There Is No Neutrality in a Foxhole: Teaching Critical Thinking "Objectively" in High Schools

• In Event: Playing It Safe in Volatile Times: Teacher Neutrality When Teaching About Trump and Economic Inequality

Abstract

Educational research and broad, public discourse routinely convey ideas that conservatives favor “neutral,” fact-based approaches to teaching that focus on workplace preparation (Lautzenheiser et al., 2011), while liberals push for a civic-minded education that is explicitly value-laden, promoting pluralistic tolerance and democratic citizenship (Au, 2009; Westheimer, 2015). Within this context, teachers have reported severely constrained classroom discussions, caused in part by aversions to airing any perspective that may counter the dominant (and frequently homogenous) political ideologies of their surrounding communities (Journell, 2012). Teachers must also contend with the politicization of teaching that commonly portrays highly complex classroom interactions in reductive and narrow ways. It is worth questioning how teaching from a “neutral” perspective has been mistakenly conflated with teaching “objectively,” even when, as Harding (1992) writes, “The neutrality requirement is not just ineffective at maximizing objectivity; it is an obstacle to it” (p. 580). It may seems unlikely then, that a teacher who self-identifies as “neutral” may effectively describe the democratic (and politically left-leaning) aims of student autonomy and the skills of reason and fairness as the paramount goals of their teaching. On the other hand, some critical educators argue that teacher neutrality prevents examining and analyzing any topic deemed to be a potential threat to dominant values or dominant groups, such as the immutable faith in unfettered, free markets and meritocracy hath wrought—beliefs that require interrogation in light of the 228 percent gap in income growth between the top 10 and bottom 50 percent of Americans over the past forty years (Piketty, Saez, & Zucman, 2016).

This paper begins by describing teachers’ explanations for their “neutral” or value-laden positions when addressing controversial issues in the classroom, before examining how these decisions helped shape and were shaped by their learning goals and pedagogical strategies. During Summer 2016, we conducted 136 teacher interviews with participants across the U.S. and Canada, with a focus on teaching about economic inequality, though given the political tenor of the time, many teachers also shared examples referring to the presidential election. We specifically asked teachers to describe when, how, and why they made decisions to either share or withhold their personal values when teaching about controversial topics. Drawing on these interviews, we report initial findings from a thematic coding scheme, where responses were grouped in three ways: categorical neutrality, implicit disclosure (i.e., awareness that the choice of texts or topics reveals some degree of disclosure), and explicit disclosure. Our initial findings indicate that teachers’ views about neutrality, their goals for student learning, and their decisions about when, where, and how to withhold or disclose their personal views, are far from the straightforward, narrow ways described above. Rather, the descriptions provided by participating teachers amount to a web, interweaving through ideological dispositions, differing conceptions of the teachers’ role, and classroom or communitywide contextual factors.

Authors

• Anthony A Berryman, University of California - Los Angeles

• Agata Soroko, University of Ottawa