Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
Adams, David Wallace. “Fundamental Considerations: The Deep Meaning of Native American Schooling, 1880-1900,” Harvard Educational Review. 58.1 (1988) 1-28. (Read the article)
In this article Sleeter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of multicultural teacher education programs. She begins by noting that the teaching population in the U.S. is becoming increasingly white, even as the student population grows increasingly diverse. Sleeter argues that while multicultural teacher education is somewhat effective at raising white teachers’ awareness of racial issues, the only way to reverse institutional racism is to draw more teachers of color into the teaching profession. (Read the article)
In this, one of his most influential books, Bourdieu describes how systems of education reproduce the cultural dominance of the ruling class. Drawing on the theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Bourdieu points to the examination, academic language and certification as ways of concealing the class inequality inherent in the School as an institution. While the first half of his book is primarily theoretical, the second half draws on research conducted in French schools and universities. (Read the article)
This bibliography, a selection of texts appropriate to this category but which have yet to be abstracted for the site, is a work constantly in progress and should be considered partial. Suggested additions are not only welcomed, but solicited. The title of the bibliography intentionally addresses multiple categories on the RPP site since these three categories are so closely linked. Some of these texts will inevitably cross over into additional categories as well. As titles are abstracted and posted as a separate entry on the RPP site, they will be removed from this list. (Read the article)
This essay examines the tactical play with Native American stereotypes enacted by Native American students in a course taught by Owens in 1991 at UC Santa Cruz. This course, devoted to the Native American novel, was unusual in Owens’ experience because the Native American students made up a significant portion of the class; they took advantage of this situation by exercising their knowledge and authority with the cultural material in such a way as to displace the expectations, including what Owens calls the “literary tourism,” of the participating EuroAmerican students. The essay shifts between an analysis of the Native American students’ discourse, and an examination of the trauma negotiated by the EuroAmerican students. (Read the article)
In this indispensable and highly influential book, bell hooks (the writing persona of Gloria Watson) writes essays in the varying forms of feminist personal narratives and/or dialogues, based on her experience as a black woman (both student and teacher) in an educational system dominated by a white male ethos. The essays all strive to break down that structure of domination. “Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the act of freedom.” (11)
Hooks’ work is informed by both feminist pedagogies and the Marxist critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (see his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, abstracted on this site). In the introduction hooks discusses where these pedagogies took her and also the point at which she believes they failed. They lent her the tools to eschew the submission to authority and rote memorization occurring in what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and to practice in their place critical thinking and a democratic classroom engagement with the object of knowledge. But hooks suggests that even these critical systems fail to acknowledge the radical value of the pleasure of learning, particularly in higher education. (Read the article)
Tsolidis argues that “schooling, particularly secondary schooling, is a significant site for processes of identification,” and that gender is a particularly significant part of these processes (10). Arguing as a feminist but from a diasporic position as an ethnic minority in Australia, Tsolidis endorses a feminism that does not “assume a unitary voice”: “My overall intention is to argue that it is possible and valuable to be both feminist and different” (3, 2). She writes as an antiracist feminist, and turns to education as a significant site for “potential means of changing both society and the lives of individuals” (4). Because schooling provides such an important context for adolescent identity formation, Tsolidis’ focus on secondary education has implications for identity—and society—at large. (Read the article)
2130Yarbro-Bejarano writes about the continuing marginalization of lesbian and gay issues within American ethnic studies, and notes that the underlying problem is the way in which categorical areas of study “focus on one issue, whether it be gender, race, class, or sexuality, as if it existed separately from the others” (127). Instead of employing a strategy such as “inclusion,” Yarbro-Bejarano suggests “a relational theory of difference that examines identity formation in the dynamic interpenetration of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation” (128). (Read the article)
Differentiating between obsessional and hysteric neuroses as defined by Freud and as gendered by Irigaray, Cummings argues that an obsessional (masculine) economy dominates “pop” humanity-defense pedagogy books from Irving Babbitt’s 1908 Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities to works such as E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know and Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. (Read the article)
Starting at Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (1983) along with related theories of speech/discourse communities and subcultural communities (for which shared languages are an important identifying factor), Pratt argues for an understanding of community as partaking in a “linguistics of contact.” While those other theories are correct to suggest that imagined communities contribute to the formation or reinforcement of utopian and idealized systems, practicing a politics of exclusion which perpetuates modes of domination, what they fail to do is “see the dominant and the dominated in their relations to each other.” (56) Pratt argues that there is always a fluid interrelation between all such totalized communities through “contact zones,” or the places in which different discourse communities interact. Though Pratt does not say it here, one of those spaces is certainly in the classroom. (Read the article)
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