experiences will lead to teachers’ use of culturally relevant pedagogies and to a further examination of one’s beliefs, perspectives, and assumptions about others. Service learning projects have included a range of academic, health and safety, sociocultural, recreational, and political activities such as collaborating in nutritional breakfast/snack programs, acting as support staff in English as a Second Language initiatives, providing academic programs at women’s shelters and drop-in centers for youth “at risk,” and empowering parents by actively recruiting underrepresented parents for school councils. Ethno-racial Identity Development and Teaching Students in the program are also asked to reflect on their own identities and how their experiences, beliefs, and worldviews shape them as individuals. Furthermore, the future teachers enrolled in the program are asked to examine the ways in which one’s personal and professional identities intertwine and influence one another. Several protocols are employed in assisting students in identifying teacher candidates’ “initial identity status” (Solomon, 2007, p. 4). These protocols include the Racial and Ethnic Identity Development Model developed by Helms (1995), Carlson Learning Company’s (1996) Discovering Diversity Profile , and the Multicultural & Antiracism Education Survey (Solomon, 1994). These tools provide the teachers-to-be with information necessary to create and implement “growth plans” that will assist them in working effectively within diverse schools and communities (Solomon, 2007). Community of Learners In an effort to promote an environment of reciprocity and collegiality, the UD Teacher Education Initiative creates a community of learners involving teacher candidates, veteran practitioners, and teacher educators. All of the participants are positioned as valuable contributors of information, knowledge, and resources. For example, action research projects conducted by future teachers in their classrooms and the surrounding communities showcase the knowledge of these teacher candidates and are supported by the mentor teachers and the university faculty. In sum, the UD Teacher Education Initiative at York University seeks to model the type of community involvement and partnership it hopes its graduates will develop and sustain as educational professionals. Center X at the University of California, Los Angeles (United States) Following the uprising that resulted from the 1992 Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles, the education faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles took the initiative to create an urban teacher education program within the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. In order to “highlight experimentation and the intersection of theory and practice” (Olsen et al., 2005, p. 34), the program was named Center X and enrolled its first cohort during the 1994–1995 academic year. With an explicit commitment to social justice, Center X aims to examine social inequality and the results these injustices inflict upon public schools. The Teacher Education Program Because of a teacher shortage typical of most urban centers, Center X offers a two-year program that leads to state certification as well as a master’s degree for its graduates. During the first year, those enrolled complete coursework and a student teaching placement. In their second year,
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Page 303 participants are placed in full-time teaching roles in a high-poverty urban partner school. This format builds on the former program’s one-year M.Ed. program in order to provide a scaffolded “resident year” of teaching with continued support from the program (Center X Community of Educators, 2008; Olsen, et al., 2005). The structure of the program focuses explicitly on the tenets of social justice teacher education. Reading lists for courses include topics ranging from critical pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching to community organizing and second language acquisition. To build on this informational base, a “community project” asks those enrolled in the teacher education program to examine the resources, history, demographics, and community assets that surround the schools in which they are placed. These projects and the resulting portfolios created by teacher candidates are shared publicly with the program and with the community. To build on these practical experiences, faculty members engage students in conversations about complex issues such as oppression and privilege, the inequitable distribution of resources, and institutional structures that inhibit teaching and learning within schools today. Yet, these are not simply philosophical exchanges. The tying of theory to practice frames the discourse of the program and culminates in a master’s inquiry project required of each graduate. The evaluation of teacher candidates mirrors the type of assessment the program would like to see in the classrooms of its graduates. In-class tasks and discussions, the completion of inquiry-based projects throughout their coursework, a professional portfolio, and observations of classroom practice by university supervisors are just a few of the evaluative measures used in the program. Tied to these assessments, constant critique, feedback, and support from faculty members and peers provide rich opportunities for teacher candidates to deliberately reflect on their understandings of teaching, learning, and learners. In addition to fostering an environment that utilizes authentic forms of assessment to foster teachers’ continued development, Center X places a high priority on supporting educators in their teaching practice. This support is typified by the requirement that teacher candidates accept positions in pairs as they enter urban schools. This built-in support mechanism fosters collegial relationships between members of the program while addressing the need for new teachers to have colleagues who can understand and appreciate the complex task of beginning to teach. Yet, the support does not cease upon graduation. In the following section, support networks put into place for graduates of the Center X Teacher Education Program are detailed. Supporting Graduates of the Program The faculty of Center X have put into place ways in which graduates of the program can continue to receive professional development and support. The Urban Educator Network was created as a way to continue the work of the teacher education program once teacher candidates graduate and enter the field as licensed professionals. Offerings of the network include inquiry groups, seminars, and opportunities to write and exchange ideas through an online journal, Teaching to Change LA (Center X Community of Educators, 2008). The purpose of the Urban Educator Network is to “establish additional sites of collaborative practice for teachers within the school-university partnerships” (Olsen et al., 2005, p. 45). UCLA inquiry groups are one example of such work. Graduates of the Center X program are invited to engage in inquiry-based discussion groups in order to examine issues surrounding educating for social justice. These groups are then used to build graduates’ capacities to lead school-based inquiry groups in order to effect change within their school sites. This continued effort to remain active in the professional lives of its graduates makes Center X a good illustration of social justice teacher education. This commitment exemplifies the type of work necessary to increase the possibilities that the capabilities developed during pre-service training are enacted once candidates complete their program.
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Page 304 Pedagogia da Terra (Brazil) The Landless Workers’ Movement ( Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST) in Brazil has a strong history of grassroots activism. Originally, the movement’s focus was to pressure the Brazilian government to adhere to constitutional regulations dealing with the distribution of idle farmland. This pressure was (and still is) realized through land occupations, street marches, hunger strikes, and other non-violent forms of protest (McCowan, 2003). In the 1980s, the MST began to attend to the preparation of teachers.7 Because the struggle for land and economic justice is closely tied to education (McDonald & Zeichner, in press), the movement saw great potential in playing an active role in the educational arena. Through conversations with communities of landless families, education became a major part of their movement to transform Brazilian society. Building on the ideals of democratic participation, the MST has created two different teacher preparation programs. Completed at the high school level, the Magistério is one pathway to teacher certification. In addition, Pedagogia da Terra is a pre-service teacher education program at the college level. The Pedagogia da Terra program is the focus of this vignette because of its positioning within a higher education setting.8 The program consists of two major strands: Tempo Escola (School Time) and Tempo Comunidade (Community Time). During Tempo Escola , pre-service teachers take courses, enter into political dialogues, and familiarize themselves with curricular materials designed by the MST. Common features of Tempo Comunidade include practical experiences in schools, reflective reading and writing assignments, and an action research project (Diniz-Pereira, 2005). Three main principles guide the education of pre-service teachers within the Pedagogia da Terra: technical and professional preparation, political preparation, and cultural preparation (Diniz-Pereira, 2005). The technical and professional preparation of teachers entails the mastery of knowledge sets, behaviors, and ethics surrounding education. A heightened awareness of agrarian reform and social justice are stressed within this principle. In preparing teachers politically, instructors within the program stress a historical as well as class consciousness. This awareness assists future teachers in linking their professional purposes to those of the broader political and social movements of the MST. Finally, cultural preparation stresses the ideals of cooperation and solidarity within the Landless Workers’ Movement. Acceptance into the program is based on more than traditional criteria. In addition to academic criteria, the MST program looks for candidates with diverse life experiences and a willingness to examine how those experiences have shaped them as individuals and educators. The program is designed to validate candidates from disenfranchised backgrounds because it is assumed that these candidates tend to readily identify injustices within society (Diniz-Pereira, 2005). While students from more privileged backgrounds are accepted into the program, intense self-examination is expected. Regardless of a student’s background, the teacher education program, above all, stresses the importance of an attitude towards social transformation. Selected for their commitment to political action, the participants in the Pedagogia da Terra program are expected to become community activists in addition to their roles as teachers. This work outside of formal schooling is considered essential to the success of the movement. The notion of political involvement fosters in teachers a sense of belonging to a larger movement—a movement toward social change. Centralization of power is seen as counter-productive. By participating in local, state, and national politics, teachers model the participatory nature of representational democracy (McCowan, 2003). In fact, Diniz-Pereira (2005) contends that teacher education programs must encourage their teacher candidates to involve themselves with political movements in order to effect change within schools and within the broader local, national, and global societies. In this way, “the movement creates the schools in its image, but the schools in turn create the movement of the future” (McCowan, 2003, p. 11).
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Page 305 Each of the programs described above has begun the difficult task of rethinking the role that social justice teacher education plays in the preparation of classroom practitioners. While the descriptions of each of the programs are based on the self-reports of faculty members from the various institutions, all of the programs have gained international attention for the work that they have begun and the role that this work has played in contributing to the larger dialogue surrounding social justice teacher education. We are aware that there is often a gap between the ways in which teacher educators describe their programs and what is discovered to be happening by researchers from outside the programs.9 Systematic studies by those outside of the programs are needed to more fully illuminate the complex realities of these and other similar programs. As a group, these three programs illustrate a number of things that are often missing from pre-service programs that espouse a social justice mission, such as close links with schools and communities and connections to broader movements for social change. We will now examine some of the characteristics of current efforts at social justice teacher education, as reported in the literature and based on our own observations, that we think need to be addressed if social justice teacher education is to realize its potential. Strengthening the Impact of Social Justice Teacher Education There are several issues that we think need to be addressed by teacher educators who claim to be working for social justice if this work is to make a significant contribution to the realization of greater social justice within and beyond schooling. These include: (a) taking teacher education and the preparation, induction, and continuing professional development of teacher educators more seriously in the research universities that prepare college and university teacher educators; (b) creating a teacher educator community that includes college and university faculty and staff, K-12 teachers and administrators, and people from local communities as full partners in the education of teachers; (c) focusing pre-service teacher education on issues of practice in schools in addition to the conceptual focus on social justice that has been present to date; and (d) modeling the sorts of social justiceoriented practices in the preparation of teachers that are advocated for teacher candidates to use in schools. First, in U.S. research universities that prepare most college and university teacher educators during their doctoral education, the low status of teacher education and the lack of engagement of many fulltime tenure-line faculty in the work of teacher preparation in an intensive and sustained way, have undermined the quality of both the preparation of teachers in these institutions (e.g., helping to make programs more fragmented) and the preparation of the next generation of teacher educators (Labaree, 2008; Zeichner, 2006).10 Although there are some cases where tenure-line faculty in research universities have devoted much energy into creating innovative programs and have applied their scholarly habits and skills to the renewal of their teacher education programs, and have carefully mentored new teacher educators (e.g., Carroll et al., 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2006),11 for the most part, creating the best possible programs of teacher education and preparing new teacher educators to engage in cutting edge practice and research on teacher education have not been priorities in education schools in research universities. Instead, teacher education programs have often been underfunded, marginalized, and colonized on many of these campuses, sometimes serving as nothing more than financial aid for the doctoral students who staff them and as “cash cows” to support other more highly rewarded types of activities and programs (Liston, 1995; Tom, 1997; Zeichner, 2006). There is also some evidence of a two-tiered system among faculty in these education schools where those faculty who engage in the work of teacher education have lower status, and receive less pay and fewer other benefits than those who limit their activities to those that are more highly valued within academe (Schneider, 1987).
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Page 306 The involvement of doctoral students in teaching and supervising in an institution’s teacher education programs is a necessary and important part of the preparation of new teacher educators and brings many talented educators with recent classroom experience in contact with prospective teachers. However, in our experience, the mentoring, support, and knowledge of the literature in teacher education of these novice teacher educators vary considerably, leading in some cases to graduate students being sent out on their own with little support, to work with prospective teachers. A second problem in teacher education that is conducted in these universities is the frequent disconnect between campus-based instruction and the complexities of the schools in which candidates teach and the failure to include K-12 staff and community representatives as full and equal partners in the teacher education team. For example, in her study of two social justice-focused pre-service programs in California, McDonald (2005) concluded that there was a focus on conceptual tools related to social justice and multiculturalism and a lack of attention to practical tools and strategies needed to enact equity pedagogy. In our experience and in our reading of the literature, this finding represents a very common situation in teacher education programs in research universities. Also, despite the existence of school (and sometimes school and community) advisory committees in many teacher education institutions and the often token involvement of K-12 teachers in decisions about teacher education programs, it is less common to see K-12 staff and community representatives participating as full and equal partners in all aspects of program planning and renewal. This maintenance of a hierarchical relationship with those outside of the academy, and ceding to university academics the preferential right of interpretation about program planning and renewal, is especially troublesome when university teacher educators are claiming to offer social justice-oriented programs. While it is not necessarily the case that socially just decisions will result from more inclusive and democratic social relations in teacher education programs (e.g., Zeichner, 1991), we believe that it is not possible to have a genuine social justice-oriented program without such relationships. One hopeful sign that can be observed in some education schools are the efforts of teacher educators to better connect their campus-based instruction to specific and often the most challenging school contexts by moving part or all of the instruction into the schools and working alongside K-12 teachers in educating pupils and new teachers. One of us in his role as an external evaluator of the Teachers for a New Era project at the University of Washington has observed the benefits to pupils in “high-needs” urban schools, and to prospective teachers, of this kind of situated instruction of novice teachers (Campbell, 2008). Lampert & Ball (1998) have been doing this kind of work for many years and it is now becoming more common for teacher educators to break out of the traditional model of distanced methods instruction that is not situated in relation to any specific school contexts. Some of this work, including at our own university, is taking place within the context of some type of professional development school partnership. Moving a university course to a school or having a professional development school type partnership, however, is no guarantee, in and of itself, that things will be any different from traditional and ineffective models of practice. The important element in these efforts to address a longstanding problem in teacher education is the careful mediation of the campus-based teaching in relation to the complexities of schools. This mediation can also be achieved through the strategic documentation of practice using videotaped teaching and various artifacts of practice such as teachers’ plans, student work, teachers’ research studies, and curriculum materials (Ball & Cohen, 1999). A related development in some programs has been the integration of experienced K-12 teachers into campus-based instruction (e.g., Benyon, Grout, & Wideen, 2004; Post, Pugach, Harris, &
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Page 307 Hedges, 2006) where the K-12 teachers often work alongside university faculty, staff, and graduate12 students in new “boundary-spanning” roles, providing instruction and clinical supervision and enacting ongoing program renewal as part of an inclusive teacher education community. Additionally, one of the most important ways to strengthen the impact of social justice teacher education is for teacher educators to exemplify and model the dispositions and practices that they hope their students will take up during their education for teaching. For example, prospective teachers need to work with politically committed college and university teacher educators who are willing to engage in respectful ways and on an ongoing basis with teachers and administrators working in K-12 schools for social justice. In addition, contact with people in communities working to address the vast array of injustices that now exist beyond schooling related to access to housing, food, safety, healthcare, and so on is essential to the education of teachers. This would join teacher education for social justice in colleges and universities with education for social justice in K-12 schools and movements for social justice in the broader society. This kind of alliance would ideally benefit the struggles in all three spheres, including efforts to stop the longstanding decline in state support for public higher education that has also had a negative effect on teacher education (Lyall & Sell, 2006). While reading and discussing ideas on a university campus are an important part of teacher education for social justice, this work cannot be limited to such discussions. Teacher education for social justice must be situated more than is currently the case within schools and communities, and college and university faculty who say that they are committed to working for social justice must learn how to put aside the individualistic and entrepreneurial aspects of their work culture to be able to build the kind of genuinely collaborative relationships that are consistent with the ideals expressed by social justice educators. All of this work needs to take place within schools, colleges, and departments of education that place teacher education as a central part of their missions (Ball, 2007). Good teacher education, including good social justice teacher education, requires this kind of faculty and institutional commitment. Finally, probably the most important thing that can be done to strengthen the work of social justice teacher education is for teacher educators to adopt the same self-critical inquiry stance about their work in teacher education that they expect their students to take on in elementary and secondary schools. Although there are many fine examples in the literature of social justice-oriented teacher educators who critically analyze their own individual teaching in light of social justice goals (e.g., Schulte, 2004), there also needs to be more efforts by communities of teacher educators to critically analyze and renew their teacher education programs on an ongoing basis. This requires the creation of structures and a culture within teacher education programs that support the ongoing learning of all who work with prospective teachers. This critical stance to ongoing and collaborative inquiry and a serious commitment to offer exemplary teacher education programs are fundamental to the success of all kinds of teacher education programs including those which purport to work for social justice. Notes 1 An expressed commitment to social justice does not necessarily mean that other goals of teacher education such as subject matter preparation and teaching teachers to plan, assess, and adapt instruction to the varied needs of learners are ignored (Hansen, 2008). 2 Some elements in the multicultural education literature focus on a celebration of diversity without a commitment to dealing with individual, social, institutional, and societal forces of oppression that undermine access to social and economic justice for large numbers of people in most societies (Kailin, 2002).
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Page 308 3 This conclusion is based on an analysis of published work on social justice teacher education and on an analysis of a sample of conceptual frameworks that were submitted to NCATE as part of their accreditation process. McDonald & Zeichner (2008) were given access to these conceptual frameworks by NCATE. 4 Banks et al. (2005) refer to these practices as “equity pedagogy” and elaborate on them. 5 For a discussion of these practices see Ladson-Billings, 1999; McDonald & Zeichner, 2008; Zeichner, 1996. 6 INTASC stands for Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium which was a consortium formed in the early 1990s by the Council of Chief State School Officers. 7 During its existence, this project has included programs that focus on the preparation of high school teachers and the preparation of college teachers. 8 Another example of linking teacher education to a broader social movement for social justice is located in Brazil where several universities involve their student teachers in working in the popular education movement as part of their teacher education program. This involves student teachers teaching adults elementary and secondary school subjects, usually during the evenings, and seminars in which the adults, teacher educators, and teacher education students analyze and critique this practice. 9 See Zeichner & Conklin (2008) for a discussion of this issue. 10 Our analysis here focuses on teacher education in research universities. There are similar problems for teacher education in liberal arts colleges and regional universities, but the situation there requires a separate analysis that is beyond the scope of this chapter. There is also a different set of issues to be discussed for social justice teacher education in early entry alternative certification programs where candidates complete their pre-service education while serving as teachers of record. 11 The application of scholarly habits and skills to teacher education program renewal would include such things as carefully examining the literature to see what can be learned from other institutions, and conducting research on one’s programs and using the data as input for program renewal. 12 Another weakness in current efforts to prepare teachers for social justice is the lack of attention to issues of language diversity (Lucas & Grinberg, 2008). References Ball, D. (2007, April). The case for ed schools and the challenge. Dewitt Wallace Readers’ Digest distinguished lecture presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Ball, D., & Cohen, D. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as a learning profession (pp. 3–32). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Banks, J., Cochran-Smith, M., Moll, L., Richert, A., Zeichner, K., Darling-Hammond, L., & Duffy, H. (2005). Teaching diverse learners. In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world (pp. 232–274). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Benyon, J., Grout, J., & Wideen, M. (2004). From teacher educator to teacher. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press. Boyle-Baise, L. (2002). Multicultural service learning. New York: Teachers College Press. Boyle-Baise, L., & McIntyre, D. J. (2008). What kind of experience? In M. Cochran-Smith, S. FeimanNemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 307–330). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Buck, P., & Sylvester, P. (2005). Pre-service teachers enter urban communities. In N. Gonzalez, L. Moll, & C. Amanti (Eds.), Funds of knowledge (pp. 213–232). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Campbell, S. S. (2008, March). Mediated field experiences in learning progressive teaching. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York. Carlson Learning Company. (1996). Discovering diversity profile. Mount Prospect, IL: Author. Carroll, D., Featherstone, H., Featherstone, J., Feiman-Nemser, S., & Roosevelt, D. (Eds.). (2007). Transforming teacher education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Center X Community of Educators. (2008). Supporting urban educators: Lessons from Center X’s first decade . Center X: Where Research and Practice Intersect for Urban School Professionals, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
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Page 309 Clewell, B., & Villegas, A. M. (2001). Ahead of the class. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Cochran-Smith, M. (1999). Learning to teach for social justice. In G. Griffin (Ed.), The education of teachers (pp. 114–144). University of Chicago Press. Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Walking the road. New York: Teachers College Press. Cochran-Smith, M., Davis, D., & Fries, M. K. (2003). Multicultural teacher education. In J. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 931–975). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Powerful teacher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Darling-Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Darling-Hammond, L., French, J., & Garcia-Lopez, S. P. (Eds.). (2002). Learning to teach for social justice . New York: Teachers College Press. Diniz-Pereira, J. E. (2005, October). Teacher education for social transformation and its links to progressive social movements. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 3(2). Retrieved June 8, 2007, from http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=51 Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). From preparation to practice. Teachers College Record , 103 (6), 1013–1055. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus. New York: Routledge. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Gewirtz, S. (1998). Conceptualizing social justice in education. Journal of Education Policy , 13 (4), 469– 484. Haberman, M., & Post, L. (2008). Teachers for multicultural schools. Reprinted in M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 360– 370). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Hansen, D. T. (2008). Values and purpose in teacher education. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. F. Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 10–26). New York: Routledge. Helms, J. E. (1995). An update of Helms’ white and people of color racial identity models. In J. G. Ponterotto, J. M. Casas, L. A. Suzuki, & C. M. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of Multicultural Counseling (pp. 181–198). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hollins, E., & Guzman, M. T. (2005). Research on preparing teachers for diverse populations. In M. Cochran-Smith & K. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education (pp. 477–548). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Irvine, J. J. (2003). Educating teachers for diversity. New York: Teachers College Press. Kailin, J. (2002). Anti-racist education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Labaree, D. (2008). An uneasy relationship. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 290–306). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995a). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal , 32 (3), 465–491. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). Multicultural teacher education. In J. Banks & C. A. M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 747–761). New York: Macmillan. Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Preparing teachers for diversity. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.). Teaching as the learning profession (pp. 86–124). New York: John Wiley. Lampert, M., & Ball, D. L. (1998). Teaching, multimedia and mathematics. New York: Teachers College Press. Limbert, P. (1934). Political education at New College. Progressive Education , 11 (2), 118–124. Liston, D. (1995). Work in teacher education. In N. Shimahara & I. Holowinsky (Eds.), Teacher education in industrialized nations (pp. 87–124). New York: Garland. Liston, D., & Zeichner, K. (1991). Teacher education and the social conditions of schooling. New York: Routledge. Lucas, T., & Grinberg, J. (2008). Responding to the linguistic reality of mainstream classrooms. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 606–636). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Lyall, K., & Sell, K. (2006). The true genius of America at risk. Westport, CT: Praeger. McCowan, T. (2003, March). Participation and education in the Landless People’s Movement of Brazil. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 1(1). Retrieved July 3, 2007, from http://www.jceps.com/ print.php?articleID=6
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Page 310 McDonald, M. (2005). The integration of social justice in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education , 56 (5), 418–435. McDonald, M., & Zeichner, K. (2008). Social justice teacher education. In T. Quinn, W. C. Ayers, & D. O. Stovall (Eds.), Handbook on social justice in education . Oxford, UK: Taylor & Francis. Melnick, S., & Zeichner, K. (1997). Teacher education for cultural diversity. In J. King, E. Hollins, & W. Hayman (Eds.), Meeting the challenge of diversity in teacher preparation (pp. 23–39). New York: Teachers College Press. Michelli, N., & Keiser, D. (2005). Teacher education for democracy and social justice. New York: Routledge. Montecinos, C. (2004). Paradoxes in multicultural teacher education research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education , 17 (2), 167–181. Moule, J. (2005). Implementing a social justice perspective. Teacher Education Quarterly , 32 (4), 23–42. North, C. (2006). More than words? Review of Educational Research , 76 (4), 507–535. Olsen, B., Lane, S., Metcalfe, E. L., Priselac, J., Suzuki, G., & Williams, R. J. (2005). Center X: Where research and practice intersect for urban school professionals. In P. M. Jenlink & K. E. Jenlink (Eds.), Portraits of teacher preparation (pp. 33–51). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Peterman, F. (2008). Defining standards that respond to the urban context. In F. Peterman (Ed.), Partnering to prepare urban teachers (pp. 21–40). New York: Peter Lang. Post, L., Pugach, M., Harris, S., & Hedges, M. (2006). The teachers-in-residence program. In K. Howey & N. Zimpher (Eds.), Boundary spanners. Washington, DC: American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Regenspan, B. (2002). Parallel practices. New York: Peter Lang. Rodgers, C. (2006). Turning of one’s soul. Teachers College Record , 108 (7), 1266–1295. Rogers, B. L. (2002). Social policy, teaching and youth activism in the 1960s. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, The Steinhardt School of Education. Rugg, H. (1952). The teacher of teachers. New York: Harper & Brothers. Schneider, B. (1987). Tracing the provenance of teacher education. In T. Popkewitz (Ed.), Critical studies in teacher education (pp. 211–241). London: Falmer Press. Schulte, A. (2004). Examples of practice. In J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 709–742). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Sleeter, C. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools. Journal of Teacher Education , 52 (2), 94–107. Sleeter, C. (2007, April). Equity, democracy and neo-liberal assaults on teacher education. Vicepresidential address presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Sleeter, C. (2008). Preparing White teachers for diverse students. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. FeimanNemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 559–582). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Solomon, R. P. (1994). Multicultural & antiracism education survey . Toronto: York University. Solomon, R. P. (2007). Over a decade of progressive urban teacher education . Unpublished manuscript, Toronto: York University. Solomon, R. P., & Sekayi, D. N. R. (2007) (Eds.). Urban teacher education and teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum/Routledge. Sturman, A. (1997). Social justice in education. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research. Tom, A. (1997). Redesigning teacher education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Vavrus, M. (2002). Transforming the multicultural education of teachers. New York: Teachers College Press. Villegas, A. M., & Davis, D. E. (2008). Preparing teachers of color to confront racial/ethnic disparities in educational outcomes. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education, (3rd ed., pp. 583–605). New York: Routledge. Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing culturally responsive teachers. Journal of Teacher Education , 53 (1), 20–32. Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2004). Diversifying the teacher workforce. In M. Smylie & D. Miretzky (Eds.), Developing the teacher workforce (pp. 70–104). University of Chicago Press. Wiedman, C. R. (2002). Teacher preparation, social justice, equity. Equity and Excellence in Education ,
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Page 311 Young, I. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zeichner, K. (1991). Contradictions and tensions in the professionalization of teaching and the democratization of schools. Teachers College Record , 92 (3), 363–379. Zeichner, K. (1996). Educating teachers for cultural diversity. In K. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. L. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in pre-service teacher education (pp. 133–175). New York: Teachers College Press. Zeichner, K. (2006). Reflections of a university-based teacher educator on the future of college and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education , 57 (3), 326–340. Zeichner, K. (2007). Professional development schools in a culture of evidence and accountability. School-University Partnerships , 1(1), 9–17. Zeichner, K., & Conklin, H. (2008). Teacher education programs as sites for teacher preparation. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, & D. J. McIntyre (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 269–289). New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Zeichner, K., Grant, C., Gay, G., Gillette, M., Valli, L., & Villegas, A. M. (1998). A research informed vision of good practice in multicultural teacher education. Theory into Practice , 37 (2), 163–171. Zeichner, K., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching. New York: Erlbaum/Routledge. Zeichner, K., & Melnick, S. (1996). Community field experiences and teacher preparation for diversity. In K. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. L. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in pre-service teacher education (pp. 176–198). New York: Teachers College Press. Zumwalt, K., & Craig, E. (2005). Teachers’ characteristics. In M. Cochran-Smith & K. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education (pp. 111–156). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum/Routledge.
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Page 312 23 Restoring Collective Memory The Pasts of Critical Education Kenneth Teitelbaum The Past is Present The term “critical education” is relatively new, emanating largely from the recent scholarship of Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, bell hooks, Joe Kincheloe, and others. Put briefly, it focuses primarily on helping students to “to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change” (Giroux, 2007, p. 1). It is a form of counter-socialization (Stanley, 2007) that seeks to make transparent the connections between educational and cultural practices and the struggle for social and economic justice, human rights, and democratic community, to enhance critical understandings and emancipatory practices for the purpose of progressive social and personal transformations. It is clear that this work of the last several decades has drawn significantly from the insights of earlier theorists who addressed interrelated issues of power, domination, oppression, justice, equality, culture, agency, identity, and knowledge, including Karl Marx, John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, Frankfurt School scholars such as Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, social reconstructionists such as George Counts, Harold Rugg, and Theodore Brameld, and more contemporary sociologists and cultural critics such as Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Basil Bernstein, and Pierre Bourdieu. Seemingly little-known by many current advocates of critical education are grassroots efforts of the past to develop critical educational practices for children and adults, most often outside mainstream educational institutions. From today’s perspective, the activities of these earlier critical educators might seem to have considerable conceptual weaknesses, related, for example, to a lack of attention to issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, etc., as well as to pedagogical issues of constructivism, critical inquiry, and dialogue and related concerns for self-expression, feeling, and imagination. But these historical forebears were similarly committed to grounding their work in a social and educational vision of justice and equality; demystifying the seemingly political neutrality of school life and culture in general; understanding “who benefits?” from the educational and cultural policies and practices that are prevalent; dedicating themselves to the alleviation of human suffering; and helping both teachers and students to develop a critical consciousness that contests the prevailing structures/conditions of domination and oppression and the ways in which they serve to privilege and disadvantage particular groups of individuals both in and out of the classroom (Kincheloe, 2008). Indeed, if the bottom line of critical education
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Page 313 is “being insubordinate” (Steinberg, 2007, p. ix), these historical forebears were certainly that. It is vital to recall their past efforts, perhaps to learn from them but also to keep such traditions alive. As one of the characters in the 1978 film Northern Lights observes, if these histories remain forgotten or become rewritten, we are left largely ignorant of our own “rebel roots.” Like current work on critical education, past efforts were quite varied, with competing ideas and strategies vying for consideration amid a paucity of resources. But whatever name they went by, and whatever specific approaches they took, the critical educators referred to in this chapter were all dedicated to the creation of a more egalitarian society, to fostering understandings and skills within educational and cultural settings that would, as George Counts (1932/1978) famously put it, help to create a new social order. Contesting Hegemony The work of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist political theorist and activist in Italy during the early twentieth century, is particularly relevant to consider here. Since many of his important writings were not published until after World War II (a decade after he died in prison), and were not translated into English until the late 1950s, he was not at all influential on the selected critical education activities discussed in this chapter. But it is perhaps illuminating to consider these past efforts in the light of Gramsci’s analysis of state power, culture, and education. In particular, Gramsci updated the concept of hegemony, in essence freeing Marxism from the orthodoxy of the base/superstructure metaphor that downplayed the role played by culture and education in structures of domination and social change. In so doing, he helped to explain why the presumed inevitable socialist revolution had not yet occurred. As Joseph Femia (1975, p. 31) explains, in Gramscian terms hegemony entailed “the predominance obtained by consent rather than force of one class or group over other classes.” It is attained “through the myriad ways in which the institutions of civil society operate to shape, directly or indirectly, the cognitive and affective structures whereby men [ sic ] perceive and evaluate social reality.” In advanced capitalist nations, dominant groups have been able to maintain effective control not only of material conditions but also, significantly, of the production, distribution, and legitimation processes of the cultural and ideological relations of society. Such control enhances the ability of dominant interests to essentially reproduce the social inequalities of class, gender, and race, saturating our everyday lives with reciprocally confirming ideas and conditions in which, for example, domination-subordination appears to many as the “natural” or “normal” way of life, the commonsense social reality. Hegemony thus involves ostensible control not only of political and economic conditions and practices but social activities and everyday lived identities and relationships in general. Mainstream intellectuals, social-psychological helpers, the mass media, the arts, schooling, and so forth play a role in partially reproducing dominant practices, visions, categories, and hierarchical forms, in the process fortifying inequalities of material conditions. Schools can be viewed as playing an active role in this process by adopting a selective tradition of knowledge and ways of knowing that legitimate the understandings, skills, and values of dominant ideologies and cultures. As such, they strengthen the perception that what is chosen is the natural commonsense order of things rather than the result of deliberate and purposeful choices with farreaching consequences for social and cultural definition and identification. This selective tradition appears to many as a diffuse and widely accepted sense of culture and history. Generally speaking, the material interests and ideological perspectives of White, Anglo-Saxon, middle- and upper-class males are privileged and the histories, interests, conditions, etc. of other groups, as well as alternative (nonpositivist) approaches to inquiry and knowledge, are either downplayed or ignored altogether. What exists in general is a “selective transmission of class [and race, gender, etc.] culture as common culture” that, at least partially, “silences the cultures of
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Page 314 the oppressed, and legitimates the present social order as natural and eternal” (Wexler, 1982, p. 279; Williams, 1961). Similarly, as Kohl (1995) has pointed out with regard to the laudatory actions of Rosa Parks and the larger Civil Rights Movement, the distribution of power and the possibilities for social change are viewed within an ethic of individualism, with the historical role of organized, collective action for change largely minimized. Likewise, the important role of conflict and disagreement in the advance of the social and physical sciences is supplanted by an overly consensual view of the nature of academic knowledge. It is still the case in many educational circles that to question or contest this selective tradition appears to be “impractical” in one’s concerns, or to be “introducing politics” into schooling debates. However, we must be careful not to overstate these points. The maintenance of hegemonic meanings, practices, and conditions, including the selective tradition, is not a simple or straightforward process, nor is it always successful, as the existence of critical education efforts past and present in both mainstream and alternative institutions attests. Lived culture is relatively autonomous, in part, because the social and psychological nature of human existence is too complex and cannot be totally enveloped within dominant social forms. Subjects interpret culture in multiple ways and hegemonic meanings are regularly contested. Moreover, contradictions in the logic of advanced capital (such as social production and individual appropriation, and state intrusion into personal concerns and emphasis on privatization) are played out in virtually every aspect of social life. The tensions that result from these contradictory conditions provide the opportunities for the germination of concrete alternatives to emerge. That is, although their sources are sometimes difficult to specify, forms of resistance develop within and outside hegemonic processes. Whether of a residual or emergent nature, these alternatives can develop as a real, vital opposition—a counter-hegemony—to dominant forms. The potential (or threat) of contestation always exists and is always being realized in particular ways. Gramsci postulated radical (socialist) transformation as not so much an event or series of events but a process. A politicized educational praxis, rooted in everyday political struggle, was an essential component of this transformation. Distinct from the “war of movement” (the actual assault on state power), the “war of position” involved the building of new forms of state life that could organically transform social and authority relations. Such a war of position was to be based on the idea of “ surrounding the State apparatus with a counter-hegemony, a hegemony created by mass organization of the working class and, significantly, by developing working-class institutions and culture” (Carnoy, 1982, p. 89). For Gramsci, then, the norms and values of a new, proletarian society needed to be created before, not after, the wresting of political power, possibly in alliance with a variety of other forces in a kind of historic bloc. This bloc would confront the bourgeois hegemony in a war of position, in essence “of trenches moving back and forth in an ideological struggle over the consciousness of the working class” (Carnoy, 1982, p. 89). An active role in this struggle would need to be played by revolutionary intellectuals, whom Gramsci grouped into three categories: disaffected bourgeois professional intellectuals, professional intellectuals from the working class, and organic proletarian intellectuals. The last group was seen as the most crucial and to be developed outside of mainstream institutions. Thus, the counter-hegemonic movement itself would create its own organic intellectuals, in counter-institutions, who would in turn be active in “raising new questions and introducing new modes of thinking about reality, attacking the accepted wisdom of established intellectual authorities, and providing theoretical guidance to emerging mass struggles” (Boggs, 1976, p. 77). The efforts of the critical educators discussed in this chapter can be viewed in the light of Gramsci’s political insights. They represented a contribution to a war of position and to the need to develop organic and other sympathetic intellectuals who could help fellow workers in their resistance to dominant forms of exploitation and oppression. They sought to transmit new norms and values based on a still-emerging (if eventually largely vanquished) proletarian culture, that is, ways of thinking and doing that would play a role in supplanting capitalist social and economic
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Page 315 relations with more equitable and cooperative forms. Even if these counter-hegemonic efforts are incorporated into more mainstream forms or are simply defeated, they can have great consequence. Herbert Gutman (1976, p. 67) quotes fellow historian Fernand Braudel to remind us that “victorious events come about as a result of many possibilities” and that “for one possibility which actually is realized, innumerable others have drowned.” Usually these others leave “little trace for the historian,” and yet “it is necessary to give them their place because the losing movements are forces which have at every moment affected the final outcome.” We would do well to remember these many other possibilities that, if only for relatively brief moments, were realized and are a part of our collective tradition, our rebel roots, of critical education. Radical Education for Workers On the title page of their volume on Proletcult , Eden and Cedar Paul (1921) quote from Henri de Man (later a controversial figure but at the time a leading Belgian socialist theoretician): When labour strikes, it says to its master: I shall no longer work at your command. When it votes for a party of its own, it says: I shall no longer vote at your command. When it creates its own classes and colleges, it says: I shall no longer think at your command. Labour’s challenge to education is the most fundamental of the three. There is, in fact, a long history in the United States, Great Britain, and many other countries, of formal and informal educational activities for workers that would help them to “no longer think at your command.” Grassroots activists involved in such work generally viewed this process of educating about and for radical social change as the province of the working class itself, or of those who strongly identified themselves with working-class interests, i.e., the organic intellectuals, disaffected bourgeois professional intellectuals, and professional intellectuals from the working class about which Gramsci wrote. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, for example, German and other ethnic radical groups provided networks of debating clubs, small libraries, singing societies, theater groups, newspapers, festivals, dance bands, street corner speeches, rallies, and the like for recruitment and socialization purposes but also to help educate workers, especially those who were immigrants, about the harmful effects of capitalist economic and cultural relations and the promise of the socialist alternative (e.g., Reese, 2002; Teitelbaum, 1993). Even items such as “socialist playing cards” were available, reworking traditional images in an attempt to encourage a more critical understanding of current conditions. Advertised in the December 1908 issue of International Socialist Review , the cards included Kings that were the Trusts, Queens the Capitalist Virtues, and Jacks the Guardians of Society. Each card had a verse, as in the case of the King of Spades: “OIL KING: I love to oil the college wheels, / And grease the pulpit stairs, / Where workmen learn to scorn the strike / And trust to Heaven and prayers.” More formal educational activities took a variety of forms, with many initiatives being sponsored by local political party organizations. Indeed, as Socialist Party activist Algernon Lee stated, “Every branch [of the Party] was a little school of Social Science, much more than it was a political club” (Cornell, 1976, p. 8). Lecture series were common, as were literary societies, study clubs, and correspondence courses, often organized by women because the educational sphere was deemed particularly “appropriate” for radical women activists. In addition, workers’ schools and labor colleges were organized during the first half of the twentieth century, although
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Page 316 many lasted for a relatively brief period of time. Ruskin College, for example, was established in Oxford, England in 1899 for the specific purpose of educating workers “for effective service in the British labor movement” (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 24). A similar, more short-lived Ruskin College was initiated in Florida, incorporated as a residential colony and adopting a socialist-oriented curriculum (Cornell, 1976, p. 9). The Finnish Working People’s College of Smithville, Minnesota was organized by local radical labor activists in 1907 specifically to prepare editors, teachers, and agitators “in preparation for the advent of the socialist commonwealth.” Those involved believed that the public schools were fostering an allegiance to bourgeois hegemony; in contrast they sought “to preserve Finnish culture, promote literacy, and instill socialist ideals” (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 65). By the early 1920s the school had become more aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World and more overt in highlighting the class struggle. The intention of the school was “to create ‘a revolutionary working class’ in order to generate radical social change and … to prepare workers to govern the new social order” (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 69). Another radical workers’ school was the People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas, which remained as a correspondence school during its relatively short lifespan. Its basic approach was summed up in the July 1914 issue of the Appeal to Reason newspaper: We are trying, as hard as possible, to blot out the ever present thought in the mind of man “What is there for me?” and to substitute therefor [ sic ] “What can I do to make this a better world to live in and to help my fellowmen on the road to happiness and contentment?” Basic skills in such subjects as public speaking, short story writing, Spanish, salesmanship, advanced English, etc. were taught, in part, for the roles they could play in fostering the coming socialist revolution. The Rand School of Social Science in New York City was probably the most successful adult school established by American socialists. Closely allied with the Party but not actually a part of the Party organization, it was founded in 1906 and closed in 1956, long after its close affiliation with the Party had ended. During the height of its popularity in the second decade of the century, several thousand students were enrolled each year. The school was especially attractive to immigrant workers who could take basic courses and those more directly linked to the radical cause and, because of the school’s international human brotherhood character, not be looked down upon as might happen elsewhere (Cornell, 1976). The Rand School served as a prototype for smaller, less successful efforts in communities throughout the United States, e.g., in Newark, Boston, Philadelphia, Wausau, San Francisco, and Seattle. In addition, radical trade unions established their own labor colleges, the most well known being Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York (founded in 1921) and Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas (1923). These schools were founded on the premise that workers’ education could play a significant role in promoting both critical understandings and a radical reorganization of society. Those involved viewed public schools as decidedly anti-labor and fostering “passive acceptance and conformity to a bourgeois value system” (Altenbaugh, 1990, p. 77). As labor leader James H. Maurer put it: Our children are being trained like dogs and ponies, not developed as individuals. Such methods, together with the vicious propaganda on social and economic questions to which children are subjected, produce just the results that the conservative and reactionary elements of the country want, namely, uniformity of thought and conduct, no originality or self-reliance except for money-making schemes, a worshipful attitude toward those who have wealth and power, intolerance for anything that the business element condemns, and ignorance of the great social and economic forces that are shaping the destinies of all of us.
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Page 317 He went on to assert that at Brookwood: No dogma, whether originating among the employing class or in some labor or radical group, must be held sacred. Instead we must seek light and understanding everywhere in order that the individual may determine for himself or herself proper guidance and the ways of truth. (Altenbaugh, 1990, pp. 77–78) Still, despite Maurer’s last statement, it was clear that a primary goal of Brookwood was to serve the interests of the labor movement and, by doing so, help to usher in a new, more equitable social order. Similarly, Commonwealth College was created to educate workers to be more knowledgeable about and motivated in agitating for radical social change. While the school described itself as experimental, autonomous, and non-dogmatic, one of the college’s basic premises, according to two former students and later teachers there, was that “the entire structure of society would have to be reformed and transformed to eliminate the disorders of an unplanned, competitive society.” Moreover, while an education at Commonwealth might turn out individuals with differing views regarding the exact nature of the cooperative commonwealth and the means of social change, “it will turn out no strikebreakers” (Koch & Koch, 1972, pp. 9–10, 65). Like most of the other labor colleges, its curriculum was a mix of basic courses that would be of immediate benefit to workers and those courses that sought to arouse social consciousness, promote international worker solidarity, and enlist the aid of worker-students in the struggle for systematic and comprehensive social change. Highlander Folk School (later the Highlander Research and Education Center), organized in 1932 near Monteagle, Tennessee and open until 1961, was another example of critical adult education for workers. While less overtly ideological than most of the other examples in this chapter, the school was noteworthy for its dedication to enabling local participants to help themselves, which included basing much of its educational program on the personal knowledge of the problems and experiences of the people involved. At the same time, the school was also clearly committed to the role that education could play in fostering fundamental economic and social change for a more equitable and humane society, and, to that end, it offered courses in labor history, union problems, parliamentary law, public speaking, etc. (Glen, 1988). Its cofounder and long-time director, Myles Horton, later participated in a “spoken book” with Paulo Freire (Horton & Freire, 1990), in which he shared the intense passion for selfemancipation, radical social criticism, and transformative democratic change that inspired his work at Highlander. In its 30-year history, in a wide variety of residence, extension, and community programs, the school trained scores of activists who worked in the labor and civil rights movements in Appalachia and beyond. A unique school in terms of its student population, the Summer School for Women Workers was established in 1921 at Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia by the National Women’s Trade Union League. For the next 17 years, until it was forced to close in 1938, about 1,700 blue-collar students received an education that mixed the liberal arts with practical subjects, addressing both the “bread” and “roses” of students’ desires. While the school started with a liberal humanist slant, it quickly became more explicitly leftist and feminist in its politics, progressive in its educational approach (in the Deweyan and reconstructionist senses), affiliated with the burgeoning labor movement, and racially integrationist in its selection of students. Its curriculum increasingly took as its starting point that women’s work and home experiences broached problems of industrial capitalism, and that there was a vital need for individuals to play an active role on behalf of the labor movement and radical social change in order to transform their own oppressive work environments. In other words, like the other examples cited in this
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Page 318 section, this was an education intended to encourage working women to become not middle-class college students but, rather, labor organizers, educators, and impassioned activists for other socialjustice movements. Karyn Hollis (2004, p. 5) describes the “materialist pedagogy” that was adopted at the Bryn Mawr summer school, one that provided a generally silenced population the opportunity to study, speak, and write publicly about their own experiences; in essence a chance to create their own discourse that was not “disembodied or dematerialized.” Topics for essays, speeches, and plays included unemployment, housing problems, time work and piece work, government ownership of industries, and married women in industry, not as an attempt to prescribe solutions but to provide starting points for the study and public expression of what the students experienced under industrial capitalism. In this school, perhaps unusually so among these workers’ schools (and no doubt influenced by gendered considerations), there was as much emphasis on personal development as social change. Still, the bottom line was the creation of a more just and egalitarian society. As one student at the time wrote: Here in Bryn Mawr we have found a voice with which to relate our individual experiences and we have found a wide common interest in the desire to bring humanity to a better basis. … Social control and economic planning questions have not been confined to the classroom. Why are we so poor in a world of plenty? Why can’t we make the things that people want when the material is at hand? Why should the workers of one country destroy the workers of another, and why, having made the world safe for democracy, should it be so difficult for the oppressed to make their voices heard? (Hollis, 2004, p. 166) These are the kinds of questions that informed many critical educators during the first half of the twentieth century, ones that, perhaps as part of an expanded social perspective and pedagogical approach, might seem quite relevant today. Educating Children for “Good Rebellion” Providing educational and cultural experiences for youth was more contentious among radical activists, partly in terms of determining the best use of the movement’s time, energy, and scarce resources (e.g., as compared to electoral campaigns, union work, and publishing). Still, numerous grassroots activists of different radical stripes set out to provide experiences for children that would contest what were considered to be the pernicious influences of mainstream (capitalist) schooling and culture. As prominent youth activist Kendrick Shedd put it in 1910, the purpose of such work was “to inspire the young to be true, to be brave, in a word, to learn to be good Socialists.” More than three years later, his enthusiasm remained undiminished, and he wrote that “the kids are learning to be good rebels,” which would pay off in 15 years, “when the revolution shall have waxed very hot” (Teitelbaum, 1993, p. 11). Like the counter-institutions organized for adult workers, there is evidence of radical youth activities taking place in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries such as Canada, Hungary, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. They existed within the context of the broader efforts to establish a kind of “revolutionary culture” within the communities where workers and their families lived. Although perhaps difficult to envision now, in some places such a culture “flourished in the neighborhoods: in the streets, tenements, cafes, taverns, dance halls, theatres, barber shops, church basements, settlement houses and union halls” (Leinenweber, 1977, p. 153). Indeed, during the first decades of the twentieth century, in particular, the radical movement was strikingly buoyant in nature, with the coming socialist society viewed as inevitable.
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Page 319 Radical activists tended to be supportive of public schooling as partially a result of the struggles of the laboring class and, in effect, a splendid democratic achievement. However, by the early years of the twentieth century, influenced in part by critiques from progressive educators, May Wood Simons (1908, p. 7) and others began to denounce “the tendency among educators to make the interest of society identical with the interest of the property owning class.” In textbooks and school activities, the valuable contributions of organized labor were being ignored; in fact, schools seemed generally hostile to labor, often using it as a scapegoat for society’s problems. Terms such as free enterprise went unchallenged and unanalyzed despite the realities of corporate business practices. In the August 1917 issue of the socialist New York Call newspaper, one observer went so far as to argue that “the greatest foe to any real progress in the art of human living today is our empirical, tyrannical educational system” and then referred to the necessity and distinct possibility of “capturing the schools … so that we may be sure of introducing truth and fair-mindedness in the elementary grades in place of the false and distorted teaching that now goes on.” This meant agitating for better school conditions, running for school board positions, entering the teaching profession, and becoming active in teacher unions. In their concern for the next generation of workers, activists went beyond critiquing public schools and struggled to organize their own activities for the recreational, social, and educational benefit of workingclass youth. Capitalist influences were viewed as so predominant that even for children who grew up in radical working-class homes as “red diaper babies” (Kaplan & Shapiro, 1998), the subversive effects of public schools, mainstream media and entertainment, the Churches, etc. needed to be directly contested. It was clear as well that there was a real danger that emerging non-socialist youth organizations, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Boy Scouts, could attract workingclass youth and dilute support for the radical cause. One of the most prominent and long-lasting youth groups that they established was the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which began in 1907 in Chicago (and ostensibly continues in some form today). Many other similar youth groups were organized as well, such as Junior YPSL clubs, the Inter-High School Socialist League, Young Pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s, Red Falcons of the mid-1930s, and radical summer camps that started in the 1920s and 1930s, e.g., Camp Kinderland (which continues in operation, still emphasizing “the ideals of social justice and peace”), Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, and Camp Woodland (Levine & Gordon, 2002; Mishler, 1999; Teitelbaum, 1993). However, classes and schools perhaps provide the clearest example of the kind of formal critical education that was provided to youth from primarily working-class families. Experimental or progressive (child-centered) schools at the turn of the century influenced radical activists even though progressive educators differed in their attempts to appeal to children from nonworking class families and to replace public schools with private day schools. Although some of these schools, such as the Stony Ford School in Goshen, New York, identified themselves with socialism (Hutchinson & Hutchinson, 1917), most progressive schools, as George Counts (1932/1978) pointed out, were highly individualistic in orientation and lacked a commitment to a more collectivistic perspective. Still, progressive schools and the publications associated with their educational movement did provide an important forum for alternative theories and practices, with John Dewey’s work, among others, often cited by socialist educators when discussing pedagogical issues. More in keeping with critical education were the schools organized by those who identified themselves as anarchists. Like other radicals at the time, anarchists were a diverse group, and the differences between their beliefs and activities and those of socialists, syndicalists, and other radicals were not always clearly delineated. The most famous of the anarchist schools were those inspired by the ideas and practices of the Spanish educator, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Influenced by such diverse figures as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Peter Kropotkin, and Leo Tolstoy, Ferrer helped to establish the Escuela Moderna in 1901 in Barcelona, and other similar schools for children throughout Spain. These Moderns Schools of
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Page 320 Spain were intended to serve a dual purpose: as instruments of self-development and as levers for social transformation. They were expected to encourage self-expression, individual freedom, and practical knowledge at the same time that they fostered an allegiance to brotherhood, cooperative social relations, and sympathy for the downtrodden and oppressed, as well as antimilitarism, anticapitalism, and antistatism. By World War I, a network of Modern Schools was also established in the United States. Most were short-lived and, despite intentions to be converted into day schools, remained as Sunday schools. Counting day schools and Sunday schools together, the Francisco Ferrer Association and its successor, the Modern School Association of North America, included about 22 schools. The most wellknown school began in 1915 at an anarchist residential colony in Stelton, New Jersey and stayed open until 1953. Anarchist educators in the United States allied with socialists in their opposition to the capitalist organization of society and their commitment to social justice and equality; and they shared with progressives an emphasis on individualization, spontaneity, and self-realization. In practice, however, it was not always easy to decide when attention to social causes intruded upon (or should limit) creative self-expression. As time went on, and the socialist movement splintered and weakened, the anarchist school at Stelton tended to resolve this dilemma on the side of an extreme form of educational freedom, with a relative absence of external constraints on children as a guiding principle (Avrich, 1980). In fact, according to one historian, Elizabeth and Alexis Ferm, who headed the Stelton school for many years, were probably “most elated when they could report that a particular boy or girl, with no external prompting, had spent the day completely self-absorbed in a constant flow of purposeful activity—of what precise kind it did not really matter” (Veysey, 1973, p. 145). Between 1900 and 1940, especially during the first two decades of the century, grassroots Socialist Party activists organized English-speaking Socialist Sunday Schools to provide children from the working class with an alternative (counter-hegemonic) vision of politics and culture. More than 100 such schools were founded in the United States, in about 64 cities and towns in 20 states and the District of Columbia, with the most prominent ones located in New York City, Rochester (New York), and Milwaukee (Teitelbaum, 1993). These weekend schools were allied with, and gained inspiration from, similar schools that were organized in Great Britain and by radical ethnic groups in the United States. The British Socialist Sunday School (SSS) movement began in 1892 in the Battersea district of London and in 1896 in Glasgow, Scotland. By 1901 the movement had produced its own specialized journal, the monthly Young Socialist, and by 1907 dozens of schools had been established across Great Britain. In 1909, five Unions of Socialist Sunday Schools from Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Lancashire and Cheshire, and Yorkshire united to form the National Council of British Socialist Sunday Schools. Throughout the next decade, as industrial militancy in Britain intensified, the SSS movement witnessed further expansion, so that by 1921 there were 153 schools, with 96 officially affiliated with the National Council and over 5,000 children attending every week. Many of the schools seem to have been associated with the less orthodox, non-Marxist wing of the British socialist movement. Clearly anticapitalist in their political ideology, they tended to adopt the language of traditional Christian ethics and portrayed socialism as a kind of agnostic religion (Kean, 1990; Reid, 1966). In the United States, it was the late-nineteenth-century German socialist immigrants, who first introduced Marxian socialism to the United States in the 1850s, who pioneered efforts to educate workers’ children. Organized in such places as New York City, Paterson, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Milwaukee, German-language children’s schools were established “to provide free or cheap educational opportunities unavailable to workers elsewhere and to counteract the domination of the public school system by the ‘rich’ and the ‘clerics’,” whom German radicals accused of “systematically spreading ignorance among the people” (Buhle, 1981; Poore, 1978, pp. 6–7). Here, too, it was primarily women activists who took the initiative in establishing and staffing many of the schools. The radical Finnish community of Minnesota and
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Page 321 neighboring states was also particularly active in establishing children’s schools. Books published by the socialist press were used to help teach simplified Marxist theory in the form of essays, stories, poetry, and songs, and Finnish peasant heroes who led uprisings against rich landlords were often highlighted. Other radical ethnic schools included Ukrainian Workers Schools for Children in such places as Harlem, Cleveland, and Minneapolis; Hungarian children’s schools in New York City; and Lettish Socialist Sunday Schools in New York City and Minneapolis (Teitelbaum, 1993). In addition, the Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring), a fraternal order for Jewish workers founded in 1892, also organized schools for workers’ children. During their early years, unlike some of the other radical ethnic schools, these schools tended to downplay any strong Jewish identification. They were initiated not so much for reasons of Jewish nationalism or culture but because of radical political motives. Lessons were conducted in English, with an emphasis on socialist and workers’ themes. After several years, however, as younger workers who had encountered more fiercely the prejudices of American society began to join the Workmen’s Circle, a stronger affiliation with Jewish culture was established. The schools began to adopt Yiddish-language instruction, although they continued to maintain a strong commitment to radical tenets and the labor movement. In 1919, located in such places as New York City, Newark, Paterson, Rochester, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the Workmen’s Circle schools were often closely allied with local Socialist Sunday Schools, although they remained autonomous from the larger SSS movement, in large part because members of the fraternal order embraced various schools of radicalism and did not necessarily develop a close allegiance to the Party organization (Gurock, 1979; Hurwitz, 1936; Niger, 1940; Teitelbaum, 1993). The more than 100 English-speaking Socialist Sunday Schools that were established primarily by Party (often women) activists provide one of the most concrete examples of past efforts at critical education for youth. In their lectures, stories, recitations, discussions, games, festivals, songs, and plays, these schools sought to contest the capitalist messages of mainstream social institutions. They offered an alternative body of knowledge; one that presented a version of people, events, and ideas that challenged the dominant, selective tradition of ideological values, beliefs, and meanings being promoted in public schools. One can glean 13 themes from this curriculum overall, that is, not necessarily adopted in any one school but in the SSS movement as a whole (Teitelbaum, 1993). Only brief mention of each can be provided here. The first theme of the SSS curriculum involved the concept of the abstract individual, by which the life of the individual, as an economic and social being, is not situated within the structural relations that play an influential role in determining, for example, the level of comfort that one does or does not enjoy. The result is what Michael Apple (1979, p. 9) describes as a “sense of community [that] is withered at its roots.” In contrast, Socialist Sunday Schools emphasized the place of the individual in the social world and, in particular, the interdependence and indebtedness of the individual to countless others, especially workers. Party activist Oscar Ameringer (1940/1969, p. xi) succinctly and humorously summarized this alternative perspective when he commented: Except that I inherited certain characteristics from an unknown number of ancestors, was deeply influenced by persons most of whom were dead before I was born, and shaped by circumstances over which I had not control, I am a self-made man. Ameringer’s remarks are similar to the notion by Gramsci (1971, pp. 352–354) that individuality is “the hub” of an “ensemble” of social relations, past and present. A second curricular theme entailed an emphasis on being conscious and proud of belonging to the working-class community. The dignity of labor (if not all laborers) was stressed and virtually every social issue or problem was viewed primarily from its effect on workers.
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Page 322 A third theme involved advocating for economic and social relations that were cooperative and collectivist rather than intensely competitive and privatized. One set of lessons developed by Edith Breithut, who had been a public school teacher and taught a course on Pedagogy at the Rand School, focused on the nature and advantages of social ownership and management of industry at a time when public ownership of utilities was considered a radical demand. This sense of cooperation and collectivism was extended by SSS teachers to the social sphere in general, so that working together in a variety of ways was viewed as not only a key to working-class success in contesting the capitalist system but also to more equitable and congenial personal relationships. A fourth curriculum theme was internationalism, the sense of viewing oneself as inextricably linked to the interests of workers in other nations. Correspondence with schools and youth clubs in Canada, England, and Scotland was not only to gather information but also to encourage a connectedness with youth and radical political movements across national borders. A fifth, and related, theme was antimilitarism, especially during the middle years of the second decade when the European conflict started and the United States massed troops along the Mexican border. Pointing out the “wickedness and wastefulness” of war, as New York City teacher David Greenberg did in his Socialist Sunday School Curriculum , was associated with “anti-sham patriotism.” Military adventures were viewed as primarily hurting the lives of workers (who did the fighting in such endeavors) and benefiting private capitalist interests, eroding a sense of internationalism, and taking attention and funding away from pressing domestic needs. A sixth curricular theme can be explained as a revisionist interpretation of history and sociology. These radical schools taught lessons that transformed the typical public school teaching so that the laboring class was perceived as an instrument for social progress. Radical agitators were portrayed not as a lunatic fringe of bomb throwers but as important allies in the workers’ struggle to improve the conditions of their lives. Heroes and heroines whose birthdays were celebrated in the pages of the Young Socialists’ Magazine and during school sessions included William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, “Mother” Jones, Eugene Debs, William Morris, Karl Marx, and other national and international social critics and activists whose contributions typically were ignored, at best, in public schools. In addition, the plight of the poor was viewed not as the result of defective skills or character but as caused primarily by the exploitative nature of the capitalist organization of society. A seventh, and related, theme involved the study of anthropology and, in particular, the evolution of the human race, with an emphasis on the progress of people from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from feudalism to capitalism, with the logical next step in “the struggle for existence” (Mills, 1904) being socialism. It was an optimistic message, and one that embraced a liberal modernist notion of progress, but it subverted conventional teaching by assuming the necessity and inevitability of a next, socialistic stage of human civilization. Anthropological accounts were further guided not so much by a sense of how “primitive” early people were but by the presumably cooperative and collective spirit that had stood them well, a spirit that was portrayed as “natural” to humans but that had been distorted and suppressed by the dominant culture’s embrace of capitalist social relations. Moreover, these anthropological lessons emphasized the universal nature of change; that, in fact, the present is a social construction that is not eternal. Advocacy for social justice and equality was an eighth theme in the SSS curriculum, with the differences between the few “haves” (with great wealth) and the many “have nots” (with needless suffering) a consistent focus. Because radicals in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries at this time generally believed in the pre-eminence of class struggle, that is, that racial and gender inequities, for example, could not be fully addressed until the predominance of capitalist relations was eradicated, their conception of equality tended to concentrate primarily (one might say narrowly) on what was thought of at the time as a unitary working class. Economic
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Page 323 disparities were viewed as decisive throughout history and true equality of opportunity could only be attained when workers had the same advantages in life as managers and owners, in essence when wage slavery was eliminated. Adequate levels of food, clothing, and shelter were highlighted time and again as the most vital elements of human life, from the beginning of civilization to the present, with only a socialist society able to guarantee an adequate level of them to all individuals. (There were, however, SSS lesson outlines, stories, plays, and the like that did directly address race and ethnicity issues. And as one former student in Milwaukee remembers, “tolerance was strongly stressed” (Teitelbaum 1993, p. 190). A ninth theme revolved around an awareness of serious social problems and the need not just to study them but to agitate for their alleviation. Indeed, some of the curriculum materials, such as those authored by Rochester and Milwaukee youth activist Kendrick Shedd, represent a social-problems approach more than they do teaching about socialist principles or the labor movement. What differentiated the social-problems approach of these radical teachers was their consistent emphasis on poverty, unemployment, unhealthy and unsafe work conditions, child labor, alcoholism, poor housing and sanitary facilities, the destruction of nature, and disease as endemic to industrial capitalism. In other words, social ills (in one curriculum referred to as “Home Destroyers”) could not be fully comprehended or eliminated without taking into consideration the oppressive nature of capitalism. Social problems were viewed not as isolated phenomena that could be constructively addressed by wellmeaning reformers but, rather, as integral features of American (and British, etc.) society. On the other hand, structures of domination were presented as not so pervasive and powerful as to preclude individual initiatives on the part of radical activists. A tenth theme of the SSS curriculum focused attention on the everyday conditions of working-class life, beyond those that were directly economic in nature. Teachers sought to expand the children’s awareness of, and appreciation for, the need for good hygiene, healthy diets, proper exercise, safety, and nature outings. Significantly, these aspects of one’s lifestyle were presented as benefiting not only the individual but the community at large. After all, sickness can spread to others and nature can be enjoyed by all. It was the responsibility of everyone to learn to take care of these matters. Another theme involved the presentation of the Cooperative Commonwealth as embracing the ideal conditions of human life. A socialistic utopia, depicted in several of the readers that were used in the schools (such as John Spargo’s Socialist Readings for Children, 1909), was presented as a goal towards which all progressive people, including children, should and could strive to make a reality. It would be marked by public ownership and management of industry and social property, the end of wage slavery, and the elimination of the class structure. Education (and self-education) was a twelfth theme. Children needed to become better educated, not to rise out of the working class but to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of capitalist America and the coming socialist society. As important as such education was, however, it was not presented as the primary motor for significant social change. Political work outside the educational arena was also crucial for the realization of the new social order. And, finally, the SSS curriculum sought to instill a generally critical approach toward everyday social life, dominated as it was by capitalist influences. Thus, New York City SSS teacher Frances Gill stressed that the schools should develop “inquiry on the part of the child,” and Kendrick Shedd of Rochester and Milwaukee urged teachers to “get them [the children] to asking WHY?” (Teitelbaum, 1993, p. 192). Alternative notions of everyday concepts were considered, so that success and justice, for example, were viewed critically from a more socially informed perspective. For many (though clearly not all) radical educators, the goal was not for children to become mindless followers of socialist doctrine when they reached adulthood but, rather, for them to comprehend the need for, and seek to enlist in, the battle against exploitation and social inequality; in effect, that they would become “good rebels.”
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Page 324 Conclusion If one takes into account the full gamut of what might, today, be considered empowering pedagogy or critical teaching—e.g., it is participatory, affective, problem-posing, situated, multicultural, dialogic, desocializing, democratic, researching, interdisciplinary, and activist (Shor, 1992)—it is possible to see in the examples presented in this chapter a rather truncated and even distorted version of what would be meant by critical education. To be sure, the educational perspectives and lesson materials of these radical educators should not be adopted for a critical pedagogy today, as they occurred 75 or more years ago. It would be ridiculous to expect otherwise, as social conditions then were far different, the prospects of the socialist movement seemed much brighter, and progressive educational ideas were first being widely discussed. Indeed, the character of the SSS curriculum, for instance, seems deficient in several ways. Too many of the classroom activities represented the didactic “banking education” that has been critiqued by Freire (1970), hooks (1994), Giroux (2001), Apple and Beane (2007), and many others. Reconfiguring the traditional student/teacher relationship does not seem to have been a major concern. In addition, there seems to be a relative lack of a critical perspective toward their own ideas and practices; that is, alternative knowledge itself was often presented too authoritatively. Indeed, in the attempt to construct a pedagogy that balanced political radicalism with a vision of personal liberation, these past examples seem to have given insufficient attention to the latter. And, of course, their primary (in some cases sole) emphasis on class struggle resulted in what would be considered today a highly problematic devaluing of other, interrelated social categories such as race and gender. Still, there is perhaps much for critical educators today to consider here with regard to the substantive content that was presented to adults and children in these many different counterhegemonic practices. The knowledge that was considered to be of most worth in these past examples, offered as part of a war of position by the kind of organic intellectuals about which Gramsci wrote, might prove helpful for current critical educators to review, perhaps when considering a critical education of/with, for example, African Americans and newer Latino and Asian immigrants. In addition, it may be instructive to consider how the educational ideas and activities discussed in this chapter largely stand “outside” the selection tradition that has such a powerful impact on the way that we think about the present and past, as well as how we act. They are outside because current educators and others are hardly aware of their existence. Not only is awareness of our collective history at issue here but the very reasons, in the past and present, for adopting a radical approach to begin with are in danger of being eradicated. What was taught in these adult and children’s schools was a version of reality and a commitment to fostering social justice and equality that, despite the protestations of media pundits and conservative politicians, has largely been selected out of today’s K-16 classrooms. Indeed, the examples discussed in this chapter can, perhaps, help to underscore the political nature of schooling, reminding people then and now that the question in teaching is not whether to encourage a particular social and educational vision but what kind of vision it will be. When the traditions of our radical past are lost, we are in danger of not only losing the lessons they may have to teach us but also the inspiration this past can provide. An awareness of such efforts can help keep alive hope for the possibilities of social transformation and, perhaps more importantly, the possibilities within people. In an age wrought with pessimism and cynicism, there might, indeed, be a considerable contribution to be made. As historian E. P. Thompson (1981, pp. 407–408) put it: “The past is not just dead, inert, confining; it carries the signs and evidences also of creative resources which can sustain the present and prefigures possibility.” It might, in fact, be the case that some of the best sources of counter-hegemonic practice are
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Page 325 historical in nature, for example in “the recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations” (Williams, 1977, p. 116). References Altenbaugh, R. J. (1990). Education for struggle. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ameringer, O. (1969/1940). If you don’t weaken . New York: Greenwood. Apple, M. W. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (Ed.). (1982). Cultural and economic reproduction in education (pp. 275–303). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (2007). Democratic schools (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Avrich, P. (1980). The modern school movement. Princeton University Press. Boggs, C. (1976). Gramsci’s Marxism. London: Pluto. Buhle, M. J. (1981). Women and American socialism, 1870–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Carnoy, M. (1982). Education, economy and the state. In M. W. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education (pp. 79–126). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cornell, F. (1976). A history of the Rand School of Social Science—1906 to 1956 . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University. Counts, G. S. (1978/1932). Dare the school build a new social order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Femia, J. (1975). Hegemony and consciousness in the thought of Antonio Gramsci. Political Studies , 23 (1), 29–48. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Seabury. Giroux, H. A. (2001). Theory and resistance in education (Rev. ed.). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (2007). Democracy, education, and the politics of critical pedagogy. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy (pp. 1–5). New York: Peter Lang. Glen, J. M. (1988). Highlander, no ordinary school, 1932–1962. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Gurock, J. S. (1979). When Harlem was Jewish, 1870–1930. New York: Columbia University Press. Gutman, H. (1976). Work, culture, and society in industrializing America . New York: Vintage. Hollis, K. L. (2004). Liberating voices . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hurwitz, M. (1936). The Workmen’s Circle . New York: The Workmen’s Circle. Hutchinson, R. H., & Hutchinson, D. D. (1917). The Stony Ford School. Bureau of Educational Experiments, Bulletin 5, 9. Kaplan, J., & Shapiro, L. (Eds.). (1998). Red diapers. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Kean, H. (1990). Challenging the state? London: Falmer. Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Koch, R., & Koch, C. (1972). Educational commune . New York: Schocken. Kohl, H. (1995). Should we burn Babar? New York: New Press. Leinenweber, C. (1977, Summer). Socialists in the streets. Science and Society , 41 , 152–171. Levine, J., & Gordon, G. (2002). Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, CA: Avon Springs Press. Mills, W. T. (1904). The struggle for existence. Chicago, IL: International School of Social Economy. Mishler, P. C. (1999). Raising reds . New York: Columbia University Press. Niger, S. (1940). In a struggle for a new education . New York: Arbeiter Ring Education Committee. Paul, E., & Paul, C. (1921). Proletcult (Proletarian culture) . New York: Thomas Seltzer. Poore, C. (1978, Spring). German-American socialist culture. Cultural Correspondence, 6–7, 13–20. Reese, W. J. (2002). Power and the promise of school reform . New York: Teachers College Press. Reid, F. (1966). Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892–1939. International Review of Social History , 11 (1), 18–47. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education. University of Chicago Press.
