Amanda M Gebhard | University of Regina (original) (raw)

Papers by Amanda M Gebhard

Antiracism in Appreciative inquiry: Generative tensions and collective reflexivity, 2023

Appreciative inquiry is an action research methodology focused on revealing an organization's pos... more Appreciative inquiry is an action research methodology focused on revealing an organization's positive core. As a cross-racial team of antiracist researchers, we were drawn to appreciative inquiry due to its congruences with community-based research perspectives on power-sharing and co-constructing knowledge. Our collaborative reflexivity brought us to question whether Appreciative inquiry's hyper-focus on positivity would fit our antiracist research paradigm. We articulate reflections of how antiracism theory informed our approach to Appreciative inquiry in a study on the experiences of predominantly racialized settlement workers in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explain how we negotiated tensions between Appreciative inquiry's focus on positivity and our antiracist framing, in a Canadian settler colonial context where institutional expectations to ignore racism and collapse diversity, loom large. Without a theoretical framework that attends to racism and power, Appreciative inquiry may not fulsomely address participants' transnational knowledges, nor experiences outside of a positive/ negative binary. In our elucidation of how critical reflexivity on racism allowed us to integrate antiracism into Appreciative inquiry, we demonstrate the value of first-person action research for expanding the social justice aims of research.

Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice, 2021

For newcomer students, inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, including racism, unfold within their ... more For newcomer students, inequities exacerbated by COVID-19, including racism, unfold within their educational landscapes. School settlement workers perform a critical role in newcomer students' educational trajectories. COVID-19 has intensified the importance of school settlement work, yet school settlement workers remain an under-researched and under-recognized group of professionals. Anchored in an anti-racist, multidisciplinary framework, our article traces how COVID-19 measures in schools have magnified inequities for school settlement workers and newcomer students. Our data, drawn from a community-based project, consist of virtual focus groups held with school settlement workers located in a Canadian prairie province during the height of the pandemic, and the findings emerge through a critical approach to the methodology of appreciative inquiry. We illuminate systemic realities to contradict discourses that the pandemic does not discriminate and demonstrate how COVID-19 protocols are used to justify and obfuscate schooling exclusions along racial lines. We analyze themes of (in)visibility of settlement work, whiteness and racism, and resistance through Sara Ahmed's (2012, 2017) metaphor of the brick wall to animate the tensions of settlement work in schools during COVID-19. We conclude with school settlement workers' recommendations to increase recognition of their critical role and to support their work during and beyond the pandemic. We call on institutional wall makers to respond to settlement workers' recommendations and actualize institutional commitments to newcomer students and families.

Whiteness and Education, 2022

This article responds to a university’s anti-discrimination campaign, ostensibly launched to comb... more This article responds to a university’s anti-discrimination campaign, ostensibly launched to combat racism. Taking up poststructural principles and anchored in anti-racism literature, we employ a discourse analysis to examine the truth productions about racism circulated by the campaign, and the subject positions to which they give rise. We analyse the consequences and possibilities for anti-racist action in the light of our argument that the campaign produced the university as an always already anti-racist space, becoming a means to an end to meaningful action. Through themes of belonging, denial, innocence, colour-blindness, and erasure, we demonstrate that the messaging of the campaign aligns with national narratives about Canadian society as free of racial inequity. We bring readers to consider how an anti-discrimination campaign effectively delegitimised the need for anti-racist action, imploring future initiatives to guard against re-inscribing the very forms of inequality they purport to disrupt.

Our Schools, Our Selves, 2020

Studying Teacher Education A journal of self-study of teacher education practices , 2020

This article is inspired by my experience of aiming to teach against oppression on my return to a... more This article is inspired by my experience of aiming to teach against oppression on my return to an elementary school classroom after completing doctoral studies in education. The tensions that surfaced as I attempted to disrupt oppressive school knowledge in my second and third grade classrooms motivated me to engage in self-study. Locating my work within the context of the Canadian Prairies, I answer the question of how power relations both constrained and opened up possibilities for disrupting oppressive discourses circulating in everyday life at school by offering a power/ knowledge analysis of three critical incidents. My analysis traces how power was always at play through competing discourses of Whiteness, femininity, and colour-blindness as I aimed to resist traditional norms around school discipline; work against the privileging of White, male students; and accept the discomfort of talking to my young students about race and racism. By demonstrating how anti-oppressive practices necessitate the disruption of cherished narratives of neutrality and innocence in education, the findings contribute to understandings about what makes antioppressive education both difficult and possible. I emphasize the potential within everyday moments at school for disrupting oppressive discourses and highlight the usefulness of self-study as a tool for learning to teach against oppression as a lifelong endeavour.

This article applies post-structural theories of discourse, power, and performativity to trouble ... more This article applies post-structural theories of discourse, power, and performativity to trouble dominant ways of knowing Aboriginal education in the Canadian Prairies that racialize student subjects. A discourse analysis of interview transcripts traces how discourses of innocent teachers and (im)possible Aboriginal learners deploy the historicity of colonial forces to (re)create the conditions of possibility for exclusionary educational practices. The author employs the concept of ‘impossible student’ to analyse teachers’ negotiation of discourses that position Aboriginal students as everything the ‘good’ student is not, and thus outside the bounds of studenthood – before they even arrive at school. The concept of discursive performatives is used to offer insights into how persistent inequalities in Aboriginal education might be shifted within everyday practices, and to argue the need for rethinking what it means to be a teacher and a learner in a settler society.

