August 28, 2005
Defining Race and Pedagogy
Although these terms are often used as though they signified clear and well-bounded meanings, both words have complex histories and implications that are frequently only discernable once one considers the contexts in which they are used. For the purposes of this site, we offer the following definitions:
Race:
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary:
“A division of mankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type”
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994:
“There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate. It is necessary to challenge both of these positions, to disrupt and reframe the rigid and bipolar manner in which they are posed and debated, and to transcend the presumably irreconcilable relationship between them.
The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. With this in mind, let us propose a definition: race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so called “phenotypes”), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historicial process. In contrast to the other major distinction of this type, that of gender, there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race. Indeed, the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves, upon serious examination, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary.
If the concept of race is so nebulous, can we not dispense with it? Can we not “do without” race, at least in the “enlightened” present? This question has been posed often, and with greater frequency in recent years. An affirmative answer would of course present obvious practical difficulties: it is rather difficult to jettison widely held beliefs, beliefs which moreover are central to everyones identity and understanding of the social world. So the attempt to banish the concept as an archaism is at best counterintuitive. But a deeper difficulty, we believe, is inherent in the very formulation of this schema, in its way of posing race as a problem, a misconception left over from the past, and suitable now only for the dustbin of history.
A more effective starting point is the recognition that despite its uncertainties and contradictions, the concept of race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world. The task for theory is to explain this situation. It is to avoid both the utopian framework which sees race as an illusion we can somehow “get beyond,” and also the essentialist formulation which sees race as something objective and fixed, a biological datum. Thus we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than as an illusion. These perspectives inform the theoretical approach we call racial formation.” (54-55)
Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres. After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. New York: New York UP, 2004.
“‘Race’ has no scientific basis, yet racial categorization certainly foregrounds social structure and action. The majority of people in this country continue to believe that they belong to a specific race, and this has an impact on the way they conceive of their social identity. Hence, it can be said that for many racism functions to define Self and Other. This is apparent in racialized discourses of hierarchy, in which members of dominant groups assert their superiority over others, and in racialized discourses of solidarity, in which subordinated groups assert their unity and rights. As such, ‘race may not be a biological fact, but it certainly is a social reality’ (Castles 1996, 22)–a social reality kept alive by the relentless use of ‘race’ to construct meaning within both academic and popular culture” (5).
Pedagogy:
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary:
“the art, science, or profession of teaching.”
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum Press, 1981:
“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information….[B]anking education [i.e. teaching that emphasizes such transfers of data] anesthetizes and inhibits creative power…. [The latter] attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; [the former] strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.
Education as the practice of freedom…denies that [people] are abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract [people] nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world.” (67-68)
Giroux, Henry A. and Peter L. McLaren. “Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique and Anti-Utopianism.” In Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change. Eds. Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991:
“Broadly defined as “the new sociology of education” or a “critical theory of education”…critical pedagogy…attempts to examine schools both in their historical context and as part of the social and political relations that characterize the dominant society…. Taking as one of its fundamental concerns the need to reemphasize the centrality of politics and power in understanding how schools function within the larger society, critical pedagogy has catalyzed a great deal of work on the political economy of schooling, the state of education, the politics of representation, discourse analysis, and the construction of student subjectivity….Recent advances in the sociology of knowledge, the history of consciousness, the critical study of colonial discourse, cultural Marxism, continental social theory, and feminist theory have provoked a conceptual recasting of schools as more than simply instructional sites. They may instead be considered as cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discursive, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle….This new perspective has ushered in a view of the school as a terrain of contestation. Groups from dominant and subordinate cultures negotiate on symbolic terms; students and teaches engage, accept, and sometimes resist how school experiences and practices are named and legitimated. The traditional view of classroom instruction—of learning as a neutral or transparent process antiseptically removed from the concepts of power, politics, history, and context—can no longer be credibly endorsed. In fact, researchers within the critical tradition have given primacy to the categories of the social, cultural, political, and economic, in order to better understand the working of contemporary schooling….Fundamental to the principles that inform critical pedagogy is the conviction that schooling for self-and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology or to a mastery of technical or social skills that are primarily tied to the logic of the marketplace.” (152-53)
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thank you so much for such an outstanding resource. it has really helped me with my own research in art education!
Thank you! The definitions on Race have helped me a lot in my personal project in racism!