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Page 326 Simons, M. W. (1908, November). Vocational education. Progressive Journal of Education , 1, 7–9. Spargo, J. (1909). Socialist readings for children. New York: The Women’s National Progressive League. Stanley, W. B. (2007). Critical pedagogy. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy (pp. 371–389). New York: Peter Lang. Steinberg, S. R. (2007). Where are we now? In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy (pp. ix–x). New York: Peter Lang. Teitelbaum, K. (1993). Schooling for “good rebels .” Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Thompson, E. (1981). The politics of theory. In R. Samuel (Ed.), People’s history and socialist theory (pp. 396–408). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Veysey, L. (1973). The communal experience . New York: Harper & Row. Wexler, P. (1982). Structure, text, and subject. In R. M. Williams (1977), Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. Williams, R. M. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford University Press.
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Page 327 24 The Educative City and Critical Education Ramon Flecha The Educative City Perspective In common with many of the great “Western” ideas, the perspective of the educative city has profound roots in Africa. The saying “we need a whole village to educate a child” comes from the South to make the North aware of one of the main negative effects of school systems: their imposition upon popular culture, their delegitimization of communities as educative agents, and their systemic colonization of the life world (Habermas, 1987, p. 332). However, humanity has a long tradition of educating children without the need for a bureaucratic school system, but with the involvement of different sectors of their villages and cities. And many schools were initially created or demanded by these same communities in order to enrich their education with new learning dimensions. Modernity included the objective of universal schooling for all children, although unfortunately universal schooling is still far from being a reality in many places in the world. But school systems from that time colonized the educative dimension of communities’ life worlds. Based on a bureaucratic rationale, experts in those systems not only decided on what kind of education had to be provided by schools, but also what was considered to be good “educative behavior” to be undertaken by families and communities. This bureaucratic process, as analyzed by Weber, generated a loss of meaning (Weber, 1930), which can still be perceived today. The prohibition of the headscarf in some European schools is just the visible tip of the iceberg of latent conflicts between families and schools that create a loss of meaning related to schooling in communities. Today, we are in the age of the Information Society (Castells et al., 1999) and traditional modernity is being replaced by dialogic modernity. In industrial societies people who lived in rural villages or in urban workers’ neighborhoods had access to the knowledge accumulated by humanity through schools and teachers. The idea of achieving a universal school system for all citizens was created by revolutionary governments based on the encyclopedist model, in order to teach the school encyclopedia to children with parents who were busy in their rural or industrial jobs. However, in the current Information Society many families and communities have access to the same information that teachers and schools do. Besides, in traditional modernity systems, in many homes there were certain power relations according to which the father—or head of the family—made decisions and there was no need for dialogue: his seventeen-year-old daughter always had to come back home at dinner time; his wife had to cook the dinner while he watched TV. These power relations were based on
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Page 328 the symbolic violence of his status as a father and, sometimes, on physical violence. In current dialogic modernity, some power relations have experienced a crisis giving rise to two types of situations. First, the nonexistence of shared rules with the consequential continuous conflict, and second, the existence of agreed rules based on dialogic relationships, that is, on relationships between family members that are not based on status but, rather, on the arguments each of them provide. This dialogic turn, which is growing in different areas of society today, has also reached schools. There are more and more women today who do not blindly obey their fathers but, rather, they ask them for convincing arguments or simply disobey them. Many of these women, and also men, do not blindly obey their doctors or their teachers. They question expert knowledge (Beck, 1992), that is, they ask for arguments, for reasons. They increasingly reject relationships based on power and ask for dialogic relationships in diverse areas. Obviously, the existence of a dialogic turn in society does not mean that power relations are disappearing, since some of them are stronger than ever. It means that, besides existing power relationships, there are also new dialogic relationships created by social movements and individuals. In the aforementioned example about the changes in family relations, it is possible to trace the role of subjects from the feminist movement struggle to every single woman who has challenged the authoritarianism within her home. Along the lines of this dialogic turn, most teachers and school administrators are becoming increasingly aware that schools cannot provide adequate education without jointly acting along with families, communities, and the city as a whole. Therefore, they are increasingly taking on the perspective of the educative city and trying to carry out common initiatives and collaboration with other individuals, groups, and social agents. A diversification of educative agents is now being witnessed. Schools offer formal education and provide academic qualifications that allow students to continue onto the following steps of the school system. In addition, other educative agents provide nonformal education. The activities they offer—such as leisure activities, foreign languages, music courses, etc.—aim to educate but do not provide academic credentials which are valid to progress through the school system. Other agents—such as companies, the media, trade unions, neighborhood associations, feminist groups, ecological organizations, etc.—do not have educative goals but carry out activities which have educational dimensions. This is called informal education. For instance, the objective of a car factory is not education but people working there learn a lot about cars. The need for coordination between all of these educational provisions is thus evident, and the way to guarantee this coordination is through the development of an educative city project created and managed by all social sectors and agents. One of the most difficult challenges of the educative city project is to make this coordination a reality. Also, the Information Society and dialogic modernity have arrived along with an increase in the transnational movements of people around the world, with significant consequences for educational institutions. On the one hand, bureaucratic school systems have received an increasing number of children from families with an intense sense of community. Teachers and other educational agents are becoming more aware that the educational rights of all children cannot be achieved without transformations in the schools oriented towards opening them up to the collaboration of these families, social agents, and the whole city. Therefore, the educative city project includes this collaboration as one of its most important goals. Three Perspectives of the Educative City: Conservative, Reproductionist, and Transformative From the point of view of the Weberian ethics of responsibility,1 we can organize the different perspectives of educative cities depending on their educational and social consequences. In this
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Page 329 way, the ethics of intentions and the philosophy of consciousness are overcome. Thus, the main criterion for this classification is not the explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious intentions of the actors and perspectives, but the real educational and social consequences of their actions. The main consequence of the conservative perspective is the development of societies containing the present cultural and social structures. In this context, the main educational reference is efficiency, to make children able and willing to work and live within these structures. This objective involves socializing children based on this orientation towards the dominant values. It also leads to the neutralization of the potential opportunities of the school system to overcome inequalities. In the conservative perspective, the educative city includes activities such as visits to an army exhibition without questioning the cruelty of war. According to this perspective, this exhibition is just another event organized in the city and has an educational dimension. Soldiers directly explain to children how to achieve precision when establishing a target for the bombing. Subsequently, the session is focused on learning technical language due to talking to the soldiers, and is also focused on the related topics described by the teacher in the classroom, for example, calculating the route of a bomb. Thus, the session implicitly, and sometimes also explicitly, contains reference to the dominant opinions of the jobs of those people who risk their own lives in order to defend society from an “alliance of evil.” On some occasions, conservatism is not a result of the ideology of the leaders of the project, but an unintentional consequence of the corporative dynamics of its organization, which neutralizes the potential opportunities for the school system and other educational agents to overcome inequalities. For example, when teachers monopolize positions involving representation of the different sectors engaged in the educative city project, there is a danger of developing corporative dynamics. This can happen when representatives of family organizations, of the city hall, of neighborhood associations, trade unions, and political parties, etc., are teachers by profession. In other words, they are representatives of family organizations because they are parents of children who are students in these schools but, at the same time, they are teachers in other schools. In some of these cases, the educative city project acts in favor of the corporative interest of teachers, and against the educational rights of the children. When members of families of disadvantaged students protest in a poor barrio , their role in the representation of these protests is questioned in favor of the supposed superior role of their representation in the network of the educative city project, which, in fact, is monopolized by people who are professionals in the school system. In contrast to the conservative perspective, the reproductionist perspective criticizes the structures of society and, at the same time, states that schools can do nothing to change because their role is simply to reproduce these structures. Reproductionists proclaim that the solution is to change the social relations of production, because this is the only way to overcome inequalities. However, from a Weberian point of view, this is not the consequence of this perspective, because it does not make any changes in the social relations of production. The real consequence of reproductionism is the delegitimization of any attempt by schools to collaborate in the transformation of society because, according to this perspective, thinking about transformation is a useless effort and implies a lack of scientific knowledge of the real function of schooling. Based on a reproductionist approach, the educative city should include activities such as visits to places that generate the social inequalities that schools reproduce (for instance, to companies), as well as visits to places that collaborate with schools in maintaining these inequalities (for instance, to the police). These visits will become an opportunity for students to develop criticism of social structures. For instance, children reflect on the different categories held by employees in companies; they will also criticize the way in which the educational system awards higher credentials to middle- and upper-class children, and lower credentials to the lower class, thus ascribing educational legitimization to the inequalities they saw in the companies. In this way,
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Page 330 children become aware of the role of schools in society. They also become aware of the complementary role of the other ideological apparatus of the state (such as the Church and the family), as well as of the repressive apparatus of the state (such as the army and the police). Follow-ing this argumentation, the function of all these institutions is to maintain the capitalist social relations of production (Althusser, 1971).2 Today, few teachers and social agents have direct knowledge of the theories of Althusser and his reproductionist followers. However, many of them have this approach in their minds due to its dissemination among previous generations of critical teachers, and because it provides an excellent way to legitimize their own lack of commitment to families and communities to transform their schools. For example, these teachers believe they understand the inequalities that affect their students, and they criticize the existence of such inequalities; but why should they make the effort to overcome them if schools cannot do it? The well-known article by Bane and Jencks “The Schools and Equal Opportunity” (1972)3 was translated into Spanish with the following title: “School is not responsible for social inequalities and it does not change them”4 (Bane & Jencks, 1985, p. 278). Today, this title is a slogan which is continuously used by many teachers who have never heard of Jencks or Althusser. Contrary to conservative and reproductionist perspectives, the transformative perspective criticizes social structures but also highlights schools’ contributions to maintaining, increasing, or decreasing inequalities. The transformative perspective goes beyond the Althusserian approach, which did not leave any room for resistance or struggle. Today many teachers, children, relatives, and other citizens are contributing to overcome inequalities within and outside schools. We can learn from them what kind of actions, reflections, and theoretical developments contribute to equality and democracy, in order to move forward to achieve these objectives in all schools, villages, and barrios . In contrast to the conservative perspective, the transformative perspective does not attempt to maintain and develop current social structures but, rather, to transform them into more egalitarian and democratic ones. In antithesis to the reproductionist perspective, the transformative one identifies the fact that many teachers, parents, relatives, citizens, and schools are already overcoming educational inequalities in some schools and other educational settings. Based on the transformative perspective, an educative city means to put the educational rights of all children at the center of all educational activities and dimensions of the city. Thus, in the educative city’s projects, teachers act as citizens. They become what Gramsci (1971) called “organic intellectuals,” who struggle with other social agents against oppression. In contrast to teachers in the conservative and in the reproductionist perspective, they neither look at inequalities from above and do nothing nor simply complain, but they are involved in the struggle for a better education for all children. Thus, they come down from their balcony, using Bakhtin’s (1981) description of the balconies during the carnival in Europe, and associate with students, families, and communities. These teachers promote the representation of all sectors of the city by themselves and promote diversity within this representation, in terms of gender, ethnicity, social class, educational background, and profession. This openness is one way of avoiding the colonization of the educative city projects by the particular interests of some social sectors (i.e., the interests of teachers or private companies), or by the particular interests of the political parties governing the city councils. Besides, when educators participate in the democratic educational struggles of the community, they are expressing their commitment to democracy and social justice, and they are also assuming the responsibility of continuing the political work previously initiated and carried out by others (Apple, 2000; Apple & Beane, 2007). Community involvement can also transform the accountability process. When the community is involved in schools and in the educational project of the city, and they participate in management and decision bodies, they can monitor the work of administrators, principals, and other professionals in order to ensure that the community’s priorities in education are the priorities of those who hold positions of power. In this process, it is the community to whom the schools
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Page 331 are accountable, and thus the meaning of public education is recovered. Since schools are public, they should be accountable to the public: families, students, community organizations, and citizenry in general. However, the pervasive current model of accountability responds to a state concept of education, not public education, and thus schools are accountable to the state and not to the citizenry. The reconceptualization of the accountability process in this manner, also contributes to the deprivatization of public education. Moreover, when the community is involved in schools and in the educational projects of the city, the community itself feels responsible for results in the city’s schools. Besides, based on the transformative perspective, city schools educate children in community or popular knowledge as well as in classical knowledge. Students become competent in the cultural knowledge and intellectual contributions of the community, as well as they acquire knowledge that is required by the gatekeepers to have socioeconomic access. Hence, students become more capable of transforming society, because they have the knowledge to access many social and economic spheres, but they enter these spheres critically and thus they can create changes from within. In the transformative perspective, access and dissent are not contrasting processes. Opening Classrooms to Citizens Some types of organization for educative city projects happen to be bureaucratic, although they might formally include representatives from diverse city sectors and agents. For instance, a school might be represented by the principal and probably the president of the parents’ association, however, there might not be a real participatory movement in that school. These people will, therefore, represent the structure of the school, but not the people engaged in its daily functioning. Similar situations occur with other agents in the city. In this way, the organization of the educative city project becomes a superstructure that is unable to change children’s daily learning activities, including the organization of visits and campaigns that act as collateral to the key preoccupations and motivations of children, families, and communities. In this way, the educative city becomes a “decorative program” for the city’s education. The transformative perspective, however, develops bottom-up dynamics that increase participation within educative city projects, as well as its critical orientation. An increasing number of schools are opening their doors and even making their classrooms available to the participation of citizens in order to solve the problems that bureaucratic schools are not able to deal with. It is well known that segregation (i.e., tracking and streaming) is the main mechanism to create inequalities in schools and, consequently, to legitimate and promote inequalities in societies. Gramsci (1971) already pointed out in the 1930s that the division of knowledge to be taught on the basis of each student’s class was a way to ensure the reproduction of inequalities. Along these lines, he criticized the division of the educational system into two types of schools with a different curriculum: “the fundamental division into classical and vocational (professional) schools was a rational formula: the vocational school for the instrumental classes, the classical school for the dominant classes and the intellectuals” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 26). While in the classical schools students acquired classical knowledge (instrumental learning), in the vocational schools students obtained the skills that were immediately necessary for the labor market (Gramsci, 1971, p. 40). Dewey, along similar lines to Gramsci, condemned the existence of differentiated education aimed at different social groups, and he saw vocational education (when taking the economic industrial regime as its springboard) as an instrument to allocate the oppressed to the lowest position in society and be dominated: To split the system, and give to others, less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency for transferring the
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Page 332 older division of labour and leisure, culture and service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a society nominally democratic. (Dewey, 1930, p. 372) Although tracking has been intensively analyzed and its consequences are very clear, nowadays streaming is a hidden mechanism of selection which acts inside each school and each classroom. Included, an Integrated Project from the European Framework Programme for Research on school systems (CREA, 2007), classifies the different options of exclusion and inclusion. There are two main modalities of exclusion: streaming and mixture. Streaming5 divides students into different classrooms or groups based on an evaluation of their abilities, which, in practice, frequently involves excluding children from the poorest families into the lower-level groups and classrooms. Mixture retains all of the students in the same classroom and school. Inclusion organizes all children within the same classroom and into heterogeneous groups with the provision of the resources that make it possible for all students to achieve success without any discrimination, and also ensuring good coexistence. Sometimes, the same schools that segregate poor and immigrant children, ask for the participation of their families in the school and in the educative city project activities. Then, when families do not attend, these schools attribute this lack of participation to families’ lack of motivation to participate and even to their lack of motivation for their children’s education. The barriers to the participation and the inclusion of these families cannot be resolved in these bureaucratic and segregationist schools. Dialogic schools do not segregate. In these schools all students are in the same classroom, and are not discriminated against due to social class, cultural group, or any other reason. Teachers open doors to the collaboration of other professionals, relatives, and/or volunteers in order to not exclude any child, guarantee success for all as well as good coexistence between them and their families, who might be from different cultures and backgrounds. Sometimes a teacher says, “I cannot deal with these 24 children with such different levels of learning and such different cultures.” In a bureaucratic school, this situation leads to segregation, for example, by putting the “most problematic” five children into a special classroom with another teacher. In contrast to this, in a dialogic school, the same situation leads to them being included into a dialogic classroom, in which no child is cast aside and where all of them are taught by those same two teachers, and are sometimes supported by other professionals and/or volunteers. In this way, with the same resources, it is possible to achieve more academic success, more equality, more solidarity, and more participation. From this critical perspective, participation has real meaning for the families and for citizens because it leads to overcoming their children’s inequalities and, often, their own inequalities. These real transformations generate and increase the diversification of participation: first, more parents participate; second, some of them are “traditional non-participants.” Before, these parents were not seeing any connection between participation and achieving better education for their children. Now, they accept the meaning of their participation and its connection to better learning and coexistence for their children. Educational projects around the world, such as Learning Communities (Aubert et al., 2008) in Spain, Brazil, and Chile, or Democratic Schools (Apple & Beane, 2007) in the United States, are demonstrating that what increases parental involvement in schools is “serious” work, such as involvement in instructional activities in classrooms, in comparison to simply inviting parents and relatives to cook for school festivities or for a “touristic” celebration of cultures. Based on this transformative approach, the Comunidades de Aprendizagem (Learning Communities) project has been taking place in Brazil since 2003. There are three schools in the surrounding area of the city of São Carlos that are promoting wide participation of the whole community in educational activities in order to diversify and intensify access to sources of
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Page 333 knowledge within the school. These schools are creating new learning spaces inside and outside the school, in which families, volunteers, and members of the community can participate in order to help avoid the social and educational inequalities affecting these communities. In Chile, the initiative Enlazando Mundos (Connecting Worlds) is based on the same principles. The Voice of the Voiceless: The Role of “Other Women” in Critical Education Based on the transformative dynamics of the educative city, the organization of the project is led by the same social groups living in the city. They are not objects instrumentally used by their representatives; but they are subjects deciding on their lives and their social participation through their own words. In 1999, over a period of three months, the city of Barcelona promoted a process for women’s participation with the slogan “The City that Women Want” (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, & Puigvert, 2003). In different barrios , many “other women” participated actively in debates concerning the city. After this long process, a conference was held. However, the conclusions from each barrio were presented by academic women; they were from different cultures, but only the ones with university degrees spoke. Domestic cleaners who participated in the process saw how their conclusions were presented and reinterpreted by the owners of the houses they cleaned on a daily basis. One of the presenters, instead of presenting the conclusions of what had been worked on for one year, described her own personal view of the topic. The other women attending the conference complained and decided to explicitly create a movement for “other women,” led by women without university backgrounds whose voices had been silenced in different areas of society, even within women’s movements. This movement for “other women” organized a conference and invited feminist authors such as Judith Butler, Lidia Puigvert, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. After a debate with them, many things changed. In terms of education, a reflection was made: people who are more dedicated to children should have a strong and significant voice in all participatory processes in education. Most of these other women felt they were not represented by the women managing educative city projects, who mostly belonged to the small group of women who have university degrees and many of whom were professionals in the field of education. It is not possible to carry out a successful transformation of education without guaranteeing the prominence of the voices of those people who are most dedicated to children—many of whom are “other women.” In this sense, participation processes must be carried out from the bottom-up: first, because most other women need this kind of democratic process for participating in their children’s schools; and second, because based on this participation, they begin to trust in the significance of their own opinions and, in this way, they take up the challenge to bring their voices into public spaces in cities. After having found their voice in their barrios , some of these other women dare to raise their voice at the city level. They can then act as representatives in the general organization of the educative city project. Every day they will bring with them the experience of sharing the real and diverse life worlds of the different children in the city. Therefore, they enrich the educational and cultural landscape of the whole city with new languages, experiences, and arguments that, until now have been excluded from these public spaces. Indeed, the change produced by this new landscape has no limits. Similar processes of making the voice of the voiceless heard are also taking place in different fields in many parts of the world. For instance, the World Conference of Inhabitants, held on October 2–6, 2000 in Mexico, was an attempt to provide a voice to ordinary citizens, especially to those coming from poor districts, in order for them to talk about their cities. At that event,
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Page 334 more than 300 participants from 35 different countries gathered together to discuss issues and subjects that are usually monopolized by experts such as urban planners, architects, and other specialists. The ordinary citizens discussed their problems and talked about the ideal city that they dream of. Along these lines, during his mandate as secretary of education, Freire (1993) designed school councils in São Paulo, which included teachers, staff, family members, professionals, community members, and people from grassroots movements in the city. The role of the school councils was to design and evaluate school plans. This democratization of school management is also occurring in many other cities around the world, as it is, for example, as part of the Citizens School project in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the municipal Congress of Education, and in the School Councils (Gandin & Apple, 2002, 2003). Similarly, the Reflect initiative 6 is a participatory learning process that fuses Freire’s theory with the methodologies of participatory rural appraisal. Starting in 1995, nowadays this approach is used in over 350 organizations in around 65 countries worldwide (in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and Latin America) oriented towards promoting social change based on people’s critical analysis of their environment. Therefore, empowerment is placed at the center of sustainable and equitable development in these areas, where different democratic spaces are created with the objective that people can make their own analysis of the local and global realities they are living. In Hyderabad (India), for example, a small NGO called Yakshi is experimenting with the Reflect approach as a way to promote sustained dialogue at a community level. Yakshi provides support to Girijan Deepika (GD), an independent tribal people’s mass organization. Both organizations understand that the Reflect approach could help to promote debates involving reflection at a community level, connecting literacy learning to the systematization and strengthening of the Indigenous knowledge system. In all of these situations, the involvement of citizens in the design, evaluation, and reform of education, not only leads to the transformation of schools and other educational spaces in the city, but it can also radically change the relationship between communities, the state, and education. Dialogic Gatherings A dialogic gathering is a type of cultural circle based on the following principle, “one participant, one voice.” Indeed, in dialogic literary gatherings, the idea is that the teacher is not in possession of the right and only possible interpretation of the text. Each participant has her or his own interpretation, and the value of these interpretations does not depend on the academic or professional credentials of the person but, rather, on the arguments and their contributions to the dialogue. In these dialogic gatherings all of the voices and all of the people are valued. In this way, the “other women” who have interiorized their exclusion in many social and educational spaces, discover that they should, and can, overcome their lack of self-esteem and, then, they vindicate the importance of their words. In dialogic literary gatherings, people who have never before read a book, start reading, commenting on, and enjoying classics such as those written by Sappho, James Joyce, Virginia Wolf, or Garcia Lorca. Consequently, the way in which the cultural structure of the city has been traditionally shaped is challenged by these activities. The most widely read newspaper in Andalucía (Cela, 2007) devoted a whole page to an article with this title : Kafka en las Tres Mil. The article reported the dialogic literary gatherings taking place in Las Tres Mil, a very poor and marginalized area in Seville, mainly inhabited by Romani families, who were reading Kafka in the dialogic gatherings at their children’s schools. Similarly, the linguist and Doctor Honoris Causa, Miquel Siguan (2001, p. 15), wrote the following about this same activity in La Vanguardia, the
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Page 335 most important newspaper in Barcelona: “What is surprising is that these people are enjoying the books that are supposed to be the ones that university people should read, but we do not.” Many people are surprised that through dialogic gatherings, people from the poorest urban area in Spain (Las Tres Mil Viviendas), and from many other poor areas in several cities, were reading “Ulysses” and “Metamorphosis,” while members of the academic community were reading “The Da Vinci Code” and “Perfume.” The reading and conversations about literary books lead to debates on diverse cultural, social, and political matters. Then, participants in this activity read, and have debates on, different types of books and also attend public lectures on them. And in doing so, they transform cultural public spaces. Some years ago, Habermas gave a lecture at the University of Barcelona. There were about 400 people in the audience: about 390 of them were members of the academic community and the other 10 were participants in one of the aforementioned dialogic literary gatherings. One of those “other women” asked a question, but after she had said just three or four words, the audience realized she was not an academic person but a member of the “other women” collective, perhaps a factory worker or a “housewife.” Subsequently, half of the audience started to laugh. Habermas silenced them when he asked the woman to complete her question and in his reply stated the following: “That is a brilliant and very critical question.” Many of these situations transform the cultural life in the city and also in private homes, removing some of the effects of the cultural and social structures which prevail in them. In this way, the educative city perspective becomes something real and transformative, improving daily life for everyone. On another occasion, Bourdieu came to Barcelona. He said, “When a person without academic knowledge looks at La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja) by Goya, he or she does not see art but pornography.” The “other women” movement in Barcelona strongly protested against what they considered to be both a classist and a sexist disregard of them. They said: “Why is he speaking on behalf of us? Why does not he ask us himself?” Bourdieu was, in fact, carrying out a quite mechanical application of his structuralist7 theory of distinction. The “other women” acquired self-trust through participation in dialogic gatherings. In contrast to this, a structuralist analysis does not value the quality of subjects’ voices. From that moment on, when the “other women” protested, many citizens of Barcelona listened to what the “voice of the voiceless” said about themselves and about the scientists who study them without listening to them. Grassroot Barrio Dreams Catalonia has a long and profound libertarian tradition (Orwell, 1938). Many people do not respond to the proposals of participation made by governmental institutions and political parties, but they engage in intense activity when the initiatives come from themselves. This approach connects to the grassroots spirit of an increasing number of current social movements, which is what Ulrich Beck calls subpolitics (Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994). Thirty years ago, the Verneda was a poor barrio in Barcelona where some people still lived in shanty houses. A small number of very diverse people created the VERN organization, an association of neighborhood organizations including the Christian parish, the libertarian athenaeum, neighborhood associations, and the local feminist group, among others. They initiated a public debate in the neighborhood, and created a dream of what they would like the barrio to become, involving issues related to schooling, health, housing, town planning, etc. In the beginning, some of the neighborhood associations with Stalinist leaders did not accept the independent voices of other organizations such as the women’s groups, the libertarian athenaeum, or the Christian parish, but they could not put a stop to popular participation. In the end, they had to accept the VERN grassroots, pluralistic, and democratic organization. As a consequence of the fact that all of the voices were listened to, popular participation occurred without any
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Page 336 bureaucratic control. Several years later, the dream was fully achieved and they built another dream which was even better. One of the key elements of the first dream, back in the 1970s, was to create a popular education center, La Verneda-Sant Martí school for adults. Today this center has around 2,000 participants (Sánchez, 1999) and many of them have been very active in the transformation process in the neighborhood. For instance, they played an important role in the recovery of the barrio ’s historic memories. In this part of the city there are three traditional country houses and a church from the Middle Ages. One morning, a bulldozer started to demolish these houses. Quickly the news reached the adult education center and the participants decided to interrupt their classes and intervene by standing in front of the bulldozer. The participants in the adult education center knew about the history of these buildings. As a result of that mobilization, today this site is a rehabilitated historical zone, hosting social and cultural services for the neighborhood. Many transformative actions like this one have completely transformed the landscape of the barrio . In 1988, Paulo Freire heard about this school. On February 1, in an overcrowded room in the Teachers College in the University of Barcelona, a literacy learner spoke just before Freire’s lecture. At the end of her speech, Paulo hugged her, and through this symbolic action he supported the process of giving a voice to the voiceless. The ideas of this school for adults, La Verneda-Sant Martí, went along the same lines as the MOVA, the Movimento de Alfabetização de Jovens e Adultos (Movement for the Literacy of Youth and Adult People) promoted by Freire in São Paulo while he was the secretary for education. Later, he suggested that the Conference of Literacy Participants, promoted by himself in Brazil, and the Conference of Literacy Participants, promoted by this movement in Spain should join each other. Subsequently, the people in charge of adult education in Porto Alegre analyzed the experiences in La Verneda School for Adults and this promoted a change in the adult education centers in Porto Alegre, by creating the MOVA in their city. Since then, there has been an important increase in the number of participants in adult education as well as greater active participation. Today, there is a formal partnership between the two projects, La Verneda and Porto Alegre,8 as a framework for exchange and share work in democratic adult education. An example of the activities carried out within this partnership is the organization of video conferences in which literacy participants from schools in both cities have shared their perspectives and discussed the prospects of the movement of participants in adult education. Along with other popular education centers, the learners in La Verneda school for adults created the CONFAPEA organization (Confederation of Federations and Associations of Participants in Democratic Adult Education and Culture). They deliberated on and approved a bill of Participants’ Rights in Adult Education. This letter was subscribed to by the delegations of 20 countries in the UNESCO Conference on Adult Education which took place in Hamburg in 1997. In this conference a homage to Paulo Freire was held. In order to respond to the need of lifelong learning strategies in current societies, the Adult Learners’ Forum in Edinburgh9 created an Adult Learners’ Bill of Rights to be adopted by everyone involved in and committed to the field of adult education. This initiative arose from the importance of improving communication with adult learners and the need to recognize them as partners in education, making their views central in adult education projects and thus progressing towards common educational aims. Transformative projects continuously need new feedback from citizens in order to resist the systems’ attempts to colonize them. In the case of La Verneda School, there have been several attempts to replace its grassroots popular initiatives with top-down institutional plans. However, the success of the original project has generated institutions’ increasing acceptance of popular initiatives, and they now mostly work together. For instance, in 1978 VERN made part of their dream a reality by occupying a whole building in order to transform it into a bottom-up cultural center. Initially, the city council tried to avoid this occupation and to stop the transformations that were derived from it. Later, the city council accepted the idea of a cultural center but tried
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Page 337 to replace the popular initiative with a model of a civic center designed by an “expert” on citizenship participation. Several years later, the city council realized that real participation and real experts should be found among people related to the popular movements, and positive collaboration between the city council and VERN now takes place. Dialogic Digital Centers The current Information Society model creates a digital divide that increases previous inequalities, and most informational educational activities are based on this dominant dynamic. However, some educational movements and projects in the Information Society have made significant contributions to help break down the digital divide. In fact, the Information Society increases opportunities for critical actions, and the decision to either carry them out or not is made by educators and other social agents. Among these critical movements and projects, are dialogic digital centers that include all or some of the following five characteristics. First, free access to and the diversification of educational provision make the participation of every single citizen possible, particularly those who are usually excluded in the cities. Also, in every city in the world, the dissemination of information technologies has reflected inequalities in social structures. As an example of the Mertonian Matthew Effect (Merton, 1968), this process has done more for those who have more, and less for those having less. But there are also democratic and egalitarian efforts to use information technologies to overcome old and new inequalities. The Tele-centers of the Americas Partnership—a telecenters network which includes Aspira Association, PCNA, Chasquinet, Somos@telecentros and CTCNet—an organization which has more than 10,000 centers in North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean provides an example of the democratization of technology. The first CTC started in Harlem back in the 1980s with the same democratic objective. CTCs often rely on volunteers who contribute to the improvement of the programs and activities offered to the community. The UNESCO Community Multimedia Centers (CMC) have similar objectives, and have promoted combining existing community facilities with technological services for the community at a global level, in countries such as Mali, Mozambique, and Senegal. For instance, the CMC was launched based on women’s microcredit groups, diversifying the provision based on their local needs rather than offering traditional digital literacy training programs. Second, these dialogic digital centers have flexible schedules that facilitate the participation of citizens who are not able to attend within traditional schedules. Many centers supposedly oriented towards underprivileged citizens are closed at times when those people could attend them (for instance, at the weekends) in order to fit in with the bureaucratic rules of the providers. In contrast, dialogic digital centers organize their services according to community demands. For instance, the Agora Internet Point (Spain) is a digital center located in a working-class barrio and opens from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Sunday and also over the summer. The bottom-up flexibilization of schedules is different to traditional top-down educational provisions, in which schedules are organized according to institutional objectives or the educators’ work priorities rather than people’s schedule opportunities in daily life. Third, in dialogic digital centers the citizens are the managers of information (versus clients of information), thus making active citizenship a reality within the current Information Society. From a conservative perspective, citizens are consumers of information and, in this perspective, when consumers are presented as creators of information they refer to the creation of messages based on the current model of consumption imposed by companies. In contrast, dialogic digital centers allow citizens to become the managers of information, both creating new messages and critically analyzing and using those that already exist on the Internet.
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Page 338 One of the most important programs carried out by The Committee for Democracy of Information (CDI) in Brazil—a network for the provision of technology and training in the poorest communities—are the Schools for Technology and Citizenship . These schools offer support to the communities in order to create digital centers: from providing facilities and equipment, to training for community members so that they become the managers of their own centers. Through these schools, the CDI provides support to local development as well as promotes activities related to literacy, ecology, health, human rights, and social participation. In a bottom-up organization of learning, citizens become managers of information rather than simply vessels or clients of educational activities designed previously without their input. Fourth, dialogic learning in these centers promotes diversity, so the activities of the educative city include people of different ages, genders, cultural groups, and special needs, without any discrimination and making them protagonists of their own activities and multiplying their learning opportunities. Conservative provisions use only old concepts of learning commonly created for homogeneous students inside classrooms in the school system. Dialogic digital centers are open to the participation of all citizens, with no discrimination based on age, gender, culture, disability, language, or academic background. Different people from the city with very different interests go to the centers in order to learn computer skills, to communicate with family and friends abroad, to look for a job, to edit personal images and videos, and to design and print greeting cards or posters for community events. For instance, the CDI in Brazil not only targets low-income communities, but it also turns people with disabilities, homeless children, and people from Indigenous populations into protagonists in their community actions. Finally, dialogic learning in dialogic cultural centers also involves the principle of cultural intelligence , which includes all the dimensions of the human intellectual capacity—from instrumental reasoning to communicative skills. In these centers participants share their different knowledge, skills, and argumentations at each learning event and, therefore, this diversity enriches the educational environment and multiplies learning opportunities for all. In this sense, one of the objectives of the Somos@telecentros network is to consolidate a learning culture in which everyone becomes a contributor and a manager of knowledge by means of active participation through the Internet. They promote collaborative group work, based on internal solidarity, using the “learning circles” perspective. In these circles they also promote spaces for debate on public local policy. Similarly, in the Agora Internet Point, participants from different backgrounds, with different knowledge, and different levels of computer proficiency help each other in interactive groups. Notes 1 Weber (1967, pp. 164–165) differentiates the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. The second one takes into account the predictable consequences of one’s own action. 2 This reproductionist model was created by Althusser as an application to education of his structuralist Marxism. This structuralist Marxism was created by Althusser through books such as Reading Capital (Althusser & Balibar, 1998). Later, Althusser (1994) admitted that when he wrote Reading Capital he had not read Capital and he knew very little about Marxism. It is only based on a lack of knowledge of Marx’s work that it is possible to defend a Marxism that ignores the ability of human agency to transform structures. Positive developments of Marxism in education have been based on serious Marxist intellectuals, such as Gramsci, and not on others, such as Althusser. 3 In October 1972 a group of African American social scientists led “The Black Response” which was a reaction to Bane’s and Jencks’ perspective, and they claimed that all of those works supported the Right. Along these lines, Edmons (Edmons, Jackson, Riulin, & Billingsley, 1973) pointed out that Jencks’ works made it easier to stop the advances made in relation to equal opportunities and civil rights in the 1960s.
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Page 339 4 “ La escuela no es responsable de las desigualdades sociales y no las cambia .” 5 Other words are used to refer to this practice of streaming. In the American context, often the word “tracking” is used. Similarly, in the UK “setting” is used to refer to a form of what is called “streaming” here. 6 http://www.reflect-action.org/enghome.html 7 Bourdieu considered that his theory could be classified as constructivist structuralism or structuralist constructivism (Bourdieu, 1987). 8 The partnership is between the Porto Alegre City Council through its Secretary for Education and the Ágora Association from La Verneda—Sant Martí school. 9 http://www.alfieforum.edin.org References Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy . London: New Left Books. (Original work published 1970.) Althusser, L. (1994). The future lasts a long time. London: Vintage. (Original work published 1985.) Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1998). Reading capital. England: Verso. (Original work published 1965.) Apple, M. (2000). Official knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (2007). Democratic schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Aubert, A., García, C., Flecha, A., Flecha, R., & Racionero, S. (2008). Aprendizaje dialógico en la sociedad de la información. Barcelona: Hipatia. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bane, M. J., & Jencks, C. (1972, September 16). The schools and equal opportunity. Saturday Review of Education , 38 (4), 37–42. Bane, M., & Jencks, C. (1985) La escuela no es responsable de las desigualdades sociales y no las cambia. In A. Gras (Ed.), Sociología de la Educación (pp. 278–287). Madrid: Narcea. (Original work published 1974.) Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity . London: Sage. Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernization. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Beck-Gernsheim, E., Butler, J., & Puigvert, L. (2003). Women and social transformation . New York: Peter Lang. (Original work published 2001.) Bourdieu, P. (1987). Choses dites: Le sens commun. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Castells, M., Flecha, R., Freire, P., Giroux, H. A., Macedo, D., & Willis, P. (1999). Critical education in the new information age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (Original work published 1994.) Cela, D. (2007, January 21). Kafka en las Tres Mil. El Correo de Andalucía, p. 17. CREA (2007). INCLUDED. Strategies for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe from education . Report 2: Theories, reforms and outcomes in European educational systems. Integrated Project. Priority 7. Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-based Society, 6th FP, European Commission. Dewey, J. (1930). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan. Edmons, R., Jackson, P. W., Riulin, A. M., & Billingsley, A. (1973). Perspectives on inequality: A reassessment of the effects of family and schooling in America. Harvard Educational Review , 43 (1), 76– 91. European Commission. (2006, September). Communication from the commission to the council and to the European parliament (p. 481). Brussels: COM. Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the city . New York: Continuum. Gandin, L. A., & Apple, M. W. (2002). Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre, Brazil . Journal of Education Policy , 17 (2), 259–279. Gandin, L. A., & Apple, M. W. (2003). Educating the state, democratizing knowledge: The Citizen School Project in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In M. W. Apple (Ed.), The state and the politics of knowledge (pp. 193– 219). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 2), Lifeworld and system . Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981.)
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Page 340 Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure . New York: Free Press. Orwell, G. (1938). Homage to Catalonia . London: Secker & Warburg. Sánchez, M. (1999). La Verneda-Sant Martí: A school where people dare to dream. Harvard Educational Review , 69 (3), 320–335. Siguan, M. (2001, August 12). Redescubrimiento de la lectura. La Vanguardia, p. 15. Weber, M. (1930). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1904–1905.) Weber, M. (1967). El político y el científico . Madrid: Alianza Editorial. (Original work published 1919.)
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Page 341 25 The Citizen School Project Implementing and Recreating Critical Education in Porto Alegre, Brazil Luis Armando Gandin Don’t let the fear of what is difficult paralyze you. (Freire, 1998a, p. 27) It is very common in education to hear claims that critical education is an interesting idea but does not work in “real” schools. In this chapter, I describe and analyze a whole-school system that implemented the principles of critical education in its daily routine, with a great deal of success. This experience is called the Citizen School project. The Citizen School project was an educational initiative of the municipal government of Porto Alegre, the largest city in southern Brazil, with a population of approximately 1.4 million. In 1989, a coalition of leftwing parties (the Popular Administration), under the leadership of the Workers’ Party, won the municipal elections and started a new plan for the city. The basic premise was a radical idea of democracy, one that entailed a real involvement of the citizens in the governance of the city. In order to materialize such a complex ideal, the Popular Administration envisioned several macro mechanisms in the city. One of these elements is the Citizen School which is a project of involving all the municipal schools of Porto Alegre in a radical idea of education for citizenship. Fighting against the idea of an individualized citizen, the Citizen School claims that the whole educational institution has to embody citizenship. The Workers’ Party was re-elected three consecutive times, thus giving it and its policies even greater legitimacy. Despite the recent electoral loss that replaced the Workers’ Party in 2005, after 16 years in the municipal administration, the fact that the winning coalition of parties (a centrist alliance) was elected promising not to change the major set of policies implemented by Workers’ Party clearly means that these policies are already organic to the life of Porto Alegre. In what follows, I present some of the principles of critical education that guided this experience and describe and analyze the implementation of these principles in the municipal schools of Porto Alegre. Finally, I offer some concluding thoughts on the need to constantly recreate critical education. Critical Education Although it does not mention his work often and explicitly, the Citizen School project closely follows the ideas of Paulo Freire. Freire sometimes refers to the principles of critical education as “liberating education” because he is interested in going beyond the moment of critique;
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Page 342 his whole theory is deeply connected with the ultimate goal of impacting and transforming not only education but society as a whole. Freire talks about liberating education as one that assumes its political character. For him, the process of education always has to address the following questions: “which content should be taught, to whom, in favor of whom, against what, against whom, how to teach, what is the participation of students, parents, teachers, and popular movements in the discussion of what should be taught?” (Freire, 1991, p. 45). According to Freire, these are questions that have to be asked and dealt with by everyone involved in education. By doing this, school administrators and teachers can overcome the hegemonic educational practice of merely transmitting subject matter without questioning its content. It should be clear that Freire’s conception of education views the need for transformation as one that goes beyond a mere incorporation of new methodological techniques. According to Freire, this demands a new relation with knowledge—understanding it as a social construction—and with society— understanding the need for a criticism that goes beyond the walls of the school. More concretely, Freire proposes a conception of education that draws us “into the intimacy of the society, the raison d’être of every object of study” (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 13). A question directly linked with the dilemmas faced by the Citizen School is Freire’s insistence on the need to establish a balance between teaching the so-called traditional knowledge, and actively taking into consideration the knowledge gained from the experience that students bring to the schools. As Freire says, “[I]t is essential that the school, while turning itself in a more competent space, become more humble … and incorporate popular methods of knowing” (Freire, 1991, p. 45). Giving the example of language, Freire argues that the practice of teaching the “official” language and simultaneously stigmatizing the language of the students from popular classes is unfair and antidemocratic. Helping to clarify a misunderstanding of his theorization, he insists that the official language should be taught to students of popular classes. Freire asserts that it should be clear that these students should “learn the official language—which is their right—not because their language is ugly or inferior, but because by dominating the so-called official language, they would gain tools for their struggle for the needed reinvention of the world” (Freire, 1991, p. 46). Freire’s work is not naive and acknowledges the obstacles and the need for constant mobilization if hope and liberation from unjust social structures are to be achieved. He seems to fully understand Williams’ claim that “we must speak for hope, as long it doesn’t mean suppressing the nature of the danger” (Williams, 1989, p. 322). Freire’s particular combination of both being aware of the “danger,” the obstacles (both internal and external), and the strength of the hegemonic forces while reaffirming the role of hope in social transformation, seems to provide a very important role to evaluate the project of educational transformation proposed by the Popular Administration in Porto Alegre and to assess it as a materialization of critical education. Freire insists on an “active” hope, a kind of hope that feeds and is fed by concrete steps towards the transformation of society. Hope of liberation does not mean liberation already. It is necessary to fight for it, within historically favorable conditions. If they do not exist, we must hopefully labor to create them. Liberation is a possibility, not fate nor destiny nor burden. In this context, one can realize the importance of education for decision, for rupture, for choice, for ethics at last. (Freire, 1997, p. 44) The ones that have this kind of hope do not sit still and wait for the changes to come. They know that the society and the relations that they hope for will not be achieved as a result of the “natural” course of events.
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Page 343 A new language of hope, one filled with nuances, is apparently being created by teachers and students in the municipal schools of Porto Alegre. They are the ones forging the alternative in their daily life inside the schools; they are the ones proving that there is no discourse (be it from neoliberalism or from teleological “progressive” vanguardism) that can fully define and constrict the human experience, and that there is always space for human agency. In order to understand the kinds of transformations that are going on in Porto Alegre and to relate it to critical education, I want to characterize the nature of the practices. Are this transformation and this hope taking place in the gaps of a neoliberal or hybrid hegemonic arena, having the agenda set by this arena, or does this transformation represent the constitution of a new alternative space? I do not want to claim that a new space where alternatives are constructed is totally autonomous, but I do want to claim, with Freire, that there is a difference between mere resistance and construction of the new alternative. In Freire’s words: merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient [to radical transformation of society]. It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position of not only denouncing injustice but announcing a new utopia. (Freire, 1998b, p. 74) As will become clear in this chapter, the Citizen School project represents a real alternative, one that proposes real changes in the way education is structured in Brazil. Because of this, it is a concrete example of what critical education can look like when implemented in a school system. Recreating Critical Education in the Schools of Porto Alegre The Citizen School project proposed a radical democratization of three items: access to schools, governance, and knowledge. This was the result of an 18-month process of local meetings that resulted in a Constituent Assembly that decided on these principles. Describing and analyzing the whole experience of the Citizen School project in the municipal schools of Porto Alegre is something that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, I will describe and analyze, more specifically, the proposal of democratizing knowledge. For this purpose, I examine the new school configuration, the problematization of official knowledge in the municipal schools, and what democratization of knowledge means to the way curriculum is organized in the Citizen Schools. The New School Configuration In order to democratize the access to the school and to the knowledge, the Municipal Department of Education (SMED), under the leadership of the Workers’ Party, started, in 1995, to propose a new organization for the municipal schools. Instead of keeping the traditional structure of grades with the duration of one year (1st to 8th in the elementary and middle education), the idea was to adopt a new structure called Cycles of Formation. It is important to note that the idea of reorganizing the curriculum and the space-time of the schools in cycles instead of grades does not originate from Porto Alegre; it is an idea that was implemented in Belo Horizonte, another city governed by the Workers’ Party, and was being implemented in other countries—such as Spain and Portugal—and actually would be listed, in the national law, as one of the possible alternatives for school configuration in Brazil. So, what the Citizen School was implementing was not new per se, but a new configuration that, according to the SMED, would offer a substantially better opportunity for dealing with the need for democratization of access and knowledge.
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Page 344 The administrators at the Secretariat were convinced that the issue of access to schools could be dealt with in a much better way using cycles. According to the SMED, “the cycle structure offers a better way of dealing seriously with student failure, because its educational perspective respects, understands, and investigates the socio-cognitive processes that the students go through” (SMED, 1999, p. 11). The idea is that by using a different conception of learning/time, the Citizen School would not punish students for being “slow” in their process of learning. In this new configuration, the traditional deadline—the end of each academic year—when the students had to “prove” that they had “learned,” was eliminated in favor of a different time organization. The democratization of knowledge was also addressed by the adoption of the cycles: “the cycles of formation contribute to the respect of the rhythm, the timing, and the experiences of each student, enhancing the collective organization and interdisciplinarity in the schools” (SMED, 1999, p. 10). The establishment of the cycles was a conscious attempt to eliminate the mechanisms in schools that perpetuate exclusion, failure, and dropouts, as well as the blaming of the victim that accompanies these. How do the cycles of formation actually work in the Citizen School? The schools now have three cycles of three years each, something that adds one year to the fundamental education (one year of early childhood education inside the schools, expanding fundamental education to nine years). This makes the municipal schools responsible for the education of kids from 6 to 14 years old. The three cycles are organized based on the cycles of life: each one corresponds to one phase of development, i.e., childhood, pre-adolescence, and adolescence. The idea is to group together students of the same age in each of the years of the three cycles. This aims at changing the reality in the majority of public schools that cater to popular classes in Brazil and the one the SMED was faced with when the Popular Administration started to govern the city: students with multiple failures inside classrooms intended for much younger children. Through organizing the education by age, having students of the same age in the same year of the cycle, the SMED claims to re-motivate the kids who have failed multiple times and to fight against the commonsense idea that there are prerequisites to be learned without which it is impossible to apprehend the forms of knowledge next in line. As one of the Secretaries of Education says, the institution using the cycles of formation is: the redesigned school, with space and time that are geared towards the development of the students. Children and adolescents are beings in permanent development that should not be ruled by the school calendar or the school year. … The school using the cycles of formation sees learning as a process in which preparatory periods or steps do not exist; instead there is a permanent process of development. Instead of punishing the student because he/she did not learn, the Citizen School aims at valorizing the already acquired knowledge. (Azevedo, 2000, p. 129) In the schools using these cycles, students progress from one year to another within one cycle; the notion of “failure” is eliminated. Despite this victory, the SMED understood that the elimination of mechanisms of exclusion was not enough to achieve the goal of democratization of knowledge. Because of this, the Citizen School created several mechanisms that aim at guaranteeing the inclusion of students. It established Progression Groups for the students that have discrepancies between their age and what they have learned. The idea is to provide these students who have experienced multiple failures in the past with a stimulating and challenging environment where they can learn at their own pace and fill the gaps in their academic formation that exist because of the multiple failures they experienced. Furthermore, the Progression Groups are also a space for the students who come from other school systems (from other city or state schools, for example) and have experienced multiple failures to be given more close
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Page 345 attention so that they are ultimately integrated into the cycles, according to their age. The idea here is that the school has to change its structure to adapt to the students, and not the reverse, which has been historically the case (Souza et al., 1999, pp. 24–25). This idea of constructing a new structure to better respond to students’ needs led to the creation of another entity: the “learning laboratory.” This is a space where students with more serious learning problems get individual attention, but also a place where teachers conduct research in order to improve the quality of the regular classes. This is a place where teachers learn how students learn. For the students with special needs, there are the Integration and Resources Rooms, which “are specially designed spaces to investigate and assist students who have special needs and require complementary and specific pedagogic work for their integration and for overcoming their learning difficulties” (SMED, 1999, p. 50). Transforming “Official” Knowledge Curriculum transformation is a crucial part of Porto Alegre’s project to build “thick democracy.” It is important to start by saying that this dimension is not limited to access to traditional school knowledge. The Citizen School project constructed a new epistemological understanding about what counts as knowledge as well. This new understanding of curriculum is not based on a mere incorporation of new knowledge within the margins of an intact “core of humankind’s wisdom,” but a radical transformation. The Citizen School project goes beyond the mere episodic mentioning of cultural manifestations or class, racial, sexual, and gender-based oppression. It includes these themes as an essential part of the process of construction of knowledge. In the Citizen School, the notion of “core” and “periphery” in knowledge is made problematic. The starting point for the construction of curricular knowledge is the culture(s) of the communities themselves, not only in terms of content, but in terms of perspective as well. The whole educational process is aimed at inverting previous priorities and serving the historically oppressed and excluded groups. The starting point for this new process of knowledge construction is the idea of “thematic complexes”. This organization of the curriculum is a way of having the whole school working on a central generative theme, from which the disciplines and areas of knowledge, in an interdisciplinary effort, will structure the focus of their content. The schools were encouraged to follow steps for the construction of the thematic complex and for the translation of the macro discussions into curriculum. Through research (a process performed by teachers in the communities where the schools are situated), the themes that interest and/or concern the community are gathered. After this process of gathering the statements of the members of the community, teachers follow a set of criteria (defined by them) to select the most significant themes that can be extracted from these statements. The most significant statements will be selected by the collective of teachers participating in discussions specifically allocated for this and which will guide the construction of the thematic complex. SMED’s texts explaining the idea of the thematic complex emphasize that the disciplines or areas of knowledge are not all collapsed in all the levels of the curriculum; what happens is that all knowledge areas become subordinate to a global idea, to a thematic core that is rather complex because it represents the center of the preoccupations and/or interests of the community where the school is situated. All the areas or, in fact, the entire school, are guided by the discussion and problematization around the thematic complex. This thematic complex provides the whole school with a central focus that guides the curriculum of that school for a period of time that can be one semester or an entire academic year. After having determined the principles, the larger contribution of each knowledge area for the discussion of the thematic complex, and the conceptual matrix—a web of concepts from the knowledge area, rather than isolated facts or information that the teachers understand are essential to use when dealing with the thematic complex—the teachers have meetings organized
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Page 346 by their knowledge areas and by each year in the cycles, to elaborate and plan the curriculum. As the SMED explains, this plan aims at: making the principles and the conceptual matrixes concrete in order to generate a comprehension of the thematic complex. This is a moment where each knowledge area has to answer questions as “why,” “for what” and “how” this area belongs in the planning. Therefore, not every content or methodology, among all the historically accumulated in that area, is appropriate for the specific curriculum that school is constructing; the educators will, in that specific thematic conjuncture, elaborate a plan that emanates from the thematic complex. (SMED, 1999, p. 23) Therefore, teachers have to “study” their own knowledge areas and elect the concepts that would help to problematize the thematic complex. They also have to work collectively with teachers of other areas in order to assemble a curriculum that is integrated and dense enough to simultaneously address the issues listed in the thematic complex. According to one of the “creators” of this conceptualization, in the context of the Citizen School project, “the thematic complex brings about the perception and comprehension of the reality and makes explicit the worldview that all the ones involved in the process have” (Rocha, as cited in SMED, 1999, p. 21). Rather than starting from the contribution of each discipline to the construction of knowledge, the thematic complex forces all teachers to step back and consider what the knowledge of their area can offer to better deal with the central issue elected to be the thematic complex. Because the thematic complex is closely related to social problems, the process makes teachers search for the relation of their discipline to social reality as a whole. Finally, because the starting point for the thematic complex is popular knowledge or common sense, teachers are also forced to think about the relation between official knowledge and this common sense. Therefore, this approach deals simultaneously with three problems of traditional education: the fragmentation of knowledge, the “apparent” neutrality of school content, and the absolute supremacy that traditional schools grant to scientific/erudite knowledge over local knowledge of the communities, especially very impoverished ones—as is the case in Porto Alegre. The Citizen School project conceives the organization of the curriculum around a thematic complex not only as a form of generating alternative knowledge inside the curriculum, but also as a form of political intervention. To teach using thematic complexes not only generates the possibility of selecting knowledge that is significant to students but also presents us with the perspective of having a tool for analysis that can help students to organize the world they live in, so that they can understand it and act upon it through a critical, conscious, and collective social practice. (Goroditch & Souza, 1999, p. 78) The traditional rigid disciplinary structure is broken and general interdisciplinary areas are created. These areas of study are given the names of social expression, biological, chemical and physical sciences, sociohistoric, and logic-mathematical. To give a concrete example of how this works, I now describe how the sociohistoric knowledge area proceeded, in one school of Porto Alegre, to organize its curriculum. After the phase of carrying out research in the community, the school elected “the quality of life in the favela” as its thematic complex. The sociohistoric knowledge area had to construct the principle of that area, i.e., the contribution of this area to deal with the elected thematic complex. This area expressed its possible contribution as “the individual and collective transformation of the citizen, in his/her time and space, recuperating his/her origins, aiming at improving the quality of life, taking into account the ideas of the community where this individual is situated.”
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Page 347 From the major thematic complex—the quality of life—three sub-themes were listed by the teachers in the sociohistoric area: rural exodus, social organization, and property. In the rural exodus sub-theme, the issues reflected the origin of the community—living now in a favela, but originally from the rural areas. This is a common story in the favelas where people who had nothing in the rural areas came to the cities only to find more exclusion. In this sub-theme, the issues discussed were migration movements, overpopulation of the cities, “disqualification” of the working force, and marginalization. In the sub-theme social organization, the issues were distributed in terms of temporal, political, spatial, and sociocultural relations. The issues, again, represent important questions in the organization of the community: the excessive and uncritical pragmatism of some in the neighborhood associations, the connections with the neighborhood associations and the Participatory Budgeting, and cultural issues such as religiosity, body expression, African origins, dance groups, and samba schools. In the third subtheme—property—the issues were directly linked to the situation of the families in the favela, living in illegal lots with no title, having to cope with the lack of running water, basic sanitation and other infrastructure problems, the history of this situation and of the struggles for lots legalization, and their rights (of having basic public goods in the neighborhood) and duties (of understanding the importance and the social function of taxation) as citizens. This example shows the real transformation that occurred in the curriculum of the schools in Porto Alegre. The students are not studying history or social and cultural studies through books that never address the real problems and interests they have. Through the organization in thematic complexes, the students learn history by beginning with the historical experience of their families. They study important social and cultural content by focusing on and valorizing their own cultural manifestations. A real shift occurred because the focus is not on the “core/official” knowledge organized around dominant class and race visions of the world, but on the real problems and interests of the students and the community. It is important to note that these students will ultimately still learn the history of Brazil and the world, including “high” culture, but these will be seen through different lenses. Their culture will not be forgotten in order for them to learn “high status” culture. Rather, by understanding their situation and their culture and valuing it, these students will be able to simultaneously learn and will have the chance to transform their situation of exclusion. By studying the problems (rural exodus, living in illegal lots, etc.) and not stopping there but studying the strengths of self-organization (in the Participatory Budgeting, in neighborhood associations, in cultural activities and groups), the Citizen School helps to construct alternatives for the communities living in terrible conditions. In this example it is possible to see the historic silence about race in Brazil being challenged. Bringing the African origins of the music (samba), of the religion (candomble), and openly discussing racist practices in Brazil, teachers and students are constructing critical knowledge and learning that the silences about oppression only help the reproduction of exclusion and racism. Thus, the Citizen School has embarked on a dual path. It has recognized the necessity of creating empowered channels where people can speak openly, but it also knows that, at the same time, one must unveil the meanings behind these voices, question their presuppositions, and construct new knowledge. Beginning from the insights of the community, it is necessary not to stop there, but rather to construct knowledge that fights discrimination, racism, and exclusion. This experience overcomes the limited forms of multiculturalism that usually are put in place in the curriculum offered to the excluded (Giroux, 1995; McLaren, 1995). This new model of where knowledge comes from aims at constructing a new form of “official knowledge” (Apple, 2000) by shifting the center of discussion to the lived experiences of the dispossessed. This shift on what is considered the core or the center of knowledge affects not only the pedagogical conception that guides the daily life in the classrooms; it also transforms how the school itself functions as a whole. This conception of knowledge now is spreading throughout the entire school system. The project not only serves the “excluded” by generating a different
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Page 348 formal education for students, but also serves them by creating an innovative structure that makes it possible for the community of those who have historically been excluded to regain their dignity (both material and symbolic). The Democratization of Knowledge Several interconnected elements shape the conception of knowledge within the Citizen School. In order to evaluate the degree by which the project has succeeded in democratizing knowledge, all of these elements must be examined. One element is the organization of the school in cycles of formation rather than traditional grades. As I showed before, there is a political conception of knowledge and learning behind the choice of radically changing the organization of the schools. What, however, is the impact of this new school configuration on the goal of democratization of knowledge? The first clear impact that the reorganization produced was the radical decrease in repetition rates among students. The decrease in repetition rates had a direct effect on the dropout rate as well. These numbers are clearly related to the notion of democratization of knowledge. The achievements are the result of the implementation of this new conception of knowledge, but, at the same time, they create the conditions for the establishment of this conception. Let me explain this reasoning. The majority of students who drop out are the ones who had multiple repetitions. By failing students multiple times, the traditional school sends them a clear message that they do not belong there, that they do not have the “skills” necessary for schooling. The traditionally structured school does not have mechanisms that force teachers and the school as a whole to deal with learning difficulties as a problem of the pedagogy, curriculum, or conception of knowledge. The traditional school is structured as to ascribe the blame for failure to the students.1 This tendency has been maximized by the strong influence of neoliberal policies in education: the goal of education is the output. The final product must be easily measured, and all efforts are concentrated on the students who can produce quantifiable results at the end of the process. As Gillborn and Youdell (2000) show, neoliberal reforms tend to put the pressure on teachers to invest only in the students who can produce a result that puts the school in a good position in the ranking. Because it avoids reducing all education to outcome (as the neoliberal-influenced reforms do), the Citizen School project creates a space to think about the process and forces the whole school to learn, with the students, to respect their learning pace. The very structure of the school changes in order to create an environment that does not blame the victim for the school’s failure, but examines the educational (and social) processes that led to that failure. This does not mean that there is a repsychologization of the learning process;2 the emphasis is on what counts as knowledge and the reorganization of the structure of the school. As members of the SMED say, however, “eliminating the repetition in our schools was a necessary step to guaranteeing the learning of all, but it is not enough” (Freitas et al., 2000, p. 490). Rather than only implementing a policy of “automatic progression,” the elimination of failure was only one of many measures, integrated in a whole new conception of schooling that involves a deep discussion of what is valued as knowledge and what is real democratization. Therefore, the lack of repetition does not mean the lack of evaluation and monitoring of the learning process of the students. In fact, in the case of the Citizen School these two elements are much more visible than in traditional schools in Brazil. Evaluation is done not through grades, but through written reports about the progress of the students. These reports are all assembled together with samples of the student’s work in order to compose a useful “snapshot” of his or her progress.
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Page 349 Although every student has the right to advance from one year to the next, there is a very close monitoring of the learning process of each student, and there are three different ways of progressing: simple progression, progression with a supporting didactic-pedagogic plan, and progression subject to a specialized evaluation. The simple progression is just what it says: the student advances to the next year. The progression with a supporting didactic-pedagogic plan means that the student still has difficulties of some sort, but, as opposed to the situation in traditional schools, he or she will not be barred from advancing to the next year. Instead, all of the teachers of that student will compose, based on the continuous evaluation of the student during the year, a plan that the student’s next teachers will receive. The student will then proceed to the next year with new teachers who are completely aware of his or her difficulties. This student, depending on the degree of the difficulties, will probably go to the learning laboratory where he or she will receive individual attention. Finally, the students who progress subject to a specialized evaluation are those with a unique difficulty that demands specialized attention from a psycho-pedagogue or a speech therapist. They have the right to proceed to the next year just like the other students, but they will receive special attention from the school in order to help them. All these evaluation procedures show that the nonretention policy of the Citizen School project is not an isolated measure, but part of a political-pedagogical project and a new conception of knowledge. Directly involved with the elimination of repetition are other major innovations in the configuration of the schools, such as grouping students of the same age in each year of the cycle and creating support groups for the students. The progression groups and the learning laboratories are spaces that break with the traditional idea of time in a school; the learning “time” of these spaces is the learning “time” of the particular students that participate in these spaces. The experience of receiving individualized attention to their learning difficulties is normally something only children from the higher social classes can afford in Brazil. The learning laboratories are publicly instituted tutoring that offer students in the municipal schools the same opportunities that students with learning difficulties in private schools enjoy. The students know this, and one of them told me that she does not think that she is “dumb” because she goes to the learning laboratory: My cousin was mocking me, calling me “dumb” because I go to the learning laboratory. I immediately told him: I am not dumb, quite the opposite. I have the opportunity to have what rich kids have: “private tutoring.” My advantage is that I do not have to pay. I am actually really smart to be taking this opportunity that will only help me with school. This student is aware of the lack of opportunities that students have in public schools in Brazil, and she expressed that she felt that, at least in school, she was having opportunities that only “rich kids” have. Both students and teachers were quick to respond to my question: are the ones who attend the learning laboratory looked down upon? One of the students was fast with an answer: Yes, some isolated kids make fun of the ones that go to the learning laboratory. But you know how kids are, don’t you? Actually, this thing of calling others dumb is nonsense. Some people have not learned as fast as the others or they have more difficulty in learning, but nobody is dumb. The chance of having the learning laboratory is something that we are all happy with. One of the teachers who work in the learning laboratory of the same school also confirmed the lack of stigmatization among those who attend it:
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Page 350 I do not see any student feeling bad about coming to the learning laboratory. They actually feel respected here, because we cater to their specific needs. Instead of not wanting to come, we have the opposite feeling: they do not want to leave. The encouragement that teachers received to be creative, the freedom and the support they had to conceive a curriculum adapted to a particular group of students, the investment of all the SMED in generating a personal involvement from every teacher in the process of learning, and a belief that all students can learn, are some of the reasons why the Citizen School changed the way knowledge is treated in the municipal schools of Porto Alegre. The common sense around “time” in education and around what qualifies as knowledge was directly affected by this process. There is, nevertheless, another mechanism created by the SMED that is directly connected with the democratization of knowledge: the thematic complex. The thematic complex is a methodological technique constructed in order to deal with a serious challenge. The problem that the Citizen School project creators were faced with was how simultaneously to value and work with the knowledge and culture of the community and to make the accumulated body of human knowledge available and accessible to the students. The question did not exactly end there, because the Citizen School project also wanted to help students (and teachers) to construct new knowledge in the process of dialogue between, and problematization of, local and official knowledge. For the Citizen School project, only knowledge that is emancipatory—that is, that helps the students to establish relations between phenomena, between their own lives and the larger social and natural context, between this information and that—is knowledge worth pursuing in schools. Nevertheless, the Citizen School project does not claim that the schools should abandon traditional school knowledge. The creators of the Citizen School project know that this knowledge is absolutely necessary for the advancement of the students in the school system. They also insist that the students who attend the municipal schools should not be denied the “accumulated knowledge of humankind.” There are several educational programs for poor students that end up offering them a “poor” education, claiming that they will not need better education because they will end up in jobs that only require basic skills. This is something that the Citizen School strongly fights against in its programs with teachers. It is necessary to break with the dominant cultural models that say that students who live in favelas have deficits because they are poor (Paes da Silva & Vasconcelos, 1997). Part of this effort is the research in the communities, an essential part of the thematic complex. As the special adviser to one of the Secretaries of Education during the tenure of the Popular Administration would say: The research in the community is one of the strongest mechanisms that we have for the formation of teachers. This is the space where teachers are faced with the reality of where the students live and have to train their ears to learn to listen to the community. This is a pedagogical process for teachers, essential in our conception of education. This signifies that there was an active work to counter the dominant cultural model not only through lectures (an essential part of this in-service formation), but also through the practice of the school. While insisting that students from the favelas should have access to the same quality of education that wealthier students have in Brazil (and, as I described above, the material conditions that the schools offer for these students are, in fact, similar to the ones that some lower-middle-class students have in some of the private schools), the Citizen School also wants to problematize the notion that the knowledge offered to these students should not be scrutinized and criticized.
