Rick Lybeck | Minnesota State University, Mankato (original) (raw)

Papers by Rick Lybeck

Teachers College Record, Dec 19, 2023

This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AV... more This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social-justice educator and complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity.

Teachers College Record, 2023

This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AV... more This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social-justice educator and complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

The conclusion begins with a metaphor posed by Dakota educator Glenn Wasicuna in a 2012 public ad... more The conclusion begins with a metaphor posed by Dakota educator Glenn Wasicuna in a 2012 public address on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, saying that, for Dakota people, being invited to speak only on major anniversaries is like being in a VCR, put on pause for many years, and then having someone suddenly hit play. Following this metaphor, the conclusion explores how and why whitestream Minnesota is stuck in a perpetual cycle of forgetting, temporarily remembering, and then forgetting again the foundational event in state history. Moving through ethnographic data collected in 2012 as well as commemorative events occurring since the sesquicentennial, the conclusion identifies a systematic negation of the Other in regional white knowledge production, an effect rooted in settler society’s socioracial contract, or white justice as fairness. Based on missed opportunities in the college course analyzed, the conclusion theorizes a critical pedagogy for breaking Minnesota’s cycle of forgetting.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justi... more This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.

Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting, 2022

This presentation analyzes the means by which AVID for Higher Education (AHE)1 socializes teacher... more This presentation analyzes the means by which AVID for Higher Education (AHE)1 socializes teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell Notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines this process as a doubling down on positivistic principles in teacher education. Turning to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) for insight into cultures of positivism, the presentation exposes white-neoliberal structures in AHE that direct teacher-educators away from critical consciousness, racial equity, and social justice.

Minnesota State University Literacy faculty debunk three "science of reading" claims currently dr... more Minnesota State University Literacy faculty debunk three "science of reading" claims currently driving new state legislation that will dramatically restrict ways reading can be taught in Minnesota schools. Analysis includes white, neoliberal aspects of the "science of reading" movement that encourage teaching for compliance to authority rather than teaching for critical citizenship in a strong democracy.

Motskrift, 1993

Reveals Tristan legend as underlying structure to Johan Falkberget's novel Den fjerde nattevakt [... more Reveals Tristan legend as underlying structure to Johan Falkberget's novel Den fjerde nattevakt [The Fourth Night Watch]

Edda, 1994

Structuralist approach to time in Johan Falkberget's Christianus Sextus trilogy with deconstructi... more Structuralist approach to time in Johan Falkberget's Christianus Sextus trilogy with deconstructivist implications.

Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting, 2020

This paper examines discursive resistance encountered by two teacher-educators working to advance... more This paper examines discursive resistance encountered by two teacher-educators working to advance anti-oppressive practices in a college of education that has recently made “racial consciousness, social justice, and inclusion within a global context” its guiding Vision even as it continues to operate as a discourse community shaped by the Danielson Framework for Teaching. Seeking to implement a framework better aligned with our college Vision, we theorize how the dominant Danielson discourse of appropriateness persistently surfaces to reproduce oppressive orientations toward racial consciousness, social justice, and global inclusion in our programs. Through our analyses of these moments of discursive resistance, we investigate the ideological foundations for Danielson-esque appropriateness and ways this discourse inhibits anti-oppressive change in our teacher-educator discourse community.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2017

This article examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota’s white public pedagogy of t... more This article examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota’s white public pedagogy of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, focusing specifically on hardline separations between fact and opinion that divert citizens from acknowledging the moral significance of their state’s genocidal founding. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined in today’s Common Core Standards, the regional need to distinguish fact from opinion reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized, originating in primary-source materials that perplexingly frame white “victimhood” and Dakota “savagery” as objective moral knowledge. Critically analyzing recent acts of fact-checking performed by members of a regional settler discourse community, this article shows such “objective” knowledge at work, persistently thriving on age-old notions of white-settler identity and white community belonging. Ultimately, this article exposes the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources’ dominant discou...

Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2015

This article compares outcomes of two activity systems formed to memorialize the mass hanging of ... more This article compares outcomes of two activity systems formed to memorialize the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. Operating in 1911–1912, the first system failed to address tensions between its old-settler subject and progressive values taking shape in the community, especially regarding capital punishment. Informed by the first system’s nonexpansive outcome and by native activism expressed during the Vietnam War era, the second system incorporated multiple community voices, resulting in an expansive commemorative outcome that continues today. Special attention is paid to the identity work one monument performed in both eras, mediating old-settler ideology through a violent local chronotope.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This chapter analyzes passages from interviews with four students commenting on their work co-aut... more This chapter analyzes passages from interviews with four students commenting on their work co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in its sesquicentennial year (2012). Specifically, analysis concerns how students attempted to square demands for representational “balance” placed on them by their instructors and community with what their independent critical thinking was telling them. The chapter includes a brief history of the war in order to contextualize ways a situated white ideology handed down from the 1860s was creating racialized dilemmas for these students as they carried out their public history-writing project. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how white justice as fairness was not so easily taken up by students as they confronted regional “facts” designed to compel them away from framing their exhibit in terms of critical-social-justice education.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter explores the racial politics involved in a highly successful museum-writing project ... more This chapter explores the racial politics involved in a highly successful museum-writing project on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 carried out during its 2012 sesquicentennial in southern Minnesota. Specifically, the chapter analyzes negotiations between white instructors and students as they co-authored an exhibit panel displaying “settler perspectives” for a majority-white audience. Interview data reveal the explicit privileging of a “white-guy” identity behind the project and its discursive distribution through use of the inclusive pronoun we, recruiting students to take up the standardizing “white-guy” identity themselves. As the chapter unfolds, it reveals the development of an exhibit panel “balanced” in the direction of white victimhood, foiling one student’s initial hopes of exposing ways white supremacy shaped injustices in 1862. Ultimately, the chapter provides further evidence of a white public pedagogy of fear, directing instructors and students away from critical social justice and toward white justice as fairness.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter analyzes college classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War orch... more This chapter analyzes college classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War orchestrated by a seasoned Holocaust scholar teaching during the 2012 sesquicentennial in the region where the fighting once took place in southern Minnesota. Analysis concerns the instructor’s setting of discursive frames for discussion and how those frames determined a certain script that surprisingly omitted direct talk of genocide against the Dakota people. Part of this dynamic involved setting a frame of “balance” around a traditional white source on the war and a contrasting frame of “imbalance” around the critical text under discussion. The chapter contextualizes this teaching as both response to and reinforcement of a regional white public pedagogy that routinely directs citizen-scholars away from critical-social-justice education on Minnesota’s war of 1862 toward “neutral” stances that remove moral judgment from public discourse, ultimately to the favor of historic white interests.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter pursues tensions between conflicting regional- and national-insider selves construct... more This chapter pursues tensions between conflicting regional- and national-insider selves constructed by historian Gary Clayton Anderson as he delivered a public lecture on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War in January 2012. Positioning himself as regional insider, Anderson sought to diminish the importance of genocidal intent among white officials in Minnesota, a discursive move designed to persuade the implied white audience to suspend judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and the genocide they carried out against the Dakota people in the 1860s. Yet, as national-insider who confers with prominent Genocide Studies scholars, Anderson had to account for the importance of genocidal intent, raising contradictions that involved culpability for ancestors closer to heart. The chapter analyzes the lecture as an act of epistemic violence against both indigenous audience members and critical whites in attendance. Ultimately, this chapter provides more ways white justice as fairness diverts citizen-scholars away from critical social justice education on the U.S.-Dakota War.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter completes analysis of the two-panel fulcrum designed to balance settler and Dakota p... more This chapter completes analysis of the two-panel fulcrum designed to balance settler and Dakota perspectives in the Conflict and Remembrance traveling exhibit commemorating Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Looking closely into the pedagogy that shaped white students’ writing on “Dakota perspectives,” the chapter shows complex ways students were recruited toward white justice as fairness both in the classroom and in extra-institutional white spaces beyond their instructors’ purview. Textual analysis of student exhibit panels reveals narratives that tell U.S.-Dakota War history authoritatively from above rather than compassionately from below, erasing perspectives of indigenous women and children one student writer hoped to incorporate. Inevitably, this effect sparked reenactment of historic racial divides when the exhibit was unveiled to the public, exposing ways students had been implicitly positioned to defend white (intellectual) property rather than engage critical social justice education on the war.

