2460 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race and the Academic Institution

Race and the Academic Institution

September 13, 2005

Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud and Donald Morton. “Theory Pedagogy Politics: The Crisis of ‘The Subject’ in the Humanities.” Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts for Change. Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. 1-32.

September 13th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy

The authors offer a critique of the humanist pedagogical tradition in the wake of post-structuralist theory, arguing that humanism has either failed to acknowledge post-structuralist theories of the subject or has used critical theory to reinforce a notion of the unified subject. The concept of the unified subject position denies the importance of race, class, and gender in the construction and formulation of the partisan or ’split’ subject as it is theorized by post-structuralism. The authors’ critique has implications both for curricula and for pedagogical techniques. (Read the article)

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September 12, 2005

Newfield, Christopher. Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 Durham: Duke University Press, 2004

September 12th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, The Academy

Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in the United States. Christopher Newfield traces major trends in the intellectual and institutional history of the research university from 1880 to 1980. He pays particular attention to the connections between the changing forms and demands of American business and the cultivation of a university-trained middle class. He contends that by imbuing its staff and students with seemingly opposed ideas—of self-development on the one hand and of an economic system existing prior to and inviolate of their own activity on the other—the university has created a deeply conflicted middle class. (Read the article)

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Lipman, Pauline. Race, Class and Power in School Restructuring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.

September 12th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In her book, Lipman examines the effect of school restructuring on two urban junior high schools which she calls Gates and Franklin, located in a mid-sized Southern city. Efforts to restructure these schools (which included giving teachers more authority, creating smaller “teams” of students within classes and forming organizations that promoted dialogue about race) were all thwarted by teachers’ own unacknowledged racial prejudice and by the power wielded by Riverton’s white upper-middle-class parents, school board members and administrators. Lipman concludes that efforts to restructure schools fail to address the needs of minority and low-income students because they tend to reproduce larger social inequalities. (Read the article)

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September 9, 2005

McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.

September 09th 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Public School Initiatives

In this book McLaren and Farahmandpur pose a Marxist critique of postmodern, liberal pedagogy, arguing that its emphasis on “diversity” and “multiculturalism” obscures underlying class issues. McLaren and Farahmandpur believe that in an age of global capitalism and neo-imperialism it has become critical for educators on all levels to acknowledge and resist capitalism in their classrooms: “In the space that follows, we attempt to sketch out in broad strokes the key characteristics of a socialist working-class pedagogy that attempts to move beyond liberal and Left-liberal efforts at making capitalist schooling less barbaric and more democratic. The democratic working-class pedagogy that we envision here agitates on behalf of pedagogical practice connected to a larger socialist project” (52). (Read the article)

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September 8, 2005

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

September 08th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, African American, Public School Initiatives, Court & Policy Issues

In this widely-discussed book, Kozol examines the inequalities of the public school system by interviewing teachers, students, coaches and administrators in six of the nation’s poorest urban areas. Kozol compares the day-to-day experience of students in well-funded, predominately white suburban schools to the experience of students living in predominately black and Latino urban areas. Kozol notes that many problems facing urban schools (poor facilities, high dropout rates, large class sizes and underpaid teachers, to name a few) are largely the result of funding inequalities. He suggests that desegregation through school bussing programs combined with a nationwide effort to equalize funding could help narrow the gap between suburban and urban schools. (Read the article)

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September 6, 2005

Delpit, Lisa. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.” Harvard Educational Review. 58.3 (1988), 280-298.

September 06th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In this article Delpit examines the (often unacknowledged) codes and structures that create a “culture of power” in classrooms. She suggests that, while middle-class whites might not be aware of this “culture of power”, minority students are acutely aware of their exclusion from certain codes and discourses. Delpit compares black teaching strategies—which are often more direct and task-oriented—to more process-oriented white teaching strategies in order to show that “progressive” pedagogy often fails to reach minority students because it participates in rather than dismantles the “culture of power”. Ultimately, Delpit argues that teachers should make minority students aware of the culture of power so that they can succeed, while at the same time respecting their individual cultural backgrounds. (Read the article)

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September 3, 2005

Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy

Focusing on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debates-including The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

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Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, The Academy

Cultural Capital challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in a new theoretical framework. The result is a book that recasts not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over “multiculturalism” and the ongoing “crisis in the humanities.” Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups in the canon than as a question of the distribution of “cultural capital” in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.

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The Affirmative Action and Diversity Project:
A Web Page for Research

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Court & Policy Issues

This web site presents diverse opinions regarding Affirmative Action topics; rather than taking a singular pro or con position, it is designed to help lend many different voices to the debates surrounding the issues of affirmative action. This site is an academic resource and it provides scholars, students, and the interested public with on-site articles and theoretical analyses, policy documents, current legislative updates, and an annotated bibliography of research and teaching materials. The site is a particularly valuable resource for information regarding particular legal cases involving race and educational policies.

AAD web site

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September 2, 2005

Anyon, Jean. “Race, Social Class, and Educational Reform in an Inner-City School.” Teachers College Record 97.1 (1995) 69-95.

September 02nd 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In this article Anyon explores the ways that school reform can fail by observing a reform implemented in a predominately black and Latino grade school in Newark, New Jersey. Anyon argues that “three factors—sociocultural differences among participants in reform, an abusive school environment, and educator expectations of failed reform—occurring in a minority ghetto where the school population is racially and economically isolated constitute some of the powerful and devastating ways that concomitants of race and social class can intervene to determine what happens in inner-city schools, and in attempts to improve them” (70). (Read the article)

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