Critical Exploration of Failure: A Reconstructive Horizon Analysis of One Oppressive Moment

• In Event: Courageous Conversations: The Power and Possibilities of Participatory Inquiry With Youth

Abstract

Nietzsche proclaimed that “the surest way to corrupt youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently” (1911/2019). Over a century later, scholars continue to expose ways that education can cause harm (Bourdieu, 1977; Giroux, 1983; Olson, 2009). Yet the system of education in the United States, including higher education, remains normative and standardized in its design, systems, and goals (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991; Au, 2008). This paper examines how harmful dynamics can persist even in spaces dedicated to fostering expression and challenging inequitable norms in schooling.
The purpose of the larger youth participatory action research project from which this paper draws was to engage and collaborate with an intergenerational group of co-researchers in varying roles (professor, teacher, student) in order to arrive at new, multiple understandings of equity, justice, and safety and incorporate those into our everyday actions, being, and knowing. This paper reports on one experience we had during a day of art workshops, through which we hoped to foster liberating and healing moments for the participating students and for those who experienced their exhibits and performances. However, during the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979, 1995) workshop, adults deferred to time constraints as they denied a youth co-researcher the opportunity to enact his oppressive vignette, despite the activity’s explicit purpose of interrogating unjust norms.
This paper examines the dynamics of the workshop using reconstructive horizon analysis (RHA) (Carspecken, 1996; Call-Cummings, Hauber-Özer, & Ross, 2019; Ross & Call-Cummings, 2019) of reflections from student, teacher, and university co-researchers, transcripts from follow-up conversations, and collective analysis methods such as priority sorting (Chambers, 2002). As an analytic approach grounded in critical ethnography, RHA first deconstructs dialogic artifacts as meaning fields, an exhaustive list of possible meanings, which are then compared across the text. Attributes are then sorted into validity claims – objective, subjective, normative, or identity claims – and along a pragmatic horizon as explicit/foregrounded, mid-grounded, or implicit/backgrounded. Results of this analysis revealed strongly rooted power inequities despite the explicit commitments of the adult facilitators to sharing power with youth participants. For instance, we saw a highly oppressive yet backgrounded norm of overt racism while foregrounding this dangerous, erroneous thinking as something invisible that permeates social interactions and is superficially experienced as normal social structure.
This paper finds that participatory researchers are not immune to this socialization. We argue that it is not enough to know of the existence of oppressive social systems – we must understand our positions within these structures as both oppressor and oppressed (Freire, 1970/2000) in order to create spaces of liberation, rather than run the risk of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1960) described as the most dangerous of mental states, that of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” (p. 407). Ultimately, this work aims to transform ourselves and our realities, moving from limiting, constricting social norms and toward liberation of all.

Authors

• Maria Rybicki-Newman, George Mason University

• Jeffrey Blibo