Challenging Meritocracy and Other Class Narratives

• In Event: Teaching for Outrage and Empathy: Challenging Preservice Teachers’ Hegemonic Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: My central objective is to look closely at one classroom activity designed to interrupt narratives taken-for-granted by many in US and other capitalist societies, including most pre-service teachers I teach, that sustain the existing distribution of wealth and identify some of the preconditions for provoking outrage at hunger, homelessness and illness in the midst of obscene wealth.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This presentation draws on Foucault’s (1977) idea that power in the modern age operates in subtle ways, invisible to many people, focusing on how classification sustains hierarchies. It also draws on critical pedagogy (Freire, 1993), and critical multiculturalism (May and Sleeter, 2010), emphasizing how hegemonic power reproduces neo-liberal, capitalist, socio-economic hierarchies, and how the educational process may interrupt hegemony.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: This is a self-study of how I and a succession of cohorts of pre-service credential candidates have responded to and learned from an activity I call The Tax Activity that I have used with students for over two decades. This presentation will engage session participants in The Tax Activity, requiring them to come to agreement with two others regarding which of three federal income tax policies they prefer. We explore the issue in terms of two individuals Mr. Gerstner, one-time CEO of IBM, whose income from salary is $18,000,000 yearly, and Maria, who cleans the building where Mr. Gerstner works, and earns $20,000 a year.
I ask the participants to listen during group discussion for the arguments offered for and against each of the options, especially the ones for and against taxing Gerstner at the highest bracket. We eventually identify and evaluate the arguments each participant made initially and the narrative it is embedded in, and the category assumptions underlying each (e.g. who works harder, Gerstner or Maria?)

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: Informal field notes and published papers that analyze my teaching over a period of 20 years, as well as student’s journal responses and comments during classes.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: I analyze the significant attributes of an activity that reveals to participants the narratives that inhabit them, and puts them in a position to assess the lenses through which they consider economic justice. Recognizing the categories through which they apprehend the allocation of resources and privileges (“seeing how they see”) enables them to re-think their “normal” ways of categorizing who is deserving, intelligent, hard working, and worthy.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: I believe that, until teachers have untangled themselves from the class narratives and categories they have come to take as given and often do not even realize inhabit them, they will be unable to teach for social transformation. If Homo Sapiens does, in fact, have an “innate distaste for hierarchical extremes” (Angier, 2011), it is deeply buried and in need of excavation. This presentation clarifies how teachers can promote the excavation process.

Author

• Ann Berlak, Retired