Identity Politics and the Politics of Learning (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
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...
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 how it is that we come to understand concepts of identity to be one-dimensional, rather than understanding privilege as dynamic and situated. Using in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students and 8 instructors from 2 contrasting universities, this study explores 3 main questions: (1) How do students in higher education who are engaged in critical identity studies interpret privilege, both for others and themselves? (2) How do the participants understand their experiences inside and outside the classroom to be related to notions of privilege and oppression that often arise in critical identity classrooms? (3) How does using a multi-site approach to study critical identity classroom experiences extend the ways in which students’ understandings of privilege can be explored? Using these research questions, the intersections of space/location, power, and identities as they inform notions of privilege and oppression are demonstrated. The participants’ reflections expose how questions of belonging, safety, and ‘place’ contribute to the silences around the study of privilege. The study suggests that understanding privilege and oppression as located within the same network of relations, rather than as binary opposites, will aid in making privilege more accessible as a topic of study in critical identity classrooms.
Deconstructing Power, Privilege, and Silence in the Classroom
Radical History Review, 2008
While teaching about race, ethnicity, and class from a critical pedagogical standpoint, we might not only encounter student resistance to learning about systems of domination but we should also be aware of the ways in which power, privilege, and exclusion in the larger society may be reproduced in our own classrooms. In this article, we recount how we used freewriting and discussions in an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics in an upper-division seminar on Latinas/os and education. Though a majority of the students in the course were first-generation Latinas, several middle-and upper-middle-class White students tended to participate the most. This dynamic resulted in a situation in which class discussions were steered away from the focus on Latinas/os and unequal educational practices to a perspective that reinforced an ideology of equality and a climate that privileged dominant modes of classroom communication. Since these patterns were precisely the ones the course topics and readings were meant to deconstruct, we turned the gaze onto the classroom as we observed the reproduction of inequality there and used freewriting and discussions to uncover the unequal ways in which students were experiencing the space.
Intellectuals Rethinking Politics of Difference: A Pedagogical Project
Discourse of Sociological Practice Journal, Volume 7, Issues 1&2, 2005
We live in an era marked by an ever-increasing anti-intellectualism that is manifested in almost every aspect of public and private life. From the flat rejection of theory in the ranks of teachers and educators to the vocalization and corporatization of higher education, to the conservative call for the oxymoron "political neutrality," to the U.S. political debate where to be an "intellectual" is often considered a liability, we are witnessing the demise of intellectualism as a democratic force that should shape and inform all public spheres.
Resisting the Binary Divide in Higher Education: The Role of Critical Pedagogy
The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2018
The article explores the landscape in higher education in which old binary divisions are officially denied yet have been reinvigorated through mix of conservative and neo-liberal policies. Efforts to resist such pressures can happen at different levels, including, in this case, module design and classroom practice. The rationale for such resistance is considered in relationship to the authors’ political and moral standpoints. Debates within higher education policy circles are invariably reduced to a series of oppositions: theory and practice; training and education; research and teaching. The article seeks to break down such polarities through an exploration of classroom practice. In fact, we argue that such distinctions help to legitimize the existing inequalities in higher education and groubased harms, which characterize the sector. Instead, a case is made for a pedagogy that enables students, particularly those from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds, to use their experiences...
Power, Identity, and the Construction of Knowledge in Education
This paper explores the social construction of knowledge, identity formation, and the ways in which the education system supports dominant societal ideology. I examine how dominant historical and societal ideologies are deeply cultivated and facilitated through education systems, including forcefully through the residential school system and, in many cases, subtly through post-secondary education. Further, I identify the method in which personal biases, predisposed by dominant social influence, are subconsciously reflected in the classroom through micro-aggressive behaviour. Weber's (2010) framework of themes provides a comprehensive perspective from which to understand the nature in which identity is influenced by dominant societal ideology. Finally, I analyze the social construction of knowledge, development of identity, and support of dominant ideology through Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Foucault's theory of discourse. The discussion then shifts to describe how conscientization and critical reflection can provide a step forward towards diminishing dominant societal ideology within the educational environment and create a path to embracing Freire's concept of liberating education.
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2011
In K–12 schools throughout the United States, policies intended to increase student achievement, such as those associated with No Child Left Behind, often propagate deficit notions about minoritized students and overlook the interdependence of students’ identities, academic achievement, and classroom contexts. The classroom is an evaluative school setting in which students construct and negotiate multiple identities that are shaped by their ascribed and/or assumed positions as learners and achievers. This article explores how an identities-in-practice theory can reframe pivotal critical and poststructural debates on achievement and curriculum by problematizing conceptions of students’ multiple identities in the interest of education for social justice. Conceptualizing identities as multiple, intersectional, and contextual, as well as mediated by mainstream academic discourses, allows educators to consider how raced, classed, abled, and gendered identities (among many others), shape and inform experiences of curriculum and achievement for minoritized students in U.S. schools.
2016
AbstractI suggest here that introductory Gender and Women’s Studies courses must teach students the narratives that feminism tells about itself and of related activist movements and that we also must engage students in critiquing these very narratives. Drawing from Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) Object Lessons and Sara Ahmed’s (2012a) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, I argue that feminist teachers must critically interrogate our utilization of discourses of identity and diversity in the feminist classroom.ResumeJe suggere ici que les cours d’introduction aux Etudes sur le genre et les femmes doivent enseigner aux etudiantes les discours que le feminisme fait sur lui-meme et les mouvements activistes associes et que nous devons egalement inciter les etudiantes a critiquer ces discours. En m’appuyant sur les articles Object Lessons (2012) de Robyn Wiegman et On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)de Sara Ahmed, j’affirme que les ensei...