For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgm... more For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgment about the U.S.-Dakota War rose to the level of an urgent collective need in 2012. Whether balancing perspectives from points of no perspective or presenting "the facts" so that majority-white audiences could decide for themselves what happened in 1862, empowered producers of public knowledge routinely modeled ways of remaining neutral on a situation of injustice and, thus, choosing the side of the oppressor. Below are some examples of white justice as fairness at work: We're not going to get into who was right and who was wrong. We're trying to stay as neutral as we can. (in Ojanpa, 2011)-Jessica Potter, Blue Earth County Historical Society, December 22, 2011 There is no great benefit in trying to weigh who was more at fault during the times that led up to and during the conflict. […] Learning and discussing the facts, as best they can be found and as fairly as possible, should be the goal in this sesquicentennial year.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter examines public demands for “objectivity” and “balance” in Minnesota’s white public ... more This chapter examines public demands for “objectivity” and “balance” in Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War and its effect on public-history work and classroom teaching during the war’s 2012 sesquicentennial. The chapter begins by analyzing a key newspaper editorial from 2012 encouraging citizens to consult “the facts” on the war before taking Dakota people’s claims to historical trauma to heart. The chapter then consults facts from early sources on the war and their use of anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008) discourses to persuade citizens from judging white officials and their extermination campaign against the Dakota in the 1860s. The chapter returns then to modern contexts, analyzing the ongoing influence of anti-Indian-sublime “facts” on public knowledge, including curricular materials commonly understood to be “objective” and “balanced” by well-educated scholars today. The chapter ends by analyzing contradictions experienced by one college student working to achieve “balance” in her public history-writing work.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter continues to analyze Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 186... more This chapter continues to analyze Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and its demands for “objectivity” in regional teaching and commemoration. First, the chapter looks at the specter of white victimhood and its power providing certain “facts” designed to silence critical social justice teachings. The chapter then historicizes this effect by going back to the war’s 1912 semicentennial when “old settlers” engaging in public commemoration made bold claims to objectivity while fashioning their collective white identity as epistemologically supreme vis-à-vis Dakota identity. After exploring foundations of this dynamic in settler society’s socio-racial contract, the chapter demonstrates how it lives on in today’s evolved, pluralist forms of teaching and commemoration, with whites positioning themselves as especially “objective,” “balanced,” and “neutral” regarding 1862. The chapter theorizes this impulse as white justice as fairness and provides evidence of it as a pedagogical approach hostile to critical social justice education.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy, 2020

This chapter continues analysis of classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War... more This chapter continues analysis of classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 led by a seasoned Holocaust scholar teaching in 2012 near where the fighting once took place. First, the chapter pursues silences in the instructor’s classroom pedagogy as she deftly avoided aspects of the assigned reading covering the genocide of Dakota people. The chapter then brings interview data to bear on instructor silences, finding notions of uniqueness for the Holocaust behind her reluctance to take a clear position in the classroom. Student interview and focus-group data are then analyzed to investigate the pedagogical effects of instructor neutrality, finding much critique but also endorsement of that neutrality. The chapter ends by contextualizing the classroom pedagogy as enactment of a regional white public pedagogy that advocates white justice as fairness, i.e., suspending moral judgment toward symbolic white forebears when studying the racially violent past.

Teachers College Record, Dec 19, 2023

This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AV... more This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social-justice educator and complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity.

Teachers College Record, 2023

This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AV... more This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social-justice educator and complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

The conclusion begins with a metaphor posed by Dakota educator Glenn Wasicuna in a 2012 public ad... more The conclusion begins with a metaphor posed by Dakota educator Glenn Wasicuna in a 2012 public address on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, saying that, for Dakota people, being invited to speak only on major anniversaries is like being in a VCR, put on pause for many years, and then having someone suddenly hit play. Following this metaphor, the conclusion explores how and why whitestream Minnesota is stuck in a perpetual cycle of forgetting, temporarily remembering, and then forgetting again the foundational event in state history. Moving through ethnographic data collected in 2012 as well as commemorative events occurring since the sesquicentennial, the conclusion identifies a systematic negation of the Other in regional white knowledge production, an effect rooted in settler society’s socioracial contract, or white justice as fairness. Based on missed opportunities in the college course analyzed, the conclusion theorizes a critical pedagogy for breaking Minnesota’s cycle of forgetting.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justi... more This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.

Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting, 2022

This presentation analyzes the means by which AVID for Higher Education (AHE)1 socializes teacher... more This presentation analyzes the means by which AVID for Higher Education (AHE)1 socializes teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell Notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines this process as a doubling down on positivistic principles in teacher education. Turning to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) for insight into cultures of positivism, the presentation exposes white-neoliberal structures in AHE that direct teacher-educators away from critical consciousness, racial equity, and social justice.

Minnesota State University Literacy faculty debunk three "science of reading" claims currently dr... more Minnesota State University Literacy faculty debunk three "science of reading" claims currently driving new state legislation that will dramatically restrict ways reading can be taught in Minnesota schools. Analysis includes white, neoliberal aspects of the "science of reading" movement that encourage teaching for compliance to authority rather than teaching for critical citizenship in a strong democracy.

Motskrift, 1993

Reveals Tristan legend as underlying structure to Johan Falkberget's novel Den fjerde nattevakt [... more Reveals Tristan legend as underlying structure to Johan Falkberget's novel Den fjerde nattevakt [The Fourth Night Watch]

Edda, 1994

Structuralist approach to time in Johan Falkberget's Christianus Sextus trilogy with deconstructi... more Structuralist approach to time in Johan Falkberget's Christianus Sextus trilogy with deconstructivist implications.

Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting, 2020

This paper examines discursive resistance encountered by two teacher-educators working to advance... more This paper examines discursive resistance encountered by two teacher-educators working to advance anti-oppressive practices in a college of education that has recently made “racial consciousness, social justice, and inclusion within a global context” its guiding Vision even as it continues to operate as a discourse community shaped by the Danielson Framework for Teaching. Seeking to implement a framework better aligned with our college Vision, we theorize how the dominant Danielson discourse of appropriateness persistently surfaces to reproduce oppressive orientations toward racial consciousness, social justice, and global inclusion in our programs. Through our analyses of these moments of discursive resistance, we investigate the ideological foundations for Danielson-esque appropriateness and ways this discourse inhibits anti-oppressive change in our teacher-educator discourse community.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2017

This article examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota’s white public pedagogy of t... more This article examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota’s white public pedagogy of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, focusing specifically on hardline separations between fact and opinion that divert citizens from acknowledging the moral significance of their state’s genocidal founding. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined in today’s Common Core Standards, the regional need to distinguish fact from opinion reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized, originating in primary-source materials that perplexingly frame white “victimhood” and Dakota “savagery” as objective moral knowledge. Critically analyzing recent acts of fact-checking performed by members of a regional settler discourse community, this article shows such “objective” knowledge at work, persistently thriving on age-old notions of white-settler identity and white community belonging. Ultimately, this article exposes the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources’ dominant discou...

Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2015

This article compares outcomes of two activity systems formed to memorialize the mass hanging of ... more This article compares outcomes of two activity systems formed to memorialize the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. Operating in 1911–1912, the first system failed to address tensions between its old-settler subject and progressive values taking shape in the community, especially regarding capital punishment. Informed by the first system’s nonexpansive outcome and by native activism expressed during the Vietnam War era, the second system incorporated multiple community voices, resulting in an expansive commemorative outcome that continues today. Special attention is paid to the identity work one monument performed in both eras, mediating old-settler ideology through a violent local chronotope.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This chapter analyzes passages from interviews with four students commenting on their work co-aut... more This chapter analyzes passages from interviews with four students commenting on their work co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in its sesquicentennial year (2012). Specifically, analysis concerns how students attempted to square demands for representational “balance” placed on them by their instructors and community with what their independent critical thinking was telling them. The chapter includes a brief history of the war in order to contextualize ways a situated white ideology handed down from the 1860s was creating racialized dilemmas for these students as they carried out their public history-writing project. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how white justice as fairness was not so easily taken up by students as they confronted regional “facts” designed to compel them away from framing their exhibit in terms of critical-social-justice education.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter explores the racial politics involved in a highly successful museum-writing project ... more This chapter explores the racial politics involved in a highly successful museum-writing project on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 carried out during its 2012 sesquicentennial in southern Minnesota. Specifically, the chapter analyzes negotiations between white instructors and students as they co-authored an exhibit panel displaying “settler perspectives” for a majority-white audience. Interview data reveal the explicit privileging of a “white-guy” identity behind the project and its discursive distribution through use of the inclusive pronoun we, recruiting students to take up the standardizing “white-guy” identity themselves. As the chapter unfolds, it reveals the development of an exhibit panel “balanced” in the direction of white victimhood, foiling one student’s initial hopes of exposing ways white supremacy shaped injustices in 1862. Ultimately, the chapter provides further evidence of a white public pedagogy of fear, directing instructors and students away from critical social justice and toward white justice as fairness.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter analyzes college classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War orch... more This chapter analyzes college classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War orchestrated by a seasoned Holocaust scholar teaching during the 2012 sesquicentennial in the region where the fighting once took place in southern Minnesota. Analysis concerns the instructor’s setting of discursive frames for discussion and how those frames determined a certain script that surprisingly omitted direct talk of genocide against the Dakota people. Part of this dynamic involved setting a frame of “balance” around a traditional white source on the war and a contrasting frame of “imbalance” around the critical text under discussion. The chapter contextualizes this teaching as both response to and reinforcement of a regional white public pedagogy that routinely directs citizen-scholars away from critical-social-justice education on Minnesota’s war of 1862 toward “neutral” stances that remove moral judgment from public discourse, ultimately to the favor of historic white interests.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter pursues tensions between conflicting regional- and national-insider selves construct... more This chapter pursues tensions between conflicting regional- and national-insider selves constructed by historian Gary Clayton Anderson as he delivered a public lecture on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War in January 2012. Positioning himself as regional insider, Anderson sought to diminish the importance of genocidal intent among white officials in Minnesota, a discursive move designed to persuade the implied white audience to suspend judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and the genocide they carried out against the Dakota people in the 1860s. Yet, as national-insider who confers with prominent Genocide Studies scholars, Anderson had to account for the importance of genocidal intent, raising contradictions that involved culpability for ancestors closer to heart. The chapter analyzes the lecture as an act of epistemic violence against both indigenous audience members and critical whites in attendance. Ultimately, this chapter provides more ways white justice as fairness diverts citizen-scholars away from critical social justice education on the U.S.-Dakota War.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter completes analysis of the two-panel fulcrum designed to balance settler and Dakota p... more This chapter completes analysis of the two-panel fulcrum designed to balance settler and Dakota perspectives in the Conflict and Remembrance traveling exhibit commemorating Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Looking closely into the pedagogy that shaped white students’ writing on “Dakota perspectives,” the chapter shows complex ways students were recruited toward white justice as fairness both in the classroom and in extra-institutional white spaces beyond their instructors’ purview. Textual analysis of student exhibit panels reveals narratives that tell U.S.-Dakota War history authoritatively from above rather than compassionately from below, erasing perspectives of indigenous women and children one student writer hoped to incorporate. Inevitably, this effect sparked reenactment of historic racial divides when the exhibit was unveiled to the public, exposing ways students had been implicitly positioned to defend white (intellectual) property rather than engage critical social justice education on the war.

