Niceness and the Reproduction of Inequity: The (Im)Perfect Storm of Whiteness, Middle-Classness, and Cis-Femaleness in School Contexts

• In Event: A Culture of Nice: How Educators’ Niceness Holds Inequities in Place

Abstract

This paper explores the culture of “niceness” as it manifests in a teacher education program (elementary) in a College of Education in the American southwest. This is largely a theoretical project, drawing on observational and anecdotal data over 10 years of teaching in a College of Education (Author 1) and autoethnographic inquiry into classroom experiences as a student (Author 2) “on the margins” (Eisner, 1998; Ellis et al, 2010). It examines the discursive terrain and ideological frames accessed and deployed by elementary teacher candidates as they resist the constructs of critical pedagogy and the positioning of social justice issues at the center of teachers’ work. With elementary teacher candidates coming from predominantly white, female identities, the culture that pervades and shapes the College of Education and its Teacher Education program exudes “niceness” – characterized, in part, by a seemingly charitable but illusory tolerance for individual differences, a fetishized reverence for individual opinions, and a pathological avoidance of conflict. (Bissonnette, 2016; Boser, 2014; Carby, 1997; Castagno, 2014; Hess, 2009; Saltman, 2014)

In the current context, teachers are forcefully faced with the challenge of drawing their students into critique of an ever-hardening totalitarianism feeding on the dispossessed and marginalized in this country and across the globe (Morgensen, 2011). This is a powerful challenge. The contexts of teacher education and the teaching profession – immersed in a feminized culture of “niceness” – intersect with the anti-intellectualism of corporate school reform and its attendant attack on democratic life and the impoverishment of citizenship (Bissonnettee, 2016; Duggan, 2003). These elements serve as a perfect storm as the state legitimized curriculum and the classrooms in which it is disseminated serve as locations for the ritualized reproduction of colonizing ideologies (Smith, 2011).

We posit that the politics of “niceness” in the western classroom is not simply an artifact of the ignorance/innocence of the white, mono-linguistic, female-assigned bodies that overwhelmingly occupy practitioner positions in the educational-industrial complex nor is it simply a consequence of a patriarchal condition, where the feminization of female-assigned bodies meets the feminization of child and student development. Rather, it is an intentional, calculated aggression toward the colonized bodies and lands upon which public education executes its practices. Such forces manufacture and then utilize the privileged but feminized socialization experienced by white females to reinforce and naturalize the concepts of whiteness that hegemonic powers seek to internalize among subjugated individuals and cultures (Richardson, 2015; Saltman, 2014).

Classroom practitioners are not only corrupted by the power of whiteness and its sustaining mechanisms such as niceness, they are, quite literally, produced by them (Butler, 1999). The predominance of prospective practitioners find themselves complicit in their adherence to these reinforcing norms, including institutional complacency with cis-white- male authority, social aversion to confrontation, and a liberal individualism designed to relieve the recipients of white privilege of the reality of racial and cross-cultural violence (Castagno, 2014). Consequently, the feminization/pacification of the western classroom is an ideological tool that purposefully reproduces the status quo, strengthened by standardization and nurtured through neo-liberal epistemologies.

Authors

• Joseph C. Wegwert, Northern Arizona University

• Aidan/Amanda J Charles, Northern Arizona University