Deconstructing Power, Privilege, and Silence in the Classroom

2018

2020

enrolled in schools of education. The first portion of the chapter critically examines Mechanics of the Learning Environment, highlighting privilege, bias, racism, and teaching adult learners. The second portion of this chapter, Political Powers, explores opportunities for building critical conversations among higher education faculty and teacher candidates via unheard voices and art. Lastly, this chapter concludes with Suggestions for Faculty, Department Chairs, and Deans who are working tirelessly towards transformative education to grow aspiring educators who not only view themselves as social justice advocates but operate as agents of change within our profession.

English Journal, 2008

Kelly Sassi and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas describe their struggles and eventual success with students in constructing a "counternarrative to colormuteness and colorblindness"--the self-imposed student segregation and silencing of voice. Because of discussions during a Native American unit and student participation in a classroom intervention activity, interpersonal dynamics openly shifted for the better.

2011

This qualitative study focuses on students and instructors who study, teach, and learn critical concepts of identity, such as gender, race, and dis/ability. The participants’ reflections on these university classroom experiences are examined in order to explore the ways they understand their encounters with privilege and power. In classes that take up discussions of identity – critical identity classrooms – the intention is often to teach, study, and learn how (our) identity or identities manifest in social life, how these manifestations can be problematized, and how these explorations can lead to social change. Often, these courses centre on discussing identity in terms of oppression, rather than investigating the intersections of privilege and oppression. A major contention of this study is that a lack of discussion about privilege in the academy enables the pervasive invisibility of many unearned social advantages to remain under-theorized and ‘invisible.’ This study questions ho...

Studies in Philosophy and Education

Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 2017

Ms. Mendez, English Department chair in a large urban high school, has noticed a persistent pattern in the practices of her colleagues. These practices tend to be racially insensitive and emphasize a noncritical view that does not attend to students’ experiences and positions students from a deficit perspective. Realizing that such practices serve as social reproductions of racist and classist orientations that reproduce the existing social order, Ms. Mendez decided school leadership should be informed. However, she worries that the school’s leadership will not work to enact change and instead will take her concerns lightly.

Critical pedagogy invites dialogue among diverse and even clashing perspectives, with a mind toward resolving conflicts between perspectives without privileging any one viewpoint (including the professor or teacher’s presumably more informed expertise on relevant issues). In his reply, Jones argues persuasively that critical pedagogy can be an effective means for learning experiences that are organized around self-reflective encounters with Otherness (e.g., courses related to diversity; self-reflection; conflict management; comparative analyses of culture, etc.). However, in his piece, Jones extends his defense of critical pedagogy more generally. In the following reply, I argue against the minimization of teacher authority in undergraduate classrooms. Drawing upon sociocultural approaches to human development, genuine empowerment occurs when students gain the capacity to use cultural tools to position themselves with reference to the cultures in which they will live and work. Such tools are acquired in language-based interactions between students and more accomplished cultural agents (e.g., teachers, parents, more accomplished peers, etc.). The authority of professors in the classroom is legitimized both by their greater expertise and by their responsibility to educate students. Minimization of the legitimate authority of the teacher runs the risk of disenfranchising the very students that advocates of critical pedagogy seek to empower.

Learning involves the whole person; it implies not only a relation to specific activities, but a relation to social communities-it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person. . . . To ignore this aspect of learning is to overlook the fact that learning involves the construction of identities.

This project examines student–teacher talk, offering findings that show the participating teacher questioning and directing students in routinized ways, with students responding passively and participating in familiar discursive patterns. The study also shows subtle but important shifts in authority that function to unsettle normative teacher–student interaction. Ultimately, this research implies that classroom talk can be steeped in hegemonic practices while demonstrating that critical discourse analysis is an effective means for interrogating social relations and power structures in educational contexts.