Carter, Thomas P. Mexican Americans in School: A History of Educational Neglect. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1970.
Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio : Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. New York: Basic Books, 1991. (Read the article)
Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications. (Read the article)
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)
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)
2528In 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)
This chapter argues for a rethinking of “whiteness,” especially as the term is engaged in educational settings. Giroux finds existing scholarly treatments of whiteness too inclined to simply collapse people who identify as white with the projects of domination and racism. According to Giroux, this tendency leads white students toward guilt and/or resentment, and undercuts the ways in which whiteness could function in an anti-racist fashion. In short, complicating our understanding of how whiteness operates can greatly enhance the anti-racist pedagogy project. (Read the article)
In this article Lomawaima sketches a history of the education of Native Americans over the course of the past two centuries. She then addresses a variety of issues related to the challenges faced by Native American students in the U.S. education system, ranging from the high drop-out rates of Native American students to unique learning and interactional styles to curriculum development. Lomawaima draws from a large body of research published in the past thirty years, providing several useful summaries of cornerstone studies. (Read the article)
This collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just “what things seem to be.” Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down? Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. (Read the article)
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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