2315 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race, Class and Pedagogy

Race, Class and Pedagogy

April 20, 2006

Brandt, Deborah. “‘The Power of It’: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives.” Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 105-145.

April 20th 2006 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American

At large, this study traces the changing aspects, practices, and effects of literacy in the 20th century United States through the analysis of more than 80 case histories ranging from 1895 to 1985. The chapter annotated here is concerned with the different challenges and techniques in literacy sponsorship encountered by African Americans due to issues of class and institutionalized racism.

Brandt’s overarching thesis is that “in twentieth-century America, literacy became increasingly reliant on economic sponsorship and grew increasingly vulnerable to the lack of it” (106). Her investigation in this chapter reveals that the history of African American literacy in the twentieth century both supports and complicates this thesis. (Read the article)

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October 11, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. and Carl A. Grant. “A Rationale for Integrating Race, Gender, and Social Class.” Class, Race and Gender in American Education. Ed. Lois Weis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988, 144-157.

October 11th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

In this article Sleeter and Grant voice a concern that since the sixties intellectuals in the social sciences have subsumed all forms of oppression under a class analysis. Racism and sexism, they argue, deserve separate treatment if real social change is to occur: “There is a need for the continued development of theory and research that emphasizes social justice and emancipation. Such theory must, however, see race, gender, and class as equally important and as enduring forms of oppression that are interrelated but not reducible to one form” (145). (Read the article)

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September 20, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. “How White Teachers Construct Race,” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, Eds. New York: Routledge, 1993, 157-171.

September 20th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Public School Initiatives, Whiteness Studies

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)

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September 19, 2005

Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 1970. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications, 1990.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy

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)

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Race, critical pedagogy, literacy/composition studies, and higher education bibliography

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Class and Pedagogy, The Academy

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)

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hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy

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)

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September 16, 2005

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.” The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987. 48-66.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

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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September 14, 2005

Class, Race and Pedagogy Bibliography

September 14th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy

Anyon, Jean. “Social Class and School Knowledge.” Curriculum Inquiry.
11.1 (1981) 3-42. (Read the article)

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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 258c

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

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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