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Page 351 The Citizen School project argues that the students should produce, in the schools, knowledge that is scientific. But the notion of science that the Citizen School wants to produce is one highly influenced by Freire, who opposed the positivist tradition in science. Aronowitz does a very good job of summarizing this conception of science in Freire. Educational formation becomes “scientific” when the learner grasps the link between theory and practice through a process whose assumption is that the individual is, in every respect, “unfinished.” The accomplishment of critical consciousness consists in the first place in the learner’s capacity to situate herself in her own historicity, for example, to grasp the class, race, and sexual aspects of education and social formation and to understand the complexity of the relations that have produced this situation. Such an accomplishment entails a critical examination of the received wisdom, not as a storehouse of eternal truths but as itself situated in its own historicity. … Thus, the active knower, not the mind as the repository of “information,” is the goal of education. (Aronowitz, 1998, p. 14) In this sense, the Citizen School produces a highly specialized form of scientific knowledge in its schools, because the students are able to learn about themselves as a starting point for learning about the world. As I said before, the students do not have to forget their own culture to build scientific knowledge. In this conception of science, only those who are able to understand their own culture and even problematize it are prepared to construct knowledge that can change the world. The notion of science proposed by the Citizen School represents a way for students to construct knowledge about their communities that can advance their intellectual ability to understand their history and their present simultaneously. Those who are able to read the world, as Freire would say, are constructing a new conception of knowledge that is emancipating. Creating the “knower” (to use Aronowitz’s expression), however, is also a way of producing academic achievement. Those who can think for themselves and draw relations among concepts (not only isolated information) will perform well in the school. This new notion of science has other implications as well. To work with the knowledge of the communities is to use common sense as one of the sources of knowledge. One of the pedagogical coordinators, in her Master’s thesis about conscientization in Freire (turned into a book), discusses, based on the work of Santos (1989), the need for a “double epistemological rupture” while dealing with common sense. In her thesis, she includes a quotation from Santos which explains his position: the double epistemological rupture represents a work of transforming both common sense and science. While the first rupture is essential to the constitution of science—something that does not change common sense as it was before science—the second rupture transforms common sense based on science. With this double rupture the goal is to achieve an enlightened common sense and a prudent science …, a configuration of knowledge that being practical is still enlightened and being wise is still democratically distributed. (Santos, as cited in Freitas, 2001, p. 41) Freitas connects this double epistemological rupture proposed by Santos with Freire’s idea of starting from the viewpoint of the students, but not ending there, in the construction of knowledge. She says that Santos’ theorization when read together with Freire helps to “overcome the dichotomy between scientific knowledge and common sense in the construction of a liberating knowledge that transforms both of them” (Freitas, 2001, p. 41).
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Page 352 This is a notion that can help the municipal schools in Porto Alegre to use traditional school knowledge with the students but not simply teach it as if it were neutral. Santos and Freire contribute to the understanding of the need to be critical of such knowledge and not act as if there were some “stock of knowledge out there, not problematic at all, about which there is a general accord” (Silva & McLaren, 1993, p. 43). This understanding is something that the work of Michael Apple3 (who has worked with the SMED and with the teachers in Porto Alegre) pertaining to curriculum, ideology, and power since the 1970s, has helped to consolidate. Moreover, the notion of common sense is a very sophisticated one, one that overcomes the simplification of considering it simply part of “false consciousness,” and to see this position defended by one of the leaders of the SMED is a good indication of at least one of the positions inside the secretariat. This position seems to be able to foster a real dialogue between the knowledge of the communities and traditional school knowledge; this is a dialogue that does not reduce one to the other but establishes a dialogue to overcome the limitations of both. The fact that this is one of the visions being discussed with teachers when they are constructing the thematic complex can be pointed out as a very positive aspect. The epistemological rupture that plays such a major role in the Citizen School is a sign that the project is being successful in the construction of critical education that is a real progressive alternative in education. The challenge to what counts as knowledge, to what counts as core and periphery, represents the essence of the democratization of knowledge. Instead of creating isolated multicultural programs or content that has little efficacy in the context of a largely dominant whole structure, the Citizen School project has been creating a structure, with popular participation, in which the question of diversity of cultures has space to flourish. The Citizen School created spaces where multicultural practices are organically integrated, not merely added superficially to a bureaucratically determined structure that is averse to “difference.” To construct a powerful and democratic set of multicultural experiences, the whole institutional structure was changed. In this sense, the Citizen School advances in relation to the “mainstream” notion of multiculturalism. In fact, “multiculturalism is too easily depoliticized” (Pagenhart, 1994, p. 178). It is exactly this depoliticization that the Popular Administration wants to avoid. The project seems perfectly to fit what Giroux calls an “insurgent multiculturalism,” one where “all participants play a formative role in crucial decisions about what is taught, who is hired, and how the school can become a laboratory for learning that nurtures critical citizenship and civic courage” (Giroux, 1995, pp. 340–341). Final Thoughts The Citizen School project provides a clear example of what can be done when the principles of critical education are seriously applied to a school system. It is a very precise example of teachers, administrators, community members, and students that were not paralyzed by fear of putting into practice the principles of critical education and, in this process, taught us all a great lesson about what can be achieved when these principles are the driving force behind the political and educational actions in schools. At the same time, the Citizen School project shows us how critical education has the commitment of being more than a mere exercise of intellectual recreation of curriculum. The experience in Porto Alegre teaches us that critical education demands a political commitment that goes beyond the problematization of knowledge transferring, for example. It requires new practices and new structures that open spaces for a transformed and democratic educational system. By putting critical education into practice in such a radical way (one that goes to the root of the political/educational worldview), the Citizen School recreates critical education and shows its real potential.
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Page 353 Notes 1 For a summary of the studies that examine, in Brazil, this blaming of students for their failures and the consequences, see Boruchovitch, 1999. 2 See the risks of the re-psychologization of education in Silva (1998) and Walkerdine (1984). 3 See Apple, 1979, 1982 for his first contributions around this question. References Apple, M. W. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1982). Education and power. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (2000). Official knowledge (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Aronowitz, S. (1998). Introduction. In P. Freire, Pedagogy of freedom (pp. 1–19) . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Azevedo, J. C. (2000). Escola Cidadã. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes. Boruchovitch, E. (1999). Estratégias de aprendizagem e desempenho escolar. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 12 (2). Retrieved January 24, 2002, from http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid= S0102–79721999000200008&lng=pt&nrm=iso Freire, P. (1991). A educação na cidade . São Paulo, Brazil: Cortez. Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998a). Teachers as cultural workers. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Freire, P. (1998b). Pedagogy of freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freitas, A. L. S. (2001). Pedagogia da conscientização . Porto Alegre, Brazil: EDIPUCRS. Freitas, A. L. S., Eckhardt, C. A., Gorodicht, C., Panichi, M. T., Fernandes, R. C., & Santos Jr., F. D. (2000). Escola Cidadã. In J. C. Azevedo, P. Gentili, A. Krug, & C. Simon, Utopia e democracia na educação cidadã (pp. 489–493). Porto Alegre, Brazil: Editora da UFRGS. Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Giroux, H. (1995). Insurgent multiculturalism and the promise of pedagogy. In D. T. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism (pp. 325–343). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Goroditch, C., & Souza, M. C. (1999). Complexo Temático. In L. H. Silva (Ed.), Escola Cidadã (pp. 76– 84). Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes. McLaren, P. (1995). White terror and oppositional agency. In D. T. Goldberg (Ed.), Multiculturalism (pp. 45–74). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Paes da Silva, I., & Vasconcelos, M. (1997). Questões raciais e educação. In S. Kramer (Ed.), Educação infantil em curso (pp. 38–66). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Escola de Professores. Pagenhart, P. (1994). Queerly defined multiculturalism. In L. Garber (Ed.), Tilting the tower (pp. 177– 185). New York: Routledge. Santos, B. S. (1989). Introdução a uma ciência pós-moderna. Porto, Portugal: Afrontamento. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation . Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Silva, T. T. (1998). As pedagogias psi e o governo do eu. In T. T. Silva (Ed.), Liberdades reguladas (pp. 7–13). Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes. Silva, T. T., & McLaren, P. (1993). Knowledge under siege: The Brazilian debate. In P. McLaren & P. Leonard (Eds.), Paulo Freire (pp. 36–46). New York: Routledge. SMED. (1999). Ciclos de formação. Cadernos Pedagogicos, 9(1), 1–111. Souza, D. H., Mogetti, E. A., Villani, M., Panichi, M. T. C., Rossetto, R. P., & Huerga, S. M. R. (1999). Turma de progressão e seu significado na escola. In S. Rocha & B. D. Nery, Turma de progressão (pp. 22–29). Porto Alegre, Brazil: SMED. Walkerdine, V. (1984). Developmental psychology and child-centered pedagogy. In J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject (pp. 153–202). London: Methuen. Williams, R. (1989). Resources of hope. London: Verso.
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Page 354 26 Progressive Struggle and Critical Education Scholarship in Japan Toward the Democratization of Critical Education Studies1 Keita Takayama Introduction This chapter presents an overview of progressive struggle and critical scholarship in Japanese education. In so doing, I focus on the Western influence in the development of Japanese critical education and practice. This focus on the transnational flow of influence in progressive politics and theory is important to recognize but has been understudied in critical education scholarship. Progressive activists in different parts of the world are in constant dialogue with each other in developing their practice and scholarship. This deserves serious attention, particularly when remarkably similar conservative political movements attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of public education in many parts of the world (Apple, 2006a; Takayama & Apple, 2008; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998), and thus when global progressive coalitions against the rightist restructuring of public education are needed more than ever. Recognizing transnational exchanges of progressive ideas and theories, or “borrowing from below” (Coates in Lipman, 2004, p. 183), is one way to explore developing international coalitions of progressive movements in education. Furthermore, a focus on the international flow of ideas is particularly important to the discussion of Japanese critical education. Japanese education scholars, the media, state officials, and progressive educators have relied on the West in intellectual development in general as well as in educational policy in particular (Cummings, 1986; Ichikawa, 1984).2 Hence, an attempt to review the development of Japanese critical education necessarily demands a close examination of the role of transnational borrowing in their development. Central to this examination is the process of local mediation and recontextualization (Ball, 1998; Hashimoto, 2003). This is important in order not to simplistically endorse the theories of global homogenization of critical education discourse which reinforce the problematic notion of globalization as “a process without a subject” (Dale & Robertson, 2002, p. 11). As the subsequent review shall demonstrate, Japanese critical educators and scholars as active agents sought practices and theories primarily from the West and reinterpreted (sometimes misinterpreted) and recontextualized them to make them suit the specific domestic contexts and their particular needs. I begin this chapter by discussing the struggle of “minoritized” population in seeking social justice through critical pedagogic actions.3 I particularly focus on burakumin—descendants of the premodern social outcaste—and ethnic Koreans to discuss the rich tradition of the Japanese version of critical pedagogy, which has been hardly introduced to English-language scholarship. Then, I discuss the development of Japanese critical education scholarship that is closely connected with
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Page 355 the progressive struggles in schools.4 In addition, this chapter pursues a larger conceptual and political agenda. I use this review of Japanese progressive politics in education to critique the dominant Western critical scholarship, calling for the further democratization of knowledge production in the field. As discussed above, a close attention to domestic mediation and recontextualization is important in recognizing the agentic work on the “receiving end.” However, this discussion of local agency must be situated in the overwhelmingly lopsided direction of intellectual influence from Euro-American critical scholarship to non-Western counterparts in social science in general and in education in particular (Alatas, 2003; Canagarajah, 2002; Kang, 2006; Lie, 1996; Parekh, 1992). As I review the Japanese critical pedagogic action and critical education scholarship, I identify the unequal division of intellectual labor, or what Syed Farid Alatas (2003) calls “academic neocolonialism” in critical education scholarship. I conclude by calling for more concerned efforts by Euro-American critical scholarship and Japanese counterparts to rectify the neocolonial relationship, a problematic condition also seen in many other academically and culturally marginalized nations’ critical scholarship in education. Lastly, the chapter challenges the dominant discourse of Japanese education in Anglo-American scholarship, which has been shaped by the following two approaches (see Nozaki, Openshaw, & Luke, 2005, p. 1). First, it has been dominated by a depoliticized analysis of teaching, learning, curriculum, and policy that often uncritically accepts the “official” narrative and overemphasizes the “consensus” and “harmony” in Japanese education (Horio, 1988; Okano & Tsuchiya, 1999). In so doing, the field has long dismissed the voices of Japanese progressive activists and critical scholars whom it considers as “biased.” Second, the Anglo-American literature has failed to critically engage with the Orientalist binary paradigm whereby Japanese education is defined as “exotic” or “exceptional.” This is particularly seen in the continuing insistence of many “experts” of Japanese education that Japanese education reform from the 1990s onward is moving in the “opposite” direction from the quasi-market Anglo-American education reform. They perceive Japanese education as an “exception” to the global restructuring movement in education, downplaying the serious warning among Japanese critical scholars and activists about the increasing encroachment of economic rationalism and corporate managerialism in education policies (see Takayama, 2008a, 2008b). Given the space limitation, the chapter cannot provide the comprehensive review of the Japanese progressive voices but aims to capture some of those that have long been silenced in the Anglo-American studies of Japanese education but deserve serious scholarly attention. Japanese Critical Pedagogy in Action Paulo Freire was the most influential voice in the international dissemination of critical pedagogy (Apple, Au, & Gandin, this volume), and Japanese critical educators and scholars sought out theoretical and political inspirations in his work. Some familiarized themselves with his work even before the Japanese translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed came out (Kusuhara, 1979, p. 323). However, it is important to emphasize that the Japanese tradition of critical pedagogy had been under way prior to the introduction of his work to Japanese educators and activists. Buraku(min)’s Social Movement and Educational Struggle The struggle of the buraku population has played a crucial role in the development of the Japanese version of critical pedagogy.5 The burakumin ( buraku people) have the longest history of struggle, dating back to the late nineteenth century, for economic redistribution and cultural recognition, both in and outside schools. Their liberation movement culminated in the historic formation of the National Federation of Buraku Liberation ( zenkoku suiheisha ) in 1912, its postwar version,
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Page 356 the National Association for Buraku Liberation ( buraku kaiho zenkoku iinkai ) in 1946, and the Buraku Liberation League ( buraku kaiho domei ) in 1955. The ground-up social movement represented by these organizations rejected the state’s approach to buraku discrimination which sought the solution in changing buraku and non-buraku citizens’ attitudes rather than challenging the systemic and structural nature of buraku discrimination (Mori, 1987, p. 89). The Buraku Liberation League led intense mass mobilization across the nation for the state’s support for eliminating discrimination and improving their living conditions. Their effort culminated in the landmark creation of the affirmative action law ( dowa taisaku jigyo tokubetsu sochi ho) which was designed to improve living conditions, social welfare, industrial development, employment, education, and human rights activity in buraku communities (Sowa, 2000, p. 69). The buraku activism and social movements were in no way a purely national phenomenon but, whether directly or indirectly, connected with the larger international people’s movement of the time, particularly drawing considerable inspiration from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Struggle in education has been central to the buraku liberation movement. Buraku activists and educators established the National Research Council for Dowa Education ( zenkoku dowa kyoiku kenkyu kyogikai ) in 1953 which has thereafter served as the central venue where educators collectively developed the following unique pedagogic strategies to prepare children to become the agents of social change. Students’ self-proclamation of buraku identity, or “coming out” ( burakumi sengen), usually takes place at the beginning of a school year. It speaks to the fact that unlike children of oppressed groups in Anglo-American nations, buraku children are not visibly different from other mainstream Japanese children. Hence, educators encourage buraku children to “come out” and design curriculum for the whole classroom to collectively come to terms with the reality of buraku discrimination and to develop ways to change the oppressive status quo. Crucial to the success of this coming out practice is the development of close-knit classroom community through collective (group-oriented) teaching strategies ( shudan kyoiku ). Based on the concept of “one for all and all for one” (Ogawa, 1966, p. 40; Yano, 1990), teachers use a group-focused approach to teaching, and design a learning environment where children closely collaborate with each other in all aspects of school life, ranging from daily classroom routine, learning activities, to other extracurricular school events. The focus of this approach is on those children who struggle both in school and in life outside school. Teachers carefully design children’s learning experience in a manner that develops their profound personal commitment to each other’s wellbeing (Yano, 1990).6 Learning through interviews with critical individuals in buraku communities ( kikitori gakushu ) is another noteworthy practice through which students learn how people in their communities struggle for changes. Lastly, through journaling and dialoguing about their daily lives ( seikatsu tuzuri katari ) with peers and teachers, children learn to see their individual struggles at home and school as social and structural problems and thus come to realize the needs for collective action (Mori, 1987, 1990; Ogawa, 1966). These pedagogical practices are designed to raise buraku children’s “self-consciousness of social position” ( shakaiteki tachiba no jikaku ).7 The concept addresses the three central goals of buraku liberation education: children become conscious (1) of their own social positions within the larger discriminatory structure; (2) that only through struggle do they gain human dignity and liberation from the oppression; and (3) that complete liberation only comes with their solidarity with other buraku members and labor movements (Mori, 1990, p. 198). Furthermore, these practices led buraku activists to develop the counter-hegemonic notion of “scholastic achievement for liberation” ( kaiho no gakuryoku ). The notion challenges the competitive and individualistic conception of scholastic achievement dominant in schools that removes buraku children from the collective commitment to their liberation.8 These educational interventions were pursued along with the larger social movement to demand the state to address the socioeconomic redistribution
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Page 357 issues. Though the educational achievement gap between buraku and non-buraku children—though significantly narrowed—still exists today (Nabeshima, 1997, 2004), buraku activists succeeded in realizing many tangible improvements in their educational opportunities as well as other living conditions. Buraku ’s educational struggle showcases the centrality of a larger social movement in addressing educational injustice (see also Anyon, 2005; Apple, 2006a). In recent years, buraku activists and scholars have engaged in a self-reflexive process to identify the shortcomings of their education movement. One of the limitations of the movement is the notion of “scholastic achievement for liberation” discussed earlier. Buraku activists and educators tend to define it in opposition to the individualistic scholastic achievement that dominates mainstream school culture. Ironically, the excessive emphasis on the collective form of scholastic achievement runs the risk of further disadvantaging buraku children in academic competitions (Shimizu, 1997, pp. 37, 40). In a similar manner that oppressed communities in the United States demand that their children learn the dominant culture and knowledge to be successful in mainstream society (see Delpit, 1995), buraku parents rejected the artificial binary between mainstream and liberatory scholastic achievement. The challenge for buraku educators is to prepare children to become “bi-discoursal,” enabling children to succeed in dominant scholastic competition, while nurturing their critical engagement with the competitive individualism and hence keeping their collective commitment alive. As James Gee points out, bi-discoursal students, those who master hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses, are the ultimate source of social change (Gee, 1996, p. 138; see also Delpit, 1995). Another ironic shortcoming of buraku educational struggle results from its rejection of the racialization of buraku. Discrimination against buraku was partly perpetuated by the popular perception of them as a “racially” distinctive group of people, different from mainstream Japanese.9 This racializing discourse was appropriated to legitimize both the institutionalized and more popular forms of discrimination against burakumin since the late nineteenth century. In response, buraku activists asserted their essential Japaneseness as a primary strategy to challenge the social stigmatization (Lie, 2004, p. 122). This has contributed to the unfortunate perpetuation of a Japanese racial homogeneity myth, the removal of politics of recognition from the buraku educational movement (Ikeda, 1993, p. 94), and buraku activist educators’ relative neglect to address discrimination faced by ethnic Korean and other racialized students (Nakajima, 1996, p. 132). It was this shortcoming of the movement that needed to be addressed in order for the movement to become more inclusive of other minoritized populations’ struggle in education. Towards More Inclusive Educational Struggle From the 1970s onward, buraku activists renamed their educational activism “liberation education” ( kaiho kyoiku ). The appropriation of the more inclusive language aimed to mark the shift in buraku politics towards addressing multiple forms of discrimination not just against buraku children but also children with disabilities, women, and other oppressed groups such as ethnic Korean, ethnic Chinese, the Indigenous Ainu-Japanese, and Indigenous Okinawan-Japanese children. Furthermore, since the 1994 United Nations declaration of human rights education, liberation education ( kaiho kyoiku ) was subsumed under the name of “education for human rights” ( jinken kyoiku ). While some are concerned about the dilution of the radical impulse of the buraku’s earlier educational intervention, “education for human rights” continues to inherit the critical politics of the buraku liberation movement, aspiring to address multiple forms of oppression both in cultural and economic terms (Nagao, 2002, p. 12; Nagao, 2005, p. 94; Sowa, 2000, pp. 57–58). Buraku ’s history of educational struggle and their pedagogical practices had major implications for other minoritized populations’ struggle in education. Contrary to the common Orientalist myth that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation, the country includes a sizable number of
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Page 358 minoritized populations such as ethnic Korean, Chinese, the Indigenous Ainu and Okinawans, and the recent migrant workers primarily from Latin American nations (Lie, 2001). The histories of these communities’ struggles for recognition and redistribution are inseparable from Japan’s history of colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the contemporary capitalist exploitation of international migrant labor. Their identities have long been suppressed through the Japanese state’s assimilation policy in education which has been guided by the nation’s ideology of racial homogeneity. In opposition, many of these groups inherited buraku pedagogical practices to address the specific form of oppressions that each group experienced, and perceived struggle in education as crucial to realizing justice both in economic and cultural terms (Nakajima, 1996, p. 131). The largest ethnic community in the nation, ethnic Koreans, has a long history of discrimination and struggle.10 There were 2.37 million ethnic Koreans (1% of the total Japanese population at the time) in the immediate aftermath of World War II—many of whom were brought to Japan as forced laborers during the war (Kow, 1996, p. 84). After the war, political instabilities in the Korean peninsula forced many ethnic Koreans to be settled in Japan and they quickly established their own educational system throughout the nation.11 Despite consistent attempts both by the U.S. occupation and the Japanese state to close down their schools in the early postwar period (Inokuchi, 2000; Ozawa, 1973), their desire to establish their own schools persevered. With the primary mission of developing Korean children’s ethnic identity and linguistic heritage, today there exist approximately 70 kindergarten, junior high, and senior high schools, and one university across the nation. However, the Japanese state refuses to recognize these schools as legitimate educational institutions and thus refuses to provide educational subsidies to these schools.12 Furthermore, because of the lack of official status, the graduates are not qualified for entrance examinations to Japanese colleges and universities.13 Faced with this institutionalized discrimination and with the new reality that many ethnic Koreans were settled in Japan, Korean ethnic schools shifted toward integrating more Japanese literature, culture, and geography to address the needs of their children (Li, 2000, p. 103). Partly due to the disadvantage that Korean school graduates faced and the higher tuition fees due to the lack of state subsidies, many ethnic Koreans chose to attend Japanese public schools (Li, 2000, p. 102). Japanese educators often encouraged ethnic Korean children to “pass” as Japanese so that they would not become the target of discrimination. Even the Japan Teachers Union (JTU) considered addressing Korean students’ discrimination and ethnic identity issues not as their responsibility but as something to be dealt with in ethnic Korean schools. This trend has gradually changed since the 1970s when a new social movement driven by identity politics emerged demanding changes in public schools. In 1971, a group of educators in Osaka established an association that focused on educational issues faced by ethnic Korean students in Japanese public schools, which evolved into the 1983 establishment of a national association on this issue (Nakajima, 1996, p. 132). This move encouraged making buraku liberation educators more inclusive of other forms of oppressions. Where a sizable number of Koreans live, particularly in Osaka, teachers use the buraku pedagogic approaches to address the oppressions that Koreans in Japanese schools face. Just as in the case of buraku children, “coming out” is central to the pedagogical intervention for/with ethnic Korean children in Japanese schools because they are not visibly different from other Japanese children. The public proclamation of Korean identity is the crucial starting point of the critical educational intervention, a practice hardly emphasized in Anglo-American multicultural education (Nakajima, 1996, p. 140). In the 1990s, Japanese critical pedagogy entered a new phase, as many scholars on ethnic Koreans’ and aboriginal Ainus’ educational issues turned to Anglo-American literature on multicultural education (e.g., James Banks, Carl Grant, Sonia Nieto, and Christian Sleeter). While some depoliticize multicultural education by removing its social transformative orientation and
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Page 359 articulating it within the existing discourse of “intercultural education” ( ibunka kan kyoiku ), others appropriate it to authenticate their ongoing educational struggle (Nakajima, 2000, p. 25). It is important to emphasize that the radical ethos of multicultural education, or what Sleeter & Grant (2003, p. 195) call “education that is multicultural and social reconstructionist,” had existed in Japan long before AngloAmerican literature on multicultural education became widely available in the 1990s (Nakajima, 1996, pp. 137–138). As discussed above, “education for human rights” which inherits the antioppressive orientation of the buraku liberation movement had already addressed multiple forms of cultural and economic oppressions faced by various minoritized populations. Unlike in Anglo-American nations where multicultural education is often reduced to three Fs (food, fashion, and festival), Japanese human rights education tends to be much more focused on addressing discrimination and social justice issues. Japanese scholars turned to Anglo-American scholarship on multicultural education largely for two reasons. First, they used these scholars’ conceptual frameworks to synthesize the critical pedagogic practices that they had developed and to revalidate their ongoing struggle in education. For instance, a scholar on ethnic Korean education, Tomoko Nakajima (1995, 1996, 2000) uses Sleeter and Grant’s (2003) five approaches to multicultural education as a categorical framework for various antioppression teaching in Japanese schools. In this sense, Anglo-American literature serves as the source of external legitimization, further validating the ongoing critical educational interventions. Second, Japanese scholars used the literature to challenge the tacit nationalistic assumption of Japanese education. In Japan, as much as anywhere else, public education has functioned to transform children into nationalized citizens, and thus the minoritized populations have long been forced to assimilate into Japanese cultural and linguistic norms.14 Without fully questioning this nationalistic assumption, critical educational interventions prior to the introduction of multicultural education tended to be highly localized in schools and regions which had a larger presence of burakumin and ethnic Koreans. Here the assumption was that these critical interventions matter only where schools house a sizable number of “other” children. They took the form of a “single-group studies” approach, which aimed “to promote social equality for and to recognize the group being studied” (Sleeter & Grant, 2003, p. 114). Multicultural education literature helps Japanese critical educators and scholars question this narrow focus of their interventions and denaturalize the nationalistic premise of public schooling (Kow, 1996, p. 249) and the normativity of Japaneseness (Matsuo, 2007, p. 182). Despite this possibility, the discussion of multicultural education remains thus far among scholars and educators who are involved in educating minoritized students. It has not created a larger impetus to scrutinize both cultural norms and institutional arrangements in all schools across the nation that continue to marginalize certain minoritized students and perpetuate the nation’s racial homogeneity myth (Shimizu & Shimizu, 2001). Critical Education Scholarship and Challenges The discussion of progressive struggles both in and outside schools cannot be complete without addressing how they are connected with critical scholarly work. In the early postwar period, leftist academics in education drew heavily on Marxist traditions in articulating their critique of the prewar and postwar education reform. They generally analyze education by placing it in the Marxist account of capitalism’s historical development where education is conceptualized as part of the superstructure largely determined by the economic base (Ikeda & Nagao, 1993, p. 228). Some scholars developed exceptional theoretical insights, however; for instance, as early as in 1951, Katsuo Kaizu (1979, p. 8) recognized the relative autonomy of education, its own logic of development, and hence conceptualized schools not merely as a reproductive but “productive”
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Page 360 apparatus, the kind of insight later fully developed by Althusser (1971) and Apple (1995, p. 21). However, their analysis tends to be focused largely on social class, at the expense of addressing other forms of oppression based on gender, buraku, and ethnicity (Yasukawa, 1998, pp. 47–48). Furthermore, they by and large treated schools as “a black box” (Apple, 1995, p. 18), leaving unexamined how economic and cultural reproduction is perpetuated and contested in day-to-day operation of schooling. Despite these shortcomings, the Marxist scholarships of education played a central role in the JTU’s political mobilization against the Ministry of Education and the conservative Liberal Democratic Party’s nationalistic and economic-centric politics in education throughout the postwar period. The introduction, in the 1980s, of Euro-American critical scholarship on economic and cultural reproduction and resistance in schools had considerable impact on the subsequent development of Japanese critical curriculum and education policy studies. The theoretical advance made by scholars of the so-called “new sociology of education” in the 1970s and the early 1980s has been widely known in the Japanese scholarly community, and many books that sprung out of the movement have been translated into Japanese (e.g., Michael Apple, Basil Bernstein, Bowles & Gintis, Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Wills, and Michael Young). The new literature challenged the liberal-humanist assumption of schools, demonstrating that schools constitute one of the key state institutions that exercise insidious forms of control. Scholars such as Apple, Bernstein, Bourdieu, and Young, for instance, demonstrated how school perpetuates the economic and cultural reproduction through a particular organization of knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogies. The theoretical advancement challenged the modernist narrative of social progress wherein schools were believed to act as the key mechanism for human liberation and social progress. This new critical perspective was much needed in the legitimacy crisis of Japanese education from the late 1970s onwards. Japanese education faced a new set of school-related “pathological problems” such as school violence, bullying, suicide, and excessive academic competition. In Manabu Sato’s (1999) words, the emergence of these problems disclosed the serious legitimacy crisis of modernist schooling which was central to Japan’s compressed modernization and rapid economic recovery since the devastation caused by the war. Japanese scholars sought out explanations for these problems in the new theoretical development of the Euro-American critical scholarship (see e.g., Yamamoto, 1985). The implications of the Euro-American critical scholarship for the Japanese counterpart were twofold. First, it provided Japanese scholars with new conceptual tools with which to pursue political-economic, cultural, and ideological analyses of curriculum and education policy, and to understand the complexities of the processes of cultural reproduction and resistance in education. These studies helped Japanese leftist scholars to move beyond the traditional Marxist frameworks which often left the black box (what goes on in schools) unexamined. The theoretical development in Euro-American nations directed Japanese scholars to the implication of school culture on the social reproduction and resistance (see e.g., Abiko, 1999a; Apple, Ikeda, & Nagao, 1993; Ikeda, Mori, & Nagao, 1997; Kimura, 1999; Nagao & Ikeda, 1990; Onai, 1995; Shimizu & Shimizu, 2001, pp. 83–84, 302–303; Whang, 1998), a perspective that had been absent in Japanese critical education scholarship (Ikeda & Nagao, 1993, p. 258; Mori, 1993, pp. 62–63; Shimizu, 1990, p. 38; Yamamoto, 1985). Second, similar to the implication of Anglo-American literature on multicultural education for Japanese critical teaching practice, Western critical scholarship provided Japanese scholars with conceptual tools to reexamine the ongoing critical interventions in Japanese schools. For instance, drawing on Freire, Willis, and Young, Kokichi Shimizu (1990) highlights the particular characteristics of buraku liberation education that were hitherto unexplored. According to Shimizu, Buraku liberation pedagogy’s core pedagogical ethos (its explicitly collective orientation, the focus on the lived experience of children, and its emphasis on children’s social transformative
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Page 361 action) speaks directly against literacy, abstractness, unrelatedness, and individualism, the four characteristics of schooling that Michael Young identifies (Young, 1971, p. 38). Likewise, Hiroshi Ikeda and Akio Nagao (1993, p. 256) draw on Euro-American critical scholarship to reconceptualize buraku’s pedagogic intervention as a form of re-articulation work through which powerful counter-hegemonic school culture can be generated. In this way, Western critical scholarship provided new language and concepts that allowed the Japanese counterpart to shed a new light on the ongoing progressive struggle in education. Despite these important implications, the Japanese “importation” of Euro-American critical scholarship shows several problematic tendencies. First, Japanese scholars actively borrow theoretical insights from Euro-American scholarship, while paying little attention to the tradition of “Indigenous” critical scholarship (Mori, 1993, p. 58). Mori claims that some of the Marxist traditions in Japanese scholarship had produced important theoretical insights similar to those later advanced by Euro-American critical scholars of education (Mori, 1993, pp. 57–58). Partly due to the higher status attached to the Western critical scholarship, Japanese scholars are keen on importing the foreign scholarship, even when similar insights were already articulated by Japanese scholars in earlier periods. Second, the politicized orientation of critical scholarship is often “lost in translation” (Coppola, 2003), according to Shimizu (1990, p. 40) and Yamamoto (1985, p. 240). They point out that Japanese scholars often partially introduce Western critical scholarship in a manner that addresses their particular interests and, in so doing, underemphasize critical scholarship’s central focus on inequality in education (Shimizu, 1990, p. 40) and gut its radical theoretical impulse (Yamamoto, 1985, p. 240). The highly political, activistoriented nature of critical scholarship that Apple, Au, & Gandin (this volume; see also Apple, 2006b; Troyna, 1994) identify, is often underplayed in Japanese sociology of education. Third, even when Japanese scholars use Euro-American critical scholarship to “bear witness to negativity”—“to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination in the larger society,” they tend to avoid the equally important task of identifying the contradictory spaces for counter-hegemonic actions (Apple, Au, & Gandin, this volume; Mori, 1993, pp. 62–63). Lastly, and most problematically, unlike the aforementioned critical pedagogic actions in schools that had a unique history and tradition, scholarly discussion of critical education tends to be more heavily dependent on Euro-American theoretical development of the field, the topic to which I now turn. Intellectual Neocolonialism No one can deny the overwhelmingly lopsided intellectual exchange between Euro-American critical scholarship and its Japanese counterpart. While any graduate student in Japanese institutions is familiar with key texts in Western critical scholarship, no Western counterpart is familiar with Japanese critical practice and theoretical discussion, unless they are Japanese education “experts.” Many Japanese scholars closely follow Euro-American theoretical discussion. They typically summarize the core argument of the noted individual scholars and then discuss—rather briefly—their specific implications and limitations for Japanese education. Relatively few engage in substantive critique of the imported literature (Abiko, 1999b, p. 23) and, even if they do so, few attempt to publish their theoretical engagement in international journals. Sometimes, the actual usefulness of Western-born theories aside, Japanese scholars are keen to embrace theoretical discussions in the West, partly because one’s “mastery” of the sophisticated theoretical discussions from the West has become an important conversion strategy for many academics. This relative passivity on the part of Japanese critical scholars speaks to the fact that critical education studies, as part of the social science discipline, is deeply imbedded in the global hegemony of Western culture and scholarship which stands on two centuries of economic and political domination
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Page 362 (Alatas, 2003; Said, 1978). This unequal flow of intellectual influence is sustained by the division of intellectual labor. While Western critical scholarship engages in theoretical labor, nonWestern critical scholarship primarily pursues empirical labor by applying theories developed elsewhere.15 Several causes of this academic neocolonialism must be identified so that we can act to challenge the unequal global division of intellectual labor in critical education scholarship. First of all, Japanese critical scholarship must move beyond their rather passive reception of Euro-American theoretical discussions. They must question the conventional “introduction and application” mode. Their application of Westernborn theories to the Japanese education context often ends up reinforcing the prevailing selfOrientalizing discourse that accentuates Japanese education’s “particularities” and “exceptionalities” (Shimizu, 1990, p. 39). Instead of interpreting the unaccountable factors as proving the “uniqueness” of Japanese education, they must use them towards the critical appraisal of the existing theories and thus the theoretical advancement of the field in general. This critical, reflexive stance towards Western critical scholarship must be differentiated from a nativist call for the outright rejection of the “foreign” ideas. There is no question that the incorporation of Western critical scholarship has contributed to the development of the Japanese counterpart. The task is to critically engage with the Western scholarship through empirical application of the theories and make contribution to the larger theoretical discussions which continue to be dominated by Euro-American scholars. The passivity of Japanese critical scholarship, however, should not be considered the sole culprit of this unequal global flow of influence in critical education scholarship. Indeed, some Japanese scholars— though still few in number—critically engage with Euro-American scholarship in a manner that moves beyond the conventional introduction/application approach. They not only discuss the implications of Western critical studies to Japanese education but also aspire to make theoretical contributions which would enrich the debate in Euro-American academic communities. For instance, Basil Bernstein’s work has been extensively discussed and critiqued among Japanese scholars (see e.g., Onai, 1995; Shimizu, 1990; Takahashi, 2004; Tendo, 2000; Yamada, 2005; Yamamoto, 1985). While some stick to the conventional introduction and application of his theoretical insights, others engage in substantive critiques of his work in an attempt to expand them further. Mutsuko Tendo is one such scholar who genders Bernstein’s theory of power and control and develops “a conceptual framework for understanding the process of symbolic transmission of gender relations in society” (2000, p. 99). She identifies the theoretical shortcomings of Madeleine Arnot’s notion of “gender code” which builds on Bernstein’s work and redefines it by drawing on a wide range of critical theoretical traditions (e.g., Joan W. Scott’s gender theory, Apple’s appropriation of Gramsci’s hegemony in education, and Bourdieu’s discussion of symbolic violence, etc). Like Tendo, others engage in theoretical critique of the Western critical literature to generate insights that can make important theoretical contributions to EuroAmerican scholarship. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, the rich history of Japanese critical pedagogies originating from buraku’s liberation movement should have considerable implications for oppressed people’s educational struggle in other national contexts. Buraku education activists and scholars generated critical pedagogic theories that showcase how students, local communities, and educators can collaborate with each other to redesign schools for explicit social justice goals (e.g., see Mori & Nakao, 1987; Yano, 1990). Their theoretical and practical tradition presents a concrete blueprint of social reconstructionist actions in an actual classroom and public school setting, the perspective that many critical educators such as Freire (1997) and Ira Shor (1992) fall short of addressing due to their emphasis on adult literacy education and higher education, respectively. This noteworthy theoretical and practical work in Japan, however, has hardly been introduced to English-language scholarly communities. The most obvious stumbling block to this is the language barrier. Japanese
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Page 363 scholars’ works that theorize buraku education practice and build on Euro-American critical scholarship are circulated exclusively in Japan. But this simple diagnosis does not adequately address the unequal power structure in critical scholarship of education. Towards Decentering the West Challenging the neocolonialism in critical education scholarship requires much more concerted effort on the part of Western scholars. The unequal concentration of knowledge production is perpetuated by Euro-American critical scholars’ inability to decenter themselves and listen to the voices that are returning from the margin, or to “act as secretaries” (Apple, Au, & Gandin, this volume; see also Nozaki, Openshaw, & Luke, 2005). Critical scholarship, not unlike mainstream social science in general, has long provided an extremely constrained discursive space, if any, from which “others” can speak out (Mohanty, 1988; Parekh, 1992). Whatever space is available to them only allows them to speak to their “particular” and “exceptional” cases, thus forcing them to speak in service of naturalizing the unspoken “universality” (normalcy) of Euro-American scholarship (Canagarajah, 2002, p. 247). Unfortunately, the very same trend is partly reflected in the way this volume is organized as well. A mere glance at the titles of each chapter should reveal who is allowed to claim the context-free, “universal voice” and who is expected to speak in “particular” voices. The inclusion of “other” voices in critical education projects must do more than simply allowing them to claim to be “international.” The recent development of critical race theory and Whiteness Studies should benefit a serious attempt to decenter the West in critical education scholarship. Just as they challenge the privilege of whiteness as an unmarked norm (Fine, Weis, Powell, & Wong, 1997; Lee, 2005), Western critical scholarship must recognize and question their taken-for-granted privileges that are automatically given to them by their location in the global hegemony of Western culture, scholarship, and English language. Euro-American critical scholarship must act more reflexively against the very unequal global flow of influence in critical scholarship that grants them the exclusive right to act as the “global preacher.” They must question why their works are actively sought out for translations in multiple languages, while they never come across scholarly discussions in other parts of the world, some of which critique or build upon their works, and why they can claim to have “discovered” theoretical constructs such as the relative autonomy of the state and education when, in fact, the concept was already discussed elsewhere at least a few decades earlier. This questioning should lead them to engage more reflexively with the political economy of the whole publishing industry that plays a crucial role in sustaining the Eurocentricity of critical education scholarship. Simply listening more carefully to the voices coming back from the rest of the world is not enough, because of the lack of interest in Euro-American publishers in translating and publishing works from elsewhere. Hence, “to act as secretaries” must involve Western critical scholars actively seeking out, in collaboration with scholars and activists around the world, exceptional scholarship elsewhere that either develops their own line of theoretical work or builds on the theoretical work in the West. And they must pressure publishing firms to translate and publish these works in English. Likewise, Western critical scholars must diversify the reviewers of “international” journals which are currently dominated by EuroAmerican scholars with the exception of a token inclusion of international scholars (Canagarajah, 2002). The peer-review process functions to exclude studies that draw on non-mainstream research epistemology and writing conventions—not only by English-speaking scholars of color (Stanley, 2007) but also non-English speaking international scholars who draw on Indigenous theoretical paradigms (Canagarajah, 2002). Only with these efforts can we begin to challenge the legacy of two centuries of the West’s economic and political domination, its monopoly of knowledge production in critical education scholarship.
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Page 364 Concluding Comments In providing the overview of critical pedagogy and critical education scholarship in Japan, this chapter highlighted how the Euro-American critical education scholarship has not only influenced, but also been reinterpreted and recontextualized in, the development of the Japanese counterpart. The overview has shown the unique tradition of Japanese critical education practice as exemplified by the buraku activists’ struggle both in and outside of education which influenced other minori-tized groups’ educational struggle. On the other hand, Japanese critical education scholarship tends to rely more heavily upon Euro-American critical scholarship work. By and large, Japanese scholars translate the Western theoretical literature, summarize the key arguments, discuss, rather briefly, their implications for and limitations to the Japanese context, or “apply” them to their critical analysis of domestic educational issues. Some Japanese scholars—though relatively few—go against this dominant trend, critically engaging with the Euro-American theoretical discussions. However, their exceptional scholarly work has never been written in, or translated into, English, thus excluding it from the larger theoretical debate in the Western “center.” I argued that the unequal circulation of critical education literature is most significantly perpetuated by the inability of the Western critical scholarship to recognize and act upon their privileged position. This chapter attempted to point this out by not only providing the review of Japanese critical education but, more importantly, problematizing the very discursive space from where I was expected to speak about things “particular” about Japanese critical education practice and theory. Critical education scholars around the world must tackle this neocolonialism within critical education scholarship. Given that the existing unequal structure automatically warrants Western scholars the right to speak “on behalf of the world,” they have ethical responsibility to bring in sophisticated theoretical work from the margin that should immensely contribute to the discussion in the center. Much more democratic space must be generated within critical education scholarship where non-Western scholars and activists can participate in theoretical knowledge production on an equal footing with Euro-American counterparts. More collaborative effort must be made among Euro-American and “other” critical scholars to disrupt the neocolonialism and to promote more democratic exchange of ideas and theories across the nations. It is only with this effort that critical education scholarship can further enrich the domestic and international discussions of progressive strategies through “borrowing from below,” a much-needed move in a time of neoliberal economic restructuring and neoconservative cultural restoration movement (Lipman, 2004). Notes 1 I would like to thank Wayne Au, Kiko Rosa, and Brian Lagotte for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper. 2 Here, I define the “West” primarily as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, three power houses in social science and humanities (Alatas, 2003). 3 I used the expressions “minoritized” and “racialized” students/populations to denote the socially constructed nature of these categorizations. 4 A review such as this necessarily involves exclusion of some studies over others. Besides, the limited space given for this chapter does not allow me to present a more comprehensive review of the field, either. Hence, this review must be understood as one out of many possible narratives on Japanese critical education. It must also be understood as a review that necessarily reflects my particular positionality, no matter how hard I try not to let it bias the review. 5 The term critical pedagogy ( hihan teki kyoiku ) is not as widely popularized in Japan as in the United States and elsewhere. The term was first introduced to Japanese educators through the translation of Paulo Freire’s work in 1979. Even after his publication, the term was not used even among progressive educators and activists.
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Page 365 6 According to Yano (1990), the buraku’s group-oriented teaching was strongly influenced by the Soviet socialist education. 7 Many Japanese scholars recognize this concept’s similarity to Freire’s critical consciousness (see e.g., Mori, 1990, p. 206; Shimizu, 1997, p. 36). It also relates to the “act of situating” that Apple (2004, p. 12) calls for in educational scholarship. 8 Shimizu and Tokuda’s (1991) study showcases the challenges that this collective pedagogic approach has faced in recent years. Their ethnographic study shows that educational interventions supposedly designed for buraku liberation often reinforce the prevailing competitive, individualistic academic culture, consequently disconnecting successful buraku children from their communities. 9 The popular discriminatory perception goes that burakumin ( buraku people) have one rib-bone lacking; they have one dog’s bone in them; they have distorted sexual organs, etc. (Lie, 2004, p. 122). 10 I use the term ethnic Koreans instead of Korean-Japanese, because many Koreans in Japan refuse to be naturalized as a form of resistance (see Motani, 2002). 11 By October 1946, there were 525 elementary schools, four junior high schools, and 12 high schools. They accommodated 42,000 students and 1,100 teachers (Kow, 1996, p. 85). 12 Instead, many local municipalities provide subsidies, though rather nominal, to these schools. 13 They are required to pass an additional comprehensive examination in all subject areas to be qualified for entrance examinations to universities. While many private universities accept Korean school graduates, national universities stick closely to the MOE’s policy and refuse to accept them, unless they pass the exam. Because of this, many Korean school children have to either pass the exam, which tests on more subject areas than in college entrance exams, or obtain a regular high school diploma through correspondence high school courses. Either way, they impose an additional burden on Korean students (Kow, 1996; Motani, 2002). 14 This explains the MOE’s consistent attempts to shut down and undermine ethnic Korean schools. 15 A similar academic dependence is identified in Korean political science (Kang, 2006) and Indian political theory (Parekh, 1992). References Abiko, T. (Ed.). (1999a). Shinban karikyuramu kenkyu nyumon. Tokyo: Keiso shobo. Abiko, T. (1999b). Karikyuramu no rekishiteki kenkyu. In T. Abiko (Ed.), Shinban karikyuramu kenkyu nyumon (pp. 1–27). Tokyo: Keiso shobo. Alatas, S. F. (2003). Academic dependency and the global division of labour in the social sciences. Current Sociology , 51 (6), 599–613. Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Books. Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1995). Education and power (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Apple, M. W. (2006a) Educating the “right” way (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2006b). Rhetoric and reality in critical educational studies in the United States. British Journal of Sociology of Education , 27 (5), 679–687. Apple, M., Ikeda, H., & Nagao, A. (1993). Gakko bunka e no chosen . Tokyo: Toshindo. Ball, S. J. (1998). Big policies/small world. Comparative Education , 34 (2), 119–130. Canagarajah, S. A. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing . University of Pittsburgh Press. Coppola, S. (Director). (2003). Lost in translation [Motion picture]. United States: Focus Features. Cummings, W. K. (1986). Japaneses images of American education. In W. Cummings, E. Beauchamp, S. Ichikawa, V. Kobayashi, & M. Ushiogi (Eds.), Educational policies in crisis (pp. 275–292). New York: Praeger. Dale, R., & Robertson, S. L. (2002). The varying effects of regional organizations as subjects of globalization of education. Comparative Education Review , 46 (1), 10–36. Delpit, L. D. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton. Fine, M., Weis, L., Powell, L. C., & Mun Wong, L. (1997). Off white . New York: Routledge.
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Page 366 Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the oppressed (New rev. 20th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum Publishing. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacy (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press. Hashimoto, M. (2003). Japan’s struggle for the formation of modern elementary school curriculum. In W. Pinar (Ed.), International handbook of curriculum research (pp. 417–424). Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Horio, T. (1988). Educational thought and ideology in modern Japan. University of Tokyo Press. Ichikawa, S. (1984). Japan. In J. R. Hough (Eds.), Educational policy (pp. 100–135). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ikeda, H. (1993). Seiji rikigaku to shite no jinshu mondai. In M. Apple, H. Ikeda, & A. Nagao (Eds.), Gakko bunka e no Chosen (pp. 67–99). Tokyo: Toshindo. Ikeda, H., & Nagao, A. (1993). Hihanteki kyoiku kenkyu no rironteki haikei. In M. Apple, H. Ikeda, & A. Nagao (Eds.), Gakko bunka e no chosen: Hihanteki kyoiku kenkyu no saizensen (pp. 227–161). Tokyo: Toshindo. Inokuchi, H. (2000). Korean ethnic schools in occupied Japan, 1945–1952. In S. Ryang (Ed.), Koreans in Japan (pp. 14–156). New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Kaizu, K. (1979). Kyoikushi kenkyu no hoho ni tsuite. In K. Kaizu & I. Hirooka (Eds.), Kindai kyoikushi I (pp. 3–12). Tokyo: Seibundo. Kang, J. I. (2006). Academic dependency. Korea Journal , 46 (4), 115–135. Kimura, R. (1999). Gakkobunka to jenda . Tokyo: Keisoshobo. Kow, C. (1996). Kokusaikajidai no minzokukyoiku. Osaka: Toho shuppan. Kusuhara, A. (1979). Atogaki. In P. Freire (Y. Ozawa, Trans.) Hiyokuatsusha no kyoiku . Tokyo: Akishobo Lee, S. J. (2005). Up against whiteness. New York: Teachers College Press. Li, W. (2000). Chosengo gakko ni okeru chosengo kyoiku. In T. Nakajima (Ed.), Tabunka kyoiku (pp. 97–132). Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Lie, J. (1996). Sociology of contemporary Japan, trend report. Current Sociology , 44 (1), 1–101. Lie, J. (2001). Multiethnic Japan . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lie, J. (2004). The politics of recognition in contemporary Japan. In S. J. Henders (Ed.), Democratization and identity (pp. 117–131). New York: Lexington Books. Lipman, P. (2004). High stakes education. New York: Routledge. Matsuo, T. (2007). America tabunka kyoiku no saikochiku. Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Mohanty, C. (1988). Under Western eyes. Feminist Review , 30 , 65–88. Mori, M. (1987). Jinken ishiki no keisei to kyoiku no kadai. In M. Mori & K. Nakao (Eds.), Dowa kyoiku no riron (pp. 78–119). Tokyo: Toshindo. Mori, M. (1990). Shakai teki tachiba no jikaku to gakko. In A. Nagao & H. Ikeda (Eds.), Gakkobunka— Shinsoeno pasupekutibu . Tokyo: Toshindo. Mori, M. (1993). Radikaru tachi no gakkoron. In M. Apple, H. Ikeda, & A. Nagao (Eds.), Gakko bunka e no Chosen (pp. 31–65). Tokyo: Toshindo. Mori M., & Nakao, K. (Eds.). (1987). Dowa kyoiku no riron. Tokyo: Toshindo. Motani, Y. (2002). Towards a more just educational policy for minorities in Japan: The case of Korean ethnic schools. Comparative Education , 38 (2), 225–237. Nabeshima, Y. (1997). Atarimae toshiteno gakuryoku hosho. In H. Ikeda, A. Nagao, & M. Mori (Eds.), Kaihokyoiku no aidentiti (pp. 46–70). Tokyo: Meijitosho. Nabeshima, Y. (2004). Darega ochikobosarerunoka. In T. Kariya & K. Shimizu (Eds.), Gakuryoku no shakaigasku (pp. 197–215). Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Nagao, A. (2002). Karikyuramu zukuri to gakuryoku hyoka. Tokyo: Meijitosho. Nagao, A. (2005). Gakuryoku hosho to jinken kyoiku no saikochiku. Tokyo: Meijitosho. Nagao, A., & Ikeda, H. (Eds.). (1990). Gakkobunka—Shinsoeno pasupekutibu . Tokyo: Toshindo. Nakajima, T. (1995). Tabunka kyoiku to zai nichi Chosenji kyoiku . Kyoto: Zenkoku zainichi Chosenjin kyoiku kenkyu kyogikai. Nakajima, T. (1996). Tabunka kyoiku toshite no zainichi kankoku Chosenjin kyoiku. In Y. Hirota & H. Komai (Eds.), Tabunkashugi to tabunkakyoiku (pp. 125–149). Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Nakajima, T. (2000). Tabunka kyoiku . Tokyo: Akashi shoten.
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Page 367 Nozaki, Y., Openshaw, R., & Luke, A. (2005). Introduction. In Y. Nozaki, R. Openshaw, & A. Luke (Eds.), Struggles over difference (pp. 1–10). New York: Routledge. Ogawa, T. (1966). Seikatsu tuzurikata to kyoiku . Tokyo: Meiji tosho. Okano, K., & Tsuchiya, M. (1999). Education in contemporary Japan . Cambridge University Press. Onai, T. (1995). Saiseisan ron wo yomu . Tokyo: Toshindo. Ozawa, Y. (1973). Zainichi Chosenjin kyoiku ron, rekishi hen . Tokyo: Aki shobo. Parekh, B. (1992). The poverty of Indian political theory. History of Political Thought, 13 (3), 535–560. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism (1st ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. Sato, M. (1999). Kyoiku kaikaku wo dezain suru. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Shimizu, K. (1990). Gakkobunka no pasupekutibu. In H. Ikeda & A. Nagao (Eds.), Gakkobunka— Shinsoeno pasupekutibu (pp. 11–42). Tokyo: Toshindo. Shimizu, K. (1997). Kaihokyoiku no aidentiti wo motomete. In H. Ikeda, M. Mori, & N. Nagao (Eds.), Kaihokyoiku no aidentiti (pp. 24–45). Tokyo: Meiji tosho. Shimizu, K., & Shimizu, M. (2001). Nyukama to kyoiku . Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Shimizu, K., & Tokuda, K. (Eds.). (2001). Yomigaere koritsu gakko. Tokyo: Yushindo. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. University of Chicago Press. Sleeter, C. E., & Grant, C. A. (2003). Making choices for multicultural education (4th ed.). Columbus: Merrill Pub. Co. Sowa, S. (2000). Jinkei kyoiku toshite no dowa kyouiku to tabunka kyoiku . Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Stanley, C. A. (2007). When counter narratives meet master narratives in the journal editorial-review process. Educational Researcher, 36 (1), 14–24. Takahashi, H. (2004). Parenting magazines as devices for differentiation and distribution. Kyoiku shakaigaku kenkyu , 74 , 129–147. Takayama, K. (2008a). Beyond orientalism in comparative education. Asia Pacific Journal of Education , 28 (1), 19–34. Takayama, K. (2008b). Japan’s Ministry of Education “becoming the right”: Neo-liberal restructuring and the Ministry’s struggles for political legitimacy. Globalisation, Societies, and Education , 6(2), 131–146. Takayama, K., & Apple, M. W. (2008). The cultural politics of borrowing. British Journal of Sociology of Education , 29 (3), 289–301. Tendo, M. (2000). Reexamining Bernstein’s power and control theory. Kyoiku shakaigaku kenkyu , 67 , 83–98. Troyna, B. (1994). Critical social research and education policy. British Journal of Educational Studies , 22 (1), 70–84. Whang, S. (1998). Nihon no erito koko . Tokyo: Sekai shisosha. Whitty, G., Power, S., & Halpin, D. (1998). Devolution and choice in education . Bristol, PA: Open University Press. Yamada, T. (2005). Kyoshitsu no jugyo bamen to gakugyo tassei (pp. 99–126). In T. Kariya & K. Shimizu (Eds.), Gakuryoku no shakaigaku. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Yamamoto, T. (1985). Gakko no genso, genso no gakko. Tokyo: Shinyosha. Yano, H. (1990). Buraku kaihokyoiku to shudan zukuri. Tokyo: Meijitosho. Yasukawa, J. (1998). Nihon kindai kyoku to sabetsu . Tokyo: Akashi shoten. Young, M. F. D. (1971). An approach to the study of curricula as socially organized knowledge. In M. F. D. Young (Ed.), Knowledge and control (pp. 19–46). London: Collier-Macmillan.
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Page 368 27 The Circumstances and the Possibilities of Critical Educational Studies in China Guang-cai Yan & Yin Chang Introduction Generally, the influence of a foreign theory or school to a nation is represented via two levels. One is the academic domain, which means the scholars translate, introduce, and comment on the foreign theoretical works. The other is the political and practical level; that is, by virtue of the scholars’ impulse, the theoretical resource is gradually attached importance to by the administration of education and the educators in class, and it then becomes their philosophy or even the method and criterion in practice. Obviously, these two levels represent the two linking phases of a continuous seedtime. The former is the primary phase, while the latter is the advanced phase. According to the example of a Western theory being imported, assimilated, absorbed, and syncretized in China, there are always several necessary conditions for the theory or school moving from the primary level to the advanced. First, this theory should be able to explain the reality in China to a certain degree. Second, the ordinary people feel sympathy with this theory, making it possible to spread and disperse. Third, this theory does not contradict the dominant ideology or, at least, only to a certain extent. Having these three qualifications at the same time, the theory will get a chance to move from the ideological realm to the terrain of policy and practice. Thanks to the collective effort of the scholars, practitioners, and officeholders, it will spread out and operate in a larger scope, even turn into the Prominent approach. Of course, rigorously, here the Prominent approach has already surpassed the original foreign theory itself. Instead, based on the original form, the foreign theory is combined with some selected traditions of the target nation, and develops a number of innovations still. To investigate the influence of critical educational studies in China according to the logic above, which phase is it in now? While the nation is in great change, how are the condition and the possibility of critical educational studies being accepted or even integrated? Considering that critical educational studies have appeared as a leftist Western educational trend of thought, we highlight the importance of its relation with the radical history and tradition of the leftist in China. Also, we will discuss the bewilderment and problems when people transplant, accept, and syncretize these studies in the current social context of China, especially when the mainstream is engaged in critically reflecting the Leftist thought.
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Page 369 The Existence of Critical Educational Studies in China It is important to clarify that the critical educational studies to which we refer in this chapter point to the trend of thought developed primarily in Western countries. As a conventional socialistic country, China has taken Marxism as the official and dominant ideology all along. Thus, given China’s historical relationship with socialism and Marxist theory, one might think that critical educational studies should have a closer relationship with Chinese academic thoughts and theories. However, the truth is to the contrary. Critical educational studies have, instead, been considered as capitalistic thought and ideology, remaining unknown until the 1980s, (similar to the situation of Western Marxism in China, an important academic origin of the studies we talk about here). In the late 1970s, the leader of the country Deng Xiao-ping officially constituted a series of policies such as, “bring order out of chaos,” “reform and opening-up,” and “focus on economic construction,” starting the reformation in China. From then on, along with many realms such as economics and technology, various Western cultural theories and academic concepts have flowed into China. A great number of translated works of Western books about social sciences suddenly appeared. One of the first Western books about the social sciences was translated in 1979, by the authoritative Chinese publisher, People’s Education Press, who edited and reprinted the book Collectanea of Western Capitalistic Educational Works (H. Zhang, 1979), which was originally published in 1964. In this book, Chinese intellectuals and scholars were introduced to many Western European and Russian educators and their opinions, including, J. A. Comenius, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, C. A. Helvetius, Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, R. Owen, Johan Friedrich Herbart, F. W. A. Froebel, F. A. W. Diesterweg, V. G. Belinskiy, Herbert Spencer and K. D. Ushinski. Most significantly, the preface of the book emphasizes that the reason for printing the book in China was to “satisfy the emergent understanding of appropriate teaching in education departments in normal universities.” This term indicated Chinese scholars’ lack of access to Western thoughts and theories after thorough isolation for more than 10 years. However, though they were too impatient to wait any longer, people still remained sensitive and cautious on political issues. One year later, Modern Educational Treatise of Western Capitalism 1 was also published by People’s Education Press. The volume systematically compiled the important works on the central Western educational ideologies after 1900, including “Pragmatism” represented by John Dewey, W. H. Kilpatrick, and Theodore Brameld, “New Education” proposed by Maria Montessori, B. A. W. Russel, and Alfred N. Whitehead, “Elementarism” sponsored by William C. Bagley, James-Bryant Conant, and Arthur E. Bestor, “Perennialism” claimed by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, “Neo-Thomism,” “Existentialism,” “Neo-Behaviorism,” “Structuralism,” and “Analytic Philosophy,” among others. These two books seem to be the beginning of Chinese educators’ interaction with the Western world after the 1980s. From then on, various Western educational theories and schools, especially those from English-speaking countries, have been continuously introduced to China in forms of translated works and monographs. During this time of political turbulence, and despite Chinese academics and publishers being criticized and facing suspicion of “bourgeois liberalism” for introducing Western theories, the importing of Western social science texts has never really stopped. In fact, after the mid-1990s, the translation and studies of various Western thoughts and theories reached a climax. What’s more, the term “capitalistic” or “bourgeois,” which had been emphasized earlier because of political sensitivity, gradually faded out as well. Thus, we could even say that from the mid-1990s, except for a few traditional subjects, most social sciences in Chinese universities have been dominated by the Western discourse. It is in these circumstances that the critical educational studies of Western academia have been introduced into China. The very first work referring to the critical educational studies is a book published in 1989, The Elementary Collectanea of Foreign Sociology of Education (R. Zhang, 1989).
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Page 370 This book contained the thesis Capitalistic System and Education in America by Bowles and Gintis, an article written by Ivan Illich, and the works of English scholars Basil Bernstein and Michael F. D. Young (both representatives of New Sociology of Education). Then in 1990, the major work of Bowles and Ginitis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life was published in Chinese in Shanghai, unfortunately catching little attention. The literature which could best tell the condition of the critical educational studies in China at that time was Corpus of Pedagogy, compiled by famous Chinese educational scholar Qu Bao-kui from 1987 and published in the early 1990s by People’s Education Press. It was seen as the authoritative collection of educational studies of China and foreign countries, assembling many important articles from domestic and foreign pedagogical scholars. However, none of the articles in it refers to critical educational studies. That is to say, even by the early 1990s, Chinese scholars had not yet attached any importance to critical educational studies. From the early 1990s onwards, Chinese scholars gradually began to pay attention to critical educational studies. In 1992, Michael Apple’s article, State Power and the Politics of Legitimate Knowledge , was published in the Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences) . Since then, some scholars have introduced the critical educational theory of England and the United States through major periodicals focusing on comparative education research, as well as the translation of major books (Box 27.1). Additionally, major Chinese journals have either printed translated articles written by Western critical theorists or have published articles written in Chinese about critical education (Box 27.2). There have also been several theses about critical education written by Chinese scholars. These are listed in Box 27.3. Box 27.1 Books by Western critical theorists that have been translated into Chinese – Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1990). Schooling in capitalist America (Wang Pei-xiong et al., Trans.). Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press. – Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of the oppressed . (Gu Jian-xin, Zhao You-hua, & He Shu-rong. Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. – Apple, M. W. (2001). Ideology and curriculum (Huang Zhong-jing, Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. – Giroux, H. (2002). Border crossings (Liu Hui-zhen et al., Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. – Apple, M. W. (2004). Official knowledge (Qu Nan-nan et al., Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. – Apple, M. W. (2005). Cultural politics and education (Yan Guang-cai, Trans.). Beijing: Educational Science Publishing House. – Apple, M. W., & Christian-Smith, L. K. (Eds.), (2005). The politics of the textbook (D. Hou, Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. – Apple, M. W. (2007). The state and the politics of knowledge (Huang Zhong-jing, Trans.). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press.
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Page 371 Box 27.2 Journal articles – Wang, P. (1990). Freire’s educational ideas. Comparative Education Review , (4). – Apple, M. W. (1992). State power and the politics of legitimate knowledge. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences) , (2). – Giroux, H. A. (1995). Post-structuralist ruptures and pedagogical possibilities: The turn towards theory. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences) , (1). – Yu, X. (1995). Review and comments on Paulo Freire’s educational idea. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences) , (3). – Zhang, H. (1996). Research on critical theory and critical pedagogy. Global Education , (4). – Deng, Z. (1996). Post-modernistic trend of thoughts and the western critical pedagogy. Global Education , (4). – Li, J. (1996). The theory and the practice of Freire’s eliminating illiteracy for adults. Comparative Education Review , (6). – Zheng, J. (1997). Critics on American critical pedagogy: Review and comments on Giroux’ theory of critical pedagogy. Comparative Education Review , (5). – Zhang, H. (1998). Primary study of contemporary critical curricular theory in the U.S. Global Education , (2/3). – Tian, Y . (2004). Education is Liberation—Analysis of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Liberation. Studies in Foreign Education , (4). – Apple, M. W. (2004). Markets, standards, and inequality. Educational Research , (7). – Xin, Z. (2004). Dilemma and way out for critical pedagogy. Comparative Education Review , (9). – Yan, G. (2005). Which party are you in? Reading , (2). – Apple, M. W. (2006). Power, knowledge, and educational reform (G. Yan, Trans.). Journal of Educational Studies , (1). – Xin, Z. (2006). Critical pedagogy reading. Comparative Education Review , (7). – Zhang, K. (2006). Exploring Freire’s educational philosophy of hope. Studies in Foreign Education , (5). – Fu, S. (2007). The values of cultural studies in educational studies: Henry A. Giroux’s educational thoughts in cultural studies. Comparative Education Review , (4). – Yan, G. (2007). Academic venation and era condition of critical educational studies. Educational Research , (8). – Apple, M. W., & Au, W. (2007). Politics, theory, and reality in critical pedagogy (G. Yan, Trans.). Comparative Education Review , (9/10). – Zheng, F. (2007). A review of moral education thoughts in the critical pedagogy in the U.S. Comparative Education Review , (10).
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Page 372 Box 27.3 Theses – Li, M. (1997). From critics to possibilities: Giroux’ contributions to contemporary educational ideas. Unpublished master’s thesis. Beijing Normal University. – Jiao, X. (2003). The understanding and the critics on Giroux’ resistant theory. Unpublished master’s thesis. East China Normal University. – Xin, Z. (2003). The criticism of Apple’s education theory. Unpublished master’s thesis. Southwest Normal University. – Zhong, L. (2005). Education cultivates critical spirit: A study on critical pedagogy. Unpublished master’s thesis. Sichuan University. – Fu, S. (2006). Education, popular culture and cultural politics: Narrations and comments of Henry A. Giroux’s educational thoughts in cultural studies. Unpublished master’s thesis. Beijing Normal University. – Zhang, K. (2007). Education is liberation: On Freire’s educational thoughts. Unpublished master’s thesis. Huazhong Normal University. – Peng, L. (2007). Citizenship and emancipation: Research on the two important titles in critical pedagogy. Unpublished master’s thesis. Capital Normal University. The titles listed in Boxes 27.1–27.3 are not all the works on critical educational studies in China, however, but illustrate enough to sketch its condition in Chinese academia. There are several characteristics that deserve special attention. First, importance has been attached to a number of representatives—Freire, Apple, and Giroux, with special attention paid to Apple, whose works have been translated into Chinese at a higher rate than others. Second, one publisher, the East China Normal University (one of the two most famous institutions of teachers’ education in China), has contributed most to the introduction of critical educational studies, because most Chinese versions were published by this press. Early theses were compiled in their periodical and the majority of the scholars who have introduced critical educational studies to Chinese people, including the theory of Bowles and Gintis, came from that university as well. Third, most of the literature on critical educational studies is published in periodicals of comparative education research, implying that, in Chinese academe, critical educational theory is still considered as one of the many foreign schools of thought that deserve notice. Thus, it is reasonable to say that the development of critical educational studies in China is still at the primary level according to the classification mentioned at the very beginning of this chapter. The Embarrassing Debut of Critical Educational Studies in China Strictly speaking, critical educational studies neither belong to a specific subject nor exist as a field of formal research. It is even inappropriate to use the term “school” when referring to critical educational studies. The main problem is the extensiveness of the themes, realms, methods, and academic resources under the umbrella of critical educational studies. Furthermore, it is highly heterogeneous inside the group, including significant diversity and conflict among its proponents.
