Navigating the Freirean Classroom: Democratic Learning, Antiracist Curricula, and Teacher/Student Positionalities

• In Event: 25.067 - Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: 25.067-3 - Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Navigating Whiteness

Abstract

Objective
In using critical pedagogy to teach racial justice, educators must often navigate two contradictory goals within its practice. On the one hand, in order to avoid “banking” knowledge into students, critical educators advocate a democratic, constructivist approach by which students construct knowledge from their own experiences (Freire, 1970). At the same time, critical educators also want students to develop an explicitly anti-racist critique of the social order (Leonardo, 2005). This leads to a dilemma: how should educators respond when “critical” thinking does not lead to the “critical” conclusions that they advocate (ie, ones that challenge racism and other systems of oppression)? This chapter addresses this paradox by interrogating my positionality and experiences as a queer Asian-American activist-educator using critical pedagogy to teach racial justice in a classroom comprised mostly of White and Asian American teacher education students at an elite public university.

Theoretical Framework
Freirean and feminist scholars have long argued that personal experience is key to the development of knowledge and truth: only when students feel their voices valued do shifts in racial ideology occur. At the same time, Kathleen Weiler has noted that “there are contradictions in­volved in claiming that…emotions are a source for knowledge and at the same time arguing that they are manipulated and shaped by dominant discourses” (Weiler, 1991, p.463). The same is true for experience. This chapter uses the feminist perspective that there is no such thing as a truly democratic or non-hierarchical space in a world structured by racial oppression (Smith, 2013) to examine how teacher educators respond to racial discourses in the classroom that are drawn from student experiences, yet mediated by relations of power within the larger sociopolitical context.

Methods and Data
This study uses ethnography and autoethnography as a means for systematically analyzing personal experiences in order to understand wider cultural, political, and social meanings (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Using social design (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), the researcher is also an involved participant in organizing the learning ecology of the classroom, as the instructor of the course. The course itself is premised on a Freirean framework, using an anti-racist curriculum, while also privileging the construction of knowledge from experience.Data that inform this discussion include classroom dialogues recorded over a year-long period, semi-structured interviews, researcher field notes, and content analysis of student written assignments.

Scholarly Significance
This study finds that negotiating between democratic learning, anti-racist objectives, and teacher/student positionalities requires constant navigation. Because the presumed “equality” of student voice is already mediated by racialized structures, strategic decisions to highlight the voices of students of Color, even at the cost of failing to create a “non-hierarchical” classroom, may better serve democratic goals. Moreover, critical educators can leverage their own positionalities to uplift race as a political – rather than cultural or biological – construct, and thus empower students to see themselves as agents of social change. Through navigating the classroom as a site of struggle, critical educators might fulfill Freire’s vision of education as “the practice of freedom” (Freire, 1970).

Author

• Joanne Tien, University of California - Berkeley