21ff Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race, Class and Pedagogy

Race, Class and Pedagogy

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 22bc

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 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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Macedo, Donaldo. “Introduction (to the 30th Anniversary Edition).” Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paolo Freire. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 2000. pp.11-27.

September 02nd 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Macedo’s essay is published after Freire’s untimely death in 1997. Macedo, Freire’s closest collaborator in the North American academy, recounts how his discovery of Pedagogy of the Oppressed altered his own life and career both as member of a colonized and oppressed people and as an educator. “This offered me – and all those who experience subordination through an imposed assimilation policy – a path through which we understand what it means to come to cultural voice.” (12) He goes on to make several critical arguments about the misunderstanding and misuse of Freire’s ideas and to defend those ideas from their most prominent critics. (Read the article)

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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)

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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)

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August 25, 2005

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)

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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)

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August 18, 2005

Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Hennessy’s objective is to converse with and argue for a materialist feminism that is rooted in rigorous theoretical inquiry and that also addresses the material inequality necessitating feminist movements. She chooses the term “materialist feminism” instead of “Marxist feminism” because the latter ignores the sexual division of labor. Hennessy explains “materialism” to mean “material life in the form of human activity” (37), and she correspondingly expands her definition of “feminism” to include the ways this material life is played out along the “multiple axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (xv). Wary of the conservative strain she detects in some postmodern critique and multiculturalism in the academy, Hennessy argues for a Gramscian-informed, post-Althusserian “Global Analytic” and an understanding of discourse as an ideology that can be counterhegemonically mobilized for a feminist politics. (Read the article)

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