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Page 373 However, Chinese scholars are used to labeling the foreign theories specifically so as to show their primary academic positions and interests, and provide a clear view for the readers. As a result they are likely to accept titles such as “radical leftist,” “academic leftist,” or “cultural leftist” (Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2003; McLaren, 1997; Roty, 1999). Generally, Chinese interest in Western critical educational studies lies in the theory of social reproduction or correspondence principle put forward by Bowles and Gintis (1976), which has the characteristics of traditional Marxism to a certain degree, the theory of ideological hegemony and cultural reproduction represented by Apple (1979) and Bourdieu (1970), and Giroux’s theory of resistance (1983). Critical educational studies in North America existed in the early 1980s, and it had a close relationship with the development of Western Marxism. Theoretically, the traditions of Marxism in Europe as well as the ensuing neo-Marxism, should have inspired sympathies within the mainstream ideology in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after 1949. However, as communist China cut off any little piece of communication with the Western world on thoughts, cultures, and theories until the late 1970s, the Chinese comprehended very little about Western Marxism in fact. By the 1960s, only a few works of Western Marxism had been translated inside Chinese theoretical circles. But because of the impact of the scholars from Russia and Eastern Europe, people learned that Western Marxism was “Anti-Marxism under the banner of Neo-Marxism,” and then criticized it merely as the typification of “Reactionary Materials” and “Revisionism” (C. Xu, 2001; Y. Xu, 1988). In addition, after 1956 when China had finished the socialist transformation from capitalist ownership, officially the capitalist and landlord class disappeared on the whole. Though some scholars claimed that at that time there was an estate structure with unequal distribution based on one’s status as cadre—worker—peasant (Y. Li, 2005), yet it was completely different from class structure in the West. The differences between the social systems left the discourse of Western Marxism little space to find the appropriate application. Though the bourgeoisie had been removed from the social structure, Chairman Mao Ze-dong still considered that capitalistic ideology might still be found among cadres along with bureaucratism, sectarianism, and subjectivism inside the Party, even endangering the validity of central power. As a result, in 1957, Mao Ze-dong started the Rectification Movement, criticizing the habits and behaviors of the ruling party. But during this process, Mao realized that there was a force making use of the Rectification Movement to counterattack socialism, which led him to feel quite distressed with much of the radical criticism that was taking place. Thereafter, the nature of the movement changed and finally turned into the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which makes Chinese intellectuals’ hearts still flutter with fear even today. An editorial in People’s Daily illustrated the essence of the campaign. It stated that in China the massive class struggle had already passed away, but its remnants remained. In the era of socialism there were not only leftists, middle-of-the-roaders, and rightists, but also some people “who are doubledealing toward socialism, yearning in their hearts for capitalism and actually longing for western politics” (Sun, 2004). The Anti-Rightist Campaign lasted for more than a year, embroiling no less than 550,000 people. Many intellectuals lost freedom of speech and were, in fact, deprived of personal freedom. The primary motive of the Anti-Rightist Campaign was to fight against privilege and bureaucratism. But afterward, it turned into severe ideological criticism and promoted fighting about the appropriate political route to take. Similarly, the so-called Si-qing Movement, which was a socialistic educational movement developed through the countryside during 1963 and 1966, also evolved in a way similar to that above. At the beginning, the goal was to rectify cadres’ misbehavior both on economic affairs and on their attitudes in day-to-day affairs. Later on, it turned into a full-scale political movement that dealt with the larger issues of the economy, the party, and the peoples’ ideological thought, ultimately promoting a cruel class struggle around the whole country. This then turned out to be an extremely difficult situation during the 10-year-long Cultural Revolution.
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Page 374 Today, scholars still have no definite conclusion as to the motives behind Mao’s decision to undertake the Cultural Revolution. There are various opinions. Even so, it is clear that one of his intentions was to solve the ineradicable problem of bureaucratism, which had been the target of all previous movements since the establishment of the PRC, via a revolution on culture. While fighting against bureaucratism, the primary target of the Cultural Revolution was the high-level cadre, called the “capitalistic ruling group.” To this group were added the intellectuals who were seen as constituting a “reactionary academic authority.” The phenomenon of bureaucraticism points to what is a crucial part of traditional Chinese political culture. It still works in the reality of today’s social and political environment, and even in economic and cultural practice. Mao tried to cure this inveterate disease in the “democratic” way of inspiring and stirring up the masses. However, some claimed that the running mode of the Cultural Revolution indeed lapsed from the characteristics of modern democratic politics. The reason for this lies in Mao’s use of his personal charm as what Weber would call a Charismatic Authority. The Chinese people responded to this kind of authority because they were used to worshiping a charismatic leader based on a 2,000-year-old moral tradition where government officials were exalted and common people were ignoble. As a result, a personality cult developed along with the centralization of power and the masses tended to unquestioningly follow. These three tendencies came together and created a disaster (M. Zhang, 2002). Many domestic and foreign studies have clearly claimed that the radical Cultural Revolution and the expansion of various movements brought unprecedented catastrophe to Chinese society. In a word, from the establishment of the PRC to the late 1970s, the history of Chinese modern times could be equal to the history of political movements, each of which carried the radicalness of leftists. It is undeniable that the original intentions of some political movements were good, to eliminate the notion of privilege, to abolish bureaucratic hierarchies, etc. However, according to the process and the result, the radical actions of leftists have not only broken away from the reality in China, causing chaos in economic and political systems, but also increasingly illustrated the characters of autarchy and authoritarianism, going even further from democratic politics. The orientation of school and education in this social condition is imaginable—ultimately losing the relative independency, attaching itself to the politics, and falling into the instrument of class struggle during the Cultural Revolution as well (Qu & Shen, 1993). To be sure, in the 17 years from the establishment of the PRC and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, we achieved a lot in giving the children of workers and peasants the opportunity for education, actualizing equality in education, combining the education to labor and culture, and so on. Nevertheless, under the impact of the thought of leftists, we once considered all the Western learning and knowledge as capitalistic in mentality and negative to the core, denying the value of classroom teaching while emphasizing the connection to labor and practice. Due to the frequent revolutionary movements, the normal school order went to pot, and suspending class to “go in for revolution” became common practice (Y. Zhang, 1988). Some even say it was just “the third generation of the Republic” brought up during this 17 years, people who had been educated by the left and had been swept up in the political enthusiasm when growing up, all adding fuel to the fire of the radical movement (Y. Li, 1998). On the other hand, “the educational revolution” and the Cultural Revolution in this period of time almost completely destroyed the normal educational system, and it even got out of Mao’s control (Di, 2005). The authorities in school were overthrown while all the cultural and academic traditions were pulled down. There was hardly any natural academic activity. The intellectuals lost their dignity, not to mention their academic freedom. The curricular structure and the textbooks in primary and secondary schools were entirely politicized and formalized. The teaching content was reduced at will according to the need of political warfare. As Peng (2005) explains:
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Page 375 The class struggle became the main course while labor became the focus. The teaching plan kept changing without a strict requirement in academic learning. Teachers and students went to the wider classroom, that was, outside the school, numerous and complicated, in and out, uphill and downhill, which left the school order in such a mess. (p. 77) We could say that the experience of the leftist politics and social movements after the establishment of the PRC brought a serious disaster to Chinese society. That is why the Chinese feared leftists more than rightists during the self-reflection on the Cultural Revolution, both officially and unofficially. Governmentally, Deng Xiao-ping, who had experience in numerous political movements, presented a verdict to the late times of Mao’s guidance. Deng (1993) said: Now there is Rightist influence as well as the Leftist influence. But it is the Leftist that turns out to be inrooted. Some theorists and politicians frighten people with serious accusations. They are not Rightists but Leftists. Leftist implies the revolutionary spirit somehow, as if the more radical, the more revolutionary you are. The Leftist is so fearful in the history of our party that it would destroy something good. The Rightist can put an end to socialism, so the Leftist. Thus, we Chinese should look out for the Rightist, but prevent the Leftist mainly. To be concrete, looking “out for the Rightist” means keeping on guard against Western capitalistic thinking, ideology, and culture. But “preventing the Leftist” has manifested mainly through economic and social policies, such as, opening up China to foreign influence, blurring the distinction between capitalism and socialism, and making use of some capitalistic institutions, technologies, and cultural resources to impel the social economical development and the advancement of comprehensive national strength. In addition, the Chinese have started to reflect on the leftists since the 1980s. The popular “scar literature” in the 1980s addressed and restored the collective memory of the radical age and comforted its remaining sorrow in the society in the special way that only literature can convey. At the same time, people, especially the young, began to welcome Western sciences and technologies, and stopped spurning the West’s cultures and theories as well. To study abroad in Western countries has become popular again due to people’s longing. After the Pan Xiao event in 1980,2 in January 1988, some young educational experts had a debate with local youths about the relationship between social demands and individual self-fulfillment in the Shekou district in Shenzhen, which has gained much attention as the “Shekou Event” (Chen, 2006). This event represented a contest between traditional idealism, collectivism, realism, and individualism, and ended with the victory of folk ideology. It ultimately indicated that an age of individualism, pluralism, and consumerism has come to China. Simultaneously, the translation of various Western social theories came out in great numbers in academia, and Western discourse turned out to be increasingly dominant, in part due to the educational system, which valued English so much. Sensitive terms such as freedom, democracy, and market, which had been previously related to capitalistic culture and ideology, were accepted more and more extensively among the people. So it is understandable that before the mid-1990s at least, in a context where the politicians and the public felt more sensitive to the leftist influence than to the rightist one, people found it hard to accept the theories of the Western leftist theorists, despite the fact that these theorists had nothing to do with the traditional notion of the left in Chinese discourse. Consequently, it is also understandable why the Chinese academia paid little attention to the critical educational studies, given its indebtedness to leftist theorizing. Furthermore, at that time there was no apparent polarization in Chinese social structure. No matter what was said by the social reproduction theory and the correspondence principle of Bowles and Gintis (1976), the cultural reproduction
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Page 376 theory of Bourdieu (1970) and Apple (1990), or the resistance theory of Giroux (1983), these could not fully explain the reality of Chinese society and education. As for the discourse of critical pedagogy held by Freire (1970), McLaren (1986), Giroux (1983), etc., which seemed to be rather radical, these would find it was even harder to find a place in Chinese academia. Comparatively, in that period, except for the traditional Western theories of education by Herbart (H. Zhang, 1979), Pestalozzi (H. Zhang, 1979) and so on, Dewey’s progressive education (2001), the curricular theories of Bruner (1982), Bloom (1956), Tyler (1994) etc. and the metatheory of education and others (Y. Lu, 1993; H. Zhang, 1979) have been given more attention. Chances for Critical Educational Studies Spreading in Chinese Academia Chinese society has changed dramatically since the 1990s. Though the official narration of the mainstream ideology has not adjusted fundamentally, its essence has become quite different due to the emphasis on the pragmatism of the politics, which means that the increase of the social fortune and the economical development have become the basic goals. The complex of class struggle in Mao’s age has nearly totally faded. Seeking private profit is no longer seen as the pursuit of “the corrupt life style of capitalism.” In people’s opinion, yearning for fortune and a wealthy life is natural. It is even the sign of self-fulfillment. “Capital,” “market,” “owner of private enterprise,” and “private possession”—all of these have become legitimate. They are not something particular to capitalism any more, but are also shared as primary moments within socialism. By the mid-1990s, as most state corporations finished their systematic transformation, private capital increased, the employment systems of enterprise, real estate, and medical treatment had experienced deep reform, and the transition from a planned economy to a market economy with Chinese characteristics was basically done in China. At the same time, while attracting a great deal of overseas investment, China has opened up even further, becoming a member of WTO and entering into the international marketplace. During the great social transformation characterized by marketization, China has achieved economically, but a series of social problems has arisen at the same time. For instance, the unemployment rate has risen; the urban–rural gap has become wider; the distribution of wealth has polarized. Gradually, the problem of structural class difference, which has been quite a sensitive subject all along, has been acknowledged and given importance by academia and the government. In The Report of Contemporary Chinese Stratum , released in 2001 by the official research institution in China, National Academy of Social Sciences, researchers invoked the social stratification standards in the social conflict theory of Max Weber to analyze Chinese society. According to the criteria of political power (organizational resources), economic reward (economic resources), and social prestige (cultural resources), the researchers developed three general grades of classification from top to the bottom, 10 categorizations altogether, from the dimension of occupation within China. They were, national and social governor, manager, owner of private enterprise, professional and technical personnel, clerks, self-employed, servers in business, industrialists, agricultural laborers, and unemployed or semi-unemployed in the rural and urban areas (X. Lu, 2002). Another scholar Li Qiang (P. Li, Q. Li, & Sun, 2004) suggested that in Chinese social reform of the 1980s, different groups benefited quite differently. There existed at least four interest groups relative to the reforms in China, the very beneficial, the common beneficial, the relative loser of interest, and the bottom group in society. The last two groups were the unemployed in the city and the great number of poor in the countryside. Without achieving benefit in the reform, most of them seemed passive toward the innovation and more likely to feel “relatively deprived” or “relative losers” compared with other groups (P. Li, Q. Li, & L. Sun, 2004).
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Page 377 From the egalitarianism of Mao’s age, which was characterized by lacking of materials, collectivism, and relative poverty, to the apparent stratification nowadays, though the living standard of many Chinese people has improved, the great gap in benefit has probably aroused “the feeling of unfairness” in the bottom group of the society. Different groups understand their “deprivation” variously. For example, some consider it as evidence of the privileged making use of power, and some blame “the evilness of the market.” Thus, they feel discontent, even wrath, toward the reform or the existing institutional arrangement, resulting in a series of conflicts that impacted social stabilization. It was under this potential social crisis that the Chinese academia has begun to reflect on the reform since the late 1990s. During this process, two camps appeared, “neo-rightist” and “neo-leftist,” respectively, in the terms of Western tradition. Both camps agreed on the conjunction between the social inequality and the existence of the privileged, and talked about “democracy” openly. But their understandings on the topics such as liberty, nation, government, and market essentially opposed each other. Though they both made use of Western theoretical resources, the notion of left and right in China was not exactly the same as that in the West. Generally, neo-rightist in China could be referred to as liberalism. Most scholars in this camp majored in economy and political science. In their opinion, the inequality in China had nothing to do with the market itself, but arose because of the uncontrolled power and the disordered market. To solve the problem, as they thought, we should continue the reform on the economic and political system. Those popular theories in Western countries at present, such as the neoliberalism in economic policy, the neo-managerialism in social policy, the institutionalism, the constitutionalism, and the republicanism in political science, are those preferred by the Chinese neorightists. Yet unlike the neoconserva-tives in the West (Apple, 1993), these Chinese intellectuals are interested in neither the domestic political traditions nor the cultural heritage. In the same way, there are both similarities and differences between Chinese neo-leftists and their Western peers. In the 1990s, some intellectuals became conscious of privatization, the social distinction of wealth led by the conjunction between the market and the privileged, the expanding desire for material goods in Chinese society, the cultural, moral, and spiritual crisis caused by capitalistic cultural consumption, and the decline of national culture in the process of globalization. It was in this social condition that the Chinese neo-leftist came into being. Xiao Gong-qin (2003) has described it in this way: [The neo-leftist in China] is an ethos that based on the socialistic theory of the Western leftist, took equality and equity as the central value, considered the social stratification, disorder and problems in China during the transformation to market economy as the exhibition of the capitalistic contradiction, and, chose the equalitarian socialism to be the primary solution for the current problems. Most theoretical sources of the neo-leftist come from Western Marxism and postmodernism, and they are generally opposed to thorough marketization of the economy, value social equality more than individual liberty in politics, and resist the international hegemony of bourgeois cultural traditions (Ren, 1999; Xie, 2003; Y. Xu, 2006; Yao, 2000). Chinese neo-leftists can further be divided into radical and moderate camps. The former seems to be the emotional populist, and the latter tends to investigate Chinese reality with the help of academic resources of Western Marxism and postmodernism. They take the contradiction in Western capitalism as the root of Chinese plight and suggest social democracy with state intervention, without excluding the market (Xiao, 2003). Actually, the radical neo-leftist, with their populist nature, could gain the response more or less among the common people, but they have few followers in academia, where the moderate group has taken hold.
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Page 378 The ascendance of the moderate neo-leftist in Chinese academia is understandable in terms of the publishing of the translated literatures in Chinese academia since the mid-1990s. The poststructuralism of Foucault (1978) and Derrida (1981), Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (Apple, 1990), Said’s postcolonialism (1978), Habermas’s theory of communicative action (1987), Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction (Apple, 1996), and the theories of the British cultural studies school (Dong, 2003), have gained attention from each domain in social sciences. Others, such as world system theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and sociology of scientific knowledge (Bloor, 1976) have also spread. Among these theories, poststructuralism is characterized by antimodernity (Foucault, 1978); neo-Marxism takes responsibility for criticizing technical rationality, expanding desire for materials, cultural and ideological hegemony in capitalism (Althusser, 1971); postcolonialism and world system theory are against the international supremacy of the capitalistic countries (Said, 1978); and cultural studies oppose theories of cultural reproduction and identity politics (Hall, 1978). Confronted with the rise of these theories in Chinese academia after the mid-1990s, the neo-rightist became alarmed, and this later became a source of conflict between neo-leftist and neo-rightist. In this chapter we have no intention of making a judgment about the conflict, but merely intend to illustrate the changes of Chinese social condition after the mid1990s, survey the characters of the ideological and cultural transformation in Chinese intelligentsia, and comprehend the trend and the possibilities of the critical educational studies identified by neo-leftists in this period in China. The conflict between neo-leftists and neo-rightists in the 1990s profoundly reflects the systematic rupture and transformation in Chinese society. From glorifying the egalitarianism to recognizing stratification, from restricting individual desires to upholding consumerism, people are likely to feel lost in this dramatic change. What’s more, what is happening in China is a full-scale transformation, from the realm of economy and culture to that of education, from the social ethos to the individual mentality. As for the school of education, it had been turned into the instrument of class struggle in the Cultural Revolution and considered as “the most serious disaster area” that people once labeled “the last conservative stronghold in the way of reformation.”3 However, since the 1990s, a series of transformations have come into being in the educational system. Private education started to recover, including the founding of some “plutocrat schools” that charge high tuition fees. After the mid-1990s, productivity was officially identified as a nature of education, basing on Deng Xiao-ping’s famous saying “technology is the primary productivity” (Deng, 1993). Schultz’s (1971) theory of human capital was adopted as the basis for charging for higher education. Scholars even brought forward the concepts of educational industrialization and marketization theoretically (Tang, 1999).4 Offering parents more “choice” and introducing market mechanisms into the realm of education were implemented as reforms for a time. In this tide of marketization, some public schools even transformed into private institutions, charging students quite high tuition fees. And some advanced rural and urban public schools began to charge various fees openly. As the stratification in Chinese society has developed, the difference of educational opportunity among different groups has certainly become obvious. The serious problem of educational equity led by the interference of privilege and capital has, indeed, run over the realm of education and developed into a kind of social injustice. Despite the absolute increase of enrolment since 1990s, the gap in education between rural students and urban students has widened. Since the expansion of higher education enrolment from the late 1990s, the number of university students has greatly increased. However, especially in the famous universities, the ratio of the students coming from the different kinds of families varies. In some colleges and universities in Beijing, for instance, in 1999, 28% of the students were from Beijing, 30% from other cities, 24% from small towns around the country, and only 17.7% came from the countryside (Sun, L., 2004). That is to say, among college students, urban students outnumbered rural ones by 82% to 18%. The problem is that the population of the countryside accounted for 60% of the total at that time. In addition,
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Page 379 because of the acceleration of the urbanization and the impact of globalization on the agricultural economy, the traditional social structure in the Chinese countryside has been broken up. Many peasants have lost their farmland or cannot make a living with their farm work, and have had to rush into the city to find work, with some of their children following. However, according to the policy, all the children should enroll at the location of their registered permanent residence, so these “in-migrant” students do not have equal educational opportunity to their urban peers. Thus the in-migrant workers have to endure huge economic pressure while their children have to face educational inequity. It is because of the existence of such problems inside the educational system that issues of educational and social difference and inequality have aroused people’s attention once more, almost at the same historical moment as the rise of the conflict between the leftists and the rightists in China in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, as it was still sensitive to talk about “class” at that time, researchers seldom used this term to discuss the Chinese reality. Instead, they used a framework based upon occupational stratification, region, and gender to reveal the different educational opportunity among various groups. These researchers applied positivist research methodologies most of the time and focused on governmental resource allocation and the examination system for theoretical explanation (N. Lu & Q. Xu, 2001). Though a few scholars tried to use the new sociology of education and the cultural reproduction theory of Bourdieu (1970) and Apple (1990) to profoundly analyze the educational difference between various occupations, these theories were less effective in explaining and solving the real emergent problems in China. For instance, since what Bourdieu described as middle class in the West was not as fully developed in China, a discussion of the cultural dominance of the middle class seemed not to apply. As another example, the ideological hegemony claimed by Gramsci was complicated in the Chinese educational environment. Though there was inconsistency between the orientation of policy and the mainstream ideological discourse, it was difficult to determine a “capitalistic cultural hegemony” in China. Thus, because of the difference in backgrounds, people would inevitably feel confused about the exact target of cultural and intellectual criticism, which was a focus of critical educational studies. Although critical educational studies were unable to solve the real problems in Chinese education, those important topics in China, such as the conjunction between status difference and educational inequality, power and capital in education, neoliberalism as part of educational marketization, increasing consumerism in daily school life, and the threat of English language and cultural domination within academia, were all definite concerns for critical educational studies. It is likely that, for the above reasons, critical educational studies have gradually entered into Chinese academia since the mid-1990s, as demonstrated in the review of literature in critical educational studies translated into Chinese, discussed above. However, limited by the obstacles of cross-contextuality and the difficulty in making connections between discourses, few scholars related these studies to real problems in Chinese education. Though they were aware of the existing or the potential value of critical educational studies as the instrument of criticizing, most of the Chinese research has fallen prey to the translation or the simple introduction of Western trends of thought. The Future of Critical Educational Studies in China Contemporary Chinese society is highly complicated. Some characteristics of market capitalism have appeared, while the political structure and the officially stated ideology remain socialistic. Consumerism has brought in the expanding desire for material goods, the decline of the classically socialist and revolutionary values, and the distortion of spiritual life. But, at the same time, it has created the contemporary Chinese society that is increasingly diversified and open.
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Page 380 Thus, despite operating under the title of socialism, the social welfare in China is quite fragile, and the differentiation between the city and the countryside is worsening. Within this context the various Western radical leftists and their theories actually appear oppositional to more capitalist-minded reforms. Their target is the dominant capitalistic system, culture and ideology, and it is because of the mightiness of their target that these critical studies have gained academic and ideological acceptance. Despite the fact that the modern history of China is a radical, revolutionary history, in the collective memory of the nation, people feel more distressed and alarmed about leftists than anything else, and it is still undeniable that the tradition of the leftist, in fact, has a stable political and social basis. Due to the complexities of history and society, the conflict between the neo-leftist and the neo-rightist in China is totally different from those in the West. It is doubtful that this conflict will be resolved, but there is no question it will go on for a long time. Further, we can also be sure that as long as problems arise similar to those that exist in Western capitalism, especially social stratification, the neo-leftists with their intense criticism of inequality will gain more and more attention. However, given current political conditions, the Chinese neo-leftist is doomed to endure significantly more pressure than Western radicals, facing the challenge of the growing right, while coping with the deep-rooted privilege within China’s bureaucratic tradition. The left pursues egalitarianism while having to bear and reconcile with the heritage left by the Chinese radical revolution. Further, because of the difference in context, the Chinese neo-leftists cannot immediately apply the concepts of their Western counterparts, causing critical educational studies in China to potentially be abandoned by academics. The situation of the radicalism in Chinese academia actually traces the living condition of the critical educational studies in China to a certain degree. Currently in Chinese educational research circles there is no formal school of critical educational studies, and only a few scholars are introducing and investigating this field. As mentioned above, except for a handful of them trying to explain the educational difference in Chinese society according to Bourdieu’s (1970) and Apple’s (1990) theory of cultural reproduction, few have analyzed the real problems in China with the use of critical educational studies. In the 1990s, following a general trend in academia, postmodern analyses sprung up in the realm of education. To some extent it affected curricular reform in the late 1990s. For instance, some reformers have put forward constructivist notions of education and curricula. Because the British new sociology of education (Young, 1971) and Apple’s curricular theory (1990) criticize the ideology, power, and politics of school knowledge, people have classified this work as constructivism, and used them as the theoretical basis of curricular reform. It is necessary to notice that there is a special context for the popularity of postmodernism as a radical trend of thought in Chinese educational circles. Since the late 1980s, people have begun to detest the examination-oriented education system, a system that has been established in China for a long time. Thus, both the common people and the government agreed upon an oppositional concept called education for well-rounded development, which proposed less emphasis on the simple knowledge impartment and evaluation by testing, more attention on the cultivation of ability and character, and the idea that education should return to students’ daily life. Despite the radical positions of antirationality and antiessentialism in postmodernism, its anti-intellectualism has more or less met the Chinese urgent need to rectify the problems of the exam-oriented system. However, people conflated critical educational studies with postmodernism, only noticing the intersection of postmodernism and the criticism in critical educational studies with the technical rationality of the educational process, the struggle over legitimate knowledge, and hegemonic discourse. They thus turned a blind eye to the political and cultural position of critical studies in terms of social democracy and human emancipation. This is nothing but a misunderstanding of these studies. Furthermore, the radicalness of postmodernism could not go further, not to mention the fact that the project of Enlightenment in China was far from finished.
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Page 381 Essentially, the importation of Western critical educational studies in the 1990s has not enlightened Chinese critical educational studies. Besides the systematic contextual factors that have been referred to above, there are some other reasons for this. First, compared with the real educational inequality produced by economic stratification, the cultural criticism undertaken with critical educational studies appears weak and pale. Next, in the realm of educational research, people are too cautious and conservative to touch the sensitive topics related to culture and politics. On the contrary, it is the rightist position that involves the marketization of the system without any focus on ideology, that has been quite influential for a time. Here, based on the above analysis, and combining the situation of contemporary social and educational transformation in China, we are now going to discuss to what degree critical educational studies could turn into real critical discourse in Chinese education, or perhaps even move beyond academic, theoretical thought and into the real practices of school education. In terms of pressing issues, the regional economic differentiation, especially the unbalanced development and unequal educational opportunity between rural and urban areas, has become the most serious problem in Chinese society. In the countryside, the lag of the educational qualifications caused by the collective relative poverty has been the focus for both the government and the people. As a result, promoting the balanced development of education and materializing equality of educational opportunity and equity is a focus for the reform of social policy, institutional design, and resource collocation (though having something to do with the cultural and ideological issues in education). Even in Western countries, the equality of educational opportunity is considered an important factor in the capitalistic welfare. Currently in China, the serious imbalance of educational resource distribution among regions or schools reflects the loss of the basic principles of social justice and demonstrates a lack of essential equity. By not focusing on these realities, critical educational studies, which tend to focus on informational, cultural, and ideological criticism, seem to avoid the important issues and instead dwell on the trivial. Of course, this is not to say that analyzing stratification and cultural and hegemonic reproduction will lose its explanatory power in the Chinese context. In fact, neither the British new sociology of education, such as Bernstein’s (1971) coding theory, nor Bourdieu’s (1970) cultural reproduction, are able to wholly explain the problem of occupational inequality in China. However, compared with cultural factors, economic issues and institutional discrimination do, in fact, impact educational inequality, because, most of the time in China, poverty and cultural disadvantage are linked. They are cause and effect for each other. The relative development of cities and the lack of cultural establishment in the countryside relative to educational conditions, as well as the economic situation of the family and the parents’ social status relative to educational opportunity, are apparently related to each other, though not in a one-toone correspondence. The recruiting system is a good example of institutional discrimination in China. Since the 1990s, people have critiqued the system of standardized examination for qualification for acceptance into higher education. Most of these critiques have asserted that such a focus on the exam would cause the distortion of the purpose, essence, and human character of the process of education. These are similar to Apple’s criticisms of the technical rationality of the Western standardized examination. However, the difference is that in Apple’s opinion, the standardized examination claimed by the neoconservatives has actually materialized in cultural politics. It tries to maintain the elite culture and Eurocentric cultural hegemony. Thus, it will not only bring in cultural repression but also increase educational inequality (Apple, 1996). Nevertheless, in China, people are opposed to abolishing the rigid standardized examination just because they view it as the most effective instrument to maintain educational equality (Liu, 2002). One reason is that our hearts are still full of fear from the educational disorder during the Cultural Revolution when the examinations were replaced by standards of parentage and political identity. Further, in the current social context, people are concerned that getting rid of the standardized examination would allow those with power and capital to benefit, and then result in increased educational
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Page 382 inequality. One worry is that the absence of a unified and rigid standard will broaden the gap of enrollment opportunity among different regions. As a result, critical discourses about standardized examinations cannot be easily exchanged between the Chinese and the American contexts because positions and opinions toward the same topic are widely divergent. Here follows another problem. The primary target of Western critical educational studies is contemporary capitalism and its cultural and ideological hegemony. In China, however, critical studies should examine the tradition of privilege as well. Since the establishment of the PRC, all previous political movements targeted bureaucratism and privilege. However, almost each radical movement of “antiprivilege” and “antiauthority” both outside and within education has left a negative collective memory. Thus, while using the resources of Western critical educational studies as a reference, especially the radical theories of Freire (1970), Giroux (1983), and McLaren (1986), Chinese scholars seem to be more cautious than their Western counterparts in differentiating their position from traditional radical reforms in China. Critical educational studies also attach importance to cultural politics, proposing the need for respect for differences between classes, races, genders, and sexualities. They thus suggest that we should respect the cultures and the identities of oppressed groups, fulfill democracy in daily life in education by opposing the symbolic violence of elite culture, and reach towards social democracy. For example, Giroux has put forward the radical theory of resistance about school daily life, based on research about working-class culture, youth subculture, and popular culture raised by the British school of cultural studies. It is the wish of Chinese educators to create democracy in normal educational life as well. The popularity of Dewey’s progressivism since the 1980s, and later the prevalence of constructivism in Chinese education, is evidence of this wish. Undoubtedly the theories of critical educational studies are the most valuable and available resource to help China in the transformation of the microdemocracy of daily life to the macrodemocracy of society. Furthermore, for Chinese scholars the educational reform of Mao’s age, which emphasized the combination of education and labor and the conjunction of education with industrial and agricultural workers, has also left a rich heritage. However, people are still reflecting on the enormous cost of this heritage. For example, the movement of the intellectual youth going to the countryside, during which education fell into disorder and scientific research lacked development, was considered to have ruined a whole generation. Consequently, how to eradicate the heritage of “the radical” while at the same time understanding the concept of cultural politics, is something critical educational studies in China must contend with. For instance, in the society of the Chinese city, youth subculture has shown its resistant nature. As a form of anticulture, youth subculture takes on typical consumerist characteristics, disputing the rigid process of the traditional education, pursuing physical and sensory happiness, and resisting the solemn and dogmatic traditional Chinese ideology with a kind of joking and unconcerned posture. However, there are two characteristics of youth subculture that deserve extra attention. First, the majority of these youth come from the rising bourgeois class rather than a marginal group. Second, if school is the battlefield, the accomplishment of their anticultural struggle has, to a certain degree, manifested the successful alliance between capital and culture in the consumerist society. For instance, the phenomenon of “Super Girl” was not long ago celebrated as a carnival of “democracy” in the realm of popular culture because voting in this case was done using mobile text messaging. But what is interesting is that this “democracy” was fulfilled via the commercial operation of capital and culture. Conversely, for peasants, as the bottom group in Chinese society, rural folk culture is their leading culture. However, this rural folk culture is constructed and structured by the traditional elite culture (Yan, 2006). In other words, the marginalized rural folk culture is more conservative in China. Thus, pop culture not only collides with rural folk culture and traditional elite culture, but also goes against conventional revolutionary culture as well as Western cultural influences. To sum up, in the process of researching cultural politics, identity, and the mechanisms of power in education, we should notice the unique
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Page 383 complexity in China, rather than applying the Western discourse of critical educational studies mechanically to the Chinese context. For Chinese farmers and the great many in-migrant workers in the city, education is still understood as the means of upward mobility. What Willis (1977) discussed in Learning to Labor, where the lads resisted schooling while actively taking part in their own cultural reproduction, cannot logically explain the living condition of the farmers’ children in the city who are unable to go to school. On the contrary, if we were to take this cultural explanation to be valid, we would likely end up justifying the inequity caused by the institutional deficiency. Thus, it might be more practical and effective to arouse the democratic consciousness of the bottom group and inspire their resistance toward the unfair system. Above, we have pointed out and analyzed the many difficulties in applying critical educational studies in the Chinese context. Certainly as the transformation of Chinese society continues, many public issues will match topics in critical educational studies to a different extent, just as has happened with the neoleftists in China. These issues include: neoliberalism, led by the marketization, which has shown up gradually in the institutional reform of economy, public welfare (medical treatment, house property, etc.), and even education; the great impact on industrial structure, traditional social structure, and daily life of the Chinese countryside caused by the industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist globalization; large-scale population in-migration from rural to urban areas; and educational problems of the inmigrant children because of poor economic conditions and the cultural discrimination they face. Thus, the critical energy of critical educational studies focused on understanding reality in China will only be strengthened as conditions in China continue to develop along its present course. And its core value, that of having human emancipation and social justice in mind while cultivating students’ critical consciousness and democratic spirit, will potentially influence Chinese educational practice as well. But it must be emphasized that during the process of linking the theory of critical educational studies to the Chinese reality of education, it is far more important to comprehend the spirit of practical concern and master its analytical thinking and techniques, than to apply its discourse mechanically. Otherwise, these critical theories will lose their practical value in the unique context of China. Notes 1 This book was translated and edited in 1980, by the Department of Education of East China Normal University (ECNU) & the Department of Education of Hangzhou University. 2 In May 1980, an article titled “Letter from Pan Xiao” and co-authored by three writers was published on China Youth , which is edited by the communist youth league. In the passage, the traditional highsounding rationalistic philosophy was oppugned, and the real practical life was believed to be “selforiented subjectively and others-oriented objectively.” This turned out to be a shock for the Chinese who had been used to regarding “the private” and “individualism” as the capitalistic evilness in Mao’s era. This event once was judged as an extreme embodiment of individualism and “capitalistic pollution to the spirit,” but was later considered unofficially as the beginning of ideological opening and awakening in Chinese society. 3 These were the common slogans in Chinese society during a long period in the 1980s, when the Cultural Revolution had already come to an end but the issues of education were still under the control of the leftist ideology. 4 After the Asian financial crisis, Dr. Tang Min of the Asian Development Bank told the reporter of Economic News on February 19, 1999 that if the enrollment of Chinese universities could increase to 2 million people per year and all of these students were fully charged for the tuition fee, then each year the institutions of higher education could charge 20 billion yuan more. Plus the approximate in-school consumption of these people, which could attach to 4 billion yuan, it was estimated that 100 billion yuan of investment and final consumption could be expected in the realm of higher education in China.
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Page 384 References Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays . New York: Monthly Review Press. Apple, M. W. (1990). Ideology and curriculum (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1993). Official knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1996). Cultural politics and education . New York: Teachers College Press. Bernstein, B. B. (1971). Class, codes and control . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of education objectives . New York: Longman, Green. Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and social imagery . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1970). La reproduction (Chinese Trans., 2002). Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Bruner, J. S. (1960) . The process of education (Chinese Trans.). Hong Kong: Cultural Education Press. Chen, H. (2006). The nongovernmental observation on the important decision-makings and the crucial events in Shenzhen 1979–2000. Beijing: Changjiang Literature & Art Press. Darder, A., Baltodano, M., & Torres, R. D. (2003). The critical pedagogy reader. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Deng, X. (1993). Selected works of Deng Xiao-ping (Vol. 3). Beijing: People’s Publishing House. Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Dewey, J. (2001). Democracy and education (Chinese Trans.). Beijing: People’s Education Press. Di, S. (2005). The class suspension, resumption and the enrollment during the cultural revolution. Over the Party History , 9. Dong, B. (2002). On the cultural studies in education. Journal of East China Normal University , 3. Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and punish . New York: Vintage Books. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Herder and Herder. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and resistance in education . South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Hall, S. (1978). Policing the crisis. London: Macmillan. Li, P., Li, Q., & Sun, L. (2004). Social stratification in China today. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Li, Y. (1998). The 17-year school education and the third generation of the republic. China Youth Studies , 1. Li, Y. (2005). The structure and evolution of Chinese social stratification. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Liu, H. (2002). The contradiction between equality and efficiency in the reform of college entrance examination. Educational Research , 12 . Lu, N., & Xu, Q. (2001). Analysis on the inequality of the educational opportunities in China in the 1990s. Journal of East China Normal University , 19 (4). Lu, X. (2002). The report of contemporary Chinese stratum . Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Lu, Y. (1993). Modern western philosophy of education . Zhengzhou: Henan Education Press. McLaren, P. (1986). Schooling as a ritual performance . Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary multiculturalism . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Peng, Z. (2005, July). The intellectual doom and the institutional tragedy. Journal of Northwest Normal University , 42 (4). Qu, B., & Shen, J. (1993). Corpus of pedagogy. Beijing: People’s Education Press. Ren, J. (1999). Recognizing the neo-leftist. Frontiers , 1. Rorty, R. (1998). Achieving our country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schultz, T. W. (1971). Investment in human capital. New York: The Free Press. Sun, L. (2004). Imbalance . Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Sun, Q. (2004, June). What is the reason from rectification to anti-rightist? Tongji University Journal , 15 (3). Tyler, R. W. (1994). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction (Chinese Trans.). Beijing: People’s Education Press. Wallerstein, I. (1976). The modern world-system . New York: Academic Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor . New York: Columbia University Press. Xiao, G. (2003). Neo-leftist and the ideological differentiation of the contemporary Chinese intellectuals. Trend of thoughts . Beijing: Social Sciences Press.
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Page 385 Xie, Y. (2003). The contention on political science between neo-leftist and neo-liberalist. Journal of SJTU , 11 (1). Xu, C. (2001). Research on western Marxism in China. Theoretical Horizon, 1. Xu, Y. (1998). Western Marxism in China. Reading , 1. Xu, Y. (2006). Contemporary Chinese social thoughts. Tribune of Social Science , 6. Yan, G. (2006). Institutional origin of teacher identity and its present crisis. Journal of Beijing Normal University , 4. Yao, X., & Wang, S. (2000). The suppositional “line struggle.” Literary Contention , 1. Young, M. F. D. (1971). Knowledge and control . London: Collier-Macmillan. Zhang, H. (Ed.). (1979). Collectanea of western capitalistic educational works . Beijing: People’s Education Press. Zhang, M. (2002). Discussion on the ideological and cultural basis of the eruption of cultural revolution. Party History Research & Teaching, 168 (5). Zhang, R. (Ed.). (1989). The elementary collectanea of foreign sociology of education. Beijing: ECNU Press. Zhang, Y. (1988). Talk about “the 17-year” education. Shanghai Research on Education , 2.
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Page 387 Part VI Social Movements and Pedagogic Work
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Page 389 28 Critical Pedagogy Is Not Enough Social Justice Education, Political Participation, and the Politicization of Students Jean Anyon As a critical educator, I hold as a goal of my teaching the politicization of students. Interested in social justice, I plan lessons that communicate to students knowledge about the injustices that mark society and constrain their life chances if they are poor or of color. My pedagogy builds on students’ own insights into subordination and resistance. As I imagine is the case with other critical educators, I encourage students to become involved in the public contention that is a legitimate part of the political struggle for equity in democratic societies. I hope that my lessons will encourage them to become involved—if not now, then later, when they are adults. Most likely, other progressive educators hold this hope dear as well—that we share information and analyses with students in large part in order to politicize them, to get them “involved.” But how do people become politicized? What do we know about how people—youth or adults—actually become engaged in public political contention? Is critical pedagogy enough? Recent historiography of the Civil Rights Movement, traditional labor history, and social movement research in sociology concerning why people participate in public contention, demonstrate that there are multiple reasons people become involved in social action, and simply having information about injustices —even when those involve insult or injury to oneself—is rarely enough to motivate participation. The research reveals that of prime importance among factors that influence participation in public contention is the experience of participation itself . Research suggests that—although critical information and understanding of social system inequities or injustice are important—it is not sufficient to get people engaged in ongoing contention. This scholarship on engagement contains important lessons for those of us who practice critical pedagogy in our classrooms. Processes and Mechanisms that Encourage People to Participate in Public Contention The several social and personal processes and mechanisms described below are based on the voluminous body of sociological research on participation in public contention and social movements. I describe each factor, offer an example from history—typically from the American Civil Rights Movement —and then relate my point to the work of critical educators. While the first two processes may be common to much critical pedagogy, the rest are not, and can provide crucial direction for future activity.
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Page 390 Attribution of Opportunity The first process influencing whether people become involved in political contention has to do with how they interpret their political and economic surroundings—and changes in those. To encourage social protest, people must view current developments as presenting opportunities for waging struggle (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). As I point out in Radical Possibilities (2005), the recent suburbanization of minority poverty, the deterioration of wage and job opportunities, and the diminishing rewards for college completion, all need to be seen as openings through which to push for equity. This apprehension of new opportunities sometimes helps us to see old arrangements in a new light: Situations that were previously understood as oppressive but immutable can be re-imagined and viewed as useful. An historical example of this process of attribution of opportunity can be seen in the 1930s and 1940s, when Black Americans were becoming consumers in the economies of Southern and Northern cities. Many realized that they had new leverage over businesses where they shopped. “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s, and sit-ins and boycotts of restaurants and other public facilities by Black college students in the 1940s, as well as 1947 Freedom Rides to test interstate bus segregation —all took advantage of the economic changes affecting African Americans, interpreting them as an opportunity for gaining rights. Critical educators today have an important role to play in helping students apprehend possibility in what, at first glance, might appear overdetermined or unchangeable racial and class subordination. Appropriation of Existing Organizations and Institutions Closely related to attribution of opportunity is the process whereby people appropriate existing organizations and institutions to make them more radical, to change their function, purpose, or manner of operating, so that they are more useful for transgress politics (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). The Southern Black Church during the 1950s and 1960s is a salient instance of this process. Until the 1950s, most Black Church leaders in the South saw their churches as preparation for salvation, not as a way to change the present. In the 1950s, many congregants and pastors appropriated the Church and transformed it into a major tool of the civil rights struggle. The extensive committee structure and community activities of women members were appropriated for civil rights; the format and activities of the Sunday service were altered somewhat to provide the structure and tone of mass political meetings; extensive, widespread church networks among pastors were energized and organized for planning and sharing protest information (Morris, 1984). These institutions were already part of the Black experience. Only minor, but crucial, alterations in focus, purpose, or mode of functioning needed to be made to encourage people to participate in protest. Critical educators are involved in a similar, vital process of reimagining schools and classrooms as social justice building spaces. This work is incredibly difficult but, I would argue, not any more impossible than the reimagining of economic relations, the Church, and culture that Black Americans undertook to mount the victories of the Civil Rights Movement. Social Construction of New Identities through Participation in Transgressive Politics Reimagining economic change and institutions as potentially oppositional does not, by itself, bring social change. And developing “critical consciousness” in people through information, readings, and discussion does not, by itself, induce them to participate in transgressive politics—although it provides a crucial base of understanding. To activate people to create or join public
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Page 391 contention, it is important to actually involve them in protest activity of some kind (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Meyer, 2002; Moses, 2002; Payne, 1995, among others). To make this point, the authors of Dynamics of Contention argue that people do not “become political” and then take part in contention; rather, participation in contention creates new, politicized identities: “[I]dentities modify in the course of social interaction” (p. 126). In other words, shifts in political identity do not so much motivate contentious political action, as develop as a logical consequence of it (p. 320). One develops a political identity and commitment—a change in consciousness—from joining demonstrations, marching, singing, joining the activities of social justice organizations in one’s neighborhood, etc. Participation creates individual participants; and it also leads to groups developing their own collective identity as social change agents. As Southern sharecroppers began to register to vote, and continued in this personally dangerous, politically contentious activity, a new collective identity was constructed by them individually and as a group: They came to see themselves, and they became—individually and as a “class”—a new category: Black citizens who were entitled to representation, entitled to their “rights.” Such “signifying work” was evident at the close of the successful Montgomery bus boycott in 1956. As Martin Luther King noted, the courageous, organized, successful actions of the participants in the boycott “had rendered the conventional identities—members of this or that congregation [or] ‘our Negroes’, for example— inadequate descriptors” (p. 319) of the celebrants. After the boycott, King described the “new Negro”: “[W]e walk in a new way. We hold our heads in a new way” (p. 319). The boycott not only changed the laws in Montgomery, but helped to create, and became an expression of, “a new collective identity among Southern Blacks generally”—a result of participation (p. 320). In order to develop a sense of themselves as change agents, as active political players, youth also need opportunities to engage in such activity. The final section of this chapter provides suggestions for such lessons. Embeddedness in Social Networks and Organizations Sociologist Doug McAdam analyzed the applications of Northern college students who applied to be part of the Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Summer of 1965. He found that of the 1,000 applicants accepted into the program, those who came South to participate had much stronger links to the Summer Project than did the no-shows. They were more likely to be members of civil rights (or allied) groups, have friends involved in the movement, and have more extensive histories of civil rights activity prior to the summer … in fact nothing distinguish[ed] the two groups more clearly than this contrast [in “social proximity” to the project]. (1988, p. 65) McAdam’s analysis suggests that belonging to a social group or network increases a person’s chances of participation in contentious politics; and in this phenomenon we also find important evidence that initial participation makes further participation more likely. For participation, available organizations are joined; the networks of people connected to an organization are made known; and being part of these is critical. A crucial consequence of being part of such embeddedness is that one is more likely to be asked to join contention. And being asked to join has been found to be one of the best predictors of participation (Passey & Giugni, 2001). When educators request that students take part in pedagogy involving planning an issue campaign in the local community, in conjunction with others already so engaged (as I will describe below), they are in effect asking (recruiting) their students into networks, and engaging them in an arena through which they are likely to be asked to participate further.
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Page 392 A Sense of Efficacy A sense of efficacy—achieved through actual participation—is also among the strongest predictors of subsequent participation (Passey & Giugni, 2001). When critical educators involve students in contention via issue campaigns, we teach students the civic skills necessary for meaningful participation. We provide opportunities for them to develop the skills and experience, the successes, that can create in them a sense of efficacy as change agents and effective actors in their communities. Indeed, research has substantiated these as benefits that accrue to youth who work to further opportunity in their communities. Studies have documented that such civic activism by low-income students of color, for example, typically fosters their positive personal development, and improves their academic engagement and, therefore, achievement (see, for example, Benson & Leffert, 1998; Forum for Youth Investment, 2004; Roth & Brooks-Gunn, 1998; Zeldin & Price, 1995). Research demonstrates that organizing urban youth to work with others to improve their schools and neighborhoods gives teenagers connections , embedding them in constructive community networks. This connectedness has been shown to be a worthy alternative to that offered by most street gangs (Hilley, 2004). In addition, by organizing others to work responsibly for social change, minority youth counter the dominant society’s view that they constitute a social problem. Teens also are encouraged to understand how the poverty of their families and their peers arises from systemic rather than personal failings. And it provides them with the concrete lesson that they can bring about changes in society, giving them a foundation for pursuing this kind of activity as adults. Critical Pedagogy and Political Participation I have been discussing evidence that although critical educators do well to share with students information about systemic causes of subordination, that is not enough to get students involved in the struggle for social justice. There are important lessons to take from this discussion, including the need to assist students in interpreting economic and political developments as opportunities for participation, helping them to appropriate existing institutional and organizational forms for social justice purposes, entering students into social movement networks, and, most importantly, providing physical and emotional support for—and curriculum that engages students directly in—actual public contention and the development of themselves as active agents in their own and their communities’ futures. When educators in the mid-twentieth century added “student council,” voting, and school-wide elections to American high schools, they might have been acting on the same principle with which I am making my argument. The early educators must have assumed that participation in the processes of democracy would legitimate these in the eyes of the students. And, most likely, they hoped that participation in the processes of democracy while in high school would encourage further participation later on. Critical education today ought to be based on the same principle. By giving students direct experience with social justice work, we can educate them to appreciate and value those forms of democratic process that are aimed specifically at creating a more equitable society—public contention toward progressive social change. By setting up situations in the school experience that allow practice in, and assist students to acquire skill with, public political contention we legitimize this work and develop students’ predisposition to engage in it. I do not want to leave the reader without some practical suggestions. In chapter 10 of Radical Possibilities (2005) I provide ideas for entering students into the processes of social justice struggle. I provide a brief summary of key activities below.
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Page 393 The basic point is to develop in students the skills utilized by community organizers. The activities begin with research in the neighborhood, and lead to the development of issue campaigns that bring attention to the need for new policy. Map Community Assets Finding and documenting community resources that could be useful for making the neighborhood a better place to live and work is an important first step. Students identify the gifts and skills of individuals, households, and families, and make a list of formal and informal institutions. Maps can also reveal key demographic information such as poverty rates, race/ethnicity, age, language, employment status and rates, the cost of land development, who develops it, rates of incarceration, school achievement levels, the price of housing, and the location of any job training services. Power Analysis Asset mapping is the basis for “power analysis.” Such an inquiry assesses the causes and solutions of current problems—whether they extend from the neighborhood and city to the metropolitan or federal levels. A power analysis identifies a problem faced by students or other community residents and asks the following kinds of questions: Who is impacted by the problem? Who makes the decisions that affect the immediate situation? Who makes decisions that determine what those individuals or groups do and say? What kinds of informal influence or formal power do they have? What kinds of informal influence or formal power do community residents have over the situation? Whose interests are affected by decisions that have been made? Who are potential allies in an attempt to solve the problem? The map a group has made will show individuals and organizations that could work together to solve the problem. As the map shows categories of assets who are actual people with names, work, interests, and relationships to others, it becomes a power map. The map becomes a basis for political campaigns to improve the community. Issue Campaigns The following description of the development of an issue campaign with students is an example of critical pedagogy that takes seriously the importance of participation in contention in the politicization of students. Kim McGillicuddy, one of 13 founding members of Youth Force in Bronx, New York, works with Youth Justice Coalition to Free LA. This group was formed to deal with what they call “California’s undeclared war on youth.” The group is led by youth aged 8–24 who have been arrested, detained, incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. Kim McGillicuddy works with high school students, carrying out activities that teachers could undertake. McGillicuddy advises that a successful campaign with young people has a number of steps: It starts with identifying the students’ constituency. Who do they feel they represent?: Immigrant students? Families? All community residents? Youth then conduct a strength and needs assessment, identifying and mapping constituents’ needs, skills, resources, and vision for change. Here, youth are engaged in developing, conducting, transcribing and assessing surveys, interviews, and personal stories. Next, youth scan existing research in relation to concerns or issues identified in their community research. They obtain demographic data, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, and evaluate research done by others. Often research requires investigating primary sources, something few schools teach or expect from urban students. With the teacher’s help, the class analyzes the data that surfaced from research activities—looking at everything they have found. They make asset and power maps. Through discussion,
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Page 394 they decide whether they want to act on the concerns. If so, they begin to identify the specific issues the class will take on, and determine short- and long-term organizing goals. The goals may be worded as a youth platform or campaign demands. Base-building is the next step. With the teacher’s assistance, the students determine what sort of organizational structure will best serve their goal. This means creating and implementing recruitment and communications strategies in the neighborhood, creating informational curriculum, facilitating meetings, recording and communicating decisions, debating whether decisions will be made by majority rule or consensus, and reaching out to organizations already active in the neighborhood or city. After researching the problems, identifying the issues, sketching out demands, and beginning to educate the larger community, youth now further develop the campaign’s power analysis, including researching targets of the campaign. They ask: Who is the person or group that has the power to give us what we want? What do they believe? How have they voted in the past? From where do they gain their strength —financial resources, advice, and support? Where are they vulnerable? Who are their allies, and ours— and who can we move? The answers to these questions, combined with the other analyses already done, should produce a short-term strategy, a long-term vision, and a final list of demands—all of which should be used to measure the group’s success. Teacher and students then develop their campaign action plan—including selecting tactics that will most effectively impact targets. Full debate is necessary to choose tactics, and the pros and cons of everything from taking one’s demands to the target with an appointment if possible, to civil disobedience if necessary. Invite community-based organizations to become involved. Students might want to support their platform, or others with which they agree, with a public demonstration. Or they might decide to work with members of a community group that is planning actions. McGillicuddy reports that: many of the youth who become involved in organizing are not just leaders, but [become] local heroes. Few other “youth development” activities offer young people the chance, for example, to help rid their community of a toxic waste site or a corrupt police chief. (interview of Kim McGillicuddy by What Kids Can Do staff, May, 2003) There are important lessons here for practitioners of critical pedagogy. Issue campaigns such as the one described here offer youth important experience in what they need in order to become involved in social justice activity on their own—critical abilities to reinterpret situations and organizations as containing possibilities for change, a knowledge of and attachment to social justice networks, an opportunity to participate, and a sense of their own efficacy through actual practice in attempting to make their communities more just environments. References Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities. New York: Routledge. Benson, P., & Leffert, N. (1998). Beyond the “village” rhetoric. Journal of Applied Developmental Sciences , 2, 138–159. Hilley, J. (2004, May). Teens taking action in Tennessee. Forum Focus , 2(2), 7–8. Retrieved from http://www.forumforyouthinvestment.org McAdam, D. (1988). Freedom summer . New York: Oxford University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S., & Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of contention. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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Page 395 Meyer, R. (2002, August 17). Collective action and the making of interracial solidarity. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois. Morris, A. (1984). The origins of the civil rights movement. New York: Free Press. Moses, R. (2002). Radical equations. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Passey, F., & Giugni, M. (2001). Social networks and individual perceptions. Sociological Forum , 16 (1), 123–153. Payne, C. (1995). I’ve got the light of freedom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Roth, J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1998). Promoting healthy adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 8, 423–459. Zeldin, S., and Price, L. (1995). Creating supportive communities for adolescent development. Journal of Adolescent Research , 10 , 6–15.
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Page 396 29 Teachers’ Unions and Social Justice Mary Compton & Lois Weiner Other contributions in this book outline the nature of the neoliberal project for education, demonstrating that issues teachers and teachers’ unions frequently view as germane only to the national experience are, in fact, global in nature. As Robertson (2008) explains, neoliberalism’s promoters have remade the world, including the world of education. Out with the collective and welfare; in with the individual and freedom. This tectonic shift … has transformed how we talk about education, teachers and learners, unions, parents’ groups, and professional associations. In short, it has altered the conditions for knowledge production and the circumstances under which we might demand a socially just education system, along with the spaces and sites for claims making around education. With education yoked more closely to national and regional economies, schools and universities are now universally mandated to (efficiently and effectively) create the new breed of entrepreneurs and innovators, the value-driven minds who will spearhead the battle for global markets and consumers and a bigger share of the spoils. Education, once untrammeled virgin territory, is also being initiated into the world of property rights, markets, trade, and rating agencies. (p. 11) The nomenclature of neoliberal policies enacting performance-related pay, heightened use of standardized testing, inspection, privatization, and a shift in the curriculum towards the interests of business and employers, vary from one country to another, but the policies themselves are more or less uniform ideologically, as well as in many particulars. Despite the dramatically different social, economic, and political conditions in advanced industrial nations that make up the global North and what are called “developing” nations in the global South, educational policies being proposed by governments share common assumptions and desired outcomes. Thus Outcome Based Education (OBE) was a dominating theme in the education discourse in South Africa, which used a New Zealand model propagated through the World Bank (Spreen, 2004, p. 103). OBE was a primary concern of the 2003 conference of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), along with the relative merits of differing funeral plans for members and their families who were victims of AIDS. Teachers’ unions from Australia to India and from the UK to the Caribbean debate the same educational policies using different terminology (Compton & Weiner, 2008).
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Page 397 The thrust of the neoliberal project can be divided into three segments (Hatcher, 2001). Firstly it sees education at all levels as a potential market opportunity. As Lips (2000) from the Cato Institute puts it: “Increasingly, entrepreneurs recognize that the public’s dissatisfaction with one-size-fits-all schools is more than just fodder for political debates. It is a tremendous business opportunity.” Marketization takes the form both of direct privatization of school and higher education systems and the international trade in school services such as testing and online education (Kuehn, 2008, p. 60). Secondly there is the wholesale introduction of business methodology and terminology into education. The language of accountability, for instance “value added,” “performance,” “delivery,” “world class,” “targets,” is now so commonplace in schools throughout the world as to be assumed (Robertson, 2008, p. 20). In contrast, the systems used to enforce “accountability,” in particular the use of league tables or rankings, punitive inspection, performance management, and standardized testing, are being contested by teachers’ unions, which argue that the policies have been harmful to teaching, teachers, and the education systems subjected to them. The third aspect of the project is the increasing control of the curriculum by the corporate world, most often invited by education officials. In the UK, for example, there is an avowed intention to build “employers much more closely into the process of designing and delivering education and training” (DfES, 2004, p. 73). Teachers’ Unions Resisting the Neoliberal Assault Let us take, to begin with, the policy of maximizing the potential for profit in school systems. Teacher trade unionists can and do argue the case that the profit motive is inappropriate in a public service. Thulas Nxesi, President of Education International explains, “Private companies are accountable to shareholders, who are only interested in profits, and when you just try and link these models to the public service you are dealing with two different philosophies” (Compton, 2008, p. 212). Furthermore, the privatization of schools occurs dialectically with deterioration of pay and conditions and deskilling of teaching (Weiner, 2007). As Tooley explains in his article, “Welcome to Easy Learn,” “If in the free market schools can find dedicated champions of children’s learning willing to work longer hours, or be flexible on their pay and conditions, then what is wrong with that, if it benefits children?” (Tooley, 2006). A variant of marketization, termed “privatization lite” (Butler, 2001) has occurred in England through the City Academies program, discussed more fully later in this chapter. City Academies are run by private individuals who are not allowed to make any direct financial gains but are allowed to appoint governors who can set pay and conditions for staff. Along with the maximizing of profit goes the imperative to cut taxes, in particular for the benefit of large corporations (Harvey, 2005, p. 17). This policy is used to rationalize cuts in public spending in education, which in turn encourage local school authorities to reduce the number of educational workers; to hire people as teachers who have fewer academic qualifications and can be paid less than career teachers with more experience and education; to increase class sizes; and to erode or actually lower teachers’ salaries (Weiner, 2007). As do all labor unions, teachers’ trade unions exist first and foremost to defend the pay and conditions of their members. At the same time, enshrined in the statements of principle and purpose of most teachers’ unions is the task of defending and furthering the cause of public education. For example, rules of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), the largest teacher union in Europe state: “The objects of the Union shall be … to secure adequate financial and other resources for the full development of the publicly provided education service and satisfactory working conditions and adequate facilities in all educational establishments” (NUT, 2007/8, p. 4).
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Page 398 Clearly, then, contesting neoliberalism’s efforts to eliminate public education as a “public good” is the legitimate concern of the teachers’ trade union movement and has been treated as such all over the world (Compton & Weiner, 2008, p. 8). Many actions by teacher trade unionists have been organized to contest the creeping privatization of school systems. While the challenge to neoliberalism has been delayed and muted in the United States (Weiner, 2007), Saltman (2005) describes campaigns against the corporate takeover of schools and in some cases whole state school systems in the United States by the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The NEA and AFT have taken a lead in contesting this development, in particular by instigating, funding, and publicizing research on the success or failure of Edison schools according to the kind of criteria which are routinely used against public schools (Saltman, 2005). In England one of the main forms of privatization in the school system is the City Academy program, which requires local education authorities (school districts) to hand schools over to private companies, individuals, charitable trusts, or faith organizations. In exchange for a small initial outlay these entities then own the school and the land, and control the governing body. One instance that raised considerable public outcry occurred when Peter Vardy, a fundamentalist Christian car dealer took over several schools in the North of England, imposing his religious beliefs on the science and RE (Religious Education) curriculum. As Murch (2008) describes, at a protest meeting organized by the teaching unions: Many of us had heard the first Vardy Academy described as totalitarian by ex-pupils and staff … what we hadn’t heard was the raw emotion of parents put in the front line of this bizarre new kind of social experiment. “Every child has been given a bible, and they get into trouble if they don’t carry it around with them,” one parent said. (p. 85) Resistance to City Academies has come primarily from campaigns by teachers and parents, organized by the NUT. The campaigns have had some success, for instance preventing Vardy setting up a school in Doncaster (Regan, 2007); there has also been a long physical occupation of the grounds of an academy planned in Brent (Goff, 2007). The NUT’s efforts in Bradford, described in detail by Murch (2008) are instructive about how a teachers’ union can succeed in reaching out to parents and community groups to mobilize against a well-funded and politically well-connected sponsor. In other cases teachers have taken strike action against the transfer of their pay and conditions to an academy (Chaudhari, 2008). And in local elections in May 2008 a group of teachers and parents in Barrow in Furness fighting City Academy proposals stood under the banner of “Our Schools are Not for Sale” and won four seats. There is also a national umbrella organization—the Anti-Academies Alliance which coordinates campaigns across England. Neither the privatization of schools nor the resistance to it is confined to countries in the global North, however. Cai (2008) describes her shock when she returned to China at finding “a brand new glittering title hanging outside my former elementary school—Quishi Education Corporation” (p. 89). She describes, however, how teachers are hampered from resistance by the fact that their union is run by the state. Yet despite this, in another part of China, pre-school teachers closed all the kindergartens in their town when they were told they were being taken over by a private corporation (Crienglish.com, 2008); and in Pakistan a general strike was called in Sindh province to oppose the banning of the teachers’ union and the privatization of schools. As the national organizer of the Trade Union Rights Campaign of Pakistan, Khalid Bhatti put it: This government wants to privatize all the main educational institutions in the province which are providing very cheap education to poor working class students. The government
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Page 399 wants to break the teachers’ power to make it sure that there should not be any resistance or opposition to the privatization policy. (www.TURCP.org, 2006) Just as some national teachers’ unions are resisting privatization with vigor, there are many examples around the world of struggles against the cuts in education budgets which go hand in hand with privatization. In Burundi—a country with one of the lowest per capita incomes and the lowest life expectancies in the world—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insisted in 2008 that teachers not be paid an overdue 34% pay rise on their already meager salaries of $25 to $30 a month, which do not meet even their basic needs (www.bicusa.org, 2007). As Kuehn (2008) explains, Structural Adjustment Programs imposed on countries that require economic aid demand drastic cuts in public expenditures for education. Another requirement is privatization of the country’s main assets, in Burundi this being coffee. Challenging these economic policies, in October 2007, both the secondary and primary school teachers’ unions went on strike. The South African teachers’ union SADTU has staged a series of strikes over the years against extremely large class sizes—in many cases over 100 pupils to a class—low salaries, and teacher shortages. In contrast to the global South, where neoliberal reforms have been imposed as the price of economic aid, in the global North, reforms have been adopted by governments that are, at best, unwilling to challenge neoliberal ideology, and are often proponents of the reforms (Kuehn, 2008). Yet, even in countries that have willingly adopted neoliberal policies, resistance occurs. In Puerto Rico, teachers went on strike early in 2008 for parity of salaries with the rest of the United States and for improved infrastructure for schools ( Washington Post, 2008). There are also encouraging developments in the Norwegian trade union movement, where unions are joining together with the wider community to form groups such as the Popular Movement for Public Services, and pushing the boundaries of political participation by formulating their own demands based on their opposition to the neoliberal project (Wahl, 2007). The second element in the neoliberal education project—the importing of business methodology and managerialism into schools—is well under way in many countries, with the United States and the United Kingdom leading the way. Schools which are subject to the attention of neoliberal education policies in relation to their management are not so much places where professionals and learners work in cooperation with their local communities, but micromanaged units accountable to streams of government-determined standards, benchmarks, inspections, and league tables (Zeichner, 2008). The effect on teachers’ conditions of service and pay can be extreme, with paperwork and box-ticking exercises taking the place of creativity and joy in teaching. In India, for example, where the World Bank is sponsoring a program called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) or Education for All, primary teachers give surveys, collect census data, keep enrollment data, and in addition compile statistics on student enrollment, retention and learning. As a result the primary school teachers have very little time to teach. Top level leaders of SSA consider data collection, not teaching or even building maintenance, to be the priority. (Chakraborty, 2008) The incidence of stress among teachers as a result of this drive for standards is well documented. For example, the extremely punitive inspection regime in England which can lead to schools being threatened with closure, and to the local “naming and shaming” of schools, has been associated with several cases of suicide both among heads and among classroom teachers who have been bullied by heads passing the stress down the line (Eason, 2000). For most teachers’ unions, there is little doubt then that this raft of measures is the legitimate concern of their organizations and members, a vital part of whose task is to defend the conditions
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Page 400 of service of their members. Unfortunately, scholars have tended to ignore the involvement of unions in examining the resistance to neoliberal policies (Compton & Weiner, 2008). Yet evidence of teachers’ unions’ challenges abound. In Scotland and Wales a prolonged campaign and boycott by teachers and parents led to the abolition of the SATs testing regime (Compton, 2008). And the Australian Education Union (AEU) has fought a long campaign against performance-related pay, including public education campaigns, rallies, work stoppages, and much political campaigning to bring about the defeat of state governments which had been largely responsible for such policies, as Durbridge (2008) explains. Teachers’ unions have also challenged the ideological premises of neoliberal reform, in particular the idea that the “free market” is the superior method of regulating public services. Neoliberalism’s presumption that education can be treated in the same way as an industrial process and that children should be seen as products of that process whose added value can be measured by standardized tests is opposed by most teachers’ unions. As Education International (EI), the international confederation of teachers’ unions, puts it in its theme document from the 2004 Congress, “The market aided by performance indicators, produced by a growing private evaluation industry, will lead inexorably to a change in the nature of teaching, indeed the very concept of education” (p. 19). EI documents advance a definition and purpose of education that is aligned with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which argues that education should be “directed towards the full development of the human personality” (United Nations, 1948). The third thrust of the neoliberal agenda is the shaping of the curriculum in favor of the needs of business. For example, in the UK, the government talks about “employers in the driving seat” of curriculum reform (DfES, 2004). Curricular changes that favor the expressed needs of business are enforced through use of standardized testing and punitive measures that are said to enforce accountability (Weiner, 2007). Neoliberalism contends that business-oriented curricular reforms are enacted to enhance and extend educational opportunity, by creating a better-educated workforce. Yet, a closer look at these policies and their results indicates that they result in reduced expectations and outcomes for academic learning (Weiner, 2005). Ramachandran (2004) sees literacy “beating out education” in India, noting that: Literacy skill is all that the masses need, argue the market forces, so that they can read the product label and advertisements. Its somewhat evolved form would be adequate for factory workers to read production instructions and to use even the internet. (as cited in Compton & Weiner, 2008, p. 59) In Mexico, the ICATEP program is a collaboration between education and industry which theoretically prepares pupils to work in the local industries. In one school, for example, a production line is set up using machines from a local garment factory where pupils spend part of the day sewing police uniforms. As Rincones, Hampton, &Silva (2008) put it, “the owner of the clothing factory said that this program is very beneficial to his business. He can select the best students to fill his vacancies, and the time to train new employees is reduced significantly from seven weeks down to about three weeks” (p. 39). Not only does this program severely restrict the opportunity for the kind of democratic education which teachers in Mexico want for their pupils (Arriaga Lemus, 2008) it does not even succeed in its own terms, with graduates of these programs losing their jobs if the company moves to another country with a cheaper labor force or closes due to an economic downturn (Rincones, Hampton, & Silva, 2008). One important exception to the growing hegemony of neoliberal policy in regard to curriculum content is in Brazil, where the teachers’ unions have been working with local communities to develop the so-called Escolas Plurales or plural schools (Hypolito, 2008). The Escolas Plurales are based on Freirean pedagogy, aiming to teach a culturally relevant curriculum and to change in radical ways school organization and culture, like the way in which time is
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Page 401 allocated in schools. Unlike the kind of reforms that we are seeing in the rest of the world, handed down from corporations, mediated by politicians to teachers, these innovations are produced through discussion between teachers, their unions, and the local community so that teachers “participate in processes of democratic school governance, workshops, interdisciplinary projects, participatory planning, research, collective and collaborative production and a rich process of in-service education. Paid time for studying and researching is another expression of this new professional consciousness” (Hypolito, 2008). The Limits to Teachers’ Union Opposition But although teachers’ unions around the world are opposing the neoliberal project, this opposition is not always highly effective or widespread. Curiously, the potential of teachers’ unions to organize successful resistance to neoliberal reforms is more often seen by the World Bank and by private education corporations than by the unions themselves (Compton & Weiner, 2008). One reason for the disparity between teachers’ unions’ potential power and their leadership of resistance is that many trade union bureaucracies seem disoriented by the rhetoric of neoliberalism. Margaret Thatcher’s famous doctrine of TINA—”There Is No Alternative”—has become deeply ingrained in all areas of the media and the popular consciousness (Robertson, 2008); teachers and trade union leaders are not immune to this influence. Neoliberalism has succeeded in altering the discourse of politics, making the notion that the world is made up of consumers desperate to exercise choice in all aspects of life, including their children’s right to win in the educational race to excellence, a given (Robertson, 2008). Like other citizens, teachers, teacher trade unionists, and teachers’ union officials too often accept the neoliberal project, trying to tinker with it to make it slightly less damaging. This strategy is seen, for example, in the NUT’s employment of a consultancy firm to come up with ways that performance-related pay could benefit teachers (Coopers & Lybrand, 1998). Kohn (2004) notes the power of neoliberalism’s discursive hegemony: This rhetorical assault seems to come out of nowhere, as though a memo had been circulated one day among those on the right: “Attention. Effective immediately, all of our efforts to privatize schools will be known as ‘reform’, and any opposition to those efforts will be known as ‘anti-reform.’ That is all.” (p. 1) The World Bank, the IMF, neoliberal politicians, and the mass media have borrowed, or as neoliberalism’s critics put the process, usurped, the language of social justice (Weiner, 2005). From the most famous school reform “No Child Left Behind,” to World Bank Documents with titles like “Making Services Work for Poor People” or “Bringing the Little Girls of Pakistan to School,” neoliberal rhetoric explains its reforms as eliminating poverty and extending educational opportunity. Neoliberal pundits identify its policies with “freedom,” “democracy,” “equal opportunity,” all concepts which have an iconic status (Robertson, 2008). Neoliberalism’s rhetoric and, consequently, its policies appeal to the poor and marginalized groups who often view standardized testing and its punitive accountability as well as the setting up of “independent” schools such as charter schools in the United States as a means of holding governments responsible for the lack of equality in schooling and creating alternatives (Robertson, 2008). The fact that these reforms often have the opposite from the stated effect and the effect desired by some advocates for marginalized groups, does not become obvious until after damage has been done (Kuehn, 2008).
