Teaching Racial Justice Through Critical Pedagogy: Navigating Teacher and Student Positionalities in the Democratic Classroom

• In Event: Freireian Dilemmas: Confronting Contradictions in the Practice of Critical Pedagogy and Participatory Action Research in Undergraduate Curriculum

Abstract

Objective:

Despite critical pedagogy’s increasing popularity, many of its internal contradictions remain unresolved. Critical pedagogues advocate a democratic, constructivist approach to learning, while at the same time expecting students to develop an explicit critique of the social order (Freire, 1998; Shor, 1992). The use of such a constructivist approach for the pursuit of explicit ideological goals leaves critical educators with a dilemma: what happens when students’ experiences don’t lead them to conclusions that challenge oppression? This study will address this paradox by exploring the tensions that arise in using critical pedagogy to teach racial justice in a multicultural classroom at an elite public university. In particular, the paper examines how students’ positionalities affect their navigation of race dialogue and the maintenance of “democratic” classroom space, and vice versa.

Theoretical Framework:

This project draws on feminist epistemologies that reject claims to universality and traditional notions of objectivity (Noddings, 1998). In fact, standpoint theorists argue that dominant groups are especially poorly equipped to identify the oppressive features of their own beliefs because their life experiences do not provide them with the resources to do so (Hill Collins, 2000; Harding & Norberg, 2005). Feminists seek to be politically and ethically accountable to non-dominant groups, “studying up” – the powerful, their institutions, policies, and practices – rather than positioning non-dominant groups as “objects” of research (Harding & Norberg, 2005). Thus, this paper uses the feminist perspective that there is no such thing as a non-hierarchical space in a world structured by racialized systems (Smith, 2013), as its analytic lens.

Methods:

This project uses data collected from four different sections of an undergraduate course. In one of these classes, the researcher was also a participant-observer, acting as the instructor of the course. The course itself is premised on a Freireian framework, using a curriculum that is designed to prepare undergraduates with a foundational understanding of intersecting systems of oppression, with particular attention paid to race, while also privileging the construction of knowledge from experience and the creation of a democratic classroom.

Data that inform this discussion include classroom dialogues recorded over a semester-long period, semi-structured interviews, researcher field notes, and content analysis of student written assignments. Sources were triangulated and analyzed using open-ended and focused thematic coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007).

Preliminary Findings and Scholarly Significance:

This project finds that classrooms pre-defined as “democratic” can actually hinder students’ engagement with race dialogue because it gives them permission to disengage from conversations when their racial ideologies are threatened. At the same time, this finding also demonstrates the importance of student input in structuring race dialogue. Only when students felt their voices valued did shifts in racial ideology occur. The study concludes that teachers must make decisions about when some voices should be highlighted over others in order to pursue liberatory goals. At the same time, teachers must challenge rather than silence dominant discourses. In so doing, this work contributes to literature that helps educators practice critical pedagogy in ways that uphold its liberatory goals, while navigating its contradictions.

Author

• Joanne Tien, University of California - Berkeley