Initiatives to improve low levels of educational attainment amongst Indigenous students in the Ca... more Initiatives to improve low levels of educational attainment amongst
Indigenous students in the Canadian Prairies have long emphasized
cultural approaches and ignored how racism affects achievement.
Taking up the debates offered by critical race theory, and utilizing
post-structural theorizing of knowledge and subjectivities, this article
provides a discourse analysis of educators’ contradictory deployments
of cultural discourses. The analysis highlights the inadequacy of
cultural narratives for explaining the inequality experienced by
Indigenous students. I show how naming racism in schools is
difficult for teachers because cultural integration efforts are taken
as evidence that equality is being achieved, and I trace the ways in
which this leads to the naturalization of schooling exclusions and
unequal subjectivities. Readers are brought to rethink the integration
of Indigenous culture in schools as a singular pathway to student
success, and the importance of centering race and racism.

The residential school system is one of the darkest examples of Canada's colonial policy. Educati... more The residential school system is one of the darkest examples of Canada's colonial policy. Education about the residential schools is believed to be the path to reconciliation; that is, the restoration of equality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada. While the acquisition of the long-ignored history of residential schools has the potential to centre marginalized perspectives and narratives, knowledge acquisition alone is not necessarily a reconciliatory endeavour. The critical discourse analysis offered in this article reveals how dominant narratives about residential schools, cited by well-meaning educators, re-inscribe harmful colonial subjectivities about Aboriginal peoples. Through a post-structural lens and drawing from interviews conducted across one prairie province, I demonstrate how citing popular, contemporary discourses about residential schools continues to racialize Aboriginal peoples while positioning non-Aboriginal peoples as supportive and historically conscious. Readers are brought to think about how learning about residential schools for reconciliation might be approached as the disruption of subjectivities and the refusal to (re)pathologize Aboriginal peoples. Otherwise, efforts at reconciliation risk re-inscribing the racism that justified residential schools in their inception.

Book Reviews by Amanda M Gebhard

Canadian Journal of Education, 2018

Have you ever questioned the usefulness of labels such as "at-risk," "special needs," or "underac... more Have you ever questioned the usefulness of labels such as "at-risk," "special needs," or "underachiever" that are used to describe the young people in your teaching context? Have you ever been part of a conversation where speakers made assumptions about a young person's abilities due to race, class, gender, or ability? Have you ever questioned simplistic rationales for inequality that blame young people and forestall conversations seeking more fully informed explanations? Have you ever considered how language shapes young people's lives in their classrooms and outside school walls? My personal answer is yes, to all of the above. I have most often considered these questions in the context of conversations about Indigenous students. Mica Pollock's Schooltalk: Rethinking what we say about-and to-students every day provides readers with a detailed account of how the language used to describe young people in everyday conversations is inseparable from the opportunities they are offered inside and outside of school. The book goes on to detail concrete suggestions for interrupting harmful discourses and redesigning how we talk about young people. Schooltalk continues Pollock's long record of research into educators' daily efforts toward antiracism and equality. She brings complex theories to

Books by Amanda M Gebhard

White Benevolence Fernwood Publishing, 2022

McLean's chapter “Toxic Encounters: What’s Whiteness Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?” is a... more McLean's chapter “Toxic Encounters: What’s Whiteness Doing in a Nice
Field Like Education?” is a provocative piece that extends the literature
on racism in education by examining whiteness in the context of public
schools. McLean’s research on racism in high schools illustrates how
white teachers actively perpetuate racism and protect white supremacy.
McLean demonstrates that racism is neither random nor rare, evidenced
by patterns of whiteness that create a toxic climate of racial hostility for
Indigenous students. McLean examines how white dominance is maintained through everyday performances of whiteness in school systems and makes explicit the role white teachers play in patterns of racial violence. The forms of whiteness examined in this chapter are not unique to public education, and McLean encourages readers to recognize similar practices of whiteness across institutional and social space

When working with Indigenous people, the helping professions —education, social work, health care... more When working with Indigenous people, the helping professions —education, social work, health care and justice — reinforce the colonial lie that Indigenous people need saving. In White Benevolence, leading anti-racism scholars reveal the ways in which white settlers working in these institutions shape, defend and uphold institutional racism, even while professing to support Indigenous people. White supremacy shows up in the everyday behaviours, language and assumptions of white professionals who reproduce myths of Indigenous inferiority and deficit, making it clear that institutional racism encompasses not only high-level policies and laws but also the collective enactment by people within these institutions. In this uncompromising and essential collection, the authors argue that white settler social workers, educators, health-care practitioners and criminal justice workers have a responsibility to understand the colonial history of their professions and their complicity in ongoing violence, be it over-policing, school push-out, child apprehension or denial of health care. The answer isn’t cultural awareness training. What’s needed is radical anti-racism, solidarity and a relinquishing of the power of white supremacy.

“White Benevolence is a powerful collection scrutinizing the myriad ways racism in Canada manifests, is sustained, and is perpetuated in our systems of power and in social, political and economic relations. This panoptic collection is a clarion call for Canadians to wake up and dispense, once and for all, with the delusion that Canada is racism free. This is a must-read for students, educators and the general public.”

— Raven Sinclair, professor, writer, filmmaker and editor of Wicihitowin: Aboriginal Social Work in Canada

“Interrogating the relation between the ‘helping professions’ and the production of white racial power, this much-needed work exposes the everyday violence that permeates Canada’s social institutions. This book is an essential and timely read for educators and activists, and for social workers and policy makers.”

— Dr. Sunera Thobani, Professor, Department of Asian Studies, UBC

“White Benevolence makes a major contribution to understandings of historical and contemporary practices of violence in the helping professions. It interrogates the operationalization of claims to innocence, while being deeply implicated in systems of colonialism and white supremacy. It should be a foundational text for anyone working in and against formal systems of social working, including education, healthcare and social work.”

— AJ Withers, author of Fight To Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing (2021) and Disability Politics and Theory (2012)