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Page 402 A second reason for the failure of teachers’ unions to use their power to contest neoliberal reform is the degree to which they are not independent organizationally from the state. One extreme form of this problem is in countries such as China where, as Cai (2008) explains, the chair of the union in a school is often a full-time position, paid by the school authorities and government. Proposals at meetings “often got passed almost unanimously, because we all sort of know this proposed issue most probably has already been decided among the administrative or even higher level officials” (Cai, 2008, p. 93). This incorporation of unions into the state is not the sole preserve of Communist governments, however. In Mexico, regarded as a democracy: Historically … there has been fear of democratic and independent unionism. The PRI ( Partido Revolucionario Institucional ) ruled Mexico for over seventy years, enacting labor laws that gave the state control over union recognition and the right to strike. The PRI integrated into itself the only officially recognized unions, exercised authoritarian control, and repressed union members who disagreed with or protested against autocratic union leaders. (Rincones, Hampton, & Silva, 2008, p. 217) The government-controlled teachers’ union, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (SNTE) has been aligned with the PRI and exercises enormous power as a result of this alliance. In response to the SNTE’s autocratic control, teacher activists in Mexico formed reform groups, uniting in a national confederation, Coordinadora Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE). Arriaga Lemus (2008) points out that the SNTE actively promotes neoliberal policies in Mexico, including “policies to keep wages low and to keep employment precarious, to limit budgets and to decentralize education as a condition for the sector’s privatization” (p. 223). China and Mexico obviously present extreme examples of unions that are controlled by governments. In other unions, control takes a different form. In England, the neoliberal New Labour government attempted to depress union opposition through its “social partnership” arrangement. All the school staff unions with the exception of the NUT agreed to work with the government to improve education. To critics of the social partnership arrangement, the ostensible “improvements” to which the unions agreed were, in fact, significant defeats for teachers and quality education (Compton, 2008). The first agreement was that education workers without teaching qualifications could carry out teachers’ work provided the head (principal) agreed to it. The second agreement reorganized teachers’ pay scales and management structure leading to a loss of salary and status for thousands of teachers round the country. In exchange, the unions won the right of primary teachers to have some time off their duties to plan, prepare, and assess. To critics, this improvement was bought at the high cost of the sacrifice of teachers’ professional identity and the diminution of what historically has been considered their most potent weapon—the fact that they and they alone were legally entitled to be in charge of a classroom (Compton, 2008). In South Africa, similarly, although for very different historical reasons, the trade union center— Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) of which SADTU is a member—is wedded to the state through the so-called tripartite alliance with the South African Communist Party and the ruling African National Congress. This arrangement has meant some accommodation to the neoliberal economic policy known as GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution). As Mannah and Lewis (2008) put it: The union’s inclusion in the processes of policy formulation without the ability to change the overarching macroeconomic policy framework governing them has prevented SADTU from playing its intended role in policy formulation and as vanguard for the poor. Hence
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Page 403 SADTU has unintentionally been sidelined by the neo-liberal logic of GEAR and struggles to deliver on its vision for free public education within these neo-liberal rationalities. (p. 188) And there are some countries where teachers have never had the right to strike so that the potential bargaining power of unions is significantly weakened, as, for example, in the Federal Republic of Germany where teachers are counted as civil servants for whom it is illegal to take industrial action, and several states in the United States. Even without the more or less obvious subversion of independent teachers’ unions by the state, there is the issue of union bureaucracy and the inertia which critics note it causes even in unions which have not been “taken over.” Teacher unions are often divided both between sectors—many countries have different unions for primary and secondary teachers—but even within sectors as is the case in the UK where the NUT, for example, has slightly less than half of all teachers in membership, the rest being dispersed between six others, and is engaged in a continual and debilitating membership struggle with its main rival the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT). This division makes it much more difficult to take effective action since the unions too often fail to support one another when they are taking action beyond the basic trade union principle of not taking on the work of strikers. Only if the action is very popular and successful do they join in (Seifert, 1987). This has, of course, been made even more difficult by the inclusion of the NAS/UWT in the social partnership. And although there is a great deal of will among the membership of both unions to join together, the vested interests of the bureaucracy make it a well-nigh impossible task (Compton, 2008). Reclaiming the Agenda: How can Teachers’ Unions Make a Real Difference? Although teachers’ trade unions and their leaders often do not recognize their own power, there is little doubt that global education corporations, the World Bank, and the IMF do. They are seen and characterized as the main “obstacle to reform” and the World Bank commissions research into strategies to tackle them. The following comes from a draft report by the World Bank: With their political power, teachers and doctors are able to protect their incomes when there is pressure for budget cuts. The only thing left to cut, therefore is non-wage operations and maintenance expenditures. Many governments have responded by creating a second class of civil servants who are outside the civil service, and are correspondingly paid less with fewer benefits. (Devarajan & Reinikka, 2002, p. 6) And the World Bank reports approvingly that progress has been made in highly impoverished countries by reducing teacher costs by taking on underqualified or unqualified teachers at about 50% of the salary of contracted teachers (World Bank, 2007). Reinikka, in the report “Making Services Work for Poor People” (Devarajan & Reinikka, 2002) goes further, suggesting that teachers’ “failure to perform their duties in a reasonable fashion” is “probably the biggest constraint to making services work for poor people” (p. 6). Advocates for teachers would argue, however, that failures in the education systems in the global South have more to do with the economic policies pursued by the World Bank, for example, privatizing Africa’s mineral and agricultural wealth for the benefit of foreign corporations rather than using them to enrich both the citizens of Africa and, of course, their education systems (Zeichner, 2008).
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Page 404 Not only international bodies but also private corporations see the unions as an obstacle to their plans for profiting from education. Henry Pitman the managing director of Tribal—a consultancy corporation with interests in education says, for example: “In areas such as North London, you are up against the local Labor party, the Socialist Labor party, the unions, and increasingly also groups such as Parents Against Privatization” (cited by Hatcher, 2001). The World Bank document, The Politics of Education Reform: Bolstering the Supply and Demand; Overcoming Institutional Blocks , by Javier Corrales analyzes how best to overcome the potential power of teachers’ trade unions. Firstly the document makes clear, as indicated in the quote above from Tribal consultancy, that coalitions between those who contest reforms are regarded as a significant threat. Where teachers’ unions have been successful in their struggles—both historically and in the present—it has often been the case that they have enjoyed the support of parents and the wider community (Seifert, 1987). Both the Anti-academy Alliance and the Coalition against SATs in England are coalitions led by parents and teacher trade unionists. The experience of the Australian Education Union (AEU) is one of mobilizing parents alongside teachers to campaign for public education and against the destruction of labor rights (Durbridge, 2008). In Brazil as described earlier it was communities and teachers working together who helped to forge the Escolas Plurales. And in Oaxaca the struggle in 2006 involved the whole community in fighting to defend public education (Arriaga Lemus, 2008). In South Africa it was the coalition of unions and communities that succeeded in overthrowing the racist apartheid regime. The strategy that Corrales proposes to counter such successful coalition building is to build an alternative alliance in order to attempt to isolate the teachers’ unions. He quotes approvingly the strategy pursued by the state government in Victoria Australia in 1992: In short, the government built a strategic alliance with outsider actors as well as one crucial potential cost-bearer (principals), which effectively preempted the coalition possibilities of veto groups. Serious education reforms inevitably produce losers. Whether or not these losers take active stands against the government may depend on certain institutional variables: … (amongst which) strategic coalitions between veto groups and other societal groups seem to be the most malleable by government policies. (Corrales, 1999, p. 38) Another part of the strategy detailed by Corrales is to be aware of the long-held union principle “Divided we Stand, United we Fall”—that divided unions are weakened unions. He says: Externally fragmented unions, i.e., those in which multiple unions compete with one another for teacher membership, will be less effective in disrupting reforms. In this institutional setting, “each union is weaker, and all of them can only bargain after coordinating their actions.” (Murillo, 1999, p. 48) The collective action problems associated with fragmentation reduce the capacity of unions to block the reforms. (Corrales, 1999, p. 35) As in the case of the UK described above, it is still true that teachers’ unions are very much divided and there is an increasing recognition among their leaderships that there is a pressing need for professional unity if they are to be successful (Compton, 2008). There are instances both from history and from the present day where teachers’ unions have merged. For example, the Indian teachers’ union the Teachers’ Association of South Africa (TASA) joined up with SADTU during the struggle against apartheid even though the latter was much bigger and poorer and the leaders of the Indian union knew it would mean they almost certainly would lose their positions (Samuel, 2008). And last year in the UK the Association of University Teachers joined forces with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education to form one union, the University and Colleges Union.
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Page 405 The last thing that Corrales mentions as a threat to reform is that teacher’ unions are strengthened when there is what he calls internal fragmentation. Union leaders who feel “threatened from below” are more likely to contest reform on behalf of their members. “Union leaders who do not face internal challenges on the other hand will feel more comfortable cooperating with the state and even accepting certain sacrifices, as long as there is some compensation” (p. 38). Teaching unions have the potential to roll back the neoliberal agenda but, as shown, there are many obstacles in their way. Despite the strength of the assault on unions and public education, unions retain their power to take collective action. This power, potential and actual, continues to present a threat to those who seek to remodel education on neoliberal lines. An example of how unions may choose in the future to exercise leadership was shown in the UK in 2008. The NUT called the first national teachers’ strike for 21 years. Leaders acknowledged a danger that members would not vote for action because there was a new generation of teachers who knew little about unions and who certainly had never taken strike action. And yet the leadership of the union was faced with a situation in which it decided that its only recourse was to call a strike to protect members’ pay, since teachers had received belowinflation pay over the past three years and were facing another three years of loss in real wages (NUT, 2008). The NUT leadership opted to go to the members for permission to strike; members voted by a large majority to strike. The difficulty union leaders face in making judgments about teacher desires in regard to job actions is shown by the results of the NUT vote. Although the turnout in the ballot was comparatively low, the support for the strike was high. Thousands of schools were closed and large rallies and demonstrations were held up and down the country (NUT, 2008). The union presumed that the neoliberal New Labour government would not back down in the face of a one-day strike. However, the leadership intended to build alliances with other public sector unions and make the strike the beginning of a rolling program of action, and in so doing to create stronger possibilities of changing the political landscape, turning the tide in favor of well-funded public education and, with it, improved teacher salaries (NUT, 2008). One question of importance as yet unanswered is how the ideology of teachers’ union leaders as individuals affects their decisions about political opposition to neoliberalism. To what extent have teachers’ union leaders assimilated neoliberal assumptions? To what extent do leaders and teachers share beliefs about collective struggle to defend public education? These questions are especially in areas where there is either no tradition of struggle or that tradition has lapsed, as was largely the case in the UK. Nonetheless, significant evidence exists from countries around the world that teachers, as a force, can be mobilized. Like the Chinese kindergarten teachers mentioned above and teachers in Zimbabwe confronting a regime widely recognized as maintaining its authority through violence and force (www.thezimbabwean.co.uk), teachers are taking action in situations which take considerable physical as well as moral courage. Conclusion This chapter details examples of the struggles of teachers around the world against the neoliberal project for education, the forces that stand in their way, and strategies to overcome them. Neoliberalism is an international doctrine. It has spread quickly over almost the entire world. Corporations are accepted as being international in their reach. Less recognized is the global presence of teachers and their unions. If teachers’ unions’ struggles can become more international in nature, their potential for contesting the neoliberal project for education is likely to be realized in ways not yet seen. Also a factor is the increase in interest within teacher unions to unite with social movements internationally to fight against the neoliberal agenda. The World Education Forum which met
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Page 406 in Porto Alegre in 2004, for example, put forward an alternative vision for education that runs directly counter to the neoliberal agenda. Among other things it affirms: It is the duty of the state to guarantee, as part of public service and without discrimination or exclusion related to nationality, religion, ethnicity, sex, social class and sexual choice, the full right to a substantial high-quality public education, at all levels from pre-school to university. (World Education Forum, 2004) Teachers are organized into an international confederation, Education International (EI), which represents 30 million teacher trade unionists around the world. EI has a “key strategic role in organizing the alliances that can push back the neo-liberal offensive and win for the children of the world the futures they deserve” (Weiner, 2008). Advocates of more leadership from teachers’ unions in the struggle against neoliberalism argue that for EI to exercise the full extent of its power, the unions that constitute the EI, and the EI itself, may have to undergo internal change (Weiner, 2008). Many teachers’ unions have atrophied in the past 20 years, in part due to economic and political attacks by neoliberal governments (Weiner, 2005). Another force weakening teacher unionism has been internal, the growth of bureaucracy and a concomitant diminution in members’ activity (Weiner, 2005). If this analysis is correct, teachers will need to transform their unions, to make them truly democratic and to make them “consistent defenders of equality, social justice and democracy—that is of human emancipation” (Weiner, 2008). If teachers’ unions are to have a real chance of turning back the neoliberal tide they must also have a vision of their own about what education is for and how to achieve it. It is this vision of a truly emancipated education which is the subject of this volume. We need to say there is another worldview, and we must be able to put it on the table as a counter to what they are saying … you can’t rely on negotiation only. You will have to back negotiation with mass mobilization on the ground, but you can’t just say you’re going to mobilize because people will ask what your counterproposal is. The two strategies work hand in hand; they enhance one another. (Compton, 2008, p. 215) References Arriaga Lemus, M. (2008). In Mexico, to defend education as a social right, we must fight for union democracy. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching teachers and their unions (pp. 221–225). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bicusa. (2007). Nurses, teachers in Burundi strike over IMF mandated constraints. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://www.bicusa.org/en/article.3577.aspx Butler, P. (2001, May 16). Confident Blair flaunts private sector links. Society Guardian. Cai, Y. (2008). An inner-city public school teacher’s story from China. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 89–94). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chakraborty, B. (2008). Universalization of elementary education in India. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 143–148). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chaudhari, S. (2008, May 9). The teachers’ strike at Withins School. The Bolton News . Compton, M. (2008). Interview with Thulas Nxesi and British teacher trade unions and the Blair government: Anatomy of an abusive relationship. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 211–215, 237–250). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Page 407 Compton, M., & Weiner, L. (Eds.). (2008). The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coopers & Lybrand. (1998). Review of Teachers’ salary structure . National Union of Teachers. Corrales, J. (1999). The politics of education reform: Bolstering the supply and demand; Overcoming institutional blocks. World Bank Education Reform and Management Series , 2(1). Crienglish.com. (2008). Kindergarten reform triggers teachers strike, worries parents. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://english.cri.cn/3100/2008/03/05/
[email protected] Department for Education and Skills. (2004). Five year strategy for children and learners. London: Department for Education and Skills. Deverajan, S., & Reinikka, R. (2002). Making services work for poor people. Retrieved July 25, 2002, from http://siteresources,worldbank.org?INTWDR2004 Resources/17976_ReinikkaShantInitial Framework.pdf Durbridge, R. (2008). Challenging neo-liberalism. In M. Compton and L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 109–124). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eason, G. (2000). Ofsted accused over teacher stress. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/in_depth/education/2000/unions_2000/717038.stm Education International. (2004). Education for global progress. Education International. Goff, H. (2007). Protest camp over planned academy. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/education/6549749.stm Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatcher, R. (2001). The business of education. Stafford: Socialist Education Association. Hypolito, A. M. (2008). Educational restructuring, democratic education and teachers. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 149–162). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohn, A. (2004) Test today, privatize tomorrow using accountability to “reform” public schools to death. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/testtoday.html Kuehn, L. (2008). The education world is not flat. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 53–72). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lips, C. (2000). The new trend in education. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from Cato Institute, http:// www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4437 Mannah, S., & Lewis, J. (2008). South African teachers and social movements. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 177–192). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murch, I. (2008). Campaigning against the opening of City Academies in England. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 81–88). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. National Union of Teachers. (2007/8). Rules. London: National Union of Teachers. National Union of Teachers. (2008). Fair pay for teachers: Continuing the campaign. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from http://www.teachers.org.uk Ramachandran, S. (2004, April 24). Literacy beats out education in India. Asia Times. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://www/atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FD24Df04.html Regan, B. (2007). Campaigning against neo-liberal education in Britain. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies , 5(1). Rincones, R., Hampton, E., & Silva, C. (2008). Teaching for the factory. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 37–42). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Robertson, S. (2008). Remaking the world. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 11–27). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Saltman, K. J. (2005). The Edison schools. New York: Routledge. Samuel, H. (2008). A history of the search for teacher unity in South Africa. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Seifert, R. V. (1987). Teacher militancy. London: Falmer. Spreen, C. A. (2004). Appropriating borrowed policies: Outcomes based education in South Africa. In G. Steiner-Khamsi (Ed.), The global politics of educational borrowing and lending (pp. 101–113). New York: Teachers College Press.
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Page 408 Tooley, J. (2006, April 17). Welcome to easyLearn, Class 1: While our unions whinge and our children fail, the slums of Africa have a lesson for us. The Times. Retrieved from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article706239.ece Trade Union Rights Campaign Pakistan. (2006). TURCP in Sindh rejects ban on teachers’ organizations. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://www.turcp.org.articles/2006/10/23sindh.html United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. New York: United Nations. Wahl, A. (2007). The Norwegian method. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from http://www.aswahl.net/ ENGELSK/070515the_norwegian_method.html Washington Post. (2008, February 21) Teachers strike in Puerto Rico. Retrieved May 12, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022103180.html Weiner, L. (2005). Neoliberalism, teacher unionism and the future of public education. New politics , 10 (2), 101–102. Weiner, L. (2007). NCLB, U.S. education and the World Bank. In C. E. Sleeter (Ed.), Facing accountability in education (pp. 159–171). New York: Teachers College Press. Weiner, L. (2008). Building the international movement we need. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. World Bank. (2007). A Chance to Learn. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://www.worldbank.org/ afr/hd/wps/chanc_learn.pdf World Education Forum. (2004). World platform of struggle. Retrieved May 12, 2008, from http://www.ntua. gr/posdep/International/EuroWeek2005/53_Revised_Appeal.doc Zeichner, K. (2008). Contradictions and tensions in the place of teachers in education reform. In M. Compton & L. Weiner (Eds.), The global assault on teaching, teachers and their unions (pp. 125–142). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. The Zimbabwean. (2008). Civil servants, nurses join teachers’ strike. Retrieved from www.thezimbabwean. co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11401:civil-servantsnurses-
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Page 409 30 Teachers, Praxis, and Minjung Korean Teachers’ Struggle for Recognition Hee-Ryong Kang Introduction In 1999 the members of the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union (Chunkyojo or KTU) experienced an historic event: The KTU was, as Ko & Apple (1999) predicted, finally legalized, and its 90,000-member body (approximately a quarter of all teachers) gained increased political power. It was a dramatic victory for committed educators who had waged a painful struggle for 12 years despite massive lay offs and severe persecution (Chunkyojo, 1990), and for many people who supported the KTU’s struggle from inside and outside of South Korea (S. S. Jang, 1998, p. 65). The legalization of the KTU opened a new era to the teachers of South Korea, one that brought many changes. Most of all, teachers now had the right to benefit from collective bargaining power, though technically their right to strike was, and is still, denied. Working conditions that were once far beyond the reach of teachers’ control to change became the object of bargaining, and now many teachers are able to organize their political voice for the public to hear them. The legalization of the KTU, however, was not the panacea for all problems, because the main social and political forces opposing the KTU still exist. These forces are largely neoliberals campaigning to restructure education through free market reforms such as school choice, teacher evaluation, and an incentive-based wage system (I. S. Jang, 2005, pp. 39–44). As a consequence of this neoliberal campaign, anti-KTU sentiment is increasing among the South Korean public, and the membership of the KTU, which rapidly increased right after the legalization, has dropped significantly ( Chosunilbo newspaper, 2007, September 1). Further, factional struggles within the KTU have weakened the union’s leadership (K. J. Lee, 2006). These challenges are not insignificant. One might say that the KTU is stepping into a new stage of struggle, the struggle against neoliberalism. Given these realities, this essay aims at taking up a critical investigation of the politics of the KTU’s struggle. I argue that, ultimately, the KTU’s struggle for the labor rights of teachers and for legalization in South Korea developed as a form of praxis (Freire, 1972) focused around a “struggle for recognition” (Fraser, 1997), and, as such, defined the trajectory for the future of the KTU. This analysis, I believe, will provide us with an understanding of both the current struggles of the KTU specifically, and also how to respond to the neoliberal challenge within education reform internationally.
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Page 410 Praxis and the Critical Theory of Recognition There are two central impulses embedded within the KTU’s struggle for legalization. One is a struggle over identity, working with teachers to develop a sense of identification of themselves as union laborers. The second impulse within the KTU’s struggle is connected, yet distinct. The legalization of the union was also linked to issues of political economy and the redistribution of resources. These two impulses are seemingly at odds with each other. The effort to develop teachers’ identity as laborers can essentially be understood as a “struggle for recognition” (Fraser, 1997), whereas the struggles over working conditions can essentially be seen as the struggle for redistribution of resources. Theories of identity, however, usually fail to address the issue of political economy and the redistribution of resources. This tension is what Fraser (1997) refers to as the “redistribution-recognition dilemma.” According to Fraser, the two different sources of social injustice require two different remedies, namely, recognition and redistribution. Traditionally in progressive struggles, these two remedies have seemed contradictory because the redistribution attempts to decrease the differences among social groups, while recognition emphasizes distinctions between the groups. Fraser thus suggests reformulating this distinction by asserting that recognition can help alleviate some forms of maldistribution, while redistribution can address some forms of misrecognition. Therefore, in order to fully understand the KTU’s struggle and accomplishments, one needs a theory of identity that more fully takes political economy into consideration. While Fraser (1997) suggests a critical theory of recognition to fill the vacuum that identity theories create by ignoring issues of redistribution, she agrees that identity theories, which mainly pursue differences, contribute to struggles for social justice by redressing misrecognition, a source of social injustice, including mis/underrepresentation, misinterpretation, and miscommunication. However, the pursuit of these differences, Fraser insists, may be harmful to the efforts of correcting maldistribution of resources, another source of social injustice including exploitation, economic marginalization, and economic deprivation. Thus, a new identity theory is needed, “one that identifies and defends only those visions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality” (Fraser, 1997, p. 12). Fraser calls this a critical theory of recognition. The application of a critical theory of recognition to the case of the KTU, however, requires further development. First, Fraser’s suggestion stands on the assumption that there is a clear distinction between culture and political economy. While Fraser (1997) believes that there is a close relationship between culture and economy, she also asserts that the distinction is possible within a particular domain, namely that of an ideal-typical mode of collectivity whose existence is rooted wholly in the political economy. Fraser’s distinction between ideology and misrecogni-tion demonstrates this assumption well. She distinguishes the misrecognition derived from political economy from the misrecognition derived from culture. The former, for Fraser, is the issue of ideology and is different from the latter, the issue of recognition. Thus, for Fraser, “the ideology of class inferiority proliferated to justify exploitation” (p. 35) does not belong to the terrain of culture but to that of political economy. Following her logic, ideology, as false consciousness, can be transformed by altering socioeconomic structures. This distinction is important for the present discussion because the KTU represents an “idealtypical mode of collectivity,” and therefore requires a different theoretical assumption than Fraser has to offer. Following Gramsci’s (1971) conception of hegemony and relative autonomy, we can see a central problem with Fraser’s formulation. According to Gramsci, ideology cannot be reduced to the economy. Rather, misrecognition (a manifestation of ideology) can be formed through ideological warfare, as a form of war of position where laborers eventually accept this misrecognition as commonsense. If this is the case, misrecognition requires not only an economic remedy but also a cultural remedy.1 Thus, contrary to Fraser’s conception, it is possible that
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Page 411 struggles for recognition might be cultural/ideological in their own right, and might not be reduced to economic struggles alone. Second, to apply Fraser’s (1997) critical theory of recognition to the KTU, Fraser’s means to achieve the goal of the theory must be clarified, because the remedy that Fraser suggests, a struggle for recognition paired with deconstructive remedy, has a logical error. The logical error is this: Fraser admits that, “a culture that ever-new construction of identities and differences are elaborated and swiftly shifted” (p. 30) is only possible on the basis of social equality. This suggestion is contradictory because social equality (A), is the necessary precondition of the deconstructive remedy (B), whose ultimate goal is to pursue social equality (A). Thus, in Fraser’s suggestion, (A) is the necessary condition of (B), which pursues (A). In this syllogism, (A) becomes both condition and goal. Consequently, Fraser does not provide an appropriate way in which the transformative remedy based on a critical theory of recognition works. Further, Fraser’s theory does not emphasize two different sides of the politics of recognition. The issue of recognition, of course, is the issue of identity “against,” but, at the same time, it is also the issue of identity “with.” When one pursues its distinctive recognition against a certain group, one simultaneously has to define commonalities with another group that one pursues to identify with. The politics of identity “against” is meaningful by itself. It is, however, not enough to achieve the goal of social transformation because social transformation requires alliances to achieve and exercise hegemony (Apple, 2001). The critical theory of recognition, which aims at transforming the order of the society, should consider another side of the politics of identity “with,” which promotes the possibility of solidarity, the basis of the formation of the alliances for the transformation of a society. The point of the above critiques of Fraser’s (1997) critical theory of recognition is not to dismiss the importance of her formulation. The central point of Fraser’s theory is both valid and necessary for understanding struggles for social justice. Rather, my intent here is to use Fraser’s critical theory of recognition to understand the KTU, and perhaps even improve our understanding of how to apply it within an international context. Such an application, however, requires some suggestions that help to theorize the means to achieve the goal of the theory. I suggest that Freire’s (1972) theory of praxis as well as Korean minjung consciousness (recognition of oneself as a political being) offer a “tangible” means to work towards a critical theory of recognition. Freirean Praxis The concept of praxis is defined as an action based on critical reflection (Freire, 1972). For Freire, the meaning of a word is crucial terrain for the formation and exercise of praxis because critical reflection becomes possible through naming the world with a “true” word, that is, naming an identity that is free of cultural, political, or economic deficit. For Freire, one can speak a true word through the exercise of one’s own praxis and “to transform the world” (Freire, 1972, p. 75). To speak a true word (to claim a true identity), the essential and tangible expression of praxis, however, is not easy to achieve because dominant elites seek to deny true praxis to the people in order to maintain power (Freire, 1972, p. 121). For Freire, speaking a true identity is not possible under situations where praxis is denied, that is, situations which he terms as dehumanized. In Freire’s concept dehumanization is defined in relation to a lack of freedom, where freedom is an “indispensable condition for the quest for human completion” (Freire, 1972, p. 31). Further, to be dehumanized and oppressed means, to some degree, internalizing aspects of the oppressor’s consciousness (Freire, 1972, p. 31). Therefore, within the Freirean conception, the politics of shifting one’s identity (both identity against and identity with) requires overcoming the internalization of the oppressor’s consciousness. Building on a Freirean conception of praxis, in the struggle of the establishment and legalization of the
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Page 412 KTU, minjung consciousness became a manifestation of praxis for Korean teachers, a consciousness that contributed to Korean teachers’ pursuance of a new identity and the development of their own critical theory of recognition. Minjung Consciousness and Korean Praxis Minjung consciousness was the product of the democratization struggle that Koreans waged under the military dictatorship and can be best understood within the social context of that era. The 1980s in South Korea began with massacre in Kwangju, but ended with people’s uprising. Hence the decade was characterized as the era of Democratization.2 Amid the collective action for social democratization, the concept of minjung became a key word of the political and cultural turmoil of the decade. As the reflection of the legacy of the 1970s, activists of the 1980s had reached the understanding that earlier activism had serious limitations because it did not develop an appropriate theory around which powerful but fragmented social movements could be organized (Lenin, 1969). The development of the theory of minjung was the response to meet this demand. The formation of the concept of minjung 3 was developed through the collective struggle of the activists who represented the oppressed. The concept of minjung was defined as people who lack material resources as well as cultural means to be respected, as a consequence of exclusion and deprivation by the ruling class (Ahn, 1983; Han, 1984; Moon, 1985; H. C. Park, 1979). Minjung theologist Suh NamDong developed a more refined definition of minjung , which refers to the people who are economically poor, politically oppressed, and culturally alienated (Suh, 1983, p. 227). In this sense, the concept of minjung offers explanatory power to understand the political, economic, and cultural struggles of more than just working-class South Koreans because, while it definitely includes proletarians, it also includes other marginalized groups such as people with disabilities, women, orphans, single mothers, prisoners, etc. (H. C. Park, 1984; Suh, 1983, p. 207). Furthermore, the concept also carries with it a sense of antiimperialist nationalism that encompasses the experiences of colonized peoples, including those of South Korea. Thus the anti-imperialist decolonization and the experiences of people who were exploited, excluded, and oppressed are folded together within the concept of minjung (Ahn, 1988, p. 24). The most important feature of minjung was the politically awakened consciousness4 that it can become a significant force in the progression of human history (S. H. Cho, 1986, p. 132; Ryu, 1984, p. 11). That is, it is the minjung or oppressed of society, not the elite, who are the protagonists of history. Thus the transformation of society is possible only when minjung are politically awakened. Minjung consciousness is important here because minjung can form a collective solidarity based on this consciousness and their oppressed position within Korean society. Without minjung consciousness, the minjung population can be easily fragmented and it may have limited power for social transformation. Combining the above analyses, one can see how minjung consciousness builds upon Freire’s (1972) conception of praxis. Minjung consciousness is defined by its focus on social transformation for social, political, economic, and cultural equality. In this sense, minjung consciousness is thus a manifestation of Korean praxis. Further, minjung consciousness remedies Fraser’s (1997) critical theory of recognition. First, it explicitly connects the identity politics of recognition with the economic politics of redistribution, and thus overcomes any false distinction between the two. Second, because of its inherent praxis, minjung consciousness also provides for a coherent theory of action that is absent in Fraser’s original conception because minjung consciousness builds towards a shift in identity among the minjung population that inherently works toward social transformation. Third, minjung consciousness explicitly develops an identity that is at once an identity “with” other minjung and “against” those elites who seek to oppress the minjung
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Page 413 populations. Thus, minjung consciousness, as a Korean form of praxis, played a key role in the South Korean teachers’ ability to wage their own critical struggle for recognition. Given this reformulation, in what follows I take up the tasks of identifying the origins of the misrecognition of Korean teachers, the role of minjung consciousness in their struggle, and the ramifications both have in the current trajectory of the KTU. Origins of Misrecognition The KTU’s struggle for recognition was preconditioned both by the dehumanizing educational system found in South Korea and by the misrepresentation of teachers within South Korean society. First, school sites were filled with the type of dehumanizing education wrought by the severe competition driven by high-stakes testing (Kang, 1989). For the students, school was not a place of education but a place of battle for survival. Around the time of the KTU’s establishment, more than 100 students a year were reported as committing suicide because of the overwhelming pressures of high-stakes tests (Ko, 1990). For teachers, work conditions were similarly poor during this time. One study on “the reality of Korean education” (Kyoyuk Gaehyeok Simuihoe, 1986) reported that, in 1986, a regular teacher had to do 5.8 hours of extra work per week in average for complementary classes.5 In addition, students and teachers were forced to participate in “nighttime self-study.” Teachers also had to commit nine extra hours per week to supervise students. Between complementary classes and nighttime self-study, students had to spend most of their time at school from early in the morning to late evening (7.30 a.m. to 11.00 p.m., for example). Teachers’ official work hours reached 61.4 hours a week in 1986 (Kyoyuk Gaehyeok Simuihoe, 1986). This test-driven education drained the energy of both students and teachers alike.6 Second, teachers were powerless because they did not have their own representative organization since the first teachers’ union was destroyed by the military coup in 1961. While there had been a teachers’ association ( Kyochong or Korean Federation of Teachers Association [KFTA]) since 1947, their collective bargaining power was not legally recognized. Further, the KFTA was formed by the U.S. Army as a substitute for a Korean teachers’ autonomous organization, and has been directed by the repressive South Korean state ever since (J. Y. Park, 1965). Teachers were the last group who could exercise the leadership within the KFTA (E. S. Kim, 1988) and, as a result of such misrepresentation, teachers felt intense subjugation by the state. Under such conditions, many teachers felt they had no choice but to train their students to be better prepared for the tests. Hence, for the teachers and students, school was not a place of education but a place of training. In response, one teacher proclaimed, “I want to be a people’s teacher not a slave of officers of the Department of Education” (Jung, 1987). The demands outlined by the Declaration of Democratic Education (Secondary Teachers Council of YMCA Korea,7 2007, p. 1) illustrate teachers’ sentiments during this period: • We insist that education should not be used as propaganda of the regime. • We insist that the educational rights of teachers, students, and parents should be protected and the other rights of teachers as citizens cannot be limited because they were teachers. • We insist that educational autonomy should be guaranteed. • We insist that teachers’ autonomous organization should be protected from any persecution or any irrational intervention of the government. These demands are important because they reveal the vicious reality for teachers: Education was under the direction of the state and educational autonomy was denied. Further, these demands document the changing political awareness of the teachers, an awareness that was going to contribute, in part, to the formation of minjung consciousness.
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Page 414 Minjung Consciousness and the Struggle for Laborer Identity If we look at the struggle of the KTU through the lens of the critical theory of recognition, outlined earlier, we can see two things. First, a key aspect of the struggle for the KTU was that of their identity. Second, minjung consciousness played a central role in the teachers’ development of praxis in their struggle for recognition. I outline these two aspects of the critical theory of recognition in the KTU’s struggle below. Struggle over Teacher Identity One of the main objectives of the struggle of the KTU was over teachers’ identity. On the one hand, teachers in South Korea were not identified as “laborers.” Rather, teaching was portrayed as a sanctified profession, a portrayal that the state employed to outlaw the teachers’ labor union. For instance, as one government document asserted: It is totally wrong to perceive a teacher as a laborer; therefore it is also wrong to insist that teachers are eligible to labor union based upon the assertion that teachers are laborers. Teaching is a professional occupation, supposedly raises second generation of citizen, equipped with expertise in knowledge and high level of ethics. (Department of Education, 1989a, p. 1) According to the government’s justification, teachers are not laborers because a “laborer” can be defined as a worker who is dedicated to labor. The government denied that the teaching profession is labor because teaching is a professional occupation which demands expertise and a high level of ethics, an occupation that is differentiated from manual work. This problematic definition of laborer was later upheld in the Korean Constitutional Court. In a ruling on teachers’ unions, the Korean Constitutional Court asserted that: Teachers of every grade level have characteristics of laborers. However, they are different from normal laborers who are eligible to form labor unions in the following ways; the contents of the labor that teachers are engaged in is education; the employers are students and parents, eventually people in general; the employer has no means to respond to the union’s strike such as shut down schools; the labor dispute can victimize students. Therefore, teachers are not eligible for labor union. (Kim et al., 1991)8 As can be seen from the above excerpt, the court rules that teachers are not eligible to a labor union because teaching is not labor. The ruling, however, is contradictory. It admits that teachers have the characteristics of laborers. At the same time, however, it denies that teachers are eligible to unionize because teaching is not deemed “normal” labor. Further, the rationale of the state and the courts does not make sense based on the Korean standard labor law, which provides that wage is the sole criterion for defining laborers. The government’s rhetoric, however, seemed to make sense to many Koreans who were influenced in part by the state’s propaganda and, in part, by the traditional Korean notion of teacher.9 Resisting the state’s unilateral definition of the identity of teachers, the KTU pursued a new identity, that of a laborer. This new identity is important in the perspective of the theoretical lens I have employed here because it demonstrates how the politics of identity, with its basis of solidarity, can redress issues of maldistribution too. As Chonkyohyeop, the teachers’ organization which was formed to pursue the establishment of the KTU explains, teaching is, in fact, labor:
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Page 415 So far, the teaching profession has been shackled under the notion that teaching is a sanctified profession. It is understandable that the socially accepted despised notion of labor evoked many people’s negative sentiment over the KTU’s assertion that teachers are laborers. However, it is true that teachers are laborers because they earn wages from the employers, the state or private schools, even though teachers’ work is different from that of manual laborers. And at the same time, education is labor which aims both at raising human beings who can actively and creatively contribute to the society and at developing holistic human beings. (Chunkyohyeop, 1989, pp. 60–61) The above accounts of the state and the KTU contradict each other and illustrate how teachers’ identity and the meaning of “laborer” became the terrain of the struggle, which continued for more than a decade. Therefore, it is crucial for one to examine the meaning of “laborer” within the South Korean context in order for one to understand the deeper meaning of this struggle. The Meaning of Laborer in South Korea The meaning of the laborer that the KTU tried to identify with was concrete. Following the traditional Marxist definition, a laborer is a person who owns no means of production and therefore he/she has to sell their labor for a wage in order to survive (Marx & Engels, 1967).10 Thus, in a Marxist definition, wage plays a central role as the criterion with which one distinguishes laborers from capitalists. This criterion was meaningful within the legal struggle for labor rights in South Korea because it was used to measure compliance with the Korean Labor Standard Law. Following this criterion, there are only two parties mediated by wage: laborer and capitalist. All labor rights thus stand on this simple dichotomy. Hence, collective bargaining is the key medium with which laborers protect their rights, and a strike becomes the strongest but last resort for laborers to force capitalists to negotiate for labor rights. Without such threats, capitalists have no reason to seriously negotiate with laborers. Within the cultural norms of South Korea, however, the term “laborer” has been narrowly defined and used to derogatorily refer to manual workers. Characterized as dirty, dangerous, and difficult, manual work was distinguished from mental or white-collar work. White-collar workers, teachers included, were thus reluctant to identify themselves as “laborers.” From the perspective of white-collar workers, the manual positions were for people who were unwilling to work hard enough to become professionals. This intense distinction between manual work and mental work in South Korean society was possible partly because of the influence of the traditional culture, in which mental work was more highly valued, and partly because of the capitalists’ effective strategy of control over laborers; divide and rule (Freire, 1972). The teachers’ identity as mental or white-collar workers thus did not allow them to claim an identity as wage laborers. It was the reconceptualization of the concept of laborer and the advent of the theory of minjung in the 1980s that enabled teachers to develop an identity that integrated aspects of both recognition and redistribution. Teachers’ Praxis and Minjung Consciousness As the concept of minjung became a Zeitgeist of the 1980s, an important change occurred. The concept of the laborer was reconceptualized, inspired by the theory of minjung as the main body of agency and the locus of control for social transformation (Lim, 1995). In this reconceptualization, the mental/manual dichotomy was openly challenged as the new lines of identity were set along the laborer/capitalist dichotomy instead. This reconceptualization encouraged white-collar workers to show solidarity with manual workers as one collective class of laborers.
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Page 416 Teachers, who were traditionally classified as mental laborers, provided a case where mental workers formed solidarity with manual workers, and it was the praxis of teachers that made this alliance possible. Teachers began to critically reflect on their own situation in education and society. The publication of Minjung Kyoyuk11 in 1985 illustrates teachers’ praxis very well. Minjung Kyoyuk (Song, 1985) was a publication that dealt with the opinion of educators about the educational problems of that time from the perspective of minjung . The title of the publication reveals the influence of the concept of minjung on educators. In this publication, teachers raised questions about issues that were labeled taboo by the ruling class, including: How does the cold war ideology repressive regime of South Korea drive its education to the education of dehumanization? (Song, 1985, p. 10); how does the power of capital influence education to raise minjung as slave-like workers? (Song, 1985, pp. 12–18); how does the ruling class employ schooling as a means of securing its hegemony over minjung ? (Song, 1985, pp. 61–68); and why do teachers have to form solidarity with minjung ? (Song, 1985, pp. 38–41).12 The influence of the reconceptualization of labor and the exercise of teachers’ praxis based on minjung consciousness culminated with the establishment of the Korean Teachers’ Union, which identified itself with laborers.13 The establishment of the KTU not only provided teachers with the means for collective bargaining, it also developed solidarity between the teachers and other groups of organized labor working as part of the democratization movement that began to take place in South Korea during the 1980s. Such solidarity demonstrated the shift in teachers’ identities, which could now both find support in, and lend support to, manual laborers in their struggles. Indeed, it was this type of solidarity that the ruling class in Korea feared most. As the Korean Education Ministry states: “The underlying intention of the KTU teachers is not the normalization of education but the overthrowing the system of the society through biased conscientization14 education” (Department of Education, 1989b, p. 1). What the government, operating on behalf of the Korean ruling class, worried about was the collapse of the social and economic system through the conscientization, in the Freirean sense, of minjung demonstrated by the teachers’ labor union. Teachers and Solidarity for Social Transformation The KTU’s struggle for recognition was not confined to just rhetoric and did not remain solely in the realm of identity. Rather, after legalization, the KTU could formally employ in-school educational tactics in alliance with the other groups within the labor class. The main educational tactic that the KTU used to protest inequalities and promote social justice was the teaching of the Gongdong lesson. The Gongdong lesson is a classroom lesson that is designed and suggested by the KTU and taught by its members and other teachers who voluntarily agree to teach it. The Gongdong lesson is notable for its instructional method and content. The lesson is taught by teachers at a coordinated time throughout the nation. The contents are usually provided from KTU headquarters and are mainly about controversial or political issues. To better understand the Gongdong lesson, it is important to emphasize the context in which it emerged. The Gongdong lesson is a reaction to the state surveillance of teachers. It is designed to help teachers who address sensitive topics elude penalties from the state. Korean teachers have witnessed the penalizing of their colleagues who were dedicated to bringing authentic education, such as the teaching of topics related to the minjung population and minjung consciousness, to school sites. Such punishments instilled a great deal of fear in teachers. The Gongdong lesson was the device the KTU used to eradicate the potential threats because it carried with it the support of the union, and thus restricted the state’s ability to harshly punish teachers. The Gongdong lesson aims at more immediate intervention to the hegemonic understanding of the world.
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Page 417 Among the numerous Gongdong lessons, the lesson on Labor Law in 1997 was a typical example that locates teachers’ social identity within the labor movement. At the beginning of 1997, there was a series of protests by laborers, including a general strike, against the newly changed Labor Law, which severely undermined the rights of laborers. The KTU decided to implement a Gongdong lesson on how the new Labor Law would affect the lives of laborers, who essentially were the parents of the majority of students ( Inkwonharusosik online newspaper, 1997, February 14). This Gongdong lesson was carried out by 15,000 teachers ( Hangyeoreh newspaper, 1997, February 17). The Gongdong lesson has been implemented more than 40 times since the first one in 1997, and the topics of the lesson have included labor law, the rights of people with disabilities, antiwar, anticorruption, human rights, North Korean/South Korean reunification, and the presence of U.S. forces within South Korea, among others (Cheonkyojo, 2007). The Gongdong intervention is performed to suggest an alternative knowledge; that of minjung instead of the unilaterally biased, mainly capitalist, knowledge of the state. Conclusion In this chapter I investigated the meaning of the KTU’s struggle for recognition. Following Fraser’s insight on the relationship between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution, combined with Freire’s concept of praxis, I made use of the critical theory of recognition, particularly that of the Korean concept of minjung consciousness, as an analytic tool to interpret the historical struggle of the KTU. I argued that, key to both a struggle for recognition and the redistribution of resources, the KTU undertook a struggle over the identity of teachers-as-laborers. I further argued that there are two reasons why teachers of the KTU waged a critical struggle for recognition of teachers-as-laborers. First, establishing their identity as laborer was necessary for the teachers to create their labor union, a necessary condition for gaining collective bargaining power and gaining control over their own work. At the same time, such collective bargaining enabled teachers to have their political voice over the educational issues and policies heard. Second, claiming an identity as laborers allowed for the formation of solidarity between teachers and traditional laborers. Solidarity with the class of laborers aided the teachers not only in their own short-term project of survival as a union, but also in their long-term goal of social transformation. The struggle of the KTU was thus a struggle for recognition, one to redress misrecognition of teachers’ identity. This struggle, at the same time, was also an attempt to promote social justice by pursuing social transformation on the basis of solidarity with laborers. Hence, the struggle of the KTU was also inherently a struggle for redistribution. The development of an identity as laborers was not an easy task to the teachers of South Korea. However, the praxis of the teachers, informed by minjung consciousness, drove teachers to choose this identity in pursuit of creating a more livable society for both teachers and students, demonstrating that, while the neoliberal campaign intensified, its resurgence was not impervious to resistance—as the successful legalization of the KTU and the implementation of the Gongdong lesson show. Thus, the KTU provides an important example for educators who are concerned about social justice who seek to effectively respond to the increased influence of neoliberalism, because it was the principle of solidarity on the basis of praxis that enabled teachers of the KTU to achieve certain gains. In this way, those of us who are facing the challenges of the neoliberal campaign in South Korea can use the experience of the KTU and minjung consciousness as counter-hegemonic tools for challenging neoliberalism in other places of the globe.
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Page 418 Notes 1 The concepts of interdependency and relative autonomy are important here because the relationship between the culture and economy is not a relationship which can substitute one with the other. At the same time, they have a certain relationship which can be dependent on each other. Gramsci’s account over the role of economy and other sectors of the society explains this well. Though Gramsci criticizes the deterministic version of Marxism in order to make an emphasis on the concept of relative autonomy of the other sectors of the society than economy (Gramsci, 1971, p. 407), he never underestimates the important role of the economy in the formation of hegemony (Gramsci & Forgacs, 1988, pp. 211–212). 2 The neo-Military Junta committed the Kwangju massacre to take power of South Korea in 1980. During the 1980s, South Korean society suffered from authoritarian regime, which responded to the legitimation crisis that originated from the massacre with coercive force. South Koreans protested against the regime and finally they overthrew the military dictatorship by a people’s uprising at the end of the decade. Therefore the 1980s was filled with records of people’s struggle for democracy, such as students’ activism and labor union strikes. 3 There has been tension over the definition and genealogy of this concept. The introduction of the word minjung is relatively new to Koreans. Before the prevalent circulation of minjung in the late 1970s through 1980s, there were other words to refer to the group of people that minjung signifies; inmin and kookmin . Inmin was the word for the translation of the proletariat class of the Marxist concept. Marxism was popular in Korea during the Japanese occupation period (1910–1945). Koreans actively adopted Marxism as a theoretical tool with which they organized their liberation struggle against the Japanese empire. To avoid Marxist influence, Japanese imperialists encouraged the use of a different word, kookmin . The new word, kookmin , intentionally obfuscated the meaning of class. Thus, Korean activists only used inmin. After the collapse of the Japanese occupation, Communist North Korea began to use inmin, whereas South Korea, whose ruling class consisted of Japanese collaborators sponsored by the United States, adopted kookmin . Given this, in South Korea, social activists had to develop a new word to refer to the oppressed which could include the concept of proletariat class. The word minjung was the word that South Korean activists introduced to replace kookmin. They could not reuse inmin because it automatically reminds South Koreans of communism or North Korea, a tactical risk under the anticommunist military regime. Thus, the state (Ministry of Reunification, 1986, pp. 6–9) tried to connect this concept ( minjung ) to inmin as a way of undermining the legitimacy of the social movement. The active usage of this kind can be found in the minjung theology in the mid-1970s (Ryu, 1984; N. D. Suh, 1983; Theological Study institute, 1984). Paulo Freire’s concept of the oppressed was believed to have influenced the refining of this concept in the 1980s (J. H. Cho, 1986, p. 35). 4 Han (1984) differentiates minjung into two different categories: politically awakened and politically unawakened. For him the former is the real minjung . The unawakened cannot be the agent of the history. He, however, did not attribute blame to the unawakened because they are sleeping because there is a mechanism that makes them sleep (pp. 261–269). 5 Complementary classes are test-prep classes. They are different from Advanced Placement (AP) classes of the U.S. schools because the classes are provided after school hours and almost all of the students are participants. The classes are meant to be voluntary, but, in reality, students have very little choice not to participate. 6 Despite these harsh conditions, teachers were supposed to sacrifice themselves for the students’ sake, which was considered the traditional norm of teachers in South Korean society. Therefore, the struggle against the traditional identity of teachers cannot help redress the maldistribution issue that teachers had been faced with. 7 Teachers organizations other than KFTA were illegal, so teachers, who were not necessarily Christians, formed an organization under the name of YMCA for protection. This organization became an organizational basis for the establishment of the KTU later. 8 This ruling was made regarding a lawsuit filed in the Constitutional Court by two KTU members, each representing teachers of public schools and private schools, respectively. The lawsuit was filed over the relevant labor laws which specified that the state could regulate the basic labor rights of
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Page 419 public officers, and it also specified that teachers, regardless of whether they work in the public school or private school, are public officers. This appeal was mainly about whether the laws based upon which the government outlawed the KTU are constitutional or not. 9 It is widely believed that the traditional notion of teachers comes from Confucius’ teaching which influenced the ideas of Korean society. According to this belief, the reputation of teachers is considered as equal as parents or king. Nonetheless, Confucian orthodoxy does not support this idea (H. J. Kim, 2000, p. 232). 10 This definition is surely problematic because it neglects unpaid labor—i.e., domestic labor of women. In this chapter, however, I rely on this definition because the wage was the one of the strongest points that the KTU argued to fight a legal battle within the South Korean jurisdiction. 11 The literal meaning is the education for minjung or education from the perspective of minjung . 12 The state considered the publication of this book as a challenge to the regime so it brought a legal case against the authors. It was the first legal case where teachers were arrested and fired because of their organized collective action since the destruction of the first labor union in 1961 (E. S. Kim, 1988). 13 Teachers might choose another form of organization rather than the form of labor union. Then, they might avoid massive and direct conflict with the state (Ko & Apple, 1999). Indeed, there was a group of teachers who insisted that this option be considered (E. S. Kim, 1988, p. 68; K. J. Lee, 2006, p. 81). Nonetheless, the KTU, sustaining their initial strategy, established a labor union. 14 When the government uses this concept it refers to indoctrination, the opposite meaning from its original use in Freire (1972, p. 95). References Ahn, B. M. (1983). Haebangja Jesus . Seoul: Hyundaesasangsa. Ahn, B. M. (1988). Minjung shinhak i-yagi. Seoul: Hanguk Shinhak Yeonguso. Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way . New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Cho, J. H. (1986). Critical study on people’s education theory. Hanseong Daehak Nonmunjip, 10 (1), 33– 51. Seoul: Hansung University. Cho, K. K. et al. (1991). Sariphakyobeop JE5cho JE1hang JE4choe Kwanhan Wiheonsagun (Constitutional Ruling over Private School Act 55:1: 4). Retrieved October 10, 2008, from http://glaw.scourt.go.kr/ jbsonw/jbson.do Cho, S. H. (1986). Hankook kyohoewa minjung seongyo insik . Seoul: Jungamsa. Choi, H. I. (2002). 1980nyeondae ihoo hankookui sahoe undong nonjaeng. Hanshin Sahoekwahak Yeongu , 3, 111–123. Chunkyohyeop. (1989). Kyowon nodong chohap gunseoleul wihan gicho jaryojip . Seoul: Chunkyohyeop. Chunkyojo. (1990). Hankook kyoyuk undong baekseo. Seoul: Poolbit. Chunkyojo. (2007). Jaryo gumsaek; gongdong su-eop. 11 September, 2007, from http://www.eduhope.net/ commune/search.php?board=eduhopesearch&s_mode=all&s_arg=%BO%F8%B5%BF%BC% F6%BE%F7&x=17&y=10 Department of Education. (1989a). Kyowon nodong chohapun iraeseo ahn doemnida . Seoul: Department of Education. Department of Education. (1989b). Kyowon nojoga jujanghaneun sowi chamkyoyukui silsang. Seoul: Department of Education. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus . New York: Routlege. Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Herder and Herder. Gramsci, A., (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (1st ed., Q, Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith trans.). New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A., & Forgacs, D. (1988). A Gramsci reader. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Han, W. S. (Ed.). (1984). Minjungeui Sahwehakjeok Euimi (Sociological meaning of Minjung). In W. S. Han (Ed.), Minjung Sahwehak (Sociology of Minjung). Jang, I. S. (2005). Shinjayujuuigeok kyoyukjungchaekgwa kyoyuk gonggongseong-ui wigi . Unpublished master’s thesis, Sungkonghoe University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
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Page 420 Jang, S. S. (1998). A study of politic interaction in the course of legalization of National Union of Educational Workers (NEW). Unpublished master’s thesis, Ehwa Woman’s University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Jung, Y. H. (1987). Naneun kyoyuk kwanryo-ui jong-i anin kookminui kyosayigo sipda. Kyoyukgwa Silchon , 3, 67–73. Kang, I. S. (1989). Ibsiwiju-ui kyoyukeseo eotteocke beoseonalgoet-inga. Kyoyuk jeongsanghwaeol wihan jungchaekgwaje 8. Daehankyoyukyonhabhoe. Seoul: Republic of Korea. Kim, E. S. (1988). A study on the teacher’s movement in the 1980s. Unpublished master’s thesis, Ehwa Woman’s University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Kim, H. J. (2000). Nonuui sawookyoyougo. Honamdaehakkyo Haksulnonmunjip, 21 (1), 221–236. Honam University. Kim, S. I. (1993). Kyoyuk sahoehak. Seoul: Kyoyuk Kwahaksa. Ko, J. H. (1990). Chonkuk kyojikwonnojoui geonseolgwajunggwa jeonmang. Myungdae, 19 , 104–119. Ko, J. H., & Apple, M. W. (1999). Teachers, politics and democracy. Education and Social Justice , 2(1), 67–73. Korea Theological Study Institute. (1984). Hankook minjungron, Korea Theological Study Institute. Kyoyuk Gaehyeok Simuihoe. (1986). Hankook Kyoyook Yinyumui Jungnib (Refining the Goal of Education of South Korea). Seoul: Kyoyuk Gaehyeok Simuihoe. Lee, C. K. (1988). 4.19shigi kyowon nojo undong. Yeoksa Bipyeong, 1, 180–206. Lee, K. J. (2006). Chunkyojo nae gongronjang gujowa waegoge kwanhan yeonku. Unpublished master’s thesis, Seonggonghoe University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. Lee, M. (1989). Hankook kyowon nodongjohapsa. Pureunnamu. Lee, S. S. (1996). Kwangju haksal, mikook-shingunbuui hyeopjowa gongmo. Yeoksabipyeong , 3, 79– 139. Lenin, V. I. (1969). What is to be done? New York: International Publishers. Lim, Y. I. (1995). 1980nyeondae . Yeoksa Bipyeong, 2, 101–107. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). Capital. New York: International Publishers. Ministry of Reunification. (1986). Minjungwoondong Boonsuk. Seoul. Moon, D. W. (1985). Uisikhwa kyoyukui kwaje. In W. S. Han et al. (Eds.), Hankook minjung kyoyukron. Seoul: Hakminsa. Pak, H. C. (1984). Minjung Kwa Yoksa (Minjung and History). In W. S. Han (Ed.), Minjung Sahwehak (Sociology of Minjung). Seoul: Jongo Seojeok. Park, H. C. (1979). Minjungkwa kyeongje. Seoul: Jeongwusa. Park, J. Y. (1965). Kyoryeonyi georeo-on baljachwi. Saekyoyuk , 17 (19). Ryu, J. C. (Ed.). (1984). Minjung Hakmun kwa Jiseongsa. Sarib Hakkyobeop Je 55jo Je 58jo 1hang 4ho-e Kwanhan Wiheon Shimpan, 89hunga 106 (Constitutional Court 1991). Secondary Teachers’ Council of YMCA Korea. (2007). Declaration of democratic education. Retrieved July 17, 2007, from http://www.eduhope.net/commune/view.php?board=eduhope-4&id=2352 Song, K. W. (Ed.). (1985). Minjung kyoyuk 1. Seoul: Silcheonmunhaksa. Suh, J. S. (1986). Kyoyuk minjuhwa undong. Shindongah , 7. Suh, N. D. (1983). Minjung Sinhakui Tamgu. Seoul. Theological Study Institute. (1984). Essays on Minjung. Seoul.
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Page 421 31 Community-Based Popular Education, Migration, and Civil Society in Mexico Working in the Space Left Behind Jen Sandler Introduction This chapter discusses how community-based popular education helps to shape the contours of a changing civil society sector in communities affected by political, economic, and demographic changes in Latin America. A popular education organization in the mountainous region of Michoacán in central Mexico serves as a case study for exploring the particular contribution of community-based popular education to our understanding of the role critical educational practices might play in relation to hegemonic ideologies and structures. In rural and urban communities transformed by economic migration, there is a public sphere ripe for transformation. Community-based education encompasses the struggle to develop out of such space new educator identities, altered notions of the relationship between education and politics, and a gender perspective that shifts the boundaries of public and private spheres to focus on the changing conditions of women’s lives. This chapter begins by addressing the theory and practice of community-based popular education. I make a case for examining the relationship between popular education and social space in Latin America. Next, I introduce Ayuda Mutua, a community-based popular education organization in Michoacán, Mexico, where I conducted short-term participatory ethnographic fieldwork. After briefly examining the history of migration and anthropological studies of migration in Michoacán, I suggest that the social fabric of the communities left behind by economic migrants provides a rich context for rethinking transformations in civil society through organizations such as Ayuda Mutua. I then examine the particular community-based practices of Ayuda Mutua, including the organization’s situated feminist definition of the public sphere, its practices of defining the “civil society” sphere in which it operates, and its ideological processes. By exploring two theoretical concepts—civil society and organic intellectuals—through two vignettes from Ayuda Mutua’s practices, we begin to see the outline of a popular education that works within the spaces less directly structured by state and international economic policies to forge relationships and produce knowledge and action that are “organically” connected to the conditions of oppression in subaltern communities.
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Page 422 Beginning with Practice: What Does Popular Education Look Like? Much has been written about the curricular and pedagogical theory of popular education. But there is a huge gap between U.S. critical educators’ understanding of popular education theory as it is applied within school and university classrooms, and our understanding of popular education as it is practiced within the many communities throughout Latin America where the spirit of Paulo Freire’s work remains strong. As a U.S.-based critical education researcher who comes to research from work in community organizing, grassroots arts education, and other “nonformal” educational settings, my research in this area has been an attempt to learn from Latin American popular educators. I have not asked veiled evaluative questions such as, “Under what conditions is popular educational pedagogy or curriculum effective?” or “What is the capacity of popular education to accomplish particular political objectives?” Mine have been, in many ways, more basic questions: What does popular education in Latin America look like? How do its practices articulate with political/economic contexts and identities—in what ways is popular education in Latin America “critical”? Why is popular education in Latin America so often based in community settings rather than schools? How is popular education different from other forms of community development? When people study critical educational practices, they often refer to what goes on between teachers and students during the workshops, classes, study circles, or other curricular settings. Some focus on dissecting the process of conscientization, focusing on teachers’ roles in relationship to college students (e.g., hooks, 2001). They focus on the techniques that facilitate, and the obstacles that inhibit, the development of individual and collective critical consciousness that leads to action or to power shifts in the classroom (e.g., Shor, 1997). This sort of wrestling with the challenges of creating critical consciousness in classrooms characterizes much of the school- and university-based U.S. literature that draws inspiration from Paulo Freire’s work, but it does not characterize the practices or the literature of popular education in Latin America. In Latin America, while popular educational techniques certainly occur in schools, and while there have been much-studied instances of progressive and revolutionary states and political movements using popular education to advance political agendas (e.g., Arnove, 1995; Puiggrós, 1984; Torres, 1991) there is also a relatively independent community-based popular education movement that has been widespread in the region since the early 1980s (Kane, 2001; La Belle, 1987). This chapter interrogates the community-based popular educational movement that is not bureaucratized and disseminated in schools, not an instrument of the state or any political party, and hence not ordinarily visible to much of the critical education research community (particularly in the United States). The primary distinction of community-based popular education is, I believe, that it is a process of working with people that includes not just the formal “teaching” moments but—more importantly, really —the many relationship-building and community-engaging hours that comprise the daily lives of popular educators. To answer the heading of this section crudely, community-based popular education in Latin America looks, in addition to its many and sophisticated pedagogical manifestations, like a whole lot of informal interaction. It looks like an endless string of informal meetings punctuated by more formal workshops, all of which involve a great deal of reflection about individual, group, and community problems. The almost constant “reflection” mode of popular educators—the analysis that takes place before meetings, the informal debriefing reflections after meetings, the pairing off within meetings on occasion, the chats during cooking and traveling, the stopping by a dozen people’s houses on the way to the meeting to inquire into personal and collective problems—all of this informal talk is integral to the process of community-based educational movements. In a way, “nonformal” is a perfect descriptor of popular education in Latin America. Popular education is “nonformal” not simply insofar as it takes place outside of the formal school curriculum; it is nonformal because the formal
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Page 423 curriculum—the sophisticated, Freirean-inspired methodologies of systematizing knowledge that community-based popular education programs do certainly include—is really only a small fraction of the popular education process. Critical educational practices in community-based educational organizations and movements have as much to do with delineating space as they do with transforming students. Control over space, the formation of projects, and the process of development in communities comprises much of the focus of these organizations. This is not to say that community-based education ignores individual transformation; quite the contrary. It is to say that insufficient attention has been paid to the conditions —the type and organization of public space—that underlie popular education in community contexts. Individual transformation, in community-based popular education, requires a particular kind of space, a particular kind of public sphere, within which relationships are developed and identities are defined. So while popular educators are charged with working with individuals, much of their practices actually involve the production and delineation of space. We now turn to a particular community-based popular education organization in central Mexico. Ayuda Mutua and Popular Education During the summer of 2003, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork as a participant-researcher with Ayuda Mutua, a civil association that runs adult education and community development projects. Ayuda Mutua is located in both rural and urban areas in the central mountain region of Michoacán, a state in westcentral Mexico with a relatively high Indigenous population and a very high level of emigration compared to other Mexican states. This organization has been operating for over 17 years amid the rapidly changing national and international political and economic context of the late 1980s through the present—the heyday of neoliberal economic development agendas that culminated in policy with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented beginning in 1994. Though begun as a rural, Indigenous-based organization, Ayuda Mutua now includes educational projects in both rural and urban, Indigenous and mestizo communities throughout Michoacán. Ayuda Mutua is a complex organization. Its projects have involved many hundreds of active participants, men and women, Indigenous and mestizo/a, from desperately poor to middle-class, ranging in age from newborns to women in their eighties. Geographically, it has implemented projects in several dozen towns and cities, and has participated in regional, national, and international events, trainings, and conferences. Ayuda Mutua has accomplished a great deal. It has facilitated the building of health clinics, engaged hundreds of women in literacy groups, created dozens of community monographs, produced research to reclaim and record Indigenous knowledge, developed and implemented environmental education workshops, provided counseling and advocacy support for domestic violence victims, opened a school to train community organizer-educators ( promotoras), held classes to prepare university staff union members to obtain educational equivalency certificates, and many other diverse educational projects. All of this has been done with extraordinarily few material resources. The organization receives consistent funding from one U.S.-based foundation as well as occasional support from Mexican government agencies, but operates on an average of less than $15,000 per year. Its labor force is comprised entirely of volunteers. While the lack of economic support may seem an obvious disadvantage (and indeed, the organization sees this as their major limitation) it also insulates them from dependence on, and influence by, public and private funders. But because they operate in communities, with volunteer and student labor, Ayuda Mutua’s agenda is shaped not by politics or convention, but by the circumstances of its participants and by the will and the work of community-based popular educators.
