Racializing and Historicizing Grade Levels

• In Event: Racial and Gender Politics of Schooling

Abstract

This paper focuses on the concept of grade levels as hegemonic constructions used to understand and organize educational practice in ways that function to reproduce particular privileges and oppressions. We argue that contemporary logics of grade levels rely on unchecked and unacknowledged Eurocentric forms of cultural advantage, reproducing white supremacy through repeated patterns of normalizing and essentializing conceptions of who is universalizable and why. We contend that a better, more deeply contextualized sense of the racial history of the concept of grade levels can offer additional resources in our ongoing efforts to affect a more socially just educational experience for all peoples.

Authors

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College

• Shannon McManimon, Viterbo University