Got Privilege: Challenging Dominant Ideologies of Race, Class, and Gender From a Position of Male Privilege

• In Event: Applying Critical Methodologies to Curriculum by Male Educators in Predominantly Female Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

Rationale
Historically, the teaching force has been largely white, middle class, and female (Zumwalt & Craig, 2005), but growing evidence suggests that recent pre-service cohorts are becoming racially diverse (Castro, 2010). Despite changing demographics and evidence to suggest that current and future preservice teachers are more open to cultural diversity than their predecessors (Castro, 2010), research still suggests that many continue to harbor negative views, stereotypes, and biases against students of color (Castro, 2010; Nieto, 2010). If preservice teachers hold these beliefs, one can surmise that based on decades of labeling theory research, expectations, and outcomes will be lowered for their students (Brown, 1968; Jackson & Cosca, 1974; Rubovits & Maehr, 1973). Over the past two decades, critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy have been touted as two forms of instruction to better support preservice teachers’ ability to educate urban students of color. Critical pedagogy, in this context, will be defined as "Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129). Though conceptually powerful and potentially transformative, the actual practice of teaching these theories have often languished in traditional direct-instruction models and/or unstructured discussions with little to no facilitation for genuine discourse.

Theoretical Framework
Using the three main tenets of culturally responsive pedagogy (1) academic success, (2) cultural competency and (3) critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 2009), and critical pedagogy, teachers can recognize their position in society, as it relates to privilege and power. By doing so, they can take ownership over any inequalities they may perpetuate by virtue of their citizenship to dominant groups (Freire, 1993).

Methods and Data Sources
The structure of the course exposed preservice teachers to non-traditional classroom structures that valued participant involvement and instructional methodologies that highlight the teacher educator as facilitator. Participants engaged in activities that supported multiple methods of learning, collaborating, questioning and challenging of the status quo. This included explicit meta-cognitive analyses of classroom discourses, structures and the various positionalities of the participants and the instructor.
Data was collected in a foundations course for fifteen preservice teachers. The course focused on the social context of urban schools. This was their second course in their teacher education program. Lesson plans, participant reflections, essays, and class observations were analyzed for themes and frequency using grounded theory and critical discourse analysis.

Results and Significance
Findings suggest participants developed a more robust understanding of institutional sexism, classism, racism, and the experiences of materially unprivileged, urban students of color through non-traditional class structure that privileged openness and honesty in class activities, reflections, and essays. By utilizing the privileges afforded to me as a male teacher educator, I surfaced privileges that we possess and used it as a model to counter dominant ideologies as a means toward genuine praxis and transformative education.

Author

• Clifford H. Lee, Saint Mary's College of California