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Page 424 Women comprise approximately 80% of the popular educators/organizers (called promotoras/ promotores1) who develop and implement Ayuda Mutua’s projects, as well as the vast majority of local participants involved with the organization’s work. There are two explanations for this. First, the organization’s charismatic founder and director, Elena,2 often calls Ayuda Mutua a feminist organization and states that all of Ayuda Mutua’s activities include “a gender perspective.” Second, the demographics of the mostly poor communities in which Ayuda Mutua works have shifted dramatically with the economic migration of huge numbers of adult men to the United States and other regions of Mexico. The flight of adult men from rural and poor urban communities in Michoacán has had profound effects on social life in these communities. Extremely high levels of alcohol use—a relatively new phenomenon, according to many residents—on the part of the remaining men and boys in the struggling communities, and accompanying rises in domestic abuse, are rampant. Virtually every economically poor family I encountered had multiple members—husbands, sons, brothers, and occasionally sisters—working in the United States. The resulting space within which Ayuda Mutua organizes is characterized by families and households usually headed by women, public and private spaces (shops, streets, religious groups, and community organizations) dominated by women, and women’s issues at the forefront of publicly articulated community concerns. Michoacán: Migration and Politics In order to begin to discuss the role of space in community-based popular educational practices, we must begin with a particular historical, cultural, and economic context. Space is not carved out of theory or an abstract “political” or “public” sphere, but out of specific histories of political and economic shifts. In contemporary Mexico, space for critical education in communities is carved out of the particular contours of global hegemony as it manifests in local contexts. Michoacán has a long history of rural migration north, and of accompanying struggles over nationalism and identity in dialogue with displaced labor and politics. In different regions migration has played different economic and political roles in state and nation-building projects, but as Basch, Schiller, and Blanc (1994) claim, migration tends to result in the enmeshing of “transmigrants” in political, racial, and class regimes of both nations, requiring them to negotiate their identities in dialogue with the national projects of two nations at once. In Michoacán migration has long affected the economic and political sphere. One example can be found in Paul Friedrich’s exploration of the role of newly radicalized returning migrants in Indigenous communities of Michoacán in the decades following the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (Friedrich, 1977). But the dynamics of migrant identity negotiation have only become more complex. Gledhill examines the dynamics of contemporary migration from Michoacán and its effects on the ethnic and class politics both within the United States and in Mexico (Gledhill, 1995). He shows how structural shifts in the U.S. economy produce rifts between different generations of migrant laborers, ultimately promoting an individualist ideology that, while it serves U.S. industry rather well, undermines the potential for transnational political projects. Gledhill’s exploration of the politics of transnational possibilities illuminates the complex ideological pressures encountered by Michoacán’s migrants. Such studies of migration from Michoacán focus almost exclusively on migrants , on the individuals who move. The people who inhabit the space that is left behind are nonactors in most migration narratives. Such narratives often explore how migrants’ actions affect their home community—what money they send, how they affect home community politics, how their leaving affects the family. But the home community and the people who remain are presumed constants to be acted upon by the people who move and the circumstances of their movement.
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Page 425 Of course, both groups—those who move and those who stay behind—are gendered groups. That poor people who migrate are mostly men and the people who stay behind mostly married women, children, and elders, is well established (Kanaiaupuni, 2000); it is certainly the case in contemporary Michoacán. Therefore, the result of literatures that examine how migrants are able and not able to affect their home communities is that the question remains: “How do men effect and fail to effect Mexican communities, even in absentia?” As NAFTA creates an even more intensified migration pattern in Michoacán, and as new free trade agreements are negotiated to shift the political economy toward a similar neoliberal intensification throughout Central and South America, we must diversify our inquiries into the effects of migration. We must look at not only what happens to those who leave, and at how the economy of both immigrant and home communities are affected. We must also look at the changing social fabric of the communities from which migration takes place. We now turn our attention to the shifts that have taken place from within the public sphere of rural as well as poor suburban communities in eastern Michoacán that have experienced unprecedented migration of primarily male community members. What happens to the community, to civil society, when a traditionally patriarchal public sphere all but empties of working-class men? Economic migration has many effects on women. Women in poor communities whose husbands have not left for various reasons are frequently victims of domestic violence. In many communities, because of the stress of decreasing economic opportunities, the men and boys who remain spend their time drinking. I witnessed a great deal of depression and idleness among men in small communities, and many of the women I spoke with said these conditions, with attendant increases in domestic violence, have worsened in recent years. The effects of economic migration are also felt deeply within bi-national families, the norm in so many rural communities. Many families have lived apart for years, even decades. These families live in a constant state of economic and emotional contingency. Women and children wait for men to cross borders, seasons to change in the North, money to arrive. They plan for futures based on imagined legal shifts, and they raise children who are accustomed to contingency. This space, where women build lives in circumstances not of their own choosing, is, by default, a feminized public and private sphere. Ayuda Mutua injects into this largely feminized public sphere a distinctly feminist project. This particular feminism is an important aspect of Ayuda Mutua’s work. Ayuda Mutua’s projects and processes are situated within the daily lives of women. Promotoras focus on women’s lives irrespective of traditional boundaries between public and private spheres. Indeed, health, education, disability, children’s development, the elderly—“domestic,” “feminine” issues, often considered peripheral to men’s movements—are central to Ayuda Mutua’s educational work. Community analysis of policy, industry, globalization, and the environment, tends to focus on how these affect women and their children. As “production” happens elsewhere (in the United States and in maquiladoras near the border), the domestic sphere becomes public and not peripheral to community-based popular education work. By situating their work within the daily lives of those—mostly women—who are left behind in poor rural and urban communities that have experienced extremely high levels of economic migration, Ayuda Mutua enacts a civil society that is based upon the standpoints of women, making this standpoint the basis for a reinvented public sphere, or civil society. Civil Society as Contingent Yet Independent Social Space The term “civil society,” itself, is important to the women and men of Ayuda Mutua, but more important is the sort of relationship this term implies to them. Ayuda Mutua distinguishes itself not only from the state but, perhaps more importantly, from the development organizations, the
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Page 426 large national and international NGOs, that purport to speak for and advocate on behalf of communities. This type of international development—what Kamat calls “development hegemony,” characterized by an “NGOization” of the grassroots—is all too familiar to Elena, the director of Ayuda Mutua (Kamat, 2002). Indeed, Elena describes the difference between the work she does with Ayuda Mutua and the work of other organizations and projects she has been involved with in explicitly spatial terms, in terms of proximity to the people she is involved with. She describes it as a difference between working for people, “doing something to them, such as teaching or developing them,” and working with the people, in a space of “mutual support and development.” Elena explains that this difference, what Ayuda Mutua does with people, is connected to the dialogue between theory and practice, the systematization of knowledge that Freire describes. But she always emphasizes that the most important thing is that no part of the organization’s projects should be separated from the “daily life” in communities. It is this privileging of the lives of people in communities that I focus on here. This privileging is not only about knowledge. It is about space , an assertion that knowledge about a community begins with what goes on in the lives of the people who live there. It is about the assertion that neither the government nor outside experts, but the experiences of the people themselves, and their analysis of them, are the beginning point for any development. This is the privileging of civil society. But what is civil society? The history of civil society theory has been dominated by efforts to define the normative role of civil society in relation to the state, as if civil society were a universal concept undifferentiated by distinctions within the public sphere and among the people who inhabit it (for an extensive history of this intellectual history, see Cohen & Arato, 1992). Indeed, contemporary political theorists have extended this vision of civil society, positing a strong civil society as an antidote to the excesses of global capitalism and attendant political conflict (Kaldor, 2003; Keane, 2003). Many critical postcolonial authors outside the West remain extremely wary of the concept of civil society for precisely this continued association with normative universalism; these authors consider the concept more or less unrecoverable from its Enlightenment and colonialist roots (e.g., Kaviraj & Khilnani, 2001). But there is another, also “critical,” way of taking up the concept of civil society. Howell and Pearce suggest that an “alternative genealogy” of civil society theory paves the way for contemporary civil society activists (Howell & Pearce, 2001). The theorists in this alternative genealogy have in common radical criticisms of power inequalities deriving from capitalist exploitation, and an emphasis on civil society as a space of social movements and cultural self-determination in response to development hegemony (e.g., Escobar & Alvarez, 1992). The alternative genealogy of civil society posits a space for action carved out by what Mignolo calls “epistemological and critical localism,” a way of knowing based on the particular, situated experiences of those whose circumstances are structured by “global designs” (Mignolo, 2000). While neoliberalism might have regular effects across contexts, civil society manifestations within these contexts are made of historicized and situated responses. Ayuda Mutua’s practices include a great deal of time spent carving out and protecting this contingent space within which it is possible to struggle in complicated ways to work “with the people.” What follows is an example of Ayuda Mutua’s negotiation of community control over the development of this contingent and yet relatively independent space of civil society. Drawing Boundaries with the State Fátima is a middle-aged promotora who lives with her husband and teenage daughter in a cinder-block suburb of Morelia. She has been a promotora for over a decade, having joined Ayuda Mutua
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Page 427 through one of the early adult literacy circles and progressed through the school for promotoras to lead her own projects. The Centro Cultural (Cultural Center), in a nearby neighborhood on the outskirts of Morelia, is Fátima’s project. Fátima coordinates events and workshops there, works with women in the neighborhood, and acts as the bottom-line decision-maker in all Centro Cultural affairs. However, many others in Ayuda Mutua were involved in the center in some capacity during my visit. The young women’s puppet theater group performed at the center during its opening celebration, and several of these young women were in charge of publicizing this opening event. Several community members had asked for visual art classes for the children, and I facilitated art workshops there a few times a week during my time in Morelia. One of Elena’s university classes conducted course projects in this community, running workshops on recycling and attempting to work with community members to clean up the “green space,” the large, trash-filled lot atop the hill that many of the women from the community complained was controlled by drug dealers and overrun by addicts. In all, about 30 Ayuda Mutua participants, including at least ten promotoras, from outside of La Lágrima were involved in the Centro Cultural project in some capacity during my visit. During this first week of the center’s operation, immediately after the popular opening celebration, Elena came in contact with a representative from the state department of development and learned about the possibility of receiving state funds for the Centro Cultural. She quickly set up meetings, and Fátima contacted the women in the neighborhood who had expressed interest in being involved with the center’s development. I attended the first meeting between Fátima, Elena, and a man I’ll call Don José, from the office of the state secretary for social development. On the day of the meeting, Don José arrived quite late to Elena’s house, and immediately announced he would need to leave early. Fátima served coffee to the group while Elena made small talk with Don José, waiting for Fátima to finish up in the kitchen and join us for the meeting. During the meeting Don José addressed only Elena and me, even though Elena continually deferred to Fátima to describe the Cultural Center. Fátima began by describing the situation: Well, sir, we have a cultural center in the neighborhood known as La Lágrima—you are familiar with this neighborhood, right? Yes, good. This center is in a house, you know? But we need a lot of things to make the house into a usable center. We need a staircase to go up to the second floor, and walls or bars or something to secure the center. And after we have a method to secure it, we can put equipment up there … there is not much to do in this area—the children wander in the streets all day, without anything to do, and there’s the park with all the drug addicts and hoodlums. And the mothers, many days they don’t even leave the house. Their husbands work in the United States, or they don’t work anywhere, and then they often fight with [their wives]. Don José cut her off at this point, saying that his office was interested in supporting “the project,” affirming that it was important to work in these poor communities on constructive development projects. He then gave a long lecture to Fátima and Elena about how important it is to his office that the projects they support have some way of securing local participation, ending with: Participation is very important to us. You have to plan for it, too. The people in the community have to participate in the project. When organizations do not have a plan for getting community participation, we just won’t work with them. So you need to think about that—how will you get the community to participate in this—this center of yours? So that’s what I think you need to consider when you put together the proposal. Bring it to my office by Monday morning; we have to get to this quickly.
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Page 428 Don José then rose from his seat with an air of finality, drained the last of his coffee while standing, and let himself out. Fátima and Elena immediately set a time the next day to begin work on the proposal, and Fátima left to go and inform the community committee. I asked Elena what she thought of this meeting, and she was positive, saying that they seemed interested in a quick proposal and so they’d get one. She noted that it seemed to be a particularly good time to ask for a lot of money, which they needed in order for the center to be made into an adequate and secure facility. I pushed further, inquiring about what she made of Don José’s last bit about “community participation,” to which Elena wryly shrugged and briskly said: “The government is like that. They always think that they know everything. But it doesn’t matter, if they will receive our proposal. We have to make the proposal, and then we’ll see.” The following morning, nine of us squished into a small office with a computer and began work on the proposal. Five women from the community were in attendance, none of whom had worked with Ayuda Mutua previously. Elena, Fátima, a young promotora, and I were also there, with Elena at the computer and me with my notebook. The group began by talking about what the neighborhood’s problems were. Since they all referred to things said in previous meetings, I gathered that this was not a new conversation. Problems revolved around the chronic lack of employment opportunities, violence and drugs, youth with nothing to do but get into trouble, women isolated from one another, and domestic violence. They then discussed the resources in the community. These included various skills that women in the community have and various things the youth like to do. They then turned to the proposal, filling it out line by line. The group created an outline for a community center that would employ community members to teach classes for one another, classes that all could attend for a very small donation (they spent a long time trying to figure out how much would be appropriate and weighing the benefits of having a token fee versus having the classes be free). Their outline also included a space upstairs for youth to hang out, get tutoring, and learn how to use computers so that they could do well in school, stay out of trouble, and eventually find good “professional” jobs. The group created a budget for the entire project’s start-up and first year of operation, broken down into facility improvement, salaries, materials, and overheads to fit into the proposal format. All in all, this work took about eight hours over two days. Despite scheduling difficulties and fatigue from the work of fitting eight women’s reflections into a government proposal form, both Elena and Fátima were insistent that they only work on the proposal when the community members were present. After this highly participatory process, Elena dropped off the proposal on Monday morning at Don José’s office. Days later, they met with Don José. I was out of town visiting one of the rural communities when this meeting took place, so I spoke with Elena about it that evening. Elena said that Don José looked at their proposal and said that the group’s priorities did not match those of his office. Fox, the president of Mexico at that time, had apparently recently designated large community grants for the explicit purpose of providing Microsoft computer equipment and training to poor people. Don José said that his office was interested only in providing a computer training program that would employ government trainers, rather than employing trained community members as the women had requested. He was disdainful of the community’s other requests. Elena said that there was no mention of the importance of “participation” at this meeting, and that the bottom line was made abundantly clear: the government wanted to fund a computer training program that they would organize and staff, and they wanted to use the Centro Cultural as a free place to locate it and Ayuda Mutua as a means to manage it (also for free) and to get community members to show up. In a subsequent interview with Fátima, I asked about this meeting. She said that she was very upset during the meeting, explaining that she felt she had been misled by Don José to believe that they were actually interested in helping Ayuda Mutua with their work when they really had their own ideas and their own agenda. She said:
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Page 429 It did not make me happy, the way they were talking to me. I mean, it was very ironic, you know? All this talk about participation, about how they want to “work with the people”—absolutely ridiculous! I said to them in one moment—really, Jennifer, I said this—”Well, you need to know something about us. We don’t need you. Yes, you have the money and we do not have much money, but you know something? We have always worked with communities, for many years, you understand? We do our work when we get money from you and we work the same way when we don’t have money. We will be working with this community no matter what, with or without you.” We work with or without them, you understand? It made me a little angry that they think no one can work without their money. Fátima emphasized that her anger was an aberration, however, and that negative experiences are not what she focuses on most of the time: You know what, my work with Ayuda Mutua is something like being in a river. We’re going with the community, where they want to go, what they need. With the people, right? And when the government or anybody, whatever person wants to meet in this river with us, well, that’s okay, they can accompany us. And when they want to go in some different direction, well, I just stay with this river. It doesn’t matter to me. Ayuda Mutua did not take the government’s offer of a computer program, even though computers and training were included as a part of their own proposal. Importantly, their objection to taking the money was not on ideological grounds, not based on a refusal to ally with the state because of what the state stands for or signifies. It was not because Fox’s neoliberal agenda was at the center of the community grants that Ayuda Mutua did not accept funding for the Centro Cultural. Rather, they would not violate their own “common sense” that people who live in a community ought to set the agenda for that community. Ayuda Mutua thus negotiates its relationship with the state to maintain the integrity of its process , its space, even at the cost of the project’s efficient progress. This begs the question of leadership, requiring us to dig a little bit deeper into these norms and power shifts to interrogate the role of promotoras. Are promotoras simply the enforcers of the independent right of communities to make development decisions without undue influence from the state, or is something more complex going on? What, in short, is the difference between community-based popular education and community-based development? To address this question, we examine knowledge development and the role of promotoras as a particular type of intellectuals. Subaltern Knowledge in Civil Society: Promotoras as Organic Intellectuals If Ayuda Mutua’s work can be distilled to one core characterization, it would be the development of communities’ capacity to carry out projects through education and analysis rooted in the communities themselves. Such capacity revolves around the popular educators, or promotoras and promotores, in each community. We have seen how promotoras prioritize a form of community-situated knowledge in the development of projects. Because Ayuda Mutua works with particular “oppressed” commu-nities—poor communities, Indigenous communities, women who have been victims of domestic violence, workers without formal education, etc.—the knowledge promotoras prioritize is that which comes out of the daily lives of oppressed people. This is an expanded version of what Gramsci would call “organic” knowledge. In this section I begin by explaining Gramsci’s theory
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Page 430 of the relationship between organic and traditional intellectuals, so that we may examine how Ayuda Mutua’s promotoras, as “organic intellectuals,” interact with a dominant ideology that privileges “objective,” non-situated knowledge. Gramsci differentiates between organic intellectuals and what he calls “traditional intellectuals.” Traditional intellectuals are the class of intellectuals who consider themselves detached from social class and class interests. Traditional intellectuals think of themselves as performing their intellectual functions somehow outside of history, in objective relation to all subjective political or class interest groups. This myth of detachment allows traditional intellectuals to consider irrelevant their original social class. The alignment of the work of traditional intellectuals—those who claim to be “objective” and “interest-less”— with the agendas of the organic intellectuals of the dominant class is fundamental to the development of hegemony in Gramsci’s analysis. The overlapping consensus necessary for a state to maintain dominance is dependent on the fabrication of a “common sense” that purports to be objective while actually systematically promoting the advantage of the dominant group. Traditional intellectuals are those who brand this common sense “objective” and who perform most of the functions of elaborating and maintaining religious, educational, social, economic, and political structures—the intertwined infrastructures of civil society, economic relations, and state power—that support the dominant hegemony (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 11–13, pp. 323–324). Organic intellectuals are those who do not purport to stand in an objective relationship to the class system. They advocate for their own class and its interests, serving as intellectual leaders who interact with the state precisely because different state forms promote the interests of different social classes. Gramsci focuses on the development of organic intellectuals from “subaltern” groups (1971, pp. 52–55). For him, subaltern is a class-based concept; subaltern groups in Italy in the 1920s included the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry. Gramsci was particularly concerned with the challenge of disentangling the rural peasantry from the traditional intellectuals who are tied to dominant hegemony (see 1971, pp. 14–18, 1978, p. 130). As the next vignette will show, Ayuda Mutua actively addresses just this relationship and attempts to forge a new relationship between organic and traditional intellectuals. Gramsci’s notion that subaltern intellectual leadership should be situated in experiences of oppression , not abstracted by detached “experts,” resonates directly with Ayuda Mutua’s privileging of community-situated knowledge. University Students and Organic Intellectuals Ayuda Mutua works with middle-class university students constantly through arrangements made by the director, who is a part-time professor at the University of Michoacán and who has contacts with other universities that require placements for students to fulfill the “social service” graduation requirement common in many Mexican universities. As a part of their assignments, biology students often do research in communities, producing assessment monographs that promotoras can later use as references. Psychology students work as volunteers in the domestic violence suborganization of Ayuda Mutua, running counseling groups and planning activities. During the course of my time with Ayuda Mutua, university students were a consistent presence throughout the projects and communities. The interactions I observed between promotoras and students are quite similar across different types of project, sites, promotoras, and student groups. In each situation, promotoras follow their curricular and nonformal processes of gathering information and analyzing it with community members to produce knowledge: an analysis of the problem and a plan to address it. They recognize students’ contributions only when the students situate them within the projects defined by local community members. In short, promotoras require that traditional knowledge be located within the “alternative civil society” space that Ayuda Mutua produces. A brief example of this student–promotora dynamic follows.
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Page 431 At a meeting in Ajuno of all the rural promotoras from that area as well as a few Morelia-based promotoras, I had the opportunity to observe some of these promotoras interacting with middle-class students from the University of Guadalajara who had spent six weeks living and working in Charahuen. Charahuen is a very small community near Ajuno with one promotora, a wizened woman of perhaps 70 years old. The students lived in and worked on a nearly completed health clinic built through an Ayuda Mutua community initiative. They joined this promotora meeting to give their “final reports,” and to say their goodbyes. Some of the rural promotoras at this meeting welcome the students into their homes as if they were family members, joking with them from the start. The Charahuen promotora, whom Elena had described to me as a “true organic intellectual,” asks the students quiet, pointed questions at several moments, listening patiently while they struggle to talk about their experiences, and interjecting with gentle humor at several awkwardly serious moments. After a typical lunch of rice, tortillas, and beans, the meeting begins with the students’ reports on their work. Juan, a dreadlocked 20-year-old who is the most outspoken of the five students, speaks at great length about a community conflict over the ownership of the health clinic, a conflict that had culminated in an all-community meeting in Charahuen that I attended during my first week with Ayuda Mutua. Juan notes that many of the local women had stayed at the outskirts of the meeting. He comments that the community did not understand the students and what they were doing, saying that he and his friends were outsiders and how difficult it has been for them to make the community understand that the health clinic is the property of the community and that the community has to take responsibility for its completion. He also speaks particularly wistfully about his frustration that when Elena came to the Charahuen community meeting and said “exactly the same thing” the students had been saying about community responsibility, the community members acted like it was the first time they had heard it. The promotoras listen politely and then begin asking Juan some questions about the relationships he had forged in the community. They ask how he had gotten to know the community members, what efforts he had made to share his time with them, and what he had learned from the community. He begins talking about his experiences in a more personal way at this point, recounting his experience as a personal journey rather than a set of observations. He notes how wonderful many in Charahuen had been to open their homes, commenting how much more generous the Indigenous rural people were with what little they had than he or any of his middle-class friends were with all that they had. Juan says he has learned about how families make a very small amount of money and food go a long way. During his speech, the promotoras alternately shake their heads, nod, are pointedly silent, say “very good” several times, and finally indicate it is time to move on to let some of the other (female) students speak. Elena wraps up Juan’s long report by saying: The reality tells us what we need to do. The young people have part of the reality, for sure, but not all of it. The meeting they organized helped a lot, bringing people together to gain clarity on the project. But we need to recognize the wisdom and the role of [the promotora from Charahuen]. The community process is a very slow process. It’s about relationships, human relationships, and these are always complicated and often difficult. At this point, the attention turns to the Charahuen promotora, who says quietly to the group: “These young people are not owners of the clinic. I don’t want to assume anything, but their dream is not this. The young peoples’ job is to do their social service.” The interactions between middle-class university students and promotoras at this meeting in Ajuno were representative of the interactions I saw between promotoras and students in five different Ayuda Mutua projects. Across diverse projects and communities, university students are incorporated into the daily operation of Ayuda Mutua, and promotoras are accustomed to their
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Page 432 presence. The students’ short-term commitments and huge expectations, their condescending attitudes and their quick and sometimes dramatic disillusionment, their idealism, and their elitism are all routine challenges for experienced promotoras. In fact, the occasion of working with university students on a community event or project seems hardly worth mentioning to promotoras when they talk to me about their work. Promotoras seem neither noticeably offended by students’ insensitivities nor particularly impressed with their substantive contributions. In short, promotoras treat the university students like their own students and volunteers, assuming distinctively teacher-like roles in meetings with students and organizer-like roles in community work with students. We begin to see how promotoras address some of Gramsci’s key concerns with respect to the ideological relationship between organic “subaltern” knowledge and traditional knowledge like that held by the university students. Ayuda Mutua promotoras and promotores attempt to forge a new ideological relationship with traditional intellectuals. This has to do with redirecting traditional intellectual knowledge, demonstrating how traditional knowledge can serve subaltern interests while, at the same time, challenging students to understand that because their knowledge is not situated in the daily lives of the people, it must play a supportive role rather than a generative role. Promotoras demonstrate the prioritization of organic knowledge, and the appropriate role of traditional knowledge in supporting community-based popular education. But this ideological realignment is not easy, and is never finished. We can now see why this work needs to occur in community settings, in social space where there is relative independence to carve out these relationships. Such ideological work—not only the conscientization of community members but, simultaneously, of middle-class students in relation to the prioritization of “organic” knowledge-production—is extremely difficult. Limitations and Lessons from Communities Of course, there are clear limitations of community-based popular education. It works to carve relatively independent spaces out of the contours of dominant economic hegemony wherein popular educators conduct educational, cultural, and ideological work. But this space is limited—popular educators themselves maintain its limits through many of their practices as we have seen, and the resulting lack of monetary resources for the work clearly inhibits its growth. Despite developing and maintaining many small corners of counter-hegemonic space in communities spread throughout many parts of Latin America, it is not clear that community-based popular education will ever seriously influence the state education systems that reproduce dominant ideologies and social, political, and economic structures. But there are nevertheless important lessons to be learned from community-based popular education in Latin America. For example, there are, of course, many moments of possibility for popular educational practices within these school systems—a particularly flexible classroom, a political moment when “something new” can be tried in a city, district, or even state in a situation where popular educators are able to become central to these processes. But we know that in this era of new rightist hegemonic alliances, most of progressive educators’ time and energy is spent not building new kinds of knowledge with oppressed people but fighting for such conditions of possibility. Community-based popular education, too, requires conditions of possibility. But its practices consist of carving out space—physical space, ideological space, ultimately the ability to define their work and prioritize subaltern knowledge— from the conditions of oppressive policies and structures. And, most importantly, community-based popular educators’ practices of defining the norms and relationships that characterize its work are not fundamentally separate from its educative practices. They are the many “nonformal” practices that fly under the radar screen of most studies of critical education.
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Page 433 We must recognize that the nonformal practices of community-based popular educators are critical educational practices. How promotoras interact in meetings, how they talk over lunch, how they interact with university students, and how they chat with community members in their daily lives is not simply symbolic. These aspects of community-based education are core to the process of transforming oppressive structures and ideologies, core to the practices of working with people to analyze and address the circumstances of their lives. Where are the spaces within school systems for this kind of work? Where are the spaces that are perhaps produced by the contours of dominant hegemony, the contours of oppressive policies, but which, for whatever historically contingent reason, are relatively independent of dominant control? How might critical educational practices work within such spaces, rather than spending all of their energy fighting within the most striated and disciplined of educational space for a foothold? Gramsci reminds us that the state must work to maintain hegemony. It is never complete. Communitybased popular educators have learned to find those spaces where the neoliberal state has not adjusted to its own structural shifts, has not done particularly complete ideological work. For those of us struggling to implement popular education-inspired agendas within bureaucratic systems, a moment of reflection on how we use and redefine the diverse nonclassroom space, time, and opportunities that are carved out for us might also prove worthwhile. Notes 1“ Promotora/ Promotore” is literally translated as “promoter”; however, Ayuda Mutua’s use of this term is more accurately interpreted as “educator-organizer.” 2 Individual names are pseudonyms. References Arnove, R. F. (1995). Adult education and state policy in Latin America: The contrasting cases of Mexico and Nicaragua. Comparative Education , 31 (3), 311–326. Basch, L., Schiller, N. J., & Blanc, C. S. (1994). Nations unbound . Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Cohen, J., & Arato, A. (1992). Civil society and political theory . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Escobar, A., & Alvarez, S. (Eds.). (1992). The making of social movements in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Friedrich, P. (1977). Agrarian revolt in a Mexican village . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gledhill, J. (1995). Neoliberalism, transnationalization and rural poverty, Mexico . Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1978). Selections from political writings (1921–1926). London: Lawrence and Wishart Press. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. London: Routledge. Howell, J., & Pearce, J. (2001). Civil society and development. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Kaldor, M. (2003). Global civil society . Cambridge: Polity Press. Kamat, S. (2002). Development hegemony. Oxford University Press. Kanaiaupuni, S. M. (2000). Reframing the migration question: An analysis of men, women, and gender in Mexico. Social Forces, 78 (4), 1311–1347. Kane, L. (2001). Popular education and social change in Latin America. London: Latin America Bureau. Kaviraj, S., & Khilnani, S. (Eds.). (2001). Civil society. Cambridge University Press. Keane, J. (2003). Global civil society? Cambridge University Press. La Belle, T. J. (1987). From consciousness raising to popular education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Comparative Education Review , 31 (2), 201–217. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs. Princeton University Press.
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Page 434 Puiggrós, A. (1984). La educación popular en América Latina. Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen. Shor, I. (1997). When students have power. University of Chicago Press. Torres, C. A. (1991). The State, nonformal education, and socialism in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada. Comparative Education Review , 35 (1), 110–130.
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Page 435 Part VII Critical Research Methods for Critical Education
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Page 437 32 Towards a Critical Theory of Method in Shifting Times Lois Weis, Michelle Fine, & Greg Dimitriadis Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gives us Babel, a film which moves from initial focus on a goatherder in a poor Moroccan village to two young children looked after by a Mexican nanny in Southern California, to their parents on a Moroccan tour bus, boarded to try to recement strained marital relations after the death of their baby, to widowed father Yasujiro and deaf and mute daughter Chieko in Japan. Such seemingly disconnected individuals and events, are, however, intrinsically connected, whereby the director deftly moves to show how actions in one place and time inextricably affect those in another; Yasujiro, on a hunting expedition in Morocco, gifts his rifle to a guide, who sells it to a Moroccan goatherder with two young sons for the purpose of shooting jackals; Abdullah’s younger son, Ahmed, uses the rifle to shoot at a random tour bus containing, among others, the American mother and father of two children being taken care of by a Mexican nanny in Southern California, whose subsequently time extended job with the children results in her transporting them across the U.S. Mexican border, setting in motion events linked ultimately to two young children who wander dangerously alone in the blazing, and subsequently dark, desert without food or water. As the pieces of the seemingly unconnected plots are put in dynamic motion with and against one another, we learn of deep and abiding connections between and among seemingly unrelated parts, wherein actions in Japan, a decision to board a plane and go to Morocco with a hunting rifle, determine action in Southern California, as the nanny of the children of the parents in Morocco crosses into Tijuana to attend her son’s wedding. Through both dusty desert and stark surfaces of modernity, the lives of Amerlia, Chieko, Yasujiro, Richard, Susan, Abdullah, Yussef, and Ahmed are relationally produced and forever bound, across language and borders seemingly separate, challenging the image of linguistically and culturally isolated peoples of the tower of Babel in biblical times. While Ahmed might have pulled the trigger and shot Susan, it is the “blank spaces” that determine said action and subsequent repercussion, including an international incident tagged to wider twenty-first-century discourse and practice around “terrorist” activity; activity which is, of course, linked to broader economic and social arrangements. With Babel as metaphor, we propose that we are in need of a new research imaginary, one linked to a much broadened and rapidly shifting context. The increasingly interconnected world—of commerce and capital; war and migration; spinning signs, music, popular culture, and symbols that can instantaneously be transmitted across the globe, downloaded onto MP3 players, and resituated in new contexts; new patterns of emigration and the movement of cultural and economic capital across national borders— demands a fresh imaginary, one that enables/encourages
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Page 438 us to capture the rippling effects of actions in one place as they impact on another. While we have much good work that is conducted at one place in one time, scholarship that delves historically, ethnographically, and/or statistically into the relationship between and among key variables and/or actions of individuals/groups around a particular set of events and/or policies, we must expand our research imaginary so as to capture how actions in one place impact those in another. We call, then, for research that, at once, digs deep and theorizes wide. In the United States, for example, we are witnessing decreasing opportunities for the working class and poor who live in particular gender and racial/ethnic relational forms, as well as intensified and pressurepacked expectations directed toward the privileged. This can only be fully comprehended if we set in motion understanding of a global economy under which a variety of jobs—whether for working-class, poor and/or middle-class/upper middle-class individuals—are increasingly exported from highly industrialized (and digitalized) countries, such as the United States, to places where the multinational companies can hire highly skilled, well-educated laborers for lower pay and without benefits. This evolving set of international economic and human resource relations affects the educational aspirations and apathies of younger generations in both exporting and importing countries. Those who are educated now live and work inside a global community. At the same time the push-and-pull dynamics of globalization exert particular class-linked forms of pressure on youth. New pressures on and within schools, communities, and young bodies can be documented any/everywhere. In the United States, for example, we are witnessing decreasing opportunities (outside of the military and prisons) for the working class and poor, who live inside particular race relational forms. Privileged youth experience the corollary: intensified and pressure-packed expectations (Weis, Nozaki, Granfield, & Olsen, 2007). Child rearing, too, is altered, as parents across social class live out reworked forms of child rearing tied to the demands of the restructured world economy, whether they are aware of it or not. As Adam Gamoran (2001) argues, no matter how much the working class and poor improve in terms of test score results, the economic and health returns pale in comparison to the privileged, who simply have naturalized resources to run harder and faster. Annette Lareau (2003) argues persuasively that there are now two logics of child rearing—concerted cultivation versus natural growth. Working-class and poor parents, argues Lareau, may love their children as much as the privileged, but love them through providing housing and food. In contrast, middle- and upper middleclass parents are more likely to micromanage their children’s educational and social portfolio beginning at a very young age, sending them from lesson to lesson, so as to learn to manage themselves in an adult centered professional world and compete, down the road, in an increasingly competitive economic and social environment. Flight of jobs is not the whole story. There is also a growing gap between those possessing “flexible citizenship” that can transcend nation-state boundaries with their cultural and intellectual capital (either inherited or earned) and those who are trapped within that boundary because they do not have such cultural and intellectual capital. High-status knowledge is both produced and consumed in a wide variety of countries; students and scholars from within such countries increasingly reside, work, and/or are educated within economically powerful nations such as the United States. Top-quality intellectual human resources are seduced from these countries, which ultimately export (and lose) high-powered intellectuals, engineers, and medical professionals (Weis et al., 2007). In addition, these migrant/immigrant parents often bring new demands to American, Canadian, and British school systems, where, as Guofang Li (2005) demonstrates, Hong Kong Chinese parents in Vancouver have little use for what they see as the “soft” curriculum associated with North American schooling. Given class-linked cultural and economic capital, such privileged world citizens are demanding more strongly framed knowledge and less of the fluff that they associate with Western, particularly North American schools, even though they currently reside
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Page 439 in Canada. This scene is being played out in schools up and down the Pacific North American coast, where a new form of “White flight” is taking place, as White parents are removing their children from schools heavily populated by Asians. Rather than tagging their children with the label “failure” in comparison with academically high-achieving Asian students, however, White parents now reclaim a discourse of “well-roundedness,” one laced with sports, “hang” time, sleepovers, and so forth, in contradistinction with what they construct as the press among Asian parents for intellectual and artistic accomplishment. Such conversation and effects upon schools must be seen as linked both to a restructured global economy, which shuts off certain kinds of opportunities both at the college and university level, as well as the subsequent work place, and the movement of peoples across borders, wherein actions/activities inside schools and communities can only be understood with reference to myriad aspects of globalization. While such a new research imaginary can arguably take a variety of shapes and forms, let us outline key elements of what such an imaginary might look like in global context. Obviously this is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to pry open conversation around elements of a research imaginary in shifting times. Specifically this is addressed to those of us who do ethnographic work around the production of culture, inequality, and resistance—including issues related to academic achievement, academic attainment, and associated “life chances,” in relation to social structure. While the specificities of the argument at hand are tagged to those who engage in ethnographic work, the broad parameters hold, we would argue, for other forms of research. Deterritorializing Ethnography and the Challenge of Multisited Work We are interested here in research designs that take seriously and concurrently the deep, local and historic conditions within which cultures and movements grow and change, and at the same time seek evidence of the ways in which global winds carry across sites, bodies, capital, privilege, culture, critique, and despair. It is interesting to note that critical global studies (Appadurai, 1996) has flourished within and across the social sciences at the same time that critical Indigenous scholarship which privileges local knowledge and cross-site Indigenous knowledges (Battiste, 2000; Gilmore, Smith, & Kairaiuak, 2004; Grande, 2004; G. H. Smith, 2000; L. T. Smith, 1999, 2005) has gained intellectual and political ascendancy. These two intellectual movements can speak powerfully to each other and can, in troubling ways, be used to point to distinct designs. While the former stresses cultural, material, and social mobility enabled by globalization, the latter stresses the ways in which globalization can marginalize or even exploit deeply rooted local specificities. The social sciences, then, are now marked in key ways by contesting claims as to understanding the broad sweep of globalization and its attendant pressures. For Saskia Sassen (2005), the central question facing social scientists is that of “scale”—more specifically, moving beyond what she calls “older hierarchies of scale and conceptions of nested scalings” (p. 156), including, but not limited to, the now anachronistic notion that one can clearly separate the “local” from the “global.” As noted earlier in our discussion of Babel, the world no longer allows for such neat cultural containment. As Cameron McCarthy and colleagues (McCarthy, Durham, Engel, Filmer, & Giardina, 2008) write, the “deeply nationalist, localist, and particularistic-beyond-a-knowing fault” has been “rendered archaic” in our moment of globalization and culture. At the very least, the role of ethnography as a tool for understanding and acting upon our contemporary global moment needs rethinking. Sassen continues, arguing that we must see the tools of qualitative research as situated in different “conceptual architectures,” ones which allow us to look beyond the nation-state as a bounded point of reference (Sassen, 2005, p. 156).
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Page 440 Looking beyond the nation-state, however, does not mean abandoning local actors “on the ground.” On the contrary, as Bhavnani, Foran, & Talcott (2005) argue, such conceptual architecture can allow us to see global issues and inequalities as “configurations” that reach around the world in complex ways. As a key example, the authors discuss new struggles around biopolitics, including the ways biologically diverse and geographically specific life forms are now treated as “intellectual property” that can be patented. The global struggle to resist this pernicious form of corporatism is one that draws on the work of multiple, Indigenous social actors, as such struggle cannot be exhausted at the level of the nationstate. Understanding such complex configuration demands a different kind of ethnography, one that uses local struggles as one of several lenses through which to understand globalization. Indeed, in taking up the project of deterritorializing ethnography, we are not necessarily advocating the loss of richness in one site; rather than close borders at the ways in which the local produces subjectivities and cultures, then, we insist on an intellectual swelling as we proceed with rich and detailed empirical work. While this has been a concern in anthropology (e.g., Burawoy et al., 2000; Marcus, 1998), these concerns have taken hold in the field of education only more recently, where educators have tended to hold onto and locate young people’s lives within a fairly circumscribed set of boundaries—home and school. We need, therefore, to open our imaginations as to what “counts” as schooling and education today—not necessarily the same—where they happen, how they are understood, and how these practices link to, resist, and collude with wider social and economic forms. Such work relies, of course, on specific ideas or theories about “culture”—namely, that “culture” can no longer be conceptualized as a bounded object of study. Notions of cultural containment fly in the face of the contemporary reality of migration, mediation, and complex cultural transactions so much a part of the quotidian for many youth and adults both in and outside of the United States. “Culture”—as so much work in globalization has made clear—is interconnected, in transit, the result of various often unequally situated and disjunctive flows and trajectories (Appadurai, 1996; Dolby, 2001; Massey, 1994). As Eisenhart (2001) argues, these new tensions around “culture” have helped to “muddle” debates around ethnographic methodology. If culture can no longer be contained in discrete sites and settings, the traditional tools of qualitative inquiry need rethinking. For example, as culture intersects and emerges vibrantly in relation to gender, class, caste, immigration/exile status, and sexuality, such that the education of girls and women in varying communities challenges/enhances/subverts (depending on one’s perspective) what is seen to constitute culture in myriad national contexts, our questions must be harvested within deep intellectual intersections and crevices located beyond the local (Bhavnani et al., 2005; George, 2005). This “muddling” of culture is also evidenced in the global flow of popular culture and other symbolic resources. While the globalization of popular culture is well established, it is a phenomenon that is largely understood in binary fashion, at the level of production or consumption. Political economists such as Robert McChesney (1999) tend to stress the ways a smaller and smaller number of U.S. industries monolithically export their goods around the world, stripping cultures of their integrity and specificity. Cultural studies scholars such as Nadine Dolby (2001) and Greg Dimitriadis (2001), in contrast, tend to stress how audiences make such cultural forms their own, using them to achieve specific local ends, which cannot be predicted at the level of text or industry. Yet, as Henry Jenkins (2006) (among others) has recently argued, culture can no longer be understood at either such “macro” or “micro” levels. With the proliferation of new media, the production and consumption of popular culture is “converging” in key ways, as “consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (p. 3). As a paradigmatic example, Jenkins points to the infamous, satiric “Bert is Evil” website, which juxtaposed images of the Sesame Street character with those of Bin Laden— images that were later mistakenly taken off the website and used as part of anti-American
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Page 441 posters by Pakistani protesters. The juxtaposition of the puppet Bert and Bin Laden offered an image that circulated across the globe in ways no one could have predicted. As Jenkins writes: In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Think about the circuits that the Bert is Evil images traveled—from Sesame Street through Photoshop to the World Wide Web, from Ignacio’s [the site designer] bedroom to a print shop in Bangladesh, from the posters held by anti-American protesters that are captured by CNN and into the living rooms of people around the world. Some of its circulation depended upon corporate strategies, such as the localization of Sesame Street or the global convergence of CNN. Some of its circulation depended on tactics of grassroots appropriation, whether in North America or in the Middle East. (2006, p. 3) We see here the proliferation of media content across multiple sites, both enabling and encouraging penetration into previously unimagined spaces while simultaneously opening such content to new possibilities. A bounded and locally based notion of culture—the kind that tends to characterize much ethnographic work—would not enable scholars to capture such movement and/or vulnerability across sites. Multisited ethnography offers a key response to the “muddling” noted by Eisenhart. As Marcus (1986, 1998) suggests, multisited ethnography involves “tracing and describing the connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate” (1998, p. 14). The multisited ethnographer must “keep in view and mind two or more ethnographically conceived sites juxta-posed” (p. 4). By way of direction, Marcus offers the dictum: “follow the people,” “follow the thing,” “follow the metaphor,” “follow the plot, story, or allegory,” “follow the life or biography,” and “follow the conflict” (pp. 90–95). All imply different “starting points” for tracing connections across and between sites— whether individual biographies, objects, and/or stories. As he notes: Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. (Marcus, 1998, p. 90) In other words, the researcher (and/or a participatory research collective, see Fine & Torre, 2005) defines a question, subsequently drawing links both intuitively and empirically across different, tangible sites. This has resulted in ethnographic work in anthropology, radical geography, and cultural studies that has followed the same population across locations, as in, for example, nurses traveling between India and the United States, or software developers from Ireland engaging in work for companies in the United States (Burawoy et al., 2000, p. 30). In education, Eisenhart & Finkel’s study Women’s Science (1998), focused on the multiple sites (e.g., alternative high schools, classes, and local activist groups) where women learn to “become scientists.” In a similar vein, Rebecca Schleiffer has documented the devastating public health and education implications of the current Bush administration’s Abstinence Only policy both domestically and internationally. She focuses upon the ways in which the policy both censors educators and simultaneously miseducates students in Texas, and then she draws from research by colleagues at Human Rights Watch who have traced the devastating implications of the Bush policy for women and children’s mortality in Uganda. Across sites we can see how U.S. policy affects those of us within the nation, and then is exported with dollars that cannot easily be refused by nations in need (Human Rights Watch, 2002).
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Page 442 We recall here, as well, the comparative work of geographer, Cindi Katz (1999, 2001). As Katz demonstrates, globalization is an uneven project that has distinct though overlapping implications for youth. In Sudan, because of land tenure relations associated with the state-sponsored and internationally financed Suki Project, “young people were unlikely to have access to productive land when they got older” (1999, p. 133). While gainfully employed for the moment, “children and adolescents were not learning what they were likely to need to know in their adulthoods” (1999, p. 133). In Harlem, the structural “disinvestments in manufacturing, shipping, and warehousing along with declines in construction and infrastructural maintenance,” so characteristic of global realignment as it plays out in first-wave industrialized nations, have “dimmed the prospects for reasonably well paying, stable employment, and most certainly of meaningful work, for many working-class young people” (1999, p. 134). Here, too, young people are not getting the kinds of educational opportunities they would need to function in the so-called New Economy. Reading these cases against each other allows us to think through and create other kinds of stories about how economically related globalization is affecting youth writ large, thereby encouraging us to think through how to rechart or map relationships between disparate sites. Such recharting is critically important. The ability to create “topographical knowledge,” Katz writes, is critical to the “imperial projects glossed as globalization” (Katz, 2001, p. 2). Indeed, imperialism itself was an effort to divide up and remap the contours of the world, a project buttressed by the then modernist discipline of anthropology (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). At the heart of anthropology was a “monumentalist” impulse (Rosaldo, 1989), an impulse to sort, categorize, and naturalize cultural and national borders, to create clear isomorphic relationships between spaces, places, and cultures (Clifford, 1997). Much of anthropology’s disciplinary work has served, whether intentionally or not, to maintain these borders. As it is arguably the case that such borders are a function of power, the creation of “counter topographies” is a way to resist and rewrite them. Connecting the experiences of youth in Sudan and Harlem, as Katz does, allows us to understand both the specific ways globalization is playing out “on the ground” as well as how broader, globally linked processes are unfolding across site. The “work of the imagination” as constitutive of research design is key here (Appadurai, 1996), as multisited ethnography is not simply “a set of methods that are very specifically prescriptive for the conduct of fieldwork” (p. 6). Rather, it challenges us to rethink our “research imaginary” more broadly, implying, and at the same time demanding, a kind of self-reflexivity about how particular ethnographic sites are imagined and linked empirically, as well as how objects are, in the more traditional social science sense, delimited. All this is not to say that ethnographic work necessarily needs to work across myriad physical sites, whether within one nation or across nations, although this is certainly one rendering of multisited study. As Marcus (1998) argues, multisited ethnographies can be constructed around a single, “strategically selected locale.” Such ethnographies treat “the system as background” though they try not to lose sight of the fact that “it is integrally constitutive of cultural life within the bounded subject matter” (p. 172). As a key example of this kind of multisited ethnography, Marcus offers the well-known school ethnography, Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977). Although the primary site for this research is a single school, Willis juxtaposes and explores (although largely through self-report data, which is key here) a small group of working-class “lads,” as well as working-class conformist youth across site, including school, shop floor, home, dance hall, and local bars. All sites are put into dynamic dialogue with one another in order to explain how social class and, simultaneously, surrounding class structure, are reproduced and validated through and in everyday cultural practices. Willis makes every effort to explain larger issues of “class” through his rich ethnographic description of young people—though, as Marcus (1998) points out, without comparable deep immersion in multiple sites, Willis risks reproducing “canned visions of capitalism” (p. 45), a criticism which can be addressed by entering the site of the work place to begin with rather than relying solely on self-report data.
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Page 443 In sum, multisited ethnographic work—even work focused on a single, strategically selected locale— challenges us to rethink fundamentally our “research imaginary” in ways that push the borders and the interior complexity of the home–school–economy nexus. “Demographics” such as class, gender, immigration status, and so forth are theorized as vibrant embodied practices, and social movements and popular culture are theorized as electrified rhizomes of knowledge, resistance, and culture. Such an imaginary presses towards understanding the ways in which actions/events in one part of the world affect those in another, thus enabling us, for example, to understand why it is that so many poor kids in nations such as the United States, are alienated from the process and product of schooling, investing their time, money, and affective energies in popular forms such as hip hop, often producing poor test results, and so forth. Also, the material/financial component as linked to this particular example must not be ignored, as schools are more or less well funded, staffed, and in general working order dependent on the social class/race/ethnicity of students who attend them (Anyon, 2005; Nolan & Anyon, 2004), and massive material resources simultaneously back the production of popular culture as a way of bringing billions of dollars back to corporations which produce such products for sale to poor (and rich) kids to begin with. Such apparent “underachievement” of poor youth must, then, be seen dynamically in relation to a larger national and international context—one comprised of the movement of commerce and capital, people, and commodified cultural form, each pressed on externally but simultaneously lived out locally, in very specific sites. Taking Marcus seriously means that we “follow the people,” the politics, the money, the music, and the bodies of youth, both dispossessed and privileged, through varying zones of action , and that we do so over time. Expanding our understanding of the layers that press upon institutions and families, we re-view what are typically conceptualized as education, social, and economic “outcomes.” We turn, then, to conclude this essay, to a more praxis-oriented conversation about research design. Drawing from our writings on “compositional studies” we reflect here on how critical researchers might interrogate deep local practices and still trace broadly across sites for ways in which identities are coconstructed between those presumed similar and different; the ways in which communities define themselves in parasitic relation to those whom they neighbor, and those whom they say they despise; and the subterranean connections that tie our fates together. Compositional Studies A few years ago, Weis and Fine (2004) put forward the notion of “compositional studies,” whereby critical analysis of any one social group is undertaken in explicit theoretical relation to “bordering,” and now we would add, even remote social groups. That is, when Fine studies youth in suburban desegregated schools, she tracks financially and intellectually the concurrent enrichment of suburban schools, and economically and socially induced divestment in urban schools (2004). When Weis studies the embodied identities of White working-class women and men, they are juxtaposed to the discursive representations of African Americans, Yemenites, and Latinos in the same community, renditions that are ethnographically rather than theoretically generated (2004). When Dimitriadis studies African American youth over time, he does so against media representations of Black males that offer only “good” or “bad” subject positions (2001). In all cases, with schools or the economy as “canvas,” we theorize how “goodness” and/or “merit” come to be discursively associated with White bodies while images of deficit are associated with largely poor men and women of color. Compositional studies invites these relational analyses, for we recognize that social categories, identities, and investments are borne in deep, and often perverse relation to “bordering” groups, codependent on the dialectics of power. And we recognize further, that these social relations develop and mutate within shifting historical and contemporary social and economic arrangements.
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Page 444 Like the artist, then, we explicitly explore the negative bridging spaces within the composition, probing at all times the relationship between apparently “blank” or “negative” space, and “positive” space, while understanding that no “positive” exists except in relation to the “negative” and that both are under construction. Under our theory and practice of method then, relevant bordering groups (those groups that border the primary subject of interest in the ethnography whether physically, or virtually by reason of framing in popular culture, mass media, and the like; what and who they are; where located and how framed) are as essential to the ethnographic composition as any primary group under consideration. This call for relational analysis is by no means dismissive of the rich ethnographic work that has been undertaken within groups. To the contrary, our call for compositional studies grows out of deep respect for a number of ethnographic classics such as Paul Willis’s (1977) and Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lacey, & June Melody’s (2001) analyses of White working-class youth situated explicitly in historical and class politics, with a keen eye toward development and identity; Patricia Hill-Collins (1991), like Mari Matsuda (1995), Gloria Ladson-Billings (2000), and Patricia Williams (1992) who have developed Critical Race Theory to speak explicitly back to the webbed relations of history, the political economy and everyday lives of women and men of color; Barrie Thorne (1993) who broadened our understandings of gender, arguing against “sex difference” research, insisting instead that gender be analyzed as relational performance; Paul Farmer (2001) who theorizes across the biographies of individuals living in Haiti with tuberculosis, through a lens of international politics of epidemiology, illness, and health care; and Angela Valenzuela (1999) who helps us come to know the transnational investments of Mexican-American youth across school, home, and community. These scholars produce writings centered forcefully on rich complexity within groups, across contexts. Offering detailed and sophisticated analyses of a slice of the social matrix, they simultaneously theorize its relation to the whole (see also Bourgois, 1995; Duneier, 1994; Foley, 1990; Lee, 2006; Rubin, 1976; Scheper-Hughes & Sargent, 1998; Stack, 1997; Stepick, Stepick, Eugene, & Teed, 2001; Twine, 2000; Waters, 1999) Building on this rich legacy, compositional studies invites us to stretch social analysis beyond the group so as to incorporate those “other” groups as co-constructed in the shadows. Offering an alternative theoretical design, compositional analyses are vested in history, in context, and in explicitly theorizing relations among “bordering groups.” Deeply moved and influenced by colleagues who have interrogated ethnographically the social formation of particular social “categories,” we call here for another frame for critical scholarship whereby the complex inter-dependences between groups—whether explicit, oppressive, subversive, denied, or transparent—are scrutinized. Such an approach seems particularly critical to the demands of our day. Indeed, as Appadurai (2006) recently argued, our moment is marked by fundamental conditions of incompleteness and contingency. In particular, he notes, the nation-state project is still largely about the latent quest for cultural purity, a quest that often belies the global presence of minority groups. As he notes: “As a broad fact about the world of the 1990s, the forces of globalization produced conditions for an increase in insecurity and also in the friction of incompleteness” (p. 9). Living in a world where difference and contingency related to so-called “border groups” are permanent conditions, demands a kind of cosmopolitan disposition often anathema to world leaders and actors. Appadurai continues: “The anxiety of incompleteness (always latent in the project of complete national purity) and the sense of social uncertainty about large-scale ethnoracial categories can produce a runaway form of mutual stimulation, which is the road to genocide” (p. 9). Appadurai’s comments render a relational form of ethnography as a way of understanding current conditions, such as that advocated here, that much more imperative. More specifically, we argue for three key analytic moves, always keeping in mind our earlier points related to the importance of deterritorializing ethnography. The first is the deliberate placement of ethnographic and narrative material into a contextual and historic context of economic
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Page 445 and racial formations, gendered relations, popular culture, and forms of resistance (see Sartre, 1968). Without presuming a simple determinism of economics to identity, we take as foundational that individuals navigate lives in what Martín-Baró (1994) and Paolo Freire (1982) call “limit situations,” within historic moments, unequal power relations, and the everyday activities of life. As social theorists, then, it is our intellectual responsibility to make visible the threads that connect histories, structures, groups, and lives, while at the same time making explicit the connections and tensions between. Thus the first commitment of compositional studies in global context is to situate our analyses of communities, schools, and lives, historically, economically, and socially so that the material context within which individuals are “making sense” can be linked to their very efforts to reflect upon and transform these conditions. Such material context is inextricably linked to a realignment of the global economy, a realignment that affects lives on the ground—through communities, institutions, and action —no matter what the national and/or local situation. In addition, circulating signs and symbols tagged to the globalization of popular culture, in particular, must be theorized explicitly as part of this set of processes, as young people take up such commodified culture and at least partially make it their own, thereby advancing identities which are formed in relation to bordering groups, broader social and economic context, and elements of music, television, film, and so forth, all of which circulate in worldwide context. Second, in our work we rely, with some admitted ambivalence, on categories of social and relational identities more than many poststructural scholars do (see Dimitriadis & Carlson, 2003). That is, we trouble essentialism, resisting the categories of social life—race, ethnicity, class, gender—as coherent, in the body, “real,” consistent, or homogeneous. And yet we also take seriously, based on decades of ethnographic work, that these categories are routinely experienced as “real” for those who have long been disenfranchised. Even if performed as multiple, shifting, and fluid, social identities and investments are shaped dramatically by relations of power and technologies of surveillance (Butler, 1999; Foucault, 1977; Scott, 1990). Our work in poor and working-class communities, schools, neighborhood centers, families, elite schools, and prisons teaches us that race, ethnicity, gender, and class are not simply psychological or simple-minded inventions. Analytically we embrace these categories of identity as social, constructed, malleable, porous, and flexible; as fundamental axes of power. We also recognize them to be profoundly powerful strategies for disciplining bodies. By so doing we seek to understand how individuals make sense of, resist, embrace, and embody social categories, and, as dramatically, how they situate “others” in relation to themselves. This demands an explicitly relational method, one that enables us to track the ways in which individuals and groups construct themselves in relation to constructed “others” (as uncovered ethnographically) and social structure more generally. Again, such analyses and theory must be situated inside global context or we risk minimalizing that which produces what we think we see. Such “blank” spaces, then, going back to the artistic metaphor, stretch far beyond any given local community. Third, within compositional designs we seek to excavate differences within groups, so that social analysis can never fix, freeze, or petrify (in both senses of the term) groups as if they were coherent or static (Bhavnani, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1997). Thus we invite readers to imagine large canvas social/racial/economic/gendered formations, make visible the lines of connection and contention within, and reveal the fractures which both bind and split the interior of groups, individuals, identities, and movements. In so doing, our work stretches toward a vision that potentially challenges the stability of hegemonic narratives. Hegemonic beliefs about natural development and deficit; social progress and retardation; the inevitability of inequality, are subverted. Conclusion We come full circle, back to Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel, where actions in one place set in motion actions in another—where seemingly disconnected lives are, in reality, highly interconnected.
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Page 446 Where languages, topography, social class, ethnicity, and geography might differ markedly, but all are set in dynamic interconnection, whether participants know it or not. Yasujiro’s trip to Morocco with a rifle in his hand is connected via myriad mediating events and people both to an international incident and, among others, the lives of Susan, Richard, Abdullah, Yussef, Ahmed, Chieko, and Amerlia. Thus the “absent present” live in the shadows of individually experienced drama, whereby the actions of supposedly disconnected individuals are inextricably linked, woven together in dramatic action and forever changed by one another’s presence. Themes of identity, loss, missed moments, melancholia, revenge, and suffering bleed across sites. So, too, fantasies of isolation, “autonomy,” and privacy shatter. We, too, must engage the deep interconnections between and among apparently disparate canvases. Deterritorializing ethnography means that we open our imaginations beyond simple and stable notions of social and economic structure, as well as static and bounded notions of culture and cultural production and change. Such structures and associated cultural production processes are both fueled by and, increasingly, lie within the global, whereby it is impossible to understand White working-class identity production, whether youth or adult, for example, without understanding the ways in which the global economy renders the old industrially based White working class obsolete in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and other first-wave industrialized nations. Peeling more deeply, Weis’ work in a hard-hit, working-class community in northeast United States (Weiss, 2004), suggests that it is impossible to understand this group, and necessary yet contested gender realignment within this group, without understanding how lived out gendered forms within the bordering Arab Muslim community, coupled with construction of such community as global enemy, makes it easier for White working-class men to swallow their ostensibly devalued masculine position in the economy, thereby encouraging the maintenance of a relatively privileged White working-class fraction. Similarly, we cannot understand youth across race and class in the States and elsewhere unless we understand the circulation of meanings globally around music, clothes, and so forth, meanings that youth pick up and redeposit as they construct self in relation to one another and to social structure. Globalizing culture and capital must, therefore, be factored into our ethnographic imagination as we work to understand social relations and the ways in which individuals and collectivities both live and simultaneously rework such relations. The template we put forward asks not that we know what the pieces are that produce outcomes at the outset of investigation, but, rather, that we engage in scholarship that begins with premises related to globalizing culture and capital, as well as empirically linked patterns of migration. Historic trajectory and economic and social structures are key here, as this all plays defiantly by class, race, ethnicity, religion, and so forth, in specific locale. Such interconnections can only be probed by setting in motion a research imaginary that takes into account broadened social context and the ways in which such context seeps into relationally produced constructions. All this is hard intellectual work, which begins with an imagination that enables and encourages us to go well beyond descriptive ethnography. Here we are being critical, of our friends and ourselves. Those of us who have crafted ethnographic analyses within the United States have, perhaps, unwittingly carried a trace of isolationism; reflecting a larger cultural fantasy of enclosure, privacy, invulnerability that so dangerously characterizes U.S. global relations. No nation, no community, no person sits alone, untouched, untouching, uncontaminated. “We’re not getting involved”—on the one hand—from the United States, always sits atop an imperial grab with the other hand. It is thus critical that we engage an explicit research imaginary that takes the global into account in ways outlined here. We end, thus, with a caution for the field. While bounded descriptive studies continue to be quite useful, they can reproduce a “fantasy of isolation” we can no longer afford. That is to say, they can serve to atomize groups and individuals at precisely the moment when intellectuals must pierce the notion that we function as autonomous entities—entities with unlimited choice,
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Page 447 motion, and so forth as de-moored from social structure and the economy. While recognizing contingency as a fundamental, historical condition, ethnography calls us to understand and act ethically within the limits of our situation(s). As Sartre writes: The most rudimentary behavior must be determined both in relation to the real and present factors which condition it and in relation to a certain object, still to come, which it is trying to bring into being. This is what we call the project. (2001, p. 308) If we do not move in this direction, we too become part of the neoliberal vision, performing upon the stage so as to enhance and reproduce it. References Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement . New York: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large . Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Battiste, M. (Ed.). (2000). Reclaiming indigenous voices and vision. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press. Bhavnani, K. (1994). Tracing the contours. In H. Afshar & M. Maynard (Eds.), The dynamics of “race” and gender . (pp. 26–40). London: Taylor & Francis. Bhavnani, K., Foran, J., & Talcott, M. (2005). The red, the green, the black, and the purple. In R. Applebaum & W. Robinson (Eds.), Critical globalization studies (pp. 323–332). New York: Routledge. Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect . Cambridge University Press. Burawoy, M., Blum, J. A., George, S., Gille, Z., Gowan, T., Hanley, L., et al. (2000). Global ethnography . Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dimitriadis, G. (2001). Performing identity/performing culture . New York: Peter Lang. Dimitriadis, G., & Carlson, D. (Eds.). (2003). Promises to keep. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Dolby, N. (2001). Constructing race. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Duneier, M. (1994). Slim’s table. University of Chicago Press. Eisenhart, M. (2001). Educational ethnography past, present, and future. Educational Researcher, 30 (8), 16–27. Eisenhart, M., & Finkel, E. (1998). Women’s science. University of Chicago Press. Farmer, P. (2001). Infections and inequalities . University of California Press. Fine, M., Roberts, R., Torre, M., Bloom, J., Burns, A., Chajet, L., et al. (2004). Echoes of brown . New York: Teachers College Press. Fine, M., & Torre, M. (2005). Resisting and researching. In S. Ginwright, J. Cammarota, & P. Noguera (Eds.), Social justice, youth and their communities. (pp. 269–286). New York: Routledge. Foley, D. (1990). Learning capitalist culture . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish . New York: Pantheon. Freire, P. (1982). Creating alternative research methods. In B. Hall, A. Gillette, & R. Tandon (Eds.), Creating knowledge (pp. 29–37). New Delhi: Society for Participatory Research in Asia. Gamoran, A. (2001). American schooling and educational inequality: A forecast for the 21st century. Sociology of Education , 74 , 135–153. George, S. (2005). If you want to be relevant. In R. Applebaum & W. Robinson (Eds.), Critical globalization studies (pp. 3–10). New York: Routledge. Gilmore, P., Smith, D., & Kairaiuak, A. L. (2004). Resisting diversity. In M. Fine, L. Weis, L. Pruitt, & A. Burns (Eds.), Off White. (pp. 273–283). New York: Routledge. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hill-Collins, P. (1991). Black feminist thought. New York: Routledge. Human Rights Watch (2002). Ignorance only. New York. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture . New York: NYU Press.
