Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times: Approaches to Identity, Theory, Teaching and Research 9781641138642, 9781641138659, 9781641138666

Table of contents :
Cover
Series page
Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contents
Introduction
PART I: TESTIMONY: WITNESSING, EXPOSING, AND REVEALING INJUSTICES
REFLECTION: Vignettes
CHAPTER 1: Toward a Practice of Status Treason
CHAPTER 2: Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image
CHAPTER 3: Charting the Future
CHAPTER 4: Moral Education in Troubled Times
REFLECTION: Behold Untold
Somewhere on the Road to Damascus
Living in School
Be Careful What You Wish For
PART II: RECOGNITION: ACKNOWLEDGING AND RETHINKING THROUGH PRAXIS
REFLECTION: Moving From Activities to Activist
CHAPTER 5: Creating Force Field
CHAPTER 6: White Teacher Educators, Black Teacher Candidates, and African American Language
CHAPTER 7: We Can Theorize in a Classromm All Day, But Nothing Beats Experiencing the Real Thing
CHAPTER 8: Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education
CHAPTER 9: Our Stories As Curriculum
REFLECTION: Teaching and Writing As Activism
The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)
PART III: THE WOUNDS: HEALING OF SELF AND COMMUNITY
REFLECTION: Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom
CHAPTER 10: Critical Hip-Hop
CHAPTER 11: Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy
CHAPTER 12: Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye
CHAPTER 13: Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy
On Activism
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Citation preview

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times

A volume in Curriculum & Pedagogy Group Edited Collection The Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, Series Editor

This page intentionally left blank.

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times Approaches to Identity, Theory, Teaching, and Research

edited by

Shalin Lena Raye Purdue University

Stephanie Masta Purdue University

Sarah Taylor Cook Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center

Jake Burdick Purdue University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress   http://www.loc.gov ISBN: 978-1-64113-864-2 (Paperback) 978-1-64113-865-9 (Hardcover) 978-1-64113-866-6 (ebook) Cover design by Jorge Lucero

Copyright © 2020 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction........................................................................................... ix

PA RT I TESTIMONY: WITNESSING, EXPOSING, AND REVEALING INJUSTICES  1 Reflection: Vignettes.