For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgm... more For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgment about the U.S.-Dakota War rose to the level of an urgent collective need in 2012. Whether balancing perspectives from points of no perspective or presenting "the facts" so that majority-white audiences could decide for themselves what happened in 1862, empowered producers of public knowledge routinely modeled ways of remaining neutral on a situation of injustice and, thus, choosing the side of the oppressor. Below are some examples of white justice as fairness at work: We're not going to get into who was right and who was wrong. We're trying to stay as neutral as we can. (in Ojanpa, 2011)-Jessica Potter, Blue Earth County Historical Society, December 22, 2011 There is no great benefit in trying to weigh who was more at fault during the times that led up to and during the conflict. […] Learning and discussing the facts, as best they can be found and as fairly as possible, should be the goal in this sesquicentennial year.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter examines public demands for “objectivity” and “balance” in Minnesota’s white public ... more This chapter examines public demands for “objectivity” and “balance” in Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War and its effect on public-history work and classroom teaching during the war’s 2012 sesquicentennial. The chapter begins by analyzing a key newspaper editorial from 2012 encouraging citizens to consult “the facts” on the war before taking Dakota people’s claims to historical trauma to heart. The chapter then consults facts from early sources on the war and their use of anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008) discourses to persuade citizens from judging white officials and their extermination campaign against the Dakota in the 1860s. The chapter returns then to modern contexts, analyzing the ongoing influence of anti-Indian-sublime “facts” on public knowledge, including curricular materials commonly understood to be “objective” and “balanced” by well-educated scholars today. The chapter ends by analyzing contradictions experienced by one college student working to achieve “balance” in her public history-writing work.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy The US-Dakota War Re-Examined, 2020

This chapter continues to analyze Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 186... more This chapter continues to analyze Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and its demands for “objectivity” in regional teaching and commemoration. First, the chapter looks at the specter of white victimhood and its power providing certain “facts” designed to silence critical social justice teachings. The chapter then historicizes this effect by going back to the war’s 1912 semicentennial when “old settlers” engaging in public commemoration made bold claims to objectivity while fashioning their collective white identity as epistemologically supreme vis-à-vis Dakota identity. After exploring foundations of this dynamic in settler society’s socio-racial contract, the chapter demonstrates how it lives on in today’s evolved, pluralist forms of teaching and commemoration, with whites positioning themselves as especially “objective,” “balanced,” and “neutral” regarding 1862. The chapter theorizes this impulse as white justice as fairness and provides evidence of it as a pedagogical approach hostile to critical social justice education.

Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy, 2020

This chapter continues analysis of classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War... more This chapter continues analysis of classroom discussion of a critical text on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 led by a seasoned Holocaust scholar teaching in 2012 near where the fighting once took place. First, the chapter pursues silences in the instructor’s classroom pedagogy as she deftly avoided aspects of the assigned reading covering the genocide of Dakota people. The chapter then brings interview data to bear on instructor silences, finding notions of uniqueness for the Holocaust behind her reluctance to take a clear position in the classroom. Student interview and focus-group data are then analyzed to investigate the pedagogical effects of instructor neutrality, finding much critique but also endorsement of that neutrality. The chapter ends by contextualizing the classroom pedagogy as enactment of a regional white public pedagogy that advocates white justice as fairness, i.e., suspending moral judgment toward symbolic white forebears when studying the racially violent past.

This presentation examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota's white public pedagogy... more This presentation examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota's white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (Lybeck, 2015), focusing specifically on a regional ideology that enforces a hardline separation between facts and opinions. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined today in the state's K-12 Common Core Standards, this separation reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized. These roots include a body of primary-source materials that frame white "victimhood" and Dakota "savagery" as objective facts in order for white citizens and descendants to suspend judgment about injustices committed during their state's founding, events interpreted as acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing today (Mann, 2005; Kiernan, 2007; Waziyatawin, 2008). The presentation proceeds then to review current historiographic work produced by members of a regional settler discourse community (Swales, 2016) that seeks to keep historic separations between "the facts" and moral "opinions" in place, the purpose being to warn the public off knowledge about regional genocide. In the course of reviewing this work, the presentation reveals the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources' dominant discourse, the anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008), a discourse that, as argued, plays a significant role in reproducing public ignorance on the war.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justi... more This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.

Various initiatives are underway in Minnesota and around the country to promote racial consciousn... more Various initiatives are underway in Minnesota and around the country to promote racial consciousness in K-12 teaching (R4615). Some of these show great promise for helping to realize goals related to racial equity and social justice articulated by key professional organizations guiding teacher education and educational research nationwide (AACTE; AERA; AESA).