Inquiry into Identity- Teaching critical thinking through a study of race, class, and gender.pdf (original) (raw)
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Let's Get Real: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender Identities in the Classroom
This book is a vital resource for any teacher or administrator to help students tackle issues of race, class, gender, religion, and cultural background. Authors Martha Caldwell and Oman Frame, both lifelong educators, offer a series of teaching strategies designed to encourage conversation and personal reflection, enabling students to think creatively, rather than stereotypically, about difference. Using the Transformational Inquiry model, students learn to explore their own identities, share stories and thoughts with their peers, learn more through reading and research, and ultimately take personal, collaborative action to affect social change in their communities.
Although discussion has long played a role in classroom learning, recent focus on moving discussion away from the evaluative and toward the dialogic is key to understanding how discussion can be driven by multiple, shared understandings. Adopting a sociocultural perspective, this dissertation explores the ways in which identity performances shape one teacher and his students' participation in classroom discussions. The theoretical framework guiding this study draws on the relationship between discourse and identities construction, with further attention given to improvisations of identities, figured worlds, and the ways in which power shapes discourse. This dissertation argues that performed identities shape the ways in which discussion participants engaged in critical talk, particularly in how participants develop disagreement, engage in perspective taking, and foster power, agency, and voice in the classroom. Ultimately, this study suggests that it is imperative to consider the ways in which teachers navigate disagreement in the classroom, provide opportunities for students to participate in political discussion, and consider the ways in which participants' identities may shape discussion. vii
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In this paper, we share our work using Intergroup Dialogue (IGD) as critical pedagogical method for increasing group understanding, building relationships across difference, and enhancing social equity. Given limited published work using IGD in high school contexts, we chose to design a qualitative case study implementation that helped us to explore the use of a welldeveloped critical pedagogy in higher education in a related context. We worked with ninth and tenth grade students in their sociology class to explore their personal and social identities and their awareness of gender in society. Our findings show explicit examples of the impact of using IGD to increase intergroup understanding and relationships, providing important transferable knowledge for understanding how to use IGD to enhance empathy across differences of lived experience, background, and perspective.
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This qualitative study focuses on students and instructors who study, teach, and learn critical concepts of identity, such as gender, race, and dis/ability. The participants’ reflections on these university classroom experiences are examined in order to explore the ways they understand their encounters with privilege and power. In classes that take up discussions of identity – critical identity classrooms – the intention is often to teach, study, and learn how (our) identity or identities manifest in social life, how these manifestations can be problematized, and how these explorations can lead to social change. Often, these courses centre on discussing identity in terms of oppression, rather than investigating the intersections of privilege and oppression. A major contention of this study is that a lack of discussion about privilege in the academy enables the pervasive invisibility of many unearned social advantages to remain under-theorized and ‘invisible.’ This study questions ho...
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Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
How can faculty assist and equip students to become more “critical consumers” of the information they receive in a culture and climate of alternative facts and multiple truths? With increasing differences in political views informing “truth perspectives,” the shift in what is quickly becoming normalized as a form of appropriate discourse has fostered a culture of entitlement that lends support to voicing critique without critical inquiry. In this article, we examine the multiple and intersecting systems of power and privilege. The recognition of contradictory subjective locations occupied by all the participants in the classroom, including the instructor, are discussed. As practitioners seeking more effective forms of dialogue and engagement, we challenge conventional hegemonic discourses of difference and stereotypical representations within learning by questioning identity politics within the politics of learning and by examining the clashes between discourse and policy in the uni...
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Cultural studies aims to critique and challenge existing boundaries. Particularly relevant to a discussion of cultural studies in the context of composition pedagogy are the boundaries that exist between minority and dominant cultures, between disciplines, between academic and street cultures, between ethnicities, races, genders and classes, between student texts, literary texts, And other texts, and between representation and the represented. In an upper-level composition course, a writing project shows several cases where students consciously construct representations of their cultural experiences. Most recognize the destabilization of their identities for the first time and consequently do not feel comfortable. One American student of Puerto Rican descent finds herself troubled over her ethnicity. Working from a government-type definition of "Puerto Rican," she realizes that she cannot define herself as such, but then after reading an assigned author, she nevertheless c...