"Authority Must Be on the Side of Freedom": The Relationship Between Teachers' Authority and BIPOC Students' Political Agency in Challenging Racism

• In Event: Education and the Political: The Possibilities of Civic Education in an (Un)Democratic World

Abstract

Defining critical consciousness as the ability to recognize oppressive social forces impacting one’s life and to take action against them (Freire, 2000), we conceptualize critical consciousness as having three components: social analysis, social action, and political agency (Watts, Diemer, Voight, 2013). Social analysis refers to the ability to name and analyze the social, political, and economic forces that contribute to inequity and inequality. Social action refers to a wide range of activities through which individuals seek to resist and challenge oppressive forces. Political agency refers to the belief that they can engage in action to counter oppressive social forces.

Part of a larger study that set out to outline strategies that schools from a variety of pedagogical approaches employed to nurture Black and Latinx students’ abilities to analyze, navigate, and challenge racism, our team conducted longitudinal and mixed methods research in five different high schools that measured whether students’ critical consciousness was developing and how the schooling they received impacted their critical consciousness development over four years of high school. We applied latent growth models to five waves of survey data to consider change over time in participating students’ (n = 643) critical consciousness. Additionally, we collected four waves of interviews with a subset of students (n = 50) and analyzed them to consider students’ descriptions of their developing critical consciousness. Lastly, we conducted over 350 full-day classroom observations of at each of the schools to document the ways these schools sought to further develop their students’ critical consciousness.

While each of the schools illuminated promising practices for nurturing students’ critical consciousness across these different components, they also revealed how schools were relatively more or less reflective about the ways their teachers and staff exercised authority over/with their students when they sought to take action against racism inside or outside of school. Building on work by Freire (2000), Levinson and Fey (2019), and hooks (1994), this paper argues that educators who enact authority from a place of reciprocity will be more effective in equipping students with a sense of political agency. In other words, educators who relinquished traditional hierarchical models of authority, and who built their authority with their students on the basis of reciprocity, were best positioned to empower students to analyze racism and ultimately resist it. More specifically, educators who were reflective about their own positionalities, paired the study of racism with resistance strategies, and who made space for students to resist racism, enacted a type of authority that creates authentic opportunities for the Black and Latinx students they taught to feel capable and confident of resisting against racism inside and outside of school.

Author

• Daren Graves, Simmons University