2409 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » 2005 » August

Archive for August, 2005

August 31, 2005

Jay, Gregory and Gerald Graff. “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy.” Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. pp. 201-213.

August 31st 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Jay and Graff argue that critical pedagogy is problematic because it claims to liberate students but in fact only reinforces the “banking” dynamic by forcing progressive ideologies upon students, enforcing a predetermined outcome based upon an assumed true position on the part of the teacher. Oppositional pedagogy makes the same mistake. Instead, the authors recommend a method of “teaching the conflicts,” where the unilateral teacher’s authority in the classroom is balanced by a “counterauthority,” thus opening the possibility for multiple points of view, all of which are laid open to critique. Suggestions for practical application follow. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 30, 2005

Freire, Paolo and Donaldo Macedo. “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race.” Harvard Educational Review. 65.3 (1995) 377-402.

August 30th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

In this dialogue Freire and Macedo discuss several critiques of Freire’s work, elaborating upon the nature of Freire’s dialogical method and upon its implications for and alliance with critiques of race, class and gender oppression. The article is most valuable for Freire’s elaboration upon the concept of dialogics and for its overt address to the issue of race. (Read the article)

2118 Comments(0)

August 29, 2005

Hernandez, Daisy. “Playing with Race.” Hot and Bothered: Sex, Race, Gender. ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action 7.4 (Winter 2004-05).

August 29th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Hernandez reports on an activity in the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) community called “race play.” In race play, participants engage in racist scenarios and employ racist language in order to become aroused. The appearance of race play at BDSM workshops and conferences has prompted a controversy, with opponents both in and outside of the BDSM community arguing that such “play” hits too close to home, because “Racism was institutionalized as social, economic and legal practices, in part, through rape and the white domination of black sexuality.” (Read the article)

Comments(0)

Dean, Tim. “The Germs of Empires: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS.” The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 305-32.

August 29th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality

Dean reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness through its cultural status as a novella whose subject is colonialism. Taking as his point of departure critic Helen Vendler’s comment that a reading of colonialism in Heart of Darkness is “‘anachronistic and patronizing’” (qtd. in Dean 305), Dean addresses the novel’s role in “current controversies over the literary canon, multicultural education, affirmative action, and political correctness” by focusing on “the popular racist idea that Africa is the origin of AIDS” (305). (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 28, 2005

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.

August 28th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7). (Read the article)

Comments(0)

Defining Race and Pedagogy

August 28th 2005 Posted to Announcements

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: (Read the article)

* Comments(2)

August 25, 2005

Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In this book Donato explains that while many scholars have focused on the African American struggle for equal education during the Civil Rights movement, few have focused on the Mexican American community during this period. Donato summarizes this “silent” history, using as his primary example Brownfield School District in northern California. Donato writes that in Brownfield, “The concern for respecting and preserving the cultural identity of Mexican Americans found itself at odds with the traditional values of the Brownfield school system and the larger white community…Despite the claim that Mexican children were being processed by a neutral school system, public schools across the Southwest were rife with ethnic, linguistic and class biases. If one of the prime values of the Brownfield schools was uniformity, then there was an inherent conflict between the organization of schools and the desires of the Mexican American community” (10). (Read the article)

2012 Comments(0)

Rumberger, Russell W. and Gloria M. Rodríguez, “Chicano dropouts: an update of research and policy issues,” Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R.Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 114-146.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In Ch.4 of Valencia’s anthology, Rumberger and Rodríguez address the issue of Chicanos’ high dropout rate, citing the fact that “in 1999 the dropout rate for White, non-Latinos was 7.3 percent, compared to 12.6 percent for Black, non-Latinos and 28.6 percent for Latinos (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001, Table 106)” (Rumberger and Rodríguez 114). Rumberger and Rodríguez examine the individual and institutional factors that contribute to this high dropout rate, identify the economic and social consequences of large numbers of Latino dropouts, and offer several programmatic and policy-based solutions to the dropout problem. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 23, 2005

Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000.

August 23rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Internet, African American, Asian American

Widely acknowledged as a vanguard text on cyberspace race studies, Race in Cyberspace, in collection of twelve essays, directly challenges Internet utopists’ proclamations of an online racial paradise.

The editors begin with an anecdote illustrating how poorly online discourse on race is received, even in critical and mature academic circles. A post on a listserv about a theory positing race as a social, not biological, construct initiated a “flame war,” as the original poster was attacked and labeled a troublemaker for having the audacity to even mention race. The editors were troubled by the fact that the original poster was not attacked for any perceived theoretical flaws, but simply for the act of introducing racial discourse. Online, there seems to be a culture of ignoring race matters. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 22, 2005

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.

August 22nd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy

(page numbers cited here reflect the 2000 reprint of this text, which includes an introduction by Donaldo Macedo, abstracted separately on this site. Following the chapter summaries are suggestions for practical classroom application.)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is probably the single most influential book in the critical pedagogy movement, and it has revolutionized classroom practice across disciplines. The book’s central thesis is that all education should be “co-intentional,” meaning that all members of the classroom, both teachers and students, should engage as active subjects in the examination and critique of knowledge, thereby engaging also in the re-creation of knowledge on a non-oppressive model. It is in dialogue, the encounter of multiple human subjects with each other through language, that change is made possible and that knowledge is created in a non-oppressive fashion. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

— Next Page »

0