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Page 448 Katz, C. (2001). On the grounds of globalization: A typography for feminist political engagement. Signs , 26 (4), 1213–1234. Katz, C. (1999). Disintegrating developments: global economic restructuring and the eroding ecologies of youth. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 130–144). London & New York: Routledge. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2005). On qualitative inquiry. New York: Teachers College Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 257–277). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, S. J. (2006). Up against whiteness. New York: Teacher’s College Press. Li, G. (2005). Culturally contested pedagogy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcus, G. (1986). Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world system. In J. Clifford & G. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture (pp. 165–193). Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton University Press. Massey, D. (1994) Space, place, and gender . Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Matsuda, M. (1995). Looking to the bottom. New York: New Press. McCarthy, C., Durham, A. S., Engel, L. C., Filmer, A. A., & Giardina, M. D. (Eds.). (2008). Globalizing cultural studies. New York: Peter Lang. McChesney, R. (1999). Rich media, poor democracy . University of Illinois Press. Nolan, K., & Anyon, J. (2004). Learning to do time: Willis’s model of cultural reproduction in an era of postindustrialism, globalization, and mass incarceration (pp. 133–150). In N. Dolby & G. Dimitriadis (Eds.), Learning to labour in new times . New York: Routledge. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth . Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rubin, L. (1976). Worlds of pain. New York: Basic Books. Sartre, J. P. (1968). Search for method. New York: Vintage. Sartre, J. P. (2001). Basic writings . New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2005). The many scales of the global. In R. Applebaum & W. Robinson (Eds.), Critical globalization studies (pp. 155–166). New York: Routledge. Scheper-Hughes, N., & Sargent, N. (1998). Small wars. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the art of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting indigenous knowledge. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Reclaiming indigenous voices and vision. (pp. 209–224). Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies. London: Zed Books. Smith, L. T. (2005). On tricky grounds. In N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Stack, C. B. (1997). All our kin. New York: Basic Books. Stepick, A., Stepick, C., Eugene, E., & Teed, D. (2001). Shifting identities. In A. Portes and R. Rumbaut (Eds.), Ethnicities. Co-published by University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Twine, F. (2000). Racial ideologies and racial methodologies. In F. Twine & J. Warren (Eds.), Racing research, researching race (pp. 1–34). New York: NYU Press. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Walkerdine, V., Lacey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl. New York University Press. Waters, M. (1999). Black identities . New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weis, L. (1990). Working class without work . New York: Routledge. Weis, L. (2004). Class reunion . New York: Routledge. Weis, L., & Fine, M. (2004). Working method: Research and social justice. New York: Routledge. Weis, L., Nozaki, Y., Granfield, R., & Olsen, N. (2007). A call for civically engaged educational policyrelated scholarship. Educational Policy , 21 (2), 426–433 . Williams, P. (1992). The alchemy of race and rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour. Westmead, England: Saxon House Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. London, California & New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
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Page 449 33 New Possibilities for Critical Education Research Uses for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Daniel S. Choi Introduction Throughout the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era of this decade, the national preoccupation with accountability has resulted, naturally, in an emphasis on research focused on high-stakes tests and achievement outcomes. Some would argue that the high-stakes environment is what drives demand for such studies. Educational leaders and the general public want “the cold, hard facts” or their quantitative equivalents in an accountability context: i.e., an analysis of results or outcomes, which some refer to as “outputs.” In comparison, there has been considerably less interest in studying inputs. From a critical perspective, inputs represent the finite material and human resources that exist in unequal amounts across schools according to varying social characteristics and levels of wealth. Typically, it has meant monetary resources. More recently, however, resources have been directly linked to the actual educational resources for which the monies usually are spent. These educational resources refer to needs such as high-quality teachers, current and proven instructional materials, and safe and clean learning environments. Also by extension, there has been growing interest in the equitable access to, and distribution of, these educational resources. Therefore, equal access and distribution have gained more attention as studies have begun to show the relationship between levels of educational resources and school-level student achievement under the current accountability system. Related studies have also shown a similar relationship between student achievement and the proportion of poor and/or minority students in schools. Nevertheless, accountability systems largely have ignored these findings, as they continue to hold underresourced schools to the same standards of academic achievement as their more highly resourced school counterparts. In response, some accountability systems have begun to rank schools according to school inputs (similar school characteristics). However, the vast majority of accountability systems still issue sanctions based solely on outputs. While accountability of this sort is sure to continue, this chapter presents a critical addition to traditional research methods and research dissemination that could effect meaningful and lasting change. This chapter describes research that is framed in the context of the public interest. These are the interests that are relevant to a wide range of audiences that include academics, practitioners, and the general public. This framing of the work involves communicating research through a medium that people can relate to on many levels, and appealing deliberately to specific target audiences—that is, stakeholders at various levels of influence. This chapter begins with a discussion reviewing competing notions of equity, illustrated through a recent court case over
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Page 450 resource adequacy in California. The discussion is necessary because equity is often treated as an afterthought in many output/outcome-oriented studies. The discussion also provides the rational basis for the critical addition of new analysis tools to traditional quantitative research methods. These tools provide researchers the ability to monitor and analyze the equitable distribution of educational resources from a geographical perspective. Following this discussion are examples of the tools in use. Lastly, the chapter presents recommendations for the tool to be used not only as a research tool, but also as a means to communicate and promote more possibilities to produce research that is in the public interest. Competing Notions of Equity and the Distribution of Education Resources According to the California Constitution, the state is responsible for protecting the rights of all public schoolchildren so that they “have equal access to the basic educational tools they need to learn.” In May of 2000, 100 public schoolchildren together claimed that the state neglected this responsibility, and therefore entered into a class action suit against the state in what became known as Williams v. California. The case referred to specific aspects of the state’s neglect, citing “the lack of instructional materials, lack of qualified teachers, and unsatisfactory school site conditions—referring to both physical conditions of the school site and the problem of overcrowding”1 (Choi, 2007). After years of negotiations, the case settled in July 2004. Upon the plaintiffs’ approval of the final proposal, legislators passed into law provisions to safeguard the rights of all public schoolchildren to an acceptable and measurable level of the named resources in the case. In Williams , claims about inequity are cast in the terms of educational resources (or goods) and the extent to which they are fairly distributed or made accessible to all public school students, especially to poor and minority students. Though equity, in the broadest sense, continues to be the goal, the attention has shifted to a paradigm of adequacy. Before the 1990s, most school funding cases sought equal funding or “equity,” however, when plaintiffs were not as successful as they had hoped, they began to change their strategy to defending “the right to an adequate education”—and have, since 1989, won 23 of 27 decisions based on this shift in approach (ACCESS, 2005). According to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the successful outcomes are attributable to this change in strategy. The basis of these types of cases now appealed to the education articles of state constitutions and state standards, which were developed as part of standards-based reform. Therefore, most cases determined adequacy by the estimated levels of resources needed to meet these standards. The constitutional appeal is especially strong because typically there is a stated duty to provide educational opportunities to all public school students. Furthermore, the standards-based appeal is equally strong because states have chosen to raise academic standards while holding schools and students accountable. This approach is also far reaching in that such appeals resonate with “legislatures and governors to fulfill their state constitutional obligations to provide at least the basic educational programs and other resources that students need” (ACCESS, 2005). The Distributive Justice Paradigm Distributive justice, as Young (1990) describes it, is a paradigm that perceives social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens among society’s members. Chief among these benefits are wealth and other material resources. According to Clark (1998), there are many competing theories of distributive justice, but two in particular have been most prominent. They are: the protection/security of wealth (or more specifically, property) and the government’s role in “equalizing property rights” or redistributing wealth so long as it served
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Page 451 the public’s interest (p. 134). Classical liberal beliefs tended to cling to the “inviolability of property rights” and essentially viewed the security of property as the chief means for acting in the public’s interest. More modern liberal thinkers such as Thomas Hill Green, however, argued that “the public interest has an independent status prior to, and determinative of property rights” (Clark, 1998, p. 138). After years of controversy, Rawls (1971) responded to this emerging conflict at a time when his predecessors had successfully challenged the inviolability of property rights and the power that the free market carried. He observed the absence of criteria for determining which property rights should be restrained and how much redistribution should occur. Without a theory that looked after the larger public’s best interests, Rawls feared that the political process was in danger of degenerating into a chaotic state in which more aggressive and powerful groups would gain benefits from government at the expense of less powerful groups (Clark, 1998, p. 158). Rawls sought to determine theoretically the particular distribution of wealth that would be viewed as fair by all members of society. He argued for two principles of justice. The first principle is that: “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” The second principle stated: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. (Rawls, 1971, p. 78) Rawls’ commitment to this distributive framework is evident in his Difference Principle: “all social primary goods—liberty, and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored” (Kukathas & Petit, 1990). These principles notwithstanding, the interpretations of these principles, today, vary quite considerably across governing bodies. Comparison of Distributive Paradigms In the past, many of the social and educational reforms of the 1960s did not take equality to an egalitarian level—i.e., one that reaches complete equality among all individuals. These pioneering reforms took the necessary first steps in ending the most overt forms of inequality. Since then, however, progress has stalled at efforts to sustain the removal of the overt barriers and to provide material resources that will help make up, or compensate for, the opportunities that their more wealthy and/or English-speaking peers had exclusively. On the other hand, a Rawlsian version of Distributive Paradigms is a more progressive departure from equalizing efforts on two counts: first, they not only include material goods, but also consider as goods, nonmaterial things such as self-respect and education; secondly, the paradigm reaches beyond an overall, undifferentiated effort to equalize underserved groups as a whole by being able to invoke the second principle of justice. Howe (1997) provides a more critical approach than the Distributive Paradigm. His was a tripartite conception of equity which is framed within a continuum of equal educational opportunity. The three parts in this framework are the: formal, compensatory, and participatory. Each part draws out clearer distinctions in the quality of educational opportunities. The formal approach concerns itself with removing the surface-level barriers, which many recognize as being necessary, but not sufficient to achieve equity. Therefore, the formal seeks to remove the formal barriers that limit access to educational resources and opportunities. Unlike the formal, the compensatory approach aims to equalize the overall educational opportunities of children of different social groups by “compensating” for inequalities in children’s academic preparation that typically originate from nonacademic sources such as families and neighborhoods. As Howe (1997) explains, Title I and Head Start are among the most recognized compensatory programs.
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Page 452 On the surface, compensatory programs provide much-needed resources that these targeted populations would otherwise not receive. However, some argue that there are negative, long-term consequences of being involved in such programs. The most serious concerns are twofold: one is that it might ensconce the status quo (Howe, 1997, p. 112 )— that is, it could unintentionally reproduce the existing unequal structure, causing especially, the underclass to begin internalizing their position; secondly, it takes traditional norms and goals of schooling for granted and applies them uniformly to the whole range of special needs kids (i.e., a one-size-fits-all approach to providing relief). Howe offers an additional perspective from Bowles and Gintis who maintain: Compensatory views are often insensitive to sources of inequalities that are found in underlying economic structures, particularly as related to social class. Trying to compensate or equalize educational opportunity, diverts attention from the underlying structural sources of inequality associated with social class and in the process, serves to legitimate and perpetuate vast inequality. (as cited in Howe, 1997, p. 29) Without attaching structural and systemic reform to the Williams settlement terms, the impact of the case has the potential to be no different than the impact of a compensatory program which, some argue, ultimately undermines its own effort. The step beyond these weaker conceptions of equal educational opportunity, Howe maintains, is the need to include a participatory component: that “affording recognition and being recognized are reciprocal, and both are required to foster democratic character” (Howe, 1997, p. 36). This view resembles Gutmann’s threshold principle for equal educational opportunity: that is, “a view that activates and nurtures students’ democratic potential to fully participate in society” (Gutmann, 1987). Likewise, Howe (1997) purports that without a participatory approach, the result is a “static conception that may cement a group’s identity as recipients of compensatory programs. It’s never fully realizing their entitlement to fully participate in society” (Howe, 1997, p. 37). From this perspective, it is all too possible for well-meaning compensatory programs to undermine the values of self-determination. Cast in terms of educational resources, adequacy of resources would be measured by the levels deemed necessary for schools to develop students under this participatory paradigm. Simply providing more resources or even equal levels of resources would be inadequate without educational leaders who would commit those resources to educate students through a participatory approach. The discussion on equity and resources is vital because it provides guiding principles for states to consider as more and more resource adequacy law suits are beginning to appeal to a state’s own constitutional commitment to provide equal access (or opportunity) to education (ACCESS, 2005, p. 2). Equal access deserves more attention because finance cases are, by nature, entrenched in a “formal” orientation of equal educational opportunity; that is, removing formal barriers, which in this case, means providing formal material resources that students had not adequately possessed before. Just as removing formal barriers is not sufficient to correct or equal opportunity, it is also not realistic to think that merely supplying and redistributing resources, alone, will improve equal educational opportunity. If the Williams settlement results in providing only comparable physical conditions to students in more affluent schools, the result is, according to Howe’s tripartite conception, a compensatory approach that amounts to a “one-size-fits-all” mentality. This view takes very seriously the objection that mere differential treatment alone in the name of responding to special needs, interests, and capabilities— mere compensation for disadvantages—is insufficient or objectionable if it is not also rooted in equal respect for different views on what worthwhile needs, interests, and capabilities are, particularly when self-identity and self-respect are at stake. Young (1990) puts it another way: Groups with different circumstances or forms of life should be able to participate together in public institutions.… The goal is not to give special compensation to deviant until
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Page 453 they achieve normality, but rather to de-normalize the way institutions formulate their rules by revealing plural circumstances and needs that exist, or ought to exist, within them. The call to “denormalize the way they formulate their rules” must occur across all institutional levels of education. Void of this recognition, the principles of justice that institutions often use are destined to result in changes that only reach formal, or at most, compensatory levels. Young’s Critique of Distributive Frameworks As mentioned earlier, Young believes that distributive justice is something that is interpreted and regulated, rather than something that exists as being self-evident. She implies that there is a void between the perception that people are sole possessors of goods, and theories that regulate the distribution of those goods throughout society. What is left out, according to Young, are “actions, decisions about actions and provision of the means to develop and exercise capacities” (Young, 1990, p. 16). In other words, the principles of distribution often mask, for example, the antecedent power relations of a context that most certainly affect feasibility of distributive theories. Young’s concerns deserve more consideration, not to supplant Distributive Paradigms with an alternative, or render it useless, but rather to situate it within a broader scope of equality. She also argues that when nonmaterial goods such as educational opportunity are commodified or treated as currency, sometimes the good itself is found to be broader than the conceptual bounds of distribution. At first glance, more thorough renderings such as Rawls’ distributive justice theory consider as goods, things such as selfrespect. The problem, however, is that a distributive framework cannot treat self-respect as anything other than a commodity. This exposes the framework’s static quality. That is, even in the unlikely event that a shared commitment to fair distributive procedures emerges, it can only try to “give” more selfrespect, as if it were like any other form of currency with a conventionally fixed value. Self-respect and educational opportunity are different types of commodities. They are more like negotiated commodities such as real estate; that is, the value must be agreed upon in principle by the parties involved. As such the parties agree upon the value and the terms of the contract. Likewise, self-respect and educational opportunities must be valued among all who are involved—not only those who are seeking it. There must be no such thing as “bare opportunities”—that is, opportunities in name without the real possibility of advancement or equity. Therefore, the terms of contract only codify what is agreed upon in principle. In other words, the contract and the terms are only the means; for it is the shared acceptance in principle that is the real lever that makes educational opportunity and self-respect turn (that is, become meaningful). It is only then that fairer procedures to distribute educational resources in general are made meaningful to all. Equity and Geography In Williams v. California, plaintiffs’ attorneys cited the inadequacy of basic educational inputs in many schools, which included: the lack of instructional materials,2 lack of qualified teachers, and unsatisfactory school site conditions (referring to both physical conditions of the school site and the problem of overcrowding). Through this case, plaintiffs’ experts argued that any research on outputs without considering inputs results in an inaccurate (and inadequate) measure of growth (Oakes, 2002). Studies on school inputs are not new, of course, but recent technological innovations have made it possible for researchers to build on traditional quantitative approaches and discover new perspectives on the impact of school-level inputs on achievement outputs. In particular, the innovation is in adding a geographical component to evaluate the equitable distribution of inputs over a wide area of space. Therefore, this chapter introduces a digital
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Page 454 mapping tool that will enhance critical analyses of equitable distribution of, and access to, educational resources using traditional quantitative data and methods. Geographical Information Systems: How it Works The innovation featured in this chapter is known as Geographical Information Systems (GIS). A GIS is a powerful tool for making and using spatial information. A GIS is generally comprised of hardware, software, and attribute data (usually typical data collected on the point or polygon which usually represents, in this study, schools). GIS provides tools not only for analysis but also for presentation. The most obvious use of GIS is in presenting information visually. If one is interested in mapping all the schools in a school district, GIS needs only spatial coordinates to locate in on a map. Often the spatial coordinates are one of many common school-level characteristics included in a single central data set. When GIS links to these data, it can display and retrieve any information on that school from the central data set. Beyond using conventional tables and graphs, this tool also is capable of displaying demographic information for a specific location on the map (e.g., average household income, percentage of single-parent households, etc.) and is capable of determining the exact geographical street address location of a school and its nearby community resources. When used in combination with more traditional statistical information, GIS maps can provide a visual representation of a broader context, especially as it relates to the evaluation of policies that were intended to promote equity (Bruno, 1996). Objects in GIS appear in three distinct forms: point, line, or polygon. Points often represent fixed locations such as homes or schools. Lines also are at fixed locations and typically represent roads or highways. Polygons, however, represent a specified area of geographical space. These polygons typically represent county, census tract, or school boundaries. All three forms can appear in a single map or in transparent layers that can be overlaid. Polygons are typically the first displayed since they set the geographical extent of the map—that is, state, county or school district or neighborhood. A map with each type of polygon can be generated as separate layers, but existing all on a single map. If one is working with census data, counts on almost all characteristics can be summed according to each level of aggregation (e.g., county, census tract, census block, etc.). If the census tract-level map is overlaid on a county map, for example, a typical first step is to create a choropleth map, which is a display of the geographical region shaded relative to a measurement of the statistical variable of interest. In this step, the purpose is to subject the census tract characteristic of choice to some categorical, ordinal, or scaled classification. If the characteristic of interest is median household income, a common way to classify is according to quartiles, in which each level may correspond to a particular shade of a color (e.g., going from lowest/lightest to highest/darkest). Educational Applications of GIS on Matters of Equity Over ten years ago, James Bruno described the utility and potential of GIS to complement traditional quantitative analyses. Only few studies, however, have applied this tool to educational problems. This chapter features GIS as a tool that has the capability to examine how equitable large-scale and local educational policies and programs are in distributing resources—particularly to those who are from poor and/or minority backgrounds. Besides being an analysis tool, GIS also functions valuably as a quantitative database. This unique practical value of this database for educational leaders and researchers is that it holds input and output data and the corresponding data representing the geographical place to which each case belongs. Since the real value and utility cannot be fully understood in words, this chapter provides concrete examples from studies examining various issues related to education and equity. The following studies demonstrate how GIS has been used to examine matters of educational inputs and equity. The first examines the
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Page 455 extent of teacher absenteeism across public schools in Los Angeles County. As a follow-up the author of this chapter expands on Bruno’s work on one particular aspect of the Williams case: teacher quality and the distribution of highly qualified teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The second featured study is focused on ethnic segregation of charter schools and thus minority access to attend charter schools. Geography and Equity: Teacher Absenteeism In his study of teacher absenteeism, Bruno (2002) used GIS to examine the association between the quality of geographical space and rate of teacher absenteeism at the school site level in Los Angeles, CA. The study postulates from the outset that the quality of geographical space has some influence on the rate of teacher absenteeism, but also on most school-level issues in general. As in most GIS projects, this study utilizes traditional school-level data and geographical data to map out the participating schools and their surrounding neighborhood communities. In this study, the geographical extent is the county level, which is overlaid by another zip code-level map. On the surface, the schools have been geocoded to pinpoint their exact location. The schools are represented as points (symbolized as an X or a triangle depending upon whether it is classified as a high- or low-absentee school). Below are three maps. Figure 33.1 is a map indicating the
Figure 33.1 Distribution of Schools with High and Low Teacher Absenteeism. Note : means highest; means lowest. Source: Bruno (2002)
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Page 456 two geographical extents (zip code polygons within the one larger county polygon) with the school points categorized as being either a high-absentee or low-absentee school. Figure 33.2 includes both low- and high-absentee schools, and it includes a choropleth map layer that is color-coded by levels of per capita income (Census, 2000) at the zip code level (which is what each color-coded polygon represents). The zip code polygons have been clipped to fit the larger geographical extent of Los Angeles County. The map in Figure 33.2 presents two pieces of information: teacher absenteeism and per capita income. By appearance alone, there are clearly more high-absentee than low-absentee schools in low-income areas (lighter shaded area). Users of GIS will be the first to admit that pictures can be deceiving. Therefore, in most cases, traditional tables of summary data typically accompany maps. This study is no different. Tables 33.1–33.3 provide complementary information to the maps that corroborate what the maps suggest. The tables represent descriptive statistics for both high- and low-absentee schools. Table 33.3 records the intercorrelations between the school characteristics and teacher absenteeism for both high and low absenteeism. The differences between the high- and low-absentee schools on common school and neighborhood characteristics require serious attention. The differences in the correlation coefficient between crimes (against property) and teacher absenteeism are high, indicating that safety is a concern among highabsentee schools—and therefore in an area of negative geographical
Figure 33.2 Distribution of Schools with High and Low Teacher Absenteeism Correlated with Quality of Geographical Space (dark areas highest per capita income). Note : means highest; means lowest. Source: Bruno (2002)
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Page 457 Table 33.1 High Teacher Absenteeism Schools (n = 27) Variable Mean St. Dev. Min. Max. Teacher absenteeism rate 9.01 .77 8.05 11.44 Number w/o credential 29.22 1.6 11 29.2 Number < 2 yrs experience 47.6 14.2 19 47.6 Substitute teacher requests 1444.4 637.1 193 2571 Substitute requests unfilled 99.2 62.8 15 306 Drop out rate 6.1 3.09 1.25 15.7 Transiency percent 39.8 13.6 18.42 77.1 Number suspensions 628.5 393.9 59 1606 Opportunity transfers 78.5 59.8 2 272 Crimes against property 13.0 11.2 3 54 Crimes against people 91.04 38.6 42 199 Number of unfilled teaching position 5.75 5.5 0 21 Academic Performance Index 505.74 74.16 370 653 Number of schools (n = 27) Percent in Negative Geographical space (low community income) = 96% Note in Table 33.1 that high teacher absence (>8.0) was separated from those schools below 8.0. Note the variations in the API’s for these two groupings of schools (370–653) with an average of 505. Also note that there is far more criminal activity and higher teacher turnover at these high-absence schools. Source: Bruno (2002) Table 33.2 Low Teacher Absenteeism Schools (n = 22) Variable Mean St. Dev. Min. Max. Teacher absenteeism rate 7.3 .52 6.3 7.97 Number w/o credential 23.9 10.5 8 49 Number < 2 yrs experience 44.8 15.2 22 83 Substitute teacher requests 1451.1 542.6 402 2508 Substitute requests unfilled 68.4 51.9 9 237 Drop out rate 4.8 3.3 .47 13.34 Transiency percent 34.1 10.33 16.74 53.7 Number suspensions 419.8 234.9 23 895 Opportunity transfers 53.5 25.1 2 100 Crimes against property 9.2 5.6 2 21 Crimes against people 62.6 20.8 37 113 Number of unfilled teaching position 2.5 3.9 0 18 Academic Performance Index 563.8 84.2 426 737 Number of schools (n = 22) Percent in Negative Geographical space (low community income) = 10% Note in Table 33.2 that low absence schools have an API of 426 to 737 with an average of 564. Also note that there were fewer unfilled substitute teacher positions. Source: Bruno (2002)
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Page 458 Table 33.3 Intercorrelation of Variables with Teacher Absenteeism **p
Page 459 Geography and Equity: Ethnic Segregation and Charter Schools Another important application of GIS in education has been the focus on ethnic segregation and charter schools, and, therefore, concerns over equal access to opportunities to attend a charter school. More specifically, the goal was to examine whether charter schools were more ethnically segregated than their public school counterparts (Cobb and Glass, 1999). One aspect of the analysis was looking at the ethnic make-up of charter and public schools that were in close proximity to each other. Certainly the demographic characteristics within the boundaries that the schools inhabit are considered alongside the characteristics of each school, respectively. Map analysis in this study also was able to display and use the local infrastructure. In this study, there was a realization that geographical distance is less of an issue in comparison to other significant features shown in the map: Judging whether a traditional public school is “nearby” a charter school and hence may serve as a comparison of enrollment data is a complex judgment not captured simply by geographic distance (i.e., miles separation), school district boundaries or other obvious and easily specified criteria. For example, canals, cultural factors like the fact that Mesa is Mormon in many areas, sections of cities isolated by freeways or mountains, and differences in population densities must be simultaneously considered when making these judgments. (Cobb & Glass, 1999, p. 10) Considering such factors provides a more holistic perspective that informs traditional analyses and the existing literature on the barriers or noneducational resources that are present in school neighborhoods. These represent also the presence of cultural capital (or liability) in a school neighborhood or some other specified area surrounding a school. These are also factors that are not accounted for in school or district data, yet they may have great influence on school climate and student achievement outcomes. Much more prevalent in this ethnic segregation study is the importance in obtaining the noneducational data. Maps in this study were able to display street grids, census tracts, and zip code boundaries—all obtained from the archives at Arizona State University. Besides local universities, local governmental agencies and school districts often also possess these digital map data. Upon making initial comparisons of ethnicity between charter and public schools, further comparisons used geographical maps. These were not simple percent comparisons of ethnic groups between charter and noncharter schools. More accurately, the goal was to accurately examine the distribution of ethnic groups between the two types of schools. Particularly in metropolitan areas, where there were several of each type of schools within a particular radius, it was especially helpful to use GIS to identify the schools of interest. Cobb & Glass (1999) describe the shortcomings of traditional measures of level of segregation: Attempts to depict the magnitude of differences among schools’ ethnic compositions while holding constant size and grade level through various statistical measures prove problematic. Popular measures of level of segregation, such as the Dissimilarity Index, and measures of equity, such as the Gini coefficient or Lorenz Curve, are highly sensitive to numbers of students in schools. The relative smallness of charter schools makes comparisons via these types of measures questionable. Moreover, within this context, these indices are simply powerless to detect between-school segregation. No statistical technique can aptly discern differences among urban schools as completely as maps. Map analyses used to study issues of this sort are focused more on local contexts than they are on the ability to generalize findings to some decontextualized instance. In the context of this
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Page 460 study, a matched comparison was more appropriate than a random sample of public schools because, according to the authors, “it controls, in effect, for geographic location and ethnic composition of the immediate region” (Cobb & Glass, 1999, p. 6). Still, such studies are rigorously designed empirical studies. A major piece of this study was the matched comparison analysis. Of the 19 local area maps that the authors generated, one example was sufficient to illustrate the methods used (see Figure 33.3). In this example, the focus was on the Sequoia Charter School, whose White enrollment was 90% and therefore, much higher than the surrounding public schools. It is clear from Figure 33.3 below that the two closest public schools to the charter are Whitman and Lehi, both of which enroll roughly 40% fewer Whites than Benjamin Charter. The authors decided that large disparities warranted further investigation, even if they could not confirm completely that the increases in White students at Franklin account for the decline in Whites from Lehi. Nevertheless, Table 33.4 indicates that in the year that Franklin opened, there was a drop in White enrollment at Lehi. The authors simply made a phone call to Lehi to ask if they
Figure 33.3 Geographical Proximity of Traditional Public Schools to Neighborhood Charter Schools Source: Cobb & Glass (1999)
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Page 461 Table 33.4 Enrollment Trends by Selected Ethnicities for Neighboring Public and Charter Schools Year Number of Students 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 Lehi Public School (P-6) Whites 497 486 456 426 415 Hispanics 101 100 130 139 118 American Indians 156 157 174 175 159 White ratio (%) 64 64 59 56 59 In total 781 761 779 755 704 Benjamin Franklin Charter (K-4)a Whites — — 147 235 226 Hispanics — — 6 4 9 American Indians — — 0 1 1 White ratio (%) — — 93 96 91 In total — — 158 244 248 Note: a) Opened in Fall of 1995 Source: Cobb and Glass (1999) were right in attributing the loss of students to Franklin. Indeed, Lehi representatives did confirm that they had lost students to Franklin. Such smaller scale investigations serve an important purpose, especially when so many unaccounted factors can have some influence on enrollment, and therefore the resulting ethnic make-up. Such factors include open enrollment policies at traditional public school districts, physical obstacles such as bridges or tolls that lie in the path to the school, or psychological obstacles such as known traffic highway congestion that means delays. All these possibilities are linked in some way to the geography of school locations. Considered in conjunction with other school and neighborhood characteristics, map analyses provide a more comprehensive picture of influences for which traditional school data cannot account. The problem overall is complicated when one considers that charter schools in Arizona are required to admit all students for whom they have room, while reserving some level of selectivity. The example above is one of many examples in the study that show a pattern in charter schools consistently enrolling roughly 20% more White students than their traditional public school counterparts (Cobb & Glass, 1999). This scenario is another example of what Bruno (2002) was referring to in distinguishing between resources distributed vs. resources received. The opportunities to attend a charter notwithstanding, findings from both featured studies reveal that resources and opportunities have very little impact if there are barriers to accessing them. Implications: Critical Education Research in the Era of NCLB NCLB legislation makes more than 100 references to scientifically based research and defines it as rigorous, systematic, objective, empirical, peer-reviewed research that relies on multiple measurements and observations (U.S. Department of Education, 2000). Although such emphasis places greater responsibility on states and districts to demonstrate that the programs supported by federal funds are grounded in strong research, school and district officials are saddled with understanding, interpreting, and applying the research that exists.
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Page 462 What Qualifies as Methodological Rigor? In recent years, rigor of research design methodology has referred to two designs in particular: experimental and quasi-experimental designs. Thought to be the more rigorous of the two, experimental designs set conditions in which students are randomly assigned to comparison groups (minimally one that receives the treatment or program and one that does not). Students in each group are tested on a valid and reliable measure before and after exposure to the treatment/ program. Quasi-experimental designs also assign students to control and treatment groups, but instead of being assigned randomly, students are matched according to a number of relevant student characteristics. This design allows for analysis of historical data and retrospective analysis, while also statistically isolating the effects of the treatment/program on outcomes (Fashola, 2004). What Other Factors Should Be Considered? While scientifically based criteria for rigorous research are indeed helpful in guiding schools’ choices of the programs they will adopt, there are still newer programs that have not yet been evaluated or have not been evaluated enough. Slavin has called such programs “promising, but not proven” (Slavin, 2003). These studies on outcomes might either be qualitative in nature, or quantitative studies that did not use an experimental or quasi-experimental design. Although rigor of research design is important, consumers should be careful not to rely solely on statistical generalizability when deciding on a match with a particular program. Even if the research supporting a reform program meets all the criteria of methodological rigor, shows positive effects, results in moderate to strong effects sizes, and seems to perfectly match the needs identified in the comprehensive assessment, it is still necessary to study the contexts in which the program was implemented. In other words, factors such as school culture, support internal and external to the school, or conditions of school facilities and resources, typically do not show up in quantitatively driven evaluations. Rather than the decisive factor, generalizability should serve as further evidence when considering a model. Possibilities for GIS in Critical Education Research What consumers of education research are exhorted to examine above are the very considerations that can be built into a study using GIS. The examples in this chapter have demonstrated how GIS can probe dimensions of equity that are beyond the reach of conventional research methods. The examples also demonstrated that there is no compromise in methodological rigor. Even when used as a supplementary piece to a study, it can only add to the validity of findings. Over the past six years, a national evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform program (CSR) reported that participating school and district administrators seldom consulted the research literature before making decisions related to comprehensive school reform (Tushnet et al., 2006). Rather, they turned to their colleagues, particularly in schools or districts with similar demographic compositions, for answers. The problem is not with this type of professional support among colleagues, rather, it is their indifference to educational research that is of concern. The promise of using GIS is to address this very problem, not only by its use as an analysis tool, but also as a medium for communicating research to a broad range of audiences. Bruno (1996) explains: Presenting statistical information in the form of images and pictures has been found to be an effective method for educational policy analysts and school site administrations to convey enormous amounts of “noise free” information to client groups—especially less statistically
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Page 463 sophisticated groups such as school boards, the general public, media representatives, teachers and parents. Producing research in the public interest does not just involve studying the issues that matter. Arguably, it is as important that research in the public interest work to improve the way that research is communicated and prepared for consumer use. Some community-based organizations have used GIS for grant funding proposals to demonstrate need in a geographic region. Having been involved in such proposal efforts, there seems to be no reason why the same methods could not be used to engage in microlevel community-based research. Such efforts can be joint efforts with communities, coconstructing research goals and questions that relate to school neighborhoods and the resources they need and/or may underuse. Still, GIS serves a myriad of other worthwhile, large-scale research interests. Other possible uses include: spatial projection of possible school sites for districts that plan to expand into rural, urban, or suburban communities; studying school communities experiencing demographic shift; locating, monitoring, and improving the availability of educational and noneducational resources in high-poverty school communities; and spatially evaluating the differential effectiveness of large-scale education policies (or noneducation policies affecting education) on various populations and communities over time. Geographical Information Systems can also be a tool that large school districts can use and customize according to a variety of needs—e.g., expansion in building new schools, identifying community resources, and tracking the distribution of resources among schools that fit a profile of demographic characteristics. In the end, GIS is an important tool for critical education research. Not only for its myriad of possible uses. It also has the capability of initiating critical conversations in nonthreatening and nontechnical fashion. This is vitally important because it conveys, through the research, a deeper sense of what equity needs to represent for it to be meaningful for populations that historically have had to struggle for it. We need a more progressive, critical view of equity. If GIS can help open new possibilities for this to happen, its worth is well beyond what it represents as a research tool. Notes 1 A lack of instructional materials such that a student does not have his or her own reasonably current textbook or educational materials in useable condition in each core subject to use both at home and at school. A lack of qualified teachers such that the student attends a class or classes for which no permanent teacher is assigned or the student attends a school in which more than 20% of teachers do not have full, nonemergency teaching credentials, or the student is an English Learner and is assigned a teacher who has not been specially qualified by the state to teach ELL students. Inadequate, unsafe and unhealthful school facilities such that the student attends classes in one or more rooms in which the temperature falls outside the 65–80 degrees F range, or the student attends classes in one or more rooms in which the ambient or external noise levels regularly impede verbal communication between students and teachers; or there are insufficient numbers of clean, stocked, and functioning toilets and bathrooms or there are unsanitary and unhealthful conditions, including the presence of vermin, mildew, or rotting organic material; a lack of educational resources such that the school offers academic courses and extracurricular offerings in which the student cannot participate without paying a fee or obtaining a fee waiver, or the school does not provide the student with access to research materials necessary to satisfy course instruction, such as a library or the Internet. Overcrowded schools such that the student is subject to a year-round multitrack schedule that provides for fewer days of annual instruction than schools on a traditional calendar provide; or the student is bussed excessive distances from his or her neighborhood school; or the student attends
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Page 464 classes in one or more rooms that are so overcrowded that there are insufficient seats for each enrolled student to have his or her own seat or where the average square footage per student is less than 25 sq. feet. 2 This refers to a lack of instructional materials such that a student does not have his or her own reasonably current textbook or educational materials in useable condition in each core subject to use both at home and at school. References ACCESS. (2005). What are school funding “adequacy” lawsuits? Campaign for Fiscal Equity. Retrieved from http://www.schoolfunding.info/resource_center/know_the_issues.php3 Bruno, J. E. (1996, Fall). Use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping procedures to support educational policy analysis and school site management. International Journal of Educational Management , 10 (6), 24–31. Bruno, J. E. (2002). The geographical distribution of teacher absenteeism in large urban school district settings. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10 (32). Retrieved August 24, 2004, from http://epaa.asu. edu/epaa/v10n32/ Choi, Daniel S. (2007). Understanding the impact of district-level decision-making on the distribution of highly qualified teachers: A multi-method and geo-spatial approach . Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University, Arizona. Clark, B. (1998). Political Economy . Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Cobb, C., & Glass, G. V. (1999). Ethnic segregation in Arizona charter schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 7(1). Retrieved May 5, 2005, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n1 Fashola, O. S. (2004). Being an informed consumer of quantitative educational research. Phi Delta Kappa, 85 , 532–538. Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Howe, K. R. (1997). Understanding equal educational opportunity. New York: Teachers College Press. Kukathas, C., & Petit, P. (1990). Rawls. Stanford University Press. Oakes, J. (2002). Education inadequacy, inequality and failed state policy. A synthesis of expert reports prepared for Williams v State of California. Decent Schools for California: Williams v. State of California. Retrieved from http://www.decentschools.org Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Boston, MA: Belknap Press Harvard. Slavin, R. E. (2003). A reader’s guide to scientifically based research. Education Leadership , 60 (5), 12– 16. Tushnet, N. C., Flaherty, J. F., Kim, J-O., Connolly, B., Gold, N., Goldsmith, S. N., Yin, R., Burt. J., & Warner, E. (2006). Longitudinal assessment of comprehensive school reform implementation and outcomes: Third-year report. West Ed. U.S. Department of Education. (2000). Elementary and secondary education act: Title IX General Provisions Part A. Retrieved on April 20, 2006, from http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Page 465 34 Can Critical Education Research Be “Quantitative”? Joseph J. Ferrare Those who align themselves with the critical education tradition form a complex and often contradictory grouping of research interests and political commitments. Despite the heterogeneity, though, there is a source of cohesion that binds the tradition together: rather than thinking of education as an isolated activity, critically oriented researchers attempt to understand processes in education in relation to their cultural, economic, and political contexts. By definition, then, the critical analyst’s gaze is theoretically oriented towards these complex sets of relationships (Carspecken & Apple, 1992, p. 47).1 Using this orientation as a point of departure, critical education research is most often associated with two very broad forms of inquiry: On the one hand, there is an interest in uncovering the ways in which differential forms of power work in and through structures and agents in educational settings; on the other hand, there is a motivation to understand how alternative pedagogic and curricular arrangements can yield more egalitarian relations and processes in education and society writ large. To investigate these relationships, critical education researchers have adopted various forms of historical analysis, ethnography, discourse analysis, and narrative inquiry. The near uniform adoption of these methodologies has been mirrored by an equally uniform exclusion of statistical and mathematical techniques. The primary objective of this chapter is to explore the potential contributions the latter forms of analysis can make to critical education research. Before making the case for their inclusion, however, it will be important to try to understand the various elements that have led to their exclusion among critical scholars. The exclusion of statistical and mathematical methods in this domain of research reflects an ongoing tension between critical and positivist scholars in education and the social sciences in general. This tension involves ontological and epistemological debates about what can be known and how, as well as political debates regarding whose interests are best served by particular modes of inquiry and understanding. These debates have important consequences for education research and how educational actors and policy-makers ultimately act (or do not act) upon the results. The outcome of this ongoing tension has led to strong methodological affiliations within the field of education research. Unfortunately, however, the process through which these affiliations have taken shape has prohibited the adoption of particular methodologies that can be of great benefit to critical education scholars. After discussing the “fractal” characteristic of this process I will argue that applications such as social network analysis, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence analysis can be used within a critical theoretical orientation without compromising its underlying assumptions about the social world. In making this argument I will rely on
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Page 466 conceptual descriptions of the methods rather than formal notation. These methods of analysis are, for the most part, agnostic to the kind of data collection used by researchers. They can be used on data collected through ethnographic observations, interviews, textual data, or the use of questionnaires. Thus, these applications blur the “quantitative/qualitative” dichotomy to the point that the practical use of this distinction is severely called into question. Finally, to conclude, I will raise critical questions about importing these methods into “mainstream” critical education research. The Primacy of Relations Whether implicitly or explicitly, critical scholars tend to espouse the view that the “real is relational” (Bourdieu, Passeron, & Chamboredon, 1991). The relational perspective is concerned less with individuals, groups, or institutions, and instead is focused upon the relations between them in social transactions. In other words: the very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction. The latter, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves. (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 287) An example of this assumption can be thought of as follows. Schools do not exist as fixed objects in the world. Rather, what exists are relationships between schools and, more importantly, between schools and other institutions in society such as the economy, the state, and the family. The primacy of relations is not simply a rhetorical stance; it is a way of understanding the social world that strongly orients the critical education researcher’s analytical gaze. With this orientation in mind it is not difficult to understand why methodologies such as ethnography, discourse analysis, and narrative approaches constitute the modi operandi of inquiry in the field of critical education research. These methodologies allow researchers to interpret and describe relations embedded in the context that gives them meaning. This approach to understanding the social world fundamentally rejects forms of analysis that treat students, teachers, and other educational actors as isolated units or “substances” displaying relatively fixed and stable properties that can be reliably measured. These forms of analysis generally include linear and causal statistical procedures such as ANOVA and regression; techniques that enact a substantialist understanding of how the social world works. Critical education researchers argue that such an enactment leads to the erroneous conclusion that these “substances” have meaning outside of the context within which they are situated. As Bourdieu (1998) notes: The substantialist mode of thought, which characterizes common sense—and racism—and which is inclined to treat the activities and preferences specific to certain individuals or groups in a society at a certain moment as if they were substantial properties, inscribed once and for all in a sort of biological or cultural essence, leads to the same kind of error, whether one is comparing different societies or successive periods in the same society. (p. 4, original emphasis) The substantialist mode of thought that is inherent to the more positivist forms of research in education is fundamentally at odds with how critical scholars in education conceptualize the social world. As a result, the rejection of substantialist thinking has led critical education researchers to also reject the types of methodological tools that are associated with this line of work.
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Page 467 It is worth digging underneath the rhetorical surface of this tension to better understand what exactly critical education researchers reject about this mode of thought and subsequent way of doing research. For example, in order to make inferences about unknown parameters in the population (e.g., mean assessment score), researchers with a causal/experimental orientation generally rely on linear statistical modeling. In classical linear modeling it is assumed that independent variable(s) “X” causes change (variation) in the dependent variable “Y.” Embedded in the general linear model is a conception of causality that is fundamentally linked to the substantialist mode of thought: According to this conception, elements have attributes, mutually exclusive attributes often being considered instances of a “variable.” Relations between elements are interpreted as by-products of relations between variables, and causality is said to exist when a change in state in one variable produced by external manipulation would impel a change in state in another variable. Causality follows a mental image of external impulsion taken from classical mechanics …, but recasts this in terms of variables, as opposed to substances (see Abbott, 1988). (Martin, 2003, pp. 4–5, original emphasis) Causality, then, is seen as an attempt to “explain” variation in a fixed attribute through an association with other fixed attributes. In contrast, critical education researchers understand causality in terms of relations between actors, objects, and/or events. To explain social phenomena is thus understood as a process of understanding the social context (relations) within which actors are embedded. The way in which causal/experimental researchers in education approach the idea of context is decidedly different from critical education researchers. The former are concerned with context insofar as it enables them to add precision to their explanation of fixed attributes. For example, the classical linear regression model poses a problem for causal/experimental researchers since it assumes independence; the idea that there is nothing systematically grouping students together. Yet, due to the segregated nature of modern society it is well known that students who attend the same school or live in the same neighborhood tend to share similar class and/or racial characteristics. In order to account for this dependence, causally oriented researchers are increasingly making use of multilevel analysis, also referred to as hierarchical linear modeling (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992). Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is used when data have an inherent nested structure, such as students nested within schools. The popularity of HLM among experimental and causally oriented researchers comes from its ability to disentangle variation that exists within schools from that which exists between schools. In other words, due to the context dependence of the data, change in the dependent variable “Y” (e.g., test score) has to be understood at both the individual and group level (Snijders & Bosker, 1999). The increasing application of multilevel models within causal/experimental research in education symbolizes what critical scholars have been arguing for a long time: context matters. At the same time, however, these models are usually restricted to “things” that can be measured with standardized metrics. This restriction often leads to reductive conceptions of processes in education. For example, some within this domain of research conceptualize inequality in education as variation in assessment scores (Downey, Hippel, & Broh, 2004). Thus, inequality in education becomes reduced to one’s location within the distribution of a standardized assessment. Such theoretical reduction completely ignores forms of curricular inequality (Apple, 1979/2004; Whitty, 1985; Young, 1971), linguistic inequality (Bernstein, 1977; Gee, 1996), cultural capital inequality (Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Lareau, 2003), among many other forms of inequity that are inherently linked to social relations both internal and external to education. Not only do these models reduce inequality to outcomes on standardized assessments, but they also use prior (assessment) achievement as independent variables to “explain away” assessment variation in order to get more precise measures of experimental treatments or
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Page 468 other explanatory variables of interest. In the process, researchers allow prior achievement to “soak up” natal class variance, disregarding the social relations embedded in the achievement scores and making it impossible to disentangle accidents of birth from the myth of meritocracy (see Au, 2008). In cases where social class variables are included in statistical models they are often reduced to dichotomous measures of “free and reduced lunch status”2 or, when available, standardized metrics of socioeconomic status. To critical scholars in education the theoretical implications of these practices are alarming. Such conceptions of inequality and social class fail to capture important nuance and complexity, and make it difficult to understand how these social relations work in and through social structures and agents in education. In addition to the theoretical reductions that go hand-in-hand with this form of research, there are also political consequences. For example, in many studies that draw on large state or district data sets of student assessments it is not uncommon for as many as 25% of students to be “missing” from the analysis. Most researchers, critical or not, want to know who these students are and how their absence from the research is going to impact the results and the actions policy-makers take based upon the findings. Yet, many times, researchers using these models assume that the data are missing at random and, although they admit that this is unlikely to be the case and they have no way of testing this directly, they conclude that their assumption is more plausible than the other implicit assumptions associated with the deletion of missing data (Downey et al., 2004). Critical researchers such as Linda McNeil (2005), however, offer a troubling demonstration of how these “missing values” are anything but random, and have an unequal impact on students from marginalized populations. At the core of the substantialist approach to research in education, then, is a passive acceptance of the commonsense representations inscribed in institutions. In relying on objects that are part of the commonsense understanding of educational institutions, causally oriented researchers reduce the social reality of education to a set of constructs that are predefined and readily available in data sets provided by private vendors and the state (e.g., standardized assessments and social class as students on “free and reduced lunch”). As a result, the success or failure of curricular and pedagogic interventions is often based upon an assessment that is not designed to capture the type of learning taking place in the intervention. Not only does this create discontinuity between educational practice and assessment, but it also encourages future “innovation” to align itself with the logic of a fixed test. In this respect, investigators have given up their autonomy to construct the objects of research and have, instead, chosen to accept the objects in a preconstructed form. Critical scholars, in contrast, fundamentally reject the idea of accepting the social world as a pregiven and fixed set of objects. For them: [t]he construction of a scientific object requires first and foremost a break with common sense, that is, with the representations shared by all, whether they be the mere commonplaces of ordinary existence or official representations, often inscribed in institutions and thus present both in the objectivity of social organizations and in the minds of their participants. The preconstructed is everywhere. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 235, original emphasis) Thus, critical education researchers begin by rejecting the preconstruction of educational processes as inscribed in the common sense of institutions, and reconstruct them in a way that enables them to place relations of key importance front and center in the inquiry process. Creating a New Methodological Alliance As we have seen, at the core of the tension between the critical and causal/experimental orientations is an ontological opposition that has led to strong methodological affiliations. These
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Page 469 affiliations are characterized by the familiar “quantitative/qualitative” dichotomy. The use of the “quantitative/qualitative” dichotomy, as with most binaries, is a convenient way to categorize researchers and their work. Yet the use of such categories goes beyond linguistic convenience. In time the categories produce very real identities leading to forms of recognition but, more often, misrecognition. Once the categories become institutionalized they constitute a major structuring force in people’s lives. In the case of the “quantitative/qualitative” distinction, one only has to look at a graduate course catalogue in education. Courses are offered in “qualitative” or “quantitative” methods, thus instituting the boundary. Graduate students often decide to use “quantitative” or “qualitative” methods before they even have a research question in mind. It does not stop here, though. Many academic conferences have entire sessions organized around this dichotomy, ensuring that neither identity has to engage in a dialogue with the “other.” There are certainly practical benefits in organizing graduate courses, research programs, and conferences around a related set of methodologies, but these benefits are often offset by the forms of myopia they generate. Researchers and students often associate “quantitative” methodologies with measurement and objectivity and “qualitative” research with interpretation and subjectivity . However, upon questioning these associations it becomes evident that both quantitative and qualitative methodologies measure and interpret, and both make claims to objectivity and subjectivity. Why, then, do researchers continue to misrecognize this fact? I believe Andrew Abbott (2001)3 provides an astute answer to this question through his use of fractal distinctions. A fractal is any geometric shape that can be subdivided into parts, whereby each part is a miniature version of the whole (Mandelbrot, 1983). The microcosm does not have to be an identical replication of the macrocosm, but must satisfy what mathematicians call “selfsimilarity” (approximately the same). The Koch snowflake, named after Helge von Koch, is the example most commonly found in high school math textbooks, but examples of fractals can be found in numerous plants, crystals, and many other natural objects. In Chaos of Disciplines (2001) Andrew Abbott applies fractal thinking to numerous processes in social science, including the “quantitative/qualitative” dichotomy (see Figure 34.1). This way of thinking fits particularly well to education research methodology. As noted earlier, the macrocosm of education research methodology is divided into “quantitative” and “qualitative” domains. Yet Abbott points out that the distinction has replicated itself within each category; a process that takes shape through internal debates. Thus, the “quantitative” (1) dichotomy gets subdivided into a smaller copy of the whole that includes another “quantitative/qualitative” distinction. The “quantitative” (1.1) subcategory includes the work discussed above that primarily uses linear regression models to establish causality in experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The “qualitative” (1.2) subcategory includes descriptive and exploratory forms of analysis such as clustering and multidimensional scaling of phenomena in order to reveal complex relations between objects. Statisticians often refer to these latter methods as “qualitative” since they are generally used to describe or interpret relationships rather than explain them in terms of linear causality. Moreover, it is often (though not always) the case that researchers using these methods of analysis collect the data using text, interviews, artifacts, and observations. The “qualitative” (2) side of the initial dichotomy is also subdivided into a smaller copy of the whole, and again includes another “quantitative/qualitative” distinction. The “quantitative” (2.1) subcategory takes a formal measurement approach through observation, interview, and textual coding. This form of research is often affiliated with the view that social phenomena are relatively fixed and stable and can be measured with a high degree of reliability. In contrast, the “qualitative” (2.2) subcategory is more openly subjective and interpretive in scope, and constitutes the methodological framework where much of critical education research takes place. Note, however, that the nature of the “quantitative/qualitative” fractal process groups together forms of research that are very different from one another. To a “qualitative” researcher the distance
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Figure 34.1 Quantitative/Qualitative Fractal Distinction. Note . This diagram is a modified version of Figure 1.2 in Abbott (2001, p. 11). The general form is the same, but I have modified the third-tier descriptions to better represent the context of this chapter. between formal observational coding procedures and critical ethnography, for example, seems miles apart. This speaks to the relational process of fractal distinctions: At any given time, then, a fractal distinction profoundly shapes our understanding of our own and others’ social science. On the one hand, it measures our similarities and differences no matter how great or small those may be. On the other it generates endless misunderstanding and provides a disturbingly powerful tool for nonsubstantive argument. All of these characteristics arise from the relational character of fractal distinctions, which makes them generate a clear local structure that replicates a hazy larger one. (Abbott, 2001, p. 13) Hence the “quantitative/qualitative” fractal distinction within “qualitative” research makes sense in relation to other “qualitative” researchers, but will be rendered meaningless from the perspective of “quantitative” researchers. Despite the fact that interpretive and exploratory statistics aim to reveal complex relationships, it is very rare to see these techniques used within the critical tradition. As a result, critical education researchers are neglecting numerous available methodological tools that have the potential to reveal unobservable patterns of relationships; tools that are entirely consistent with their assumptions about how the social world works. The fractal process creates a series of what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles” (2002). To surmount these obstacles requires a fundamental restructuring of systems of thought. Thus, to expand the critical education research tradition, both substantively and methodologically, a new affiliation must be forged across fractal distinctions. Substantial changes in social science, as Abbott notes, “arise through the reshuffling of these affiliations between the fractal distinctions, within the context of individual fractal cycles” (2001, p. 32). One can imagine multiple combinations of affiliations, but the main focus in this chapter is on the particular reshuffling that concerns critical education research (see Figure 34.2). What I am suggesting is that critical education researchers import new methodological techniques into their current theoretical orientation (shown by the arrow between 1.2 and 2.2 in Figure 34.2), thus instituting a new fractal distinction within this area of methodology. This process of constructing a new methodological “alliance” can best be thought of as a fractal heuristic; a method of drawing upon apparent antinomies to discover new ideas and ways of knowing (Abbott, 2004). Such a process can serve as the basis of scientific revolutions or “epistemological breaks” (Bourdieu, 2000) within critical education research that lead to new and diverse understandings about particular relations of interest. In what follows I will provide a conceptual description of a few of these “qualitative” statistical and mathematical techniques and suggest how they can contribute to research that takes a critical
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Figure 34.2 Forging a New Methodological Alliance. theoretical orientation as its point of departure. The techniques themselves contain inherent social philosophies and theoretical presuppositions that closely approximate the relational ontology of critical researchers in education and social science in general. It is important to note, however, that no single methodology is capable of capturing the complex totality of educational processes. This is precisely why researchers should attempt to understand and use as many combinations of methodologies as possible. Where some methodologies reveal the structure of interactions among groups and individuals, others reveal the beliefs and discourses agents and groups use to navigate through these structures. As such, each of the techniques offered below has its own strengths and weaknesses; objects it highlights and suppresses at the same time. This simultaneous illumination and concealment must always be kept at the top of the researcher’s mind as they make use of particular methodologies, whether statistical, mathematical, or ethnographic. Matrices and Relations The three methods that will be discussed—social network analysis, multidimensional scaling, and correspondence analysis—take relations as their primary unit of analysis. Relations can be analyzed between individuals, groups, organizations, or even nation-states. The way in which these methods organize sets of relations is through data matrices. Many readers are likely to be familiar with matrices, but for those who are not it is worth a quick review. Put simply, a data matrix is a rectangular arrangement of numbers in which the individual units are referred to as components or elements (Bradley & Meek, 1986). The horizontal lines in a matrix are called rows whereas the vertical lines are called columns . When the dimensions of a matrix are specified the rows ( i) always come first, followed by the columns ( j ). Thus a 5 × 3 matrix has five rows and three columns. Figure 34.3 is an example of a 5 × 3 matrix (A):
Figure 34.3 An Example of a 5 × 3 Matrix.
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Figure 34.4 An Example of a 5 × 5 Adjacency Matrix. A matrix that has only one row is called a row vector, and a matrix with only one column is called a column vector. For example, the 1 × 3 matrix [6 2 1] is a row vector. The idea of vectors is important for understanding many statistical and mathematical techniques, including those discussed later in the chapter. Each of the methods discussed below makes use of matrices to organize relations between actors (e.g., individuals, groups, or organizations). Understanding matrices provides insight into how these methods “think” in terms of relationships. For example, consider the 5 × 5 actor by actor matrix4 in Figure 34.4. The individual elements in the adjacency matrix refer to relations between actors. In this case the elements denote whether a relation between actors is present (1) or not present (0). This happens to be a basic example of one kind of social network analysis, the method discussed in the next section. As we will see, however, different methods specify a variety of relationships between actors, such as strength, directionality, distance, or probability, and thus the elements of the matrices take on different properties. Social Network Analysis5 Standard linear regression modeling tends to reduce individuals to their categorical attributes (Abbott, 1988, 1997). Interpretations, then, are prone to reification since attributes are treated as real “things” that act in the world. This is not to say that categories do not matter or that they do not represent social relations. As Charles Tilly (1998, p. 47) noted, unequal relations are often categorical in form (parent/child, wife/husband, or tenant/landlord).6 The power of social network analysis (SNA) comes from the fact that it gives primacy to relations over categories , and embeds social actors within these networks of relations. In addition to the primacy given to relations, Wasserman and Faust (1994, p. 4) distinguish SNA from other forms of inquiry in the following ways: 1. Actors and their actions are viewed as interdependent rather than independent, autonomous units. 2. Relational ties (linkages) between actors are channels for transfer or “flow” of resources (either material or nonmaterial). 3. Network models focusing on individuals view the network structural environment as providing opportunities for, or constraints on, individual action. 4. Network models conceptualize structure (social, economic, political, and so forth) as lasting patterns of relations among actors.
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Page 473 The primary objective of SNA is to reveal the structure of social relations among individuals, groups, or institutions rather than focusing on decontextualized attributes of such entities. In other words: [t]he point of departure for network analysis is what we shall call the anticategorical imperative. This imperative rejects all attempts to explain human behavior or social processes solely in terms of the categorical attributes of actors, whether individual or collective. (Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994, p. 1414, original emphasis) By shifting the central focus from categorical attributes to relations, network analysts can reveal how complex sets of social relations constrain and enable actors in domains such as communication, power, and interaction. Social network analysis actually refers to an entire family of techniques that make use of mathematical concepts such as those in set theory, graph theory, sociometry, and matrix algebra. Actors (e.g., individuals, groups, or institutions) within a network are referred to as “nodes” and relations between actors as “ties.” Data collection can take numerous possible forms, such as observations, interviews, questionnaires, or texts, making SNA complementary to methods spanning from ethnography to survey research. The actual data being analyzed are relations between actors. Relations between actors can be directional (A → B) or nondirectional (A—B), and can be dichotomous (relation is present/not present) or take on a range of values that indicate the strength, intensity, or frequency of relations (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Once the data are collected analyses can be generated to assess the number and strength of ties between actors within a network (actor centrality), the density of ties among groups of actors (cohesion), the identification of microcosms or equivalence classes within the larger network (structural equivalence), and a number of other relational patterns. There are multiple kinds of social networks that can be analyzed. Most of the research using SNA analyzes one-mode networks, which are those that focus on a single set of actors. Two-mode networks center on the relationship between two sets of actors (dyadic networks) or the relationship between one set of actors and a set of events (affiliation networks). In an affiliation network, events can take on numerous forms, such as parent-teacher conferences, school board meetings, or academic conferences. Networks of actors and events can also have attributes, such as size, age, occupation, and so on. In addition to the different kinds of networks that can be analyzed, there are two distinct forms of SNA: egocentric and sociocentric. Egocentric methods of SNA are those whose focal point is a single actor and the ties this actor has with others (called “alters”). In contrast, non-egocentric (often called “sociocentric”) methods focus on patterns of relations among actors within a network and tend to focus more on the structure of the relations as a whole rather than from the perspective of any one actor. There are a great number of potential applications of social network analysis in critical education research. Some readers might already be familiar with SNA through work focused on social capital. The concept of social capital is one that many researchers draw upon in education through the work of James Coleman (1988), Pierre Bourdieu (1986), or a number of other approaches whose roots all trace back to the origins of the sociological discipline (Portes, 1998).7 The use of SNA in social capital research is already quite popular, though most of this research takes place in sociology rather than education. However, the application of SNA is certainly not limited to analyzing social capital, and thus its full potential in critical education research extends beyond this theoretical domain. Social network analysis can be used to map classroom interactions, communication patterns among educational actors in the policy-making process (Song & Miskel, 2005), linguistic and discursive frameworks, communication patterns between family networks and schools (Horvat, Weininger, & Lareau, 2003), and relations between knowledge disciplines in higher education. These examples do not even scratch the surface of the potential applications
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Page 474 of SNA for critical work in education. For the time being, other potential applications will have to be left to the reader’s imagination. Multidimensional Scaling8 Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a multivariate technique that uses multidimensional maps to replicate distance between objects in order to reveal underlying structures in data. The distance between objects in MDS can be objective, such as kilometers between schools, or subjective, such as student dispositions towards school subjects. The former version of MDS is often referred to as metrical , while the latter is referred to as nonmetrical (Kruskal & Wish, 1978). Most applications in the social sciences rely on nonmetrical MDS since the distances are usually based on subjective criteria. The procedural goal of either form of MDS is to start with a matrix of distances between objects and express the similarities or dissimilarities on a map in fewer dimensions (usually two or three) than there are objects. In the context of education, “objects” can mean a variety of things such as schools, knowledge domains, or historical events. One way of determining the relational location of the data points in multidimensional scaling is by using Euclidean distances . Euclidean distances transform the data into a metric space. While nonmetric MDS conceptualizes distance as Euclidean, additional steps are required to produce them since the data are not initially in metric form. These procedures, however, are outside the scope of this chapter. In this context what is important to understand is that MDS establishes relations between objects through the concept of distance. Once the distances are derived the objective of MDS is to reduce the number of dimensions in the data so they can be represented in a two- or three-dimensional map. This process is commonly referred to as a “data reduction” technique. When this is done, however, some of the actual distance in the data is lost. As a result, once the dimensionality of the data has been reduced it is necessary to compare the actual distance to the new distance using a “goodness-of-fit” test referred to as the stress measure . The stress measure lets researchers know how well the MDS solution fits the actual data. If the solution fits the data very well then researchers can be confident that they have accurately illustrated the distances. When the solution does not fit, however, researchers must consider whether the distances could be better represented using a different number of dimensions. While the generation of MDS maps relies upon a set of algorithms to provide a geometric representation of the underlying structure of the data, the actual interpretation requires a bit of imaginative thinking. Yet this is precisely what makes MDS a unique tool. For example, suppose researchers ask high school students from different social class origins to compare domains of school knowledge such as math, history, science, music, grammar, and rhetoric. The students are asked to compare each domain of knowledge with one another and assign a rating from 1 to 5, where 1 denotes that the subjects are very similar and 5 denotes that they are very different. Suppose, further, that students make these comparisons without being told any criteria upon which to make their similarity or dissimilarity judgments. After all the comparisons are made the average ratings are organized into an actor by actor matrix of distances, with each group of students from the varying social class origins having their own matrix (see Table 34.1 for an example). Using MDS researchers could then construct multidimensional maps for each social class grouping of students to compare the structure of the data (Figure 34.5 provides one example). The power of MDS is that it is able to reveal structures in subjective (ordinal/nonmetric) data without knowing the criteria that actors used to formulate their judgments of the objects of interest, in this case school subjects. However, while MDS illustrates the structure of the data it does not provide an answer as to the criteria used by the students to formulate their judgments. This is where researchers must invoke their theoretical understanding of the phenomena being studied. Supposing that in the above example the underlying structure of the data differed by
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Page 475 Table 34.1 Average Comparisons of Knowledge Domains Math Science History Music Grammar Rhetoric Math — Science 4.32 — History 2.37 3.56 — Music 1.11 2.34 2.54 — Grammar 4.01 1.89 2.34 1.67 — Rhetoric 3.89 1.98 3.78 2.22 4.23 — Note . The data in this matrix do not correspond to a real study. They were generated randomly for the sake of providing an example. The MDS map generated from these data, then, should not be interpreted with any significant meaning.
Figure 34.5 MDS Map of Data in Table 34.1 Showing Distances between Subjects. Note . These fictional data were analyzed using the software program R (R Development Core Team, 2007). The “MASS” package, which is part of the VR bundle (Venables & Ripley, 2002), was used to generate the solutions and the MDS map. social class origin, researchers would have to draw upon what they know about conscious and unconscious social class dispositions in order to interpret the dimensions upon which the data are structured. Correspondence Analysis9 Correspondence analysis (CA) is a way to graphically explore categorical relations expressed in contingency tables. There are two distinct approaches to correspondence analysis: basic correspondence analysis (CA) and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The basic application of CA analyzes the relationship in a two-way contingency table (matrix), such as the nature of the relationship between parental and child education. Multiple correspondence analysis is an extension of CA that examines the relationship in multiway contingency tables. Yet MCA can
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Page 476 also analyze actors by events (or response categories), an application Bourdieu (1990) used when he looked at the field of French professors by a number of categorical attributes (Greenacre & Blasius, 1994). The proceeding description will focus on CA since it serves as the basis for understanding all applications of this technique. The primary purpose of CA is to plot categories in a multidimensional space based upon distances between the categories. Similar to MDS, CA is commonly referred to as a data reduction technique since it attempts to illustrate the distance between data in fewer dimensions than categories (usually 2). As a method of analysis, correspondence analysis “is a technique which ‘thinks’ in terms of relation” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 96). In other words, the positions of categories established in a correspondence map are determined by their relationship to all other categories in a multidimensional space. Correspondence analysis is similar to social network analysis in that it focuses on relations, though it differs in that it usually places emphasis on categorical relations.10 Categories can refer to a nearly endless number of attributes, such as dispositions, demographics, educational credentials, occupations, number of publications, or school grades. There are four main concepts used in correspondence analysis: profile, mass, distance, and inertia. These concepts will be described conceptually through a basic example. Suppose a group of researchers is interested in examining the reproduction of education credentials across generations. To first get a glimpse of the overall rate of intergenerational reproduction the researchers might look at a two-way contingency table (shown in Table 34.2) showing the relationship between the highest credential acquired and the highest degree acquired by either parent. For each parental degree category there is a row profile showing the percent of those who acquired a higher education degree (Higher Ed.), a high school degree (HS) or some college (SC), or less than a high school degree (< HS). Thus, the row profile for parental “Higher Ed.” is [55.3% 43.9% 0.9%]. Recall from the matrix review above that row profiles are an example of a row vector. Correspondence analysis uses the elements in each vector (row profile) as coordinates to locate the vectors in a multidimensional space (Greenacre, 1994). The average row profile (also called the “centroid”) seen at the bottom of Table 34.2 constitutes the mass , which is a weighted average of each individual category. The row profiles and their mass are used to calculate distance. The concept of distance is crucial to the relational nature of correspondence analysis. Although there are multiple ways to conceptualize distance, most applications in CA make use of weighted Euclidean distance (also called a “chi-square” distance) to calculate the distances between row profiles. This makes CA similar to multidimensional scaling. In fact, as Blasius notes, “CA can be considered as a special case of MDS, where the dissimilarities are quantified using the chi-square distance and where each object Table 34.2 Row Profiles Showing the Relationship between Parental and Respondent Degree Attainment Highest Degree Acquired Total Higher Ed. HS/SC < HS Highest Degree of Parents Higher Ed. 55.3 43.9 0.9 100.0 HS/SC 18.6 73.2 8.2 100.0 < HS 7.2 61.8 31.0 100.0 DK 3.9 55.9 40.1 100.0 Average 21.3 58.7 20.1 100.0 Note . This table was generated using the General Social Survey (Davis, Smith, & Marsden, 2004). Data sets from the 1980s were pooled together to look at respondents between the ages of 23 and 35. Some rows may not add up to 100% due to rounding.
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Page 477 (or variable) is weighted proportional to the mass” (Blasius, 1994, p. 47). Thus, distance in CA is derived by dividing the sum of the squared distances between each profile element by the associated average profile element.11 These distances are then illustrated in a multidimensional map. Figure 34.6 provides an example of such a map using the data from Table 34.2. The fourth key concept in CA is called inertia . Inertia refers to the dispersion between points in each row profile. Each row profile contributes to the overall or total inertia, which is a measure used to describe the dispersion of the row profiles from the centroid or average row profile (Bartholomew, Steele, Moustaki, & Galbraith, 2002). The above example used data gathered from questionnaires, but CA is certainly not limited to such uses. Correspondence analysis is agnostic to the mode of data collection so long as the data are organized into a data matrix. As Bourdieu notes: If, for example, my task is to analyze various combat sports (wrestling, judo, aikido, boxing, etc.), or different institutions of higher learning, or different Parisian newspapers, I will enter each of these institutions on a line and I will create a new column each time I discover a property necessary to characterize one of them; this will oblige me to question all the other institutions on the presence or absence of this property … This very simple instrument has the virtue of forcing you to think relationally about both the social units under consideration and their properties, which can be characterized either in terms of presence and absence (yes/no) or gradationally (+, 0, –, or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 230) From Bourdieu’s example it can be seen that CA gives the analyst the authority to construct the objects of research from a relational orientation. This is essential to critical education research
Figure 34.6 Correspondence Map of Example Data Showing the Relationship between Highest Degrees Acquired by Parents and Respondent. Note . This correspondence map was generated using SPSS for Windows, Release 15.0.1 (2006). Credit for the map generating module goes to Data Theory Scaling System Group (DTSS), Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
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Page 478 since it is often the case that complex relationships do not readily present themselves in the form of everyday common sense. Critical Considerations While the above methods of analysis offer many potential contributions to critical education research, there are some limitations that deserve mentioning. For instance, although social network analysis effectively maps the structure of relations between actors in a network, it fails to capture how culture and agency mediate these relations. In other words, SNA “has inadequately theorized the causal role of ideals, beliefs, and values, and of the actors that strive to realize them; as a result, it has neglected the cultural and symbolic moment in the very determination of social action” (Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994, p. 1446). SNA is able to map relations between students and teachers in a classroom, for example, but it does not reveal the embodied dispositions that social actors use to determine and make sense of these processes. However, more recent applications in network analysis have made substantial progress toward understanding cultural processes in social networks; both in terms of the seeking of resources and the construction of particular identities (see McLean, 2007). Breiger (2000) notes that some social scientists are critical of these relational methodologies for being “merely” descriptive. At the same time, as mentioned above, the nature of relational thinking is concerned less with a linear set of causal events than with understanding the space of relations that social actors are situated within. The primary issue at stake with each of these relational methods is one of interpretation. The biggest limitation of correspondence analysis, for example, is that its very name lends itself to drawing reductive interpretations, a criticism that applies to multidimensional scaling as well. Simply because characteristics correspond, or “hang” together in space, does not mean researchers understand how the actions of social actors contribute to the structure of the relations between them. Understanding how social actors construct the meaning of their interactions in social situations is crucial in thinking about alternative pedagogic and curricular arrangements. These criticisms, however, simply suggest using SNA, MDS, and CA in conjunction with other techniques that are capable of capturing this level of understanding. Conclusion This chapter concluded by suggesting a few techniques that can assist critical education researchers in trying to understand patterns of relations in educational contexts. In doing so I have only scratched the surface of possible tools researchers can draw upon. Methods such as factor analysis, latent class analysis, cluster analysis, and applications in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can also be used to try to understand the underlying patterns within complex sets of relationships (for critical applications in GIS, see Choi, this volume). The techniques discussed in this chapter attempt to simulate processes that embody a relational perspective of the social world. In addition, their descriptive power makes them uniquely complementary to those methodologies already prominent in the field, such as ethnography, narrative, and discourse analysis. Each methodology offers a different way of looking at data, whether collected through surveys, observations, interviews, or texts. Thus it is my hope that rather than continuing to divide the spaces of inquiry by the “quantitative/qualitative” distinction, the inclusion of these methods into the critical education researcher’s “tool kit” will render the distinction useless for all practical purposes. While it is much more likely that the “quantitative/qualitative” distinction is here to stay, hopefully it is not one that will continue to structure the space of possible inquiry in the prohibitive way it does now.
