2257 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » The Academy

The Academy

September 3, 2005

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.

Comments(0)

August 10, 2005

Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres. After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. New York: New York UP, 2004.

August 10th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, The Academy

In this book, Darder and Torres critique the concept of “race” in contemporary political and academic rhetoric as a mask for the class oppression that underlies late capitalist American society. “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “race”—an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness,” write Darder and Torres (1). Darder and Torres focus their Marxist analysis on the United States education system, and specifically on the key issues of bilingual education, standardized testing, critical race theory and Latino studies departments. They argue that if any real changes are going to be made in educational policy, the concept of ‘race’ must be dismantled and the underlying class issues revealed and critiqued. (Read the article)

2115

* Comments(2)

August 8, 2005

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

August 08th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, The Academy

This groundbreaking book reports the findings of Valenzuela’s three year ethnographic study of immigrant Mexican and Mexican-American students at Juan Seguín High School (a pseudonym) in Houston, Texas. According to Valenzuela, the much-studied achievement gap between first generation Mexican immigrants (who tend to have a pro-school attitude and perform well) and second or third generation immigrants (who typically have an antischool attitude and perform poorly) can be traced directly back to the schools themselves. Valenzuela argues that, “For the majority of Seguín High School’s regular (non college-bound) track, schooling is a subtractive process. It divests these youth of important social and cultural resources, leaving them progressively vulnerable to academic failure” (3). (Read the article)

* Comments(1)

August 3, 2005

D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Free Press, 1991.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Academy

D’Souza writes that there is a “victim’s revolution” underway across U.S. college
campuses, a movement conducted “on behalf of minority victims” and seeking to “put an end to bigoted attitudes with permit perceived social injustice to continue, to rectify past and present inequities, and to advance the interests of the previously disenfranchised” (13). This revolution, D’Souza critically observes, is altering higher education admissions policies, curriculum, and student life. Analyzing episodes at Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard, D’Souza concludes that the “controversial claims of the new politics of race and sex” (20) are actually promoting “an education in closed-mindedness and intolerance, which is to say, illiberal education” in the name of liberal education (229). (Read the article)

Comments(0)

July 24, 2005

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Foreward: Toward A Race-Conscious Pedagogy in Legal Education.” National Black Law Journal v11 (1): 1-14.

July 24th 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy, Court & Policy Issues

Focusing on “the substantive dynamics of the law school classroom and their particular impact on minority students,” Crenshaw argues that “dominant beliefs in the objectivity of legal discourse serve to suppress conflict by discounting the relevance of any particular perspective in legal analysis and by positing an analytical stance that has no specific cultural, political, or class characteristics.” Crenshaw calls this primary mode “perspectivelessness.” Noting that this mode is problematic for many reasons, Crenshaw focuses on the particular burden it places on minority students as they are expected to adopt a worldview that in fact fosters white middle-class values while claiming to carry no perspective. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

« Previous Page —

0