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Page 479 Forging new affiliations between methodologies and theoretical orientations is, I believe, the most effective way to expand and enliven the realm of possible inquiry in education and social science in general. As I have argued in this chapter, critical education researchers can accomplish this task by importing particular statistical and mathematical techniques from the “qualitative” domain of “quantitative” research. The conditions for this alliance are already in place since the methodologies themselves are inherently consistent with the ontological assumptions of most critical education researchers. The relations critical scholars attempt to reveal are incredibly complex, and the techniques offered in this chapter can add precision to their understanding at the individual and structural level. This is particularly important during a time when colleges of education and critical scholars around the globe are coming under increasing attack by conservative critics and dogmatic market ideologies that have an enormous influence on how the “game” of research is played in education. The methods in this chapter provide a way of engaging in the game while simultaneously changing the way it is played. Notes 1 This should not be mistaken as saying that critical scholarship is the only form of research with a theoretical orientation. As Carspecken and Apple (1992) note, “All social research is informed from its very beginnings as a set of concerns or questions in the mind of the researcher by a particular orientation that implicitly or explicitly bears a theoretical view” (p. 511). 2 “Free and Reduced Lunch” status refers to a federal program established in 1946 by the United States Government to provide free and reduced meal prices to students whose family income is at or below 185% of the poverty level. See: http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Lunch 3 I would like to thank Adam Slez for introducing me to Andrew Abbott’s work. The readings and our subsequent conversations have challenged my thinking about methodology. 4 A matrix such as this is often called an adjacency (or “incidence”) matrix. 5 For a detailed description of SNA, including the formal mathematical notation and assumptions, see Wasserman & Faust (1994). 6 In the context of this chapter, the “quantitative/qualitative” categorical distinction represents a social relationship within the field of education research. When “quantitative” researchers claim that particular statistical procedures are merely descriptive or “qualitative” they are positioning the methods within a set of relations. 7 It is important to note that there are different conceptions and applications of social capital. Bourdieu and Coleman, for example, understood social capital in different ways. See Horvat, Weininger, & Lareau (2003) for a good review of social capital research in education, and Portes (1998) for a more thorough sociological understanding. 8 For more detail about multidimensional scaling see Kruskal & Wish (1978) and Bartholomew, Steele, Moustaki, & Galbraith (2002). 9 Those wishing to explore CA in greater detail should consider starting with Greenacre & Blasius (1994). 10 Indeed, some would loosely classify correspondence analysis as a type of network analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). 11 Since this chapter is more about conceptual understandings I have excluded the actual calculations of the weighted Euclidean distances. See Greenacre (1994) for a very clear and concise description of how to do the calculations. References Abbott, A. (1988). Transcending general linear reality. Sociological Theory , 6(2), 169–186. Abbott, A. (1997). Of time and space. Social Forces, 75 (4), 1149–1182. Abbott, A. (2001). Chaos of disciplines . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Page 480 Abbott, A. (2004). Methods of discovery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Apple, M. W. (1979/2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Au, Wayne. (2008). Unequal by design. New York: Routledge. Bachelard, G. (2002). The formation of the scientific mind. Manchester, England: Clinamen Press. Bartholomew, D. J., Steele, F., Moustaki, I., & Galbraith, J. I. (2002). The analysis and interpretation of multivariate data for social scientists . New York: Chapman & Hall/CRC. Bernstein, B. B. (1977). Class, codes and control (Vol. 3, 2nd ed.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Blasius, J. (1994). Correspondence analysis in social science research. In M. Greenacre & J. Blasius (Eds.), Correspondence analysis in the social sciences (pp. 23–52). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). Homo academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., & Chamboredon, J.-C. (1991). The craft of sociology. New York: Verlag Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. University of Chicago Press. Bradley, I., & Meek, R. L. (1986). Matrices and society. New York: Viking Penguin. Breiger, R. (2000). A tool kit for practice theory. Poetics , 27 , 91–115. Bryk, A. S., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1992). Hierarchical linear models . Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Carspecken, P. F., & Apple, M. (1992). Critical qualitative research. In M. LeCompte, W. Millroy, & J. Preissle (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 507–553). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Coleman, J. (1988). Social capital and the creation of human capital. The American Journal of Sociology , 94 (Suppl.), S95–S120. Davis, J., Smith, T., & Marsden, P. (2004). General social surveys, 1972–2004 (Cumulative File). Downey, D., Hippel, P. T. V., & Broh, B. (2004). Are schools the great equalizer? Cognitive inequality during the summer months and the school year. American Sociological Review , 69 (5), 613–635. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology , 103 (2), 281–317. Emirbayer, M., & Goodwin, J. (1994). Network analysis, culture, and the problem of agency. The American Journal of Sociology , 99 (6), 1411–1454. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies (2nd ed.). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Greenacre, M. (1994). Correspondence analysis and its interpretation. In M. Greenacre & J. Blasius (Eds.), Correspondence analysis in the social sciences (pp. 3–22). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Greenacre, M., & Blasius, J. (Eds.). (1994). Correspondence analysis in the social sciences . San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Horvat, E., Weininger, E., & Lareau, A. (2003). From social ties to social capital. American Educational Research Journal , 40 (2), 319–351. Kruskal, J. B., & Wish, M. (1978). Multidimensional scaling. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mandelbrot, B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman. Martin, J. L. (2003). What is field theory? The American Journal of Sociology , 109 (1), 1–49. McLean, P. D. (2007). The art of the network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McNeil, L. M. (2005). Faking equity. In A. Valenzuela (Ed.), Leaving children behind. Albany: State University of New York Press. Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology , 24 , 1–24. R Development Core Team. (2007). R: A language and environment for statistical computing . Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Snijders, T., & Bosker, R. (1999). Multilevel analysis . London: Sage. Song, M., & Miskel, C. (2005). Who are the influentials? A cross-state social network analysis of the reading policy domain. Educational Administration Quarterly , 41 (1), 7–48.
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Page 481 Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Venables, W. N., & Ripley, B. D. (2002). Modern applied statistics with S (4th ed.). New York: Springer. Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis . New York: Cambridge University Press. Whitty, G. (1985). Sociology and school knowledge. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Young, M. F. D. (1971). Knowledge and control . London: Collier-Macmillan.
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Page 482 35 Orientalism, the West and Non-West Binary, and Postcolonial Perspectives in Cross-cultural Research and Education Yoshiko Nozaki Research in the field of comparative and international education often examines the cultural and educational practices and systems of countries and societies other than the researchers’ own. Indeed, a cross-cultural, or so called “comparative,” perspective is one of the great contributions that research in the field of comparative and international education can make to the scholarship on education; at the same time, that comparative perspective and the issues surrounding it—conceptually, methodologically, and practically—pose difficult questions for us (both for those conducting research and those teaching in the field), especially when Western scholarship examines non-Western experiences. In this chapter, I would like to explore ways to address some of the problematic relations between the West and nonWest in scholarship in general, and in educational research in particular, by considering and reconsidering a particular example—research on Japanese culture, society, and education. Said’s Orient and Japanese Studies’ Japan According to Edward Said (1978), “Orientalism” is “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (p. 1). Orientalism comprises a mode of discourse, a body of knowledge, a political vision of reality—with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, and doctrines—that expresses and represents the Orient. The Orient represented here is actually an integral part of European material civilization, though Orientalism as a discourse represents “Orient” and “Europe” as if they were mutually exclusive entities. In short, Orientalism is “a Western style for domination, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 2). To be sure, the Orientalism that Said discusses is basically a style of thought, a specific set of discourses, that have taken place in Europe’s experiences with peoples and cultures in the region that we now call the Middle East. It is, thus, important for researchers and educators to note both the particular and universal aspects of Said’s ideas: What are implications and limitations of the notion of Orientalism for research conducted outside, or beyond, the sociohistorically specific setting of Said’s examination? Stuart Hall (1992), using Said’s Orientalism as an example (or research paradigm, I would say), identifies the discourse of “the West and the Rest” and examines how it was formed and what its main themes and strategies of representation are (pp. 296–297). Although “the Rest”
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Page 483 stands for the non-Western world generally, Hall’s study mainly focuses on languages and images representing “the New World”—the regions “discovered,” conquered, colonized, and dominated by European power(s). He finds that stereotyping, dualism, and splitting are their ubiquitous features, and, therefore, the underpinning strategy of the West and the Rest discourse, just like Said’s Orientalism. Furthermore, he points out that the discourse of the West and the Rest not only worked its way into classic works of sociology, such as those by Marx and Weber, but also that “its effects can still been seen … in the language, theoretical models, and hidden assumptions” of modern sociology as well as social sciences (p. 318). In essence, Hall extends the scope of Said’s Orientalism to address the Western power over the non-Western regions in general. Interestingly, Japan is one of the examples used to illustrate that the West is “as much an idea as a fact of geography.” As he put it: “These days, technologically speaking, Japan is ‘Western,’ though on our mental map it is about as far ‘East’ as you can get” (p. 276). So how should one examine Japan in relation to the West and the Rest discourse, or Orientalism? Richard Minear (1980), a researcher of Japanese history, responding to Said’s notion of Orientalism, examines the writings of three influential scholars in the field of Japanese Studies: Basil Hall Chamberlain, George B. Sansom, and Edwin O. Reischauer. While demonstrating the ways that the (Orientalist) binary opposition, or the discourse of the West and the East, speaks through these scholars’ works, he also notes “the striking differences in historical setting” (p. 514) between Said’s Orientalism and the tradition of Japanese Studies. The most important difference in his view is that the partnership between Orientalist studies and imperial military power did not really take place. As he put it: “Will to power, perhaps; arrogance and condescension, certainly; but actual domination, no” (p. 515). This point leads him (and us) to an interesting, critical question: Why is it that “[e]ven in the absence of overt Western domination, the attitudes manifested in the discourse on Japan seem to resemble closely those of Said’s Orientalists” (p. 515)? Minear suggests three possible ways to answer the question, but it is the third answer that he seems inclined to employ the most, and it speaks to a general disposition of cross-cultural perception (and so research): The pursuit of knowledge involves the attempt to appropriate the reality of a subject, and is therefore aggressive; the subject is reduced, almost by necessity, to the status of object … The attempt to study other cultures exacerbates precisely that element of aggression. (p. 516) Critics may wonder if “aggression” is too harsh a term for that particular element of scholarly pursuit, but one should recognize that a production of knowledge in a scholarly, or disciplinary, field involves an exercise of power, at least in an epistemological sense (e.g., Foucault, 1980). Indeed, representing a particular subject or topic by drawing a line between “us” and “them” (in this case “the West” and “Japan”), creating and describing these categories, and/or classifying things into these categories, is to produce knowledge. The implication here is that a style of thought resembling Orientalism may appear in any cross-cultural study and, maybe, in any research. It is important, thus, to critically examine the existing tradition(s) of one’s own field of study to see the kinds of discourses circulating and the kinds of power(s) that they carry. The “Them” and “Us” Binary Opposition Research on Asia, including educational research, conducted by scholars in the West in general, and in the United States in particular, often contains, implicitly or explicitly, a binary opposition—
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Page 484 that is, the West/the United States (“us”) versus the East (“them”). This binary resembles the one that takes place in the West and the Rest discourse (Hall, 1992), or Orientalism (Said, 1978), and I have argued elsewhere that it is a critical part of the discourse of Othering (e.g., Inokuchi & Nozaki, 2005; Nozaki & Inokuchi, 1998). It might be important, however, to examine as well the way the binary works in a particular instance as a manifestation of power relations between the West and a particular place in the imaginary geography of Asia, as it may possess a relative autonomy—an autonomous power related to, but independent of, paradigmatic examples such as Said’s Orient and Hall’s New World. In this regard, the field of Japanese Studies can provide examples from which we can gain some additional insights. For example, Clifford Geertz (1988) examines the ways that Ruth Benedict, in her volume The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , pursues, by repeating it again and again in plain language, the Us/Notus motif, as she explains the patterns of Japanese culture, a culture lived by a people who are “the most alien enemy the United States [has] ever fought” (Benedict, 1946, p. 1). Although, throughout the volume, Benedict constantly asks the question of “what’s wrong with this picture” of Japanese culture, she is also skeptical of American culture, and so in practice she ends up successfully deconstructing, or denaturalizing, the cultural values and beliefs of U.S. society. Geertz regards Benedict’s dismantling of “American exceptionalism by confronting it with that … of a spectacularized other [i.e., Japan]” as extraordinarily courageous, considering that her writing of the volume took place during the war with Japan (p. 122). So the use of the binary might not have been intended to be derogatory of Japanese culture. There is a series of problematic issues, however. Benedict’s volume was, in part, written in service for the wartime nation; it could be read as a sort of training manual on how to handle the Japanese; and though Benedict might not have been completely comfortable with the ways her work was assimilated into immediate political-intellectual contexts of the U.S. war with, and its occupation of, Japan, in which “understanding” the enemy was urgent and critical, she apparently took advantage of the contexts—or at least she wanted to use her discipline for societal purposes. Moreover, a portion of it, more precisely a chapter entitled “The Child Learns,” which is in fact an “unfortunately memorable” chapter (Geertz, 1988, p. 116), was for the most part based on the works of others, including Bateson and Mead (1942) on Bali and Balinese characters. Above all, Benedict did not travel to Japan at all—or, indeed, she “actually hardly went anywhere either” (Geertz, 1988, pp. 123–128). In spite of these problems, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword enjoyed a wide (and more or less favorably disposed) readership, nationally and internationally, including by people of Japan. Geertz’s examination of her volume disentangles many threads of the literary devices that Benedict employs to construct her arguments (and indeed the entire volume). However, it is putting forward the binary categories and establishing a clear-cut division of the world in the imaginary geography that serves as a foundation upon which other discourses, including Orientalist languages, images, and vocabularies, can lurk and produce knowledge(s) (see also Inokuchi & Nozaki, 2005; Nozaki & Inokuchi, 1998). Note that a general consequence of dividing the world into binary “them” and “us” terms is the rise of essentialism. Whatever category is used to define people as a group, that category inevitably stresses the similarities and disregards the differences within the category, and so ultimately has negative effects upon the people categorized (Nozaki, 2000). It is exclusive and polarizing, and, more significantly, it defines and defends the “essence” of the people and their culture (Japanese, or Chinese, or any Asian nationality for that matter), rather than promoting a full understanding of their complex identities as sociohistorical constructs (Said, 1993). Although it has been feminist scholars who have utilized the concept of (cultural) essentialism effectively to identify the problem(s) of dominant research on women (e.g., Fuss, 1989; Scott, 1988), it can also be employed to examine the tendencies of cross-cultural studies.
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Page 485 Occidentalism and Non-Western National Identity Sometimes the binary opposition of the West and non-West, constructing firm essentialist national identities of the non-Western nations, emerges in movements that struggle for liberation from colonial and neocolonial oppressions, or battles against the hegemony of the West, militarily, politically, culturally, or otherwise. In inter- and intranational clashes of power, binary oppositions and Orientalist (and Occidentalist) knowledge and images can also be appropriated, circulated, consumed, and reproduced by “native” peoples of Asian regions. Such an essentialist national identity may be critically important, depending on the moment of its use. It might possess a “continuing creative power” in post- and neocolonial struggles (Hall, 1996, p. 111); as such, it can (and should) be used consciously in “strategic” ways (Spivak, 1990, p. 11). However, one should perhaps not assume that national identities of strategic kinds that emerge through liberation movements are always liberating in their nature and effects (in the same way that identities such as “working class” or “women” may not always be liberatory in their effects as applied to diverse populations). It is, therefore, important for researchers and educators to understand the particular social and historical conditions of such inter- and intranational clashes of power in terms of the construction of nationalist, or nativist, identity formations. For example, Moeran (1990) argues that, in Japan, the writings in what is called “ nihonjinron,” or “the theory of the Japanese,” which sees Japanese culture as a coherent entity, distinct from other cultures, have arisen both in reaction to, and as borrowings from, representations of the Japanese in Western scholarship. That is, the Western scholarly tradition, which involves a style of thought aptly called “Japanism” (a term Moeran created after Said’s Orientalism), has been appropriated by many Japanese —both nationalists and internationalists—themselves, and as a discourse it has produced a genre of quasi-academic literature called nihonjinron (Moeran, 1990). The nihonjinron discourse sees Japanese culture as unique, quite different from any other cultures (but it is, for the most part, the European cultures that theorists have it positioned against), and argues either its “inferiority” or “superiority.” Critics argue that the nihonjinron, as a discourse, is essentialist, and functions as a device by which certain Japanese elite forces maintain hegemony within Japanese society as well as on an international front (see Goodman, 1990; Miyoshi, 1991). However, it is perhaps not only the elite groups that have supported this essentialist discourse on Japan, but also the popular forces. After all, Benedict’s volume was a popular best seller in Japan (and, as a classical study, it is still read widely today in an effort to understand Japanese culture and society). Japanism, which has emerged and gained currency under particular sociohistorical and political conditions, accompanies a series of particular vocabularies and a repertoire of images, so it is not exactly the same as Said’s Orientalism. In a similar vein, the nihonjinron, as it often asserts Japan’s superiority over other Asian nations, may not simply be Occidentalism, or essentialist, dehumanizing views on the West, taking place in Japan. The (re)production of Japanism, or the nihonjinron, thus needs to be analyzed through a complex array of locations and interactions, one that consists of at least three (interlocking) domains, namely: the discursive domain in the United States, that in Japan, and that between the two. That is, Japanism works in particular ways in the United States, thus warranting a critical examination. It also functions in particular ways in Japan, requiring yet another critical study. Furthermore, it defines and sustains (and might possibly tactically maneuver) particular power relations between the two nations in contemporary forms of globalization. Such analyses should highlight the political economy as well as the social and cultural dimensions involved. Regarding the first domain, Mouer and Sugimoto (1986) and Dale (1986) focus on the production of nihonjinron discourses within Japanese society, and Yoshino (1992), in part, investigates the consumption of the discourses within Japanese society. Research on the second
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Page 486 domain focuses on the production and consumption of the images of “Japan” within the research programs of other countries, particularly in the United States (Inokuchi, 1997; Inokuchi & Nozaki, 2005; Nozaki & Inokuchi, 1998), and of the images of “Japanese education” in the United States (Feinburg, 1993; Nozaki, 2001). Kogure (2005), in part, also addresses the third domain and explores the links between Japanese nationalism and American Japanist representations. These studies have clearly showed that Japanism should be understood as not only affecting relations between Japan and the West, including the United States, but also, more importantly, as exerting hegemonic effects on people living in Japan as well as those living in the West and the United States. Researchers and educators attempting to resist Japanism need to recognize the complex interactions between these three domains, even when they find it difficult to directly deal with all of them at once in their research and teaching. Although it is important to understand (and work through) the particularities of Japanism in research and teaching, it is equally critical to examine the ways Japanism relates to Orientalism. Indeed, since Asian Studies, including Japanese Studies, is the legitimate successor of Orientalist Studies, it seems plausible to consider Japanism as a strand of Orientalism, which, as a discourse, carries an ever-evolving and adjusting Western power that produces hegemonic knowledge(s) about Japan. Japanism conveys the same theme (power) as Said’s Orientalism (though it can play a different tune). In other words, Orientalism continues as the most basic part of Western discourse when dealing with Japan (and Asia). This might induce conscientious educators to withdraw from courses having anything to do with Asian Studies. Or it might cause one simply to take a position of relativist multiculturalism, one that celebrates differences, or one that takes a position of reversed Orientalism, which simply valorizes “Asia” as superior to “the West.” Neither of these, however, is desirable. The problem concerning the ideology that is embedded within Orientalism cannot be reduced to that of relations between Western and nonWestern nations. Orientalism is a central imperialist discourse (Hall, 1992; Said, 1993), one that is racist in that it explicitly or implicitly claims white European supremacy over non-European peoples and cultures. Orientalism is also sexist both in that it describes Asia in sexist language (e.g., Asia as an object to be raped) and describes Oriental women as sexual objects (Said, 1978). Above all, what is at issue here is the construction of a singular, unified national identity at both ends of the relationship—the West, on the one hand, and the Japanese, the Chinese, and so on, on the other. As discussed above, inherent in many studies of Japanese culture and history is essentialism. Any construction of a homogeneous “their” national identity is only possible through the erasure of identities of “internal others” (Hall, 1992, p. 280) in the nation in question. The erasure of internal others usually takes place in and through hegemonic processes in the realm of representation; however, it can involve the direct use of force in the real world. Critical, Counter-hegemonic Approaches How should comparative education researchers conduct research on education in Asia (and, by implication, in non-Western countries and regions)? The key problem here seems to be the essentialist divide, the line drawn between the West and Asia that is one of the most fundamental operations of hegemonic power. To counteract this essentialism, researchers need to stress the variations, multiplicities, and contradictions within all Asian nations, peoples, and cultures. One useful approach here is to represent the multiplicity of identities that exists within any Asian nation. Just like an individual’s identity, a national identity is multiple and contradictory. Researchers can approach this multiplicity by looking at the social and historical variations of a given society.
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Page 487 For example, “Japan,” which is usually represented as a homogeneous entity, has a population that is heterogeneous in its origin as well as in its history and current state (Lie, 2001; Murphy-Shigematsu, 1993). Some scholars have suggested that Japan needs to be represented in terms of “variations across space and time” (Mouer & Sugimoto, 1986). The concept “variation across space” urges us to recognize socially marginalized groups in Japanese society and to consider the power differentials in relations among various groups, and in their positions within societal institutions. The concept “variation across time” presses us to attend to the historical changes that continually emerge in these relations. Seen in terms of “variation across space,” there is a need to study the relationship of each group to the dominant groups, the relationships among the groups, and how these relationships are constructed and maintained socially and institutionally. In terms of “variation across time,” there is a need to study the historical changes that take place within these relationships. In essence, these concepts speak of directing research attention to the nation’s sociological differences and historical changes. It follows that cross-cultural research concerning a given Asian nation should address the issues of minorities and socially subordinate groups, including women, the lower classes, and homosexuals, as “internal others” and represent their histories as well as their present conditions. Historicized anthropology and anthropologized history are valuable methods (e.g., Darnton, 1984), and in fact, this move in Japanese Studies has already been launched to some extent (e.g., Amino, 1980, 1990; OhnukiTierney, 1990). In any case, comparative research and education should develop an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates many fields. In the case of Japanese Studies, it includes Women’s Studies, Buraku Studies, Ainu/Indigenous Studies, studies of Korean residents, and so on (Inokuchi & Nozaki, 1994). Cross-cultural researchers and educators need to be careful here, however. If power works by way of essentialism, representations of “internal others” may easily fall into another form of essentialism, or at least have limitations, since these groups are not internally monolithic either (e.g., Inokuchi, 1996). Comparative researchers should perhaps adopt a notion of “multiple oppression”: multiple powers that permeate within a given nation, group, or individual. Scholarship among women of color, Third World women, and lesbian women (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1990; Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991) has developed this concept, and some educational researchers suggest developing a nonessentialist representation (McCarthy & Crichlow, 1993). In this approach, the representation of “variation across space and time” must not remain a patchwork of the minority groups categorized, and so essentialized. It must show a multiple, fluid structure of domination (Mohanty, 1991): a picture of multiple axes of power (race, gender, class, etc.) that continually intersect and (re)structure social relations, assigning people to particular identities and locating their differences through particular sociohistorical contexts. Terms such as “race,” “class,” and “gender” are analytic categories used to examine such relations, and, therefore, to discuss “race” is not simply to discuss a racial (or ethnic) minority. To develop an analytic ability to read multiple and multilayered power relations is crucial. Another way to overcome essentialism is to make cross-cultural research stress the “impure,” hybrid aspects of any national and regional culture (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1993). In any region, hybridity of cultural forms has developed through millennia of migrations and conquests. The interpenetration of cultures characterizes both regions that have been colonized in history and regions from whence colonialism springs. But the notion seems especially useful for understanding the experiences of peoples placed in the category of the Rest in the colonial and neocolonial periods. In many colonized countries as well as countries going through Westernization processes in the name of “modernization,” many new hybrid “traditions” have been invented (Hobsbawn & Ranger, 1983). Comparative research and education need to focus on what Said (1993) calls “interactions, the actual and often productive traffic [that has occurred] among states, societies, groups, identities” (p. 20). Through this focus—though one should remember that cultural
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Page 488 hybridizations are never reciprocal (Miyoshi, 1991)—any essentialist construction between cultures and peoples can be fundamentally challenged and changed. Finally, I would like to stress the dangers of making “comparative research” a research enclave. The approaches mentioned above need to apply to research beyond comparative studies as well, especially research on “our” history, country, literature, and culture. The constructions of a homogeneous identity (such as “American”) have involved erasures of identities of internal Others. Any society in its actuality consists of people of hybridity: those who diversely embody the traces of particular cultures, traditions, languages, and histories that have shaped them, but who also need to come to terms with, and to make something new of, the cultures they inhabit (Hall, 1993). The aspects of Other peoples and cultures that exist in a Western nation should be well represented, and then read vis-à-vis those aspects of peoples and cultures of Asian nations. This could be called a “contrapuntal” perspective: a vision that sees the connections between peoples, cultures, and societies, while understanding the relative autonomy of their complex sociohistorical experiences. As Said says: [W]e must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others. (Said, 1993, p. 32) Contrapuntal analysis enables researchers, teachers, and students in cross-cultural studies to “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (p. 318) within their regions and imaginary geographies. Critical cross-cultural studies on Asian societies and schools must fight against Orientalist forms of hegemony. At stake is the construction of identities that affect people in the West and in other Asian countries, and with this, the relations between and among them. I have outlined several approaches to counter-hegemonic research in Asian Studies, ones that examine how power inheres in relations between peoples, and between different elements of identity, by stressing the multiplicity and fluidity of relations and identities. Additional concepts (e.g., ambivalence) developed under the rubric of postcolonial theories might also allow researchers and educators to conduct research in this direction (Kelly, 1999). Moreover, the approaches discussed here should apply to conducting research and teaching about “our” society—for example, what U.S. schools teach under the name of “our” culture and history—and that research needs to bring “their” and “our” experiences into contrapuntal connection. The approaches suggested here, if they were only to be employed in a research area that is territorialized and territorializing (which might be the case in some areas of Asia research), would have substantial limitations. What is called for here is a critical examination and reconsideration of the whole field of scholarship and curricula now in place. The crucial question concerns the kind of geography imagined in this reconfiguration. Any nation is, in fact, a multiple and contradictory “collectivity,” and its identity should be situated in a geography of multiple and contradictory identities, peoples, cultures, and histories of the region. This map will help one see that “we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of” (Said, 1993, p. 331). Moreover, only this map will enable erased internal others in various nations to find each others’ location (so that they can start a conversation to form a network of counter-hegemonic forces). Comparative research and education, or any research and teaching area such as literacy, arts, or science, must offer the public the chance to know and understand such a geography and the integrative realities and possibilities it comprises.
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Page 489 References Amino, Y. (1980). Nihon chusei no minshu-zo: Heimin to shokunin [Portraits of the people in medieval Japan: The common people and the professionals]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Amino, Y. (1990). Nihonron no shiza: Retto no shakai to kokka [Perspectives for theory of Japan societies and states of the archipelago]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Anzaldúa, G. (Ed.). (1990). Making face, making soul. San Francisco, CA: An Aunt Lute Foundation Book. Bateson, G., & Mead, M. (1942). Balinese character. New York Academy of Sciences. Benedict, R. (1946). The chrysanthemum and the sword . New York: Meridian. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture . London: Routledge. Dale, P. (1986). The myth of Japanese uniqueness . London: Croom Helm. Darnton, R. (1984). The great cat massacre . New York: Basic Books. Feinberg, W. (1993). Japan and the pursuit of a new American identity. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings, 1972–1977 (C. Gordon, Ed., C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially speaking . New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives. Stanford University Press. Goodman, R. (1990). Japan’s “international youth.” Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (1992). The west and the rest: Discourse and power. In S. Hall, & B. Gieben (Eds.), Formations of modernity (pp. 275–331). Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Hall, S. (1993). Culture, community, nation. Cultural Studies , 7(3), 349–363. Hall, S. (1996). Cultural identity and diaspora. In P. Mongia (Ed.), Contemporary postcolonial theory (pp. 110–121). London: Arnold. Hobsbawn, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press. Inokuchi, H. (1996). The finger-printing rejection movement reconsidered: Korean residents in Japan seeking new identity. Japanese Society , 1, 77–105. Inokuchi, H. (1997). United States middle school students’ discourses on Japan: A study of politics of representation. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Inokuchi, H., & Nozaki, Y. (1994, March). The “others” in Japanese society and their histories. Paper presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, MA. Inokuchi, H., & Nozaki, Y. (2005). “Different than us”: Othering, orientalism, and U.S. middle school students’ discourses on Japan. Asia Pacific Journal of Education , 25 (1), 63–76. Kelly, W. (1999). Postcolonial perspective on intercultural relations: A Japan-U.S. example. The Edge: The E-Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2(1). Retrieved from http://www.interculturalrelations.com/ v2i1Winter1999/w99kelly.htm Kogure, S. (2005). Othering around technology: Techno-orientalism, techno-nationalism, and the formation of Japanese identity. (Doctoral dissertation, University at Buffalo/State University of New York, 2005). Retrieved from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text database. (Publication No. AAT 3203922). Lie, J. (2001). Multi-ethnic Japan . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCarthy, C., & Crichlow, W. (1993). Introduction: Theories of identity, theories of representation, theories of race. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education. New York: Routledge. Minear, R. (1980). Orientalism and the study of Japan. Journal of Asian Studies , XXXIX (3), 507–517. Miyoshi, M. (1991). Off center . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moeran, B. (1990). Introduction: Rapt discourses: anthropology, Japanism and Japan. In E. Ben-Ari, B. Moeran, & J. Valentine (Eds.), Unwrapping Japan (pp. 1–17). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mohanty, C. T. (1991). Cartographies of struggle: Third world women and the politics of feminism. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, & L. Torres (Eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism (pp. 1–47). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, C. T., Russo, A., & Torres, L. (Eds.). (1991). Third world women and the politics of feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mouer, R., & Sugimoto, Y. (1986). Images of Japanese society. London: Kegan Paul International.
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Page 490 Murphy-Shigematsu, S. (1993). Multiethnic Japan and the monoethnic myth. Melus , 18 (4), 63–80. Nozaki, Y. (2000). Essentializing dilemma and multiculturalist pedagogy: An ethnographic study of Japanese children in a U.S. school. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 31 (3), 355–380. Nozaki, Y. (2001). U.S. discourses on Japanese education: World geography textbooks and the representation of Japan as the “other” in the age of educational reform. In Shirley R. Steinberg (Ed.), Multi/intercultural conversations (pp. 136–165). New York: Peter Lang. Nozaki, Y., & Inokuchi, H. (1998). What U.S. middle schoolers bring to the classroom: Student writing on the Pacific War. Education about Asia, 3(3), 30–34. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (1990). Culture through time. Stanford University Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Random House. Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Scott, J. W. (1988). Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the use of poststructuralist theory for feminism. Feminist Studies , 14 (1), 33–50. Spivak, G. C. (1990). Criticism, feminism, and the institution. In G. C. Spivak, The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues (S. Harasym, Ed., pp. 1–16). New York: Routledge. Yoshino, K. (1992). Cultural nationalism in contemporary Japan . London: Routledge.
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Page 491 Contributors Jean Anyon is Professor of Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and World Scholar and Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Wayne Au is Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at California State University—Fullerton and Editorial Board Member of Rethinking Schools . Yin Chang is a graduate student at the School of Education at Beijing Normal University, China. Daniel S. Choi is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University—Fullerton. Mary Compton is a teacher in Wales and Past President of the National Union of Teachers, England and Wales. Roger Dale is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Graduate School of Education, at the University of Bristol, England. Greg Dimitriadis is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Joseph J. Ferrare is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michelle Fine is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer is Professor of Education at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
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Page 492 Gustavo E. Fischman is Associate Professor in the divisions of Educational Policy and Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University. Ramon Flecha is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Ryan Flessner is Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at Indiana University, Indianapolis. Luis Armando Gandin is Professor of Sociology of Education at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and Editor of the journals Currículo sem Fronteiras and Educação & Realidade. Sandy Grande is Associate Professor of Education at Connecticut College, New Haven, CT. Hee-Ryong Kang is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Douglas Kellner is the George Kneller Chair of Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California—Los Angeles. Soochul Kim is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Gloria Ladson-Billings is Kellner Family Professor in Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zeus Leonardo is Visiting Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Lisa W. Loutzenheiser is Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia. Peter Mayo is Professor of Education Studies at the University of Malta, Republic of Malta. Cameron McCarthy is University Scholar in the Department of Educational Policy and the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Peter McLaren is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California—Los Angeles. Julie McLeod is Associate Professor of Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. David Monje is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University. Shannon D. M. Moore is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of British Columbia. Yoshiko Nozaki is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Buffalo, the State University of New York.
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Page 493 Viviana Pitton is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Susan L. Robertson is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Graduate School of Education, at the University of Bristol, England. Ricardo D. Rosa is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kenneth J. Saltman is Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University in Chicago. Jen Sandler is an Assistant Professor of Education at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Windsor, Canada. Jeff Share is a photojournalist who has worked with the Center for Media Literacy since 2001. Roger Slee is Professor of Inclusive Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Keita Takayama is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New England, Australia. Kenneth Teitelbaum is Dean of the College of Education at Southern Illinois University—Carbondale. Jurjo Torres-Santomé is Professor (Catedrático) of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization, and Chair of the Department of Pedagogy and Curriculum Studies at the School of Education, University of A Coruña, Spain. Marcus Weaver-Hightower is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota. Lois Weiner is Professor of Elementary and Secondary Education at New Jersey City University. Lois Weis is Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Buffalo, the State University of New York. Pia Lindquist Wong is Professor of the Department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education at California State University—Sacramento. Guang-cai Yan is Professor of the School of Education Science at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. Ken Zeichner is Associate Dean and Hoefs-Bascom Professor of Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Page 494 Index Abbott, Andrew 469–70 ability, as a basis of segregation in education 67–8 absenteeism among teachers 455–8 academic neocolonialism 361–4 adolescents see young people adult education 315–18, 336; and critical education theory 269–77 advertising in schools see school commercialism AEU (Australian Education Union) 400, 404 Africa Americans: and education 5–6, 116–20; and intelligence 73 Afro-Caribbean communities, and education 5–6 AFT (American Federation of Teachers, US) 398 Ainu indigenous people, Japan 357, 358 Allman, Paula 102–4, 106, 273 Althusser, Louis 8, 62–3, 86–9, 238, 330, 338 American Federation of Teachers (US) see AFT American Indians 197–200; and cultural imperialism 195–7; and essentialism 194; identity 190–1, 192–3; and mestizaje 198–200, 203; and postmodernism 194–7 Andalusia, Spain 77 anti-discriminatory education, obstacles to 77–8 Anti-Rightist Campaign, China 373 antigay abuse see homophobic harassment and bullying Anyon, Jean 11–12, 16 Apple, Michael W: Chapter 1 3–19; Chapter 6 83–95; also cited 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 53, 62, 63, 123, 125, 150, 169, 170, 179, 186, 225, 226, 228, 229, 241, 244, 250, 254, 270, 312, 321, 324, 330, 332, 334, 347, 352, 353, 354, 355, 357, 360, 361, 362, 363, 365, 370, 371, 372, 373, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 409, 411, 419, 465, 467, 479 Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) 207, 208, 211 Aristotle 242–3 Asia, research on education in 486–8 Asian communities, and education 439 assessment, and CRT 118 Au, Wayne: Chapter 1 3–19; Chapter 6 83–95; Chapter 16 221–31; also cited 355, 361, 363, 364, 371, 468 Australia: AEU 400, 404; boys’ education 170; Disability Discrimination Act 180; feminism in education 141; inclusive education 177, 185–6 Australian Education Union see AEU authoritarian populists, and education 10 Ayuda Mutua (community-based popular education case study) 423–33
Babel (film) 437, 445
Bakan, Joel 52 “banking method” of education (Freire) 223, 237–8, 243, 324 Barcelona, community participation of women 333 base/superstructure model 84 Bell Curve, The (Herrnstein and Murray) 73 Bell, Derrick 112–13 Benedict, Ruth 484 Benetton Corporation 74 Bernstein, Basil 90–1, 178–9, 184–5, 362 Black Churches, US 390 Black communities, and education 5–6 Boal, Augusto: Theatre of the Oppressed 240–4, 250–1; and critical education 244–50 Bologna Process 30 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 90–1, 146, 183–4, 245, 335, 339, 466, 468, 477, 494
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Page 495 Bowles, S 7, 84, 86, 89, 370, 373, 375, 452 Bowling Green Elementary Charter Complex (Sacramento) case study 260–1 boys: education of 141–2, 167–72, 170–1, 172–3; gender identity 141–2; see also masculinity Brazil: CDI (Committee for Democracy of Information) 338; Communidades de Aprendizagem (Learning Communities) 332–3; curriculum reform 400–1; and Freire’s critical pedagogy 221–2; MST, Pedagogia da Terra teacher education program 304–5; Porto Alegre Citizen School project 12, 13, 47, 254, 341–52; racism 347; young people and the media 208, 210, 212–13 Brecht, Bertolt 241–3, 251 Brennan, Marie 205 bridge-schools (Spain) 66–7 Brookwood Labor College, New York 316–17 Brown v. Board of Education case 111, 113, 114, 116, 119 Brown, Wendy 147 Bruno, James 454–8 Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia 317–18 bullying in schools 151, 154, 157, 158, 168 buraku people, Japan, and critical education 355–7, 362 Burundi, privatization of schools 399 business methodology in education 397, 399–400 Butler, Judith 206 CA (correspondence analysis) 475–8, 479 California, education case studies 255–64 Canada, Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative 300–2 Cantor, Nancy 42, 43 capacity 152–3 capital-labor relationship 100–2 capitalism 97; internal relations 102–4; in Marxist theory 100–2 Capricho (Brazilian magazine) 208, 210 Carlson, Dennis 36–7, 48 Catalonia, Spain, community action 335–7 Catholic Church 66, 68 CDI (Committee for Democracy of Information), Brazil 338 Center X (UCLA, Los Angeles) 302–3 Chaos of Disciplines (Abbott) 469–70 charter schools 54, 59, 59–60, 60, 265, 401; and ethnic segregation 459–61 Chicago, Commercial Club and Renaissance 37, 46–7, 59 Chicago School of Human Capital, US 39 children: exposure to media 281; radical education for 318–23 Chile: Enlazando Mundos (Connecting Worlds) 333; and Freire’s critical pedagogy 222 China: critical education studies 368–83;
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education 402; privatization of schools 398 Christian philosophy 214, 234, 320 Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The (Benedict) 484 Citizen School project (Brazil) 12, 13, 47, 254, 341–3, 352; curriculum transformation 345–8; democratization of knowledge 348–52; new school configuration 343–5 City Academies program, UK 397, 398 civic capacity 153–4, 158–60 civil rights 69; Civil Rights Movement, US 389–91 civil society 425–6 class 92, 96–108; as a basis of segregation in education 67; and education 6; in Marxist theory 99–102; working class 69 CLS (Critical Legal Studies) 110–13 CMCs (Community Multimedia Centers), UNESCO 337 Commercial Club, Chicago 37, 46–7 commodification 52, 97, 101, 102, 191, 197, 277; of education 31, 43, 47, 181 Commonwealth College, Arkansas 316, 317 Communidades de Aprendizagem (Learning Communities), Brazil 332, 332–3 community action 335–7, 393–4 community mapping 262–3, 393 Community Multimedia Centers, UNESCO 337 community-based popular education 421–3; Ayuda Mutua case study 423–33 comparative research 482, 486–8 compensatory programs 451–2 compositional studies 443–5 conscientization ( conscientizacao ) 224, 233, 237, 238, 351, 416, 422 conservatism 27; and critical education 9–10; and education 46 conservative modernization 10, 11 conservative perspective on the educative city 329 convergence, media 284–5 corporations 51–3 corporatization: and neoliberalism 56–7; of schools 51, 58–62 Corrales, Javier 404 correspondence analysis see CA correspondence principle (Bowles and Gintis) 7, 373, 375 counter-hegemony 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 56 Courant, Paul 42, 43 Cox, Robert 23–4, 27 critical education: and adult education 269–77; and conservatism 9–10; and globalization 27–30; historical roots of 312–24; and inclusive education 178–9; in Japan 354–64; Japanese and Euro-American scholarship 359–64; and political participation 392–4;
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Page 496 role of “other women” in 333–4 critical education research 4–6; quantitative methods in 465–79; use of GIS 449–63 critical masculinity studies 172–3 critical media education 281–9; and radical democracy 289–91 critical pedagogy 3–5, 269; political roots 5–7 Critical Pedagogy and Race (Leonardo) 9 Critical Race Theory see CRT critical theory 25–7; and gender 33–4; and problem-solving theory 23–4, 25, 32–4 critical/revolutionary pedagogy 102–7 criticism (as a new meaning of critique) 26, 27 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 26 cross-cultural research see comparative research CRT (Critical Race Theory) 8, 110, 120–1; and education 114–21; origins 110–14 cultural imperialism, and American Indians 195–7 cultural reproduction 7 Cultural Revolution, China 373–5, 381 culture: globalization of 440–1; of schools 159–60 curricular strategies: disconnection 69–70; diversity as strange and distant 75–6; exclusion 68–9; infantilizing 74–5; one sided argumentation 70–2; paternalism and false tolerance 74; presentism 76–7; psychologizing 72–4; segregation 66–8 curriculum: centralization of 45–6; content as reinforcer of the dominant culture 64–78; control of by business 397, 400–1; and CRT 116–17; and gender 167–8; hidden 56, 244; in SJTE programs 299–300; transformation in Citizen School project (Brazil) 345–8 Cycles of Formation (Citizen Schools, Brazil) 343–5 Darder, Antonia 270 data matrices see matrices Davies, Bronwyn 143, 144 Dawes Commission 191, 202 “Day of …” (curriculum strategy) 69 Democratic Schools (US) 332 democratization of knowledge, Citizen School project (Brazil) 348–52 denaturalization projects 140–1
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Deng Xiao-ping 369, 375, 378 desegregation of schools 111, 119 diabetes education 260 dialectical materialism, in Freire’s work 223–5 dialogic digital centers 337–8 dialogic gatherings 334–5 dialogic modernity 327–8 dialogue in Freirean critical pedagogy 222–3 digital centers, dialogic 337–8 digital technologies 41 disability: disabled students 177, 179–86; and education 67–8 disability discrimination legislation 180 discipline: and CRT 119–20; and gender 169 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 208, 211, 212 disconnection, as a curricular strategy 69–70 discourse (Foucault) 206–8 distributive justice 450–3 Distributive Paradigm 451 diversity: and education 65; presentation as strange and distant 75–6 divisions of labor, and gender 169–70 drug abuse, racial differences in sentencing 111–12 Eakin, Emily 36 East China Normal University 370, 372 economic determinism 84 economic migration, effects on communities of 424–5 economic reproduction 8 economics of education 170 Edison Schools 54, 55, 56, 59, 60 education: community-based popular education 421–33; and conservatism 46; critical masculinity studies 172–3; critical/revolutionary pedagogy 102–7; and CRT (Critical Race Theory) 114–21; distribution of resources 450–4; economics of 170; governance of 29, 30; inclusive 177–8, 180–6; media representation of 171; and neoliberalism 41–8, 57–8; obstacles to anti-discriminatory 77–8; privatization of 397–8; radical education for adults 315–18; radical education for children 318–23; reproduction in 83–4; three functions of 8 Education International see EI Educational Video Center see EVC educationalism, methodological 24, 28 educative city, the 327–38 EI (Education International) 397, 400, 406 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 126, 227–8, 229 EMOs (Education Management Organizations) 54
English Learners 257, 259 Enlazando Mundos (Connecting Worlds), Chile 333 Enlightenment 25, 26 equity pedagogy 299, 306, 308 ethnic minority groups 76; and teacher education 298–305 ethnic segregation of schools 66–7, 459–61 ethnography, multisited 439–43 EU (European Union) 29, 30, 273 Eurocentrism 71 European Round Table of Industrialists 64 European Union see EU
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Page 497 EVC (Educational Video Center) 291 exclusion, as a curricular strategy 68–9 extracurricular activities, and gender 168 false tolerance, as a curricular strategy 74–5 feminism 71; and critical education 9; and education 6; and Freire’s critical pedagogy 226; oppression of women 69; poststructural feminism in education 137–48; relationship with poststructuralism 139–40; in work of Ayuda Mutua 424, 425 Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (Luke and Gore) 9 Finnish Working People’s College, Minnesota 316, 320–1 fiscalization of education 44–5 flow (of media) 281 Foley, Griff 273, 274 Forum Theater 246, 247, 248, 249 Foucault: A Critical Reader (Hoy) 204–5 Foucault, Michel 38, 39, 48, 91, 140, 271–2; Archaeology of Knowledge, The 207, 208, 211; and critical education theory 204–16; Discipline and Punish 208, 211, 212; Hermeneutics of the Subject, The 212; History of Sexuality 208, 214; Order and Discourse 208; Order of Things, The 212 Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education (Popkewitz and Brennan) 205 fractal distinctions 469–70 Francis, Becky 143 Frankfurt School 8, 26, 110, 204, 206–7, 271, 282, 312 Fraser, Nancy 4, 33–4, 410–11, 412 Freiberg School, Germany 39 Freire, Paulo 5, 14, 106, 270–1, 336; application of approaches to education in the US 254–64; critical pedagogy 221–3, 228–9, 232–3, 237–8, 341–2; critiques of 225–9; and dialectical materialism 223–5; influence on Boal 243; and Myles Horton 276, 317; reasons for the impact of 233–7; and school councils 334 funding, and CRT 118 G-8 Meetings of Ministers of Education 64 Gandin, Luis Armando: Chapter 1 3–19; Chapter 25 341–53; also cited 41, 42, 45, 47, 254, 334, 355, 361, 363 gay-straight alliance see GSA gender 164; as a basis of segregation in education 66; and critical theory 33–4; and curriculum 167–8; discipline in schools 169;
and divisions of labor 169–70; and extracurricular activities 168; and Freire’s critical pedagogy 226; identity construction and deconstruction 140–2; and interpersonal interaction 168; and pedagogy 167; and research 172; and use of space and time in schools 169–70 General Agreement in Trade in Services 31 Germany: Freiberg School 39; Ordo-liberals 39; trade unions 403 Gintis, H 7, 84, 86, 89, 370, 373, 375, 452 Giroux, Henry 63, 65, 88, 89, 125–6, 127–8, 269–70, 288, 352, 371, 372, 373, 382 GIS (Geographical Information Systems) 478; and critical education research 454–63 Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler) 204 globalization 37, 39, 273, 438, 439; and critical education 27–30; of culture 440–1; and the media 283–4 Golden State Middle School (Sacramento) case study 258–60 Gongdong lesson (South Korea) 416–17 “good rebellion”, educating children for 318–23 Gore, Jennifer 9, 139 governance of education 29, 30, 59, 170–1 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 5, 8, 62, 85, 86, 87, 204, 271, 272–3, 277, 313–15, 321, 331, 338, 379, 410, 418, 429–30, 433 grassroots community action 335–7 Greek classical culture 71 GSA (gay-straight alliance) 151, 154, 155, 157, 158 gypsy communities 73; and education 66–7 Habermas, Jurgen 271, 335 Hall, Stuart 8, 482–3 harassment 246 Harlem, New York City 5–6, 321, 337, 442 hate crime 240 HCBS (Harlem Committee for Better Schools) 5–6 health education 260–1 Hegel, G 26 hegemonic masculinities 164–5 hegemony 62, 83, 84, 85, 272, 313–15, 410; counter-hegemony 4, 5, 7, 14, 16, 56 Hermeneutics of the Subject, The (Foucault) 212 Herrnstein, Richard 73 heteronormativity 152 HGDP (Human Genome Diversity Project) 196 hidden curriculum 56, 244 Highlander Folk School, Tennesee 317 historical void, as a curricular strategy 76–7 History of Sexuality (Foucault) 208, 214 HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) 467 homophobia 152; anti-homophobic curricula 158; homophobic harassment and bullying 151, 157 Horkheimer, Max 26 Horton, Myles 276, 317
Hoy, David Couzens 204–5 human nature in Marxist theory 105
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Page 498 ICT (information communication technologies) 282, 284, 285, 289, 292 identity construction and deconstruction 140–2 Image Theater 245, 249 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 13, 25, 30, 33; and education policy 30–2, 399; and knowledge economy policy 32; and neoliberal economic policies 40 inclusive education 177–8, 180–6; as a critical education project 178–9; as a political imperative 179–80 India, business methodology in education 399 Indian Country 195 Indigenous Americans see American Indians indigenous knowledge 201, 275–6, 334, 423, 439 infantilizing, as a curricular strategy 74–5 information communication technologies see ICT Information Society 327–8, 337 INTASC (Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium) 300, 308 intellectual neocolonialism 361–4 intellectuals, organic 4, 5, 272, 314, 315, 324, 330, 421, 429–32 intelligence, and race 72–3 internal relations within capitalism 102–4 International Monetary Fund see IMF interpersonal interaction, and gender 168 Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium see INTASC intesectionality 156–7 Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Rose) 207 Invisible Theater 245, 248 Iraq War 70 ISA (Ideological State Apparatus) 86 Islamic communities 75 “isms” 24, 28–9 issue campaigns 393–4 Japan: critical education 354–64; Japanese Studies 483; “Japanism” 485–6; liberation education 357; multicultural education 358–9; racial issues 357 Jewish communities 5; Workmens’ Circle 231 Jones, Alison 143–4 K4D (Knowledge for Development, World Bank) 31 KAM (Knowledge Assessment Methodology, World Bank) 30, 31 Kant, I 26 KBE (Knowledge Based Economy) 33 King, Lawrence (Larry) 151, 152, 155, 156 knowledge: democratization of 348–52; Foucault 206–8 Knowledge Assessment Methodology see KAM Knowledge Based Economy see KBE
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Knowledge for Development (K4D, World Bank) 31 knowledge economy policy (IMF/WB) 32 Korea, see also South Korea Korean ethnic communities in Japan 358, 365 KTU (Korean Teachers Union) 7, 409, 413–18 La Vernada-Sant Marti adult education school 336 labor, divisions and gender 169–70 labor-capital relationship 100–2 laborer identity in South Korea 414–15 Landless Workers’ Movement, Brazil see MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) Language Academy of Sacramento case study 261–4 Latin America: popular education 422–3; Ayuda Mutua case study 423–33 learning: lifelong 273; in social movements 274–5 Learning Communities 332 learning laboratories, Citizen School project (Brazil) 349–50 Learning to Labour (Willis) 8, 166, 383, 442 Leaving Safe Harbors (Carlson) 36–7, 48 Ledwith, Margaret 277 Leona Group 54 LGBTTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or transsexual, two–spirited, intersex and questioning) 152, 154–5, 156–7 Liberalism 26 liberation education, Japan 357 liberatory pedagogy (Freire) 222–3 lifelong learning 273 literacy programs, Brazil 221–2 literary gatherings, dialogic 334–5 LOCE (Spanish Quality of Education Law) 70 LOE (Spanish Education Law of 2006) 70 LOGSE (Spanish Educational Law of 1990) 69 Los Angeles: Center X (UCLA) 302–3; teacher absenteeism study 455–8 Lukacs, Georg 181 Luke, Carmen 9, 139 McGillicuddy, Kim 393–4 McLaren, Peter 273 McLuhan, Marshall 283 mainstreaming see inclusive education Mao Ze-dong 373–4 mapping, community 262–3, 393 marketization of education 397–8 Marxist theory 26, 97–8, 102–4, 373; capitalism 100–2; class 99–102; education 7, 8, 83–4, 234, 272–3; human nature 105; and race 132
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Page 499 masculinity 163–7, 173; critical masculinity studies 172–3; and education 167–72; research 172; see also boys materialism 26, 223–5 matrices (research methodology) 471–2; CA 475–8, 479; MDS 474–5; SNA 472–4, 478, 479 MCA (multiple correspondence analysis) 475–6 MDG (Millennium Development Goals) 31 MDS (multidimensional scaling) 474–5 media: convergence 284–5; education 281–92; representation of schooling 171; and young people 208, 210, 212–13, 281 media arts approach to media education 287 media literacy movement approach to media education 287–8 mestizaje 198–200, 203 methodological educationalism 24, 28 methodological nationalism 24, 28 methodological statism 29 Mexico: Ayuda Mutua case study 423–33; business influence on curriculum 400; trade unions 402; World Conference of Inhabitants 333–4 Michoacan, Mexico, Ayuda Mutua case study 423–33 middle classes, and education 10 migration, effects on communities of 424–5 Millennium Development Goals see MDG Minear, Richard 483 Ministers of Education, meetings of G-8 64 minjung consciousness (South Korea) 411–13, 415–16, 418 minority cultures, silencing of 68–9 Modern Schools: Spain 319–20; US 320 Morrow, Raymond A 271 Mosaica 54 Moscow Declaration (G-8 Ministers of Education) 64 MOVA Sao Paulo 270, 336 movement, and stasis 37–8 MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), Brazil, teacher education program 304–5 multiculturalism 65, 76, 129, 245; Japan 358–9 multidimensional scaling see MDS multiple correspondence analysis see MCA multisited ethnography 439–43 Murray, Charles 73, 78 nation-state 28 National Association for Buraku Liberation 356 National Education Association (US) see NEA National Heritage Academies 54
National Science Foundation (US) 71 National Union of Teachers (UK) see NUT National Women’s Trade Union League 317 nationalism, methodological 24, 28 Native Americans see American Indians naturalization of situations of injustice 72 NCLB see No Child Left Behind NEA (National Education Association, US) 398 neo-leftists (China) 377–8 neo-Marxism, and critical education theory 83–93 neo-rightists (China) 377 neocolonialism, intellectual 361–4 neoconservatives, and education 10 neoliberalism 29, 33, 37–41, 71–2, 96, 273; and corporatization of schools 56–7; and education 10, 41–8, 64; and South Korea 409; and teachers’ unions 396–406 Newman, Michael 274 NGOs, and adult learning 275 nihonjinron 485 No Child Left Behind (US) 13, 37, 44, 46, 54, 56, 118, 401; and critical education research 461–3 Norway, trade unions 399 NUT (National Union of Teachers, UK) 397, 398, 401, 402, 403, 405 Occidentalism 485–6 OECD 30, 31, 33, 273; and neoliberal economic policies 40 Okinawan indigenous people, Japan 357, 358 Olssen, Mark 271–2 one-sided argumentation, as a curricular strategy 70–2 Open Method of Coordination 30 “optimistic curriculum” 76 Order and Discourse (Foucault) 208 Order of Things, The (Foucault) 207, 212 Ordo-liberals, Germany 39 organic intellectuals 4, 5, 272, 314, 315, 324, 330, 421, 429–32 Orientalism 482–3, 486 “other women”, role in critical education 333–4 Pakistan, privatization of schools 398–9 PAR (Participatory Action Research) 275–6 paternalism, as a curricular strategy 74–5 PB (participatory budgets) 4, 12, 250, 264, 276, 347 Pedagogia da Terra (Brazil) 304–5 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 14, 222, 226, 232–3, 237–8, 335, 355, 370; reasons for the impact of 233–7 People’s College, Kansas 316 Phenomenology of the Mind (Hegel) 26 PISA indicators (OECD) 30 PO see Pedagogy of the Oppressed policy in schools 170–1
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Page 500 political participation: and critical education 392–4; factors that encourage 389–92 politicization of students 389–94 politics of recognition 3, 4, 5, 13 politics of redistribution 3, 4, 5, 13 Popkewitz, Thomas 205 popular education 421–3; Ayuda Mutua case study 423–33 portfolio person 285 Porto Alegre, Brazil 4, 12–13, 47, 216, 250, 264, 276, 334, 336, 339, 406; Citizen School project 4, 12–13, 47, 264, 276, 334, 341–53; young people and the media 208, 210, 212–13 postcolonialism 9; mestizaje 198–200, 203 postmodernism 91–3, 377, 380 poststructuralism 91–3, 138; poststructural feminism 137–48 poverty 98–9; culture of 117 power analysis (of communities) 393 power (Foucault) 209–11, 211–14 praxis: Freirean 222, 225, 229, 411–12; Korean 412–13, 415–16; philosophy of 102–8 presentism, as a curricular strategy 76–7 private schools 67 privatization of schools 54–5, 61, 397–8 problem-framing theory 33 problem-solving theory 27; and critical theory 23–4, 25, 32–4 problematizations (Foucault) 205–6, 213, 214, 216 progressive social movements, and education 10–12 promotoras (Ayuda Mutua case study) 423, 424, 425, 426–7, 428, 429–32, 433 property rights 116 protectionist approach to media education 286–7 psychologizing, as a curricular strategy 72–4 Puerto Rico, education 359 quantitative methods in critical education research 465–79 quantitative/qualitative dichotomy 469 Queensland, Australia, inclusive education 177, 185–6 queer: definition 152; queer people 156 race 133; and critical education 9; CRT (Critical Race Theory) 8; differences in sentencing in drug use cases 111–12; and education 5–6; and Freire’s critical pedagogy 226; and intelligence 72–3; in Japan 357; and Marxist theory 132; race treason 124, 125, 129–30, 131, 133, 134;
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silencing of minority cultures 68–9; and teacher education 298–305 racism 69, 75, 226, 227; in Brazil 347; in LGBTTIQ communities 157; in US society 113, 115; and whiteness 124, 126–7, 128, 129–30, 132, 133, 134 radical democracy, and critical media education 289–91 radical education: for adults 315–18; for children 318–23 Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education and a New Social Movement (Anyon) 11 Rand School of Social Science, New York 316, 322 Rawls, J 451, 453 REACH LA 291 Reagan, Ronald 39, 57 recognition 34; critical theory of 410–11, 412; politics of 3, 4, 5, 13 reconstruction (as a new meaning of critique) 26–7 Rectification Movement, China 373 red pedagogy 190, 200–2 redistribution 34, 410; distributive justice 450–3; politics of 3, 4, 5, 13 Reflect initiative (participatory learning process) 334 reification theory 181 relational perspective in critical analysis 466 relative autonomy 8, 83, 84, 85–7, 88, 89, 90, 410, 418 religious conservatives, and education 10 religious movements, and adult education 274–5 Renaissance, Chicago 37, 46–7, 59 repositioning 3 representation 34 reproduction 8; economic 8; in education 83–4, 90–1; social and cultural 7, 8 reproductionist perspective on the educative city 329–30 research 14; boys and masculinity 172; critical education 449–63; critical theory of methodology 437–47; quantitative methods in 465–79; tasks 4–5 resistance theory 87–8, 373, 376 Right-wing forces 11 Roediger, David 124, 130, 131–2, 133 Rose, Nikolas 207 RSA (Repressive State Apparatus) 86 Ruskin College 316 Sacramento, California, education case studies 255–64 sacred lands 199 SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers Union) 396, 399, 402–3, 404 safe schools programs 150–2, 154–60 Said, Edward 181, 204–5, 482–6, 487, 488
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Page 501 St. Pierre, Elizabeth 140, 143 Sao Paulo, Brazil, adult education 270 school commercialism 55, 56, 61 school councils 334 school culture 159–60 school privatization 54–5 school-university partnerships, US 255–64 Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis) 7 schools: gender differences in use of space and time 169–70; and neoliberalism 41–8; policy and governance 170–1; three functions of 8 science teaching: case studies 258–61; in Citizen School project (Brazil) 351 segmentation of curriculum 69–70 segregation 331–2; as a curricular strategy 66–8; of disabled students 179; ethnic 459–61; in schools 111, 119 SEN (Special Educational Needs) 177, 182–3, see also inclusive education setting, as a form of segregation in schools 331–2, 339 sex, as a basis of segregation in education 66 sexual minorities, definition 152 silencing of minority cultures 68–9 SJTE (social justice teacher education) 296–8, 305–7; Center X (Los Angeles, US) 302–3; Pedagogia da Terra (Brazil) 304–5; practices in 289–300; Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative (Canada) 300–2 SNA (Social Network Analysis) 472–4, 478, 479 social class see class social hegemony see hegemony social justice teacher education see SJTE social movements 14; learning in 274–5 Social Network Analysis see SNA social reproduction 7, 8 socialism, and education 6 Socialist Sunday Schools see SSS South Africa, SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers Union) 396, 399, 402–3, 404 South Korea: Gongdong lesson 416–17; KTU 7, 409, 413–18; laborer identity 414–15, see also Korea space, gendered use of 169–70 Spain: community action 335–7; dialogic literary gatherings 334–5; education case study 66–77; Modern Schools 319–20 spatial fetishism 24, 28–9 special education see inclusive education
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Special Educational Needs: Report on the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People (Warnock) 177, 182–3 Special Educational Needs see SEN SSS (Socialist Sunday Schools) 6, 320, 321–3 stasis, and movement 37–8 statism, methodological 29 streaming, as a form of segregation in schools 331–2, 339 students: disabled 177, 179–86; politicization of 389–94: student-teacher relationship 223, 225, 236 Subjects (Freirean concept) 222 substantialist mode of thought 466–7, 468 Sunday Schools (Socialist) 6, 320, 321–3 surplus value 100–1 taming, of Freire’s critical pedagogy 232–3, 235 Tate, William F 114–15, 119 teacher absenteeism study 455–8 teacher education: SJTE (social justice teacher education) 296–307; UK 46; US 255–8 teacher-student relationship 223, 225, 236 teachers’ unions: and neoliberalism 396–406; Turkey 7 technologies, digital 41 Tendo, Mutsuko 362 Thatcher, Margaret 39, 57, 401 The Politics of Education Reform: Bolstering the Supply and Demand; Overcoming Institutional Blocks (Corrales) 404 Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal) 240–1, 250–1; and critical education 244–50; formation of 241–4 thematic complexes, Citizen School project (Brazil) 345–7, 350 “Theory” in the humanities and social sciences 145–6 time, gendered use of 169–70 TINA (“There is No Alternative”) 57, 97, 401 Torres, Carlos Alberta 271 “Tourist Curriculum” 75 tracking, as a form of segregation in schools 331–2, 339 trade unions see teachers’ unions traditional intellectuals 430 transformative perspective on the educative city 330–1 transversal education 69–70 Turkey, teachers’ union 7 UCLA, Center X 302–3 UK: boys’ education 170; business influence on curriculum 400; business methodology in education 399; City Academies program 397, 398; conservatism and education 46; Disability Discrimination Act 180; inclusive education 182–4; neoliberal economic policies 39–40;
socialism and education 6; SSS (Socialist Sunday Schools) 320; teacher education 46; teachers’ unions 402, 404, 405
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Page 502 UNESCO 65, 180, 273, 284, 336, 337; Community Multimedia Centers 337; Conference on Adult Education 336 United Nations 65, 74, 357, 400 universities: and neoliberalism 41–8; research programs 44–5 university students, and organic intellectuals 430–2 university-school partnerships, US 255–64 Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative (York University, Canada) 300–2 US: Americans with Disability Act 180; application of Freirean approaches to education 254–64; boys’ education 170; business methodology in education 399; Center X (UCLA, Los Angeles) 302–3; Chicago School of Human Capital 39; Civil Rights Movement 389–91; composition of teaching force 298; conservatism and education 9–10, 46; corporatization of schools 53–5; Democratic Schools 332; education 11, 13; media literacy movement 287–8; Modern Schools 320; neoliberal economic policies 39–40; poverty 98–9; privatization of schools 54–5; racism 113, 115; school-university partnerships 255–64; socialism and education 6; SSS (Socialist Sunday Schools) 320, 321–3; “war on terrorism” 38 VERN organization, Catalonia 335–7 virtualization of education 42–3 vocationalization of education 43–4 Wal-Mart 54 Wales, socialism and education 6 “Walt Disneyfication” 75 Walton Family Foundation 54 “war on terrorism” 38 Warnock, Mary 177, 182, 183, 184 Washington Consensus 30, 31, 57 WB see World Bank Weber, Max 99–100, 327, 328, 329, 338, 376 “West and the Rest” 482–3 Westwood, Sallie 271 white abolition 124–5, 129–34 White Hat Management 54 white reconstruction 124–5, 133–4; in education 125–9 Whiteness Studies 123–4, 125, 363 Whitestream 193, 195, 196–7, 199, 200 Williams, Raymond 8, 204, 281 Williams v. State of California case 11, 450, 452, 453
Willis, P 8, 166, 442 Wisconsin-Madison, University of 114, 240, 248 Wisdom, Shaq 151, 155 women: and community-based popular education 424; impact of economic migration on 425; National Women’s Trade Union League 317; oppression of 69, 165, 166; role of “other women” in critical education 333–4; sexuality and the media in Brazil 208, 210; violence towards 75 workers’ education 315–18 Workers’ Party, Brazil 12, 13, 341 Workmens’ Circle 231 World Bank 13, 25, 30, 33; and education policy 30–2, 44, 401, 403–4; and knowledge economy policy 32; and neoliberal economic policies 40 World Conference of Inhabitants, Mexico 333–4 World Social Forum 25 WTO (World Trade Organization) 33; and neoliberal economic policies 40 York University, Canada, Urban Diversity Teacher Education Initiative 300–2 young people, and the media 208, 210, 212–13, 281 YPSL (Young People’s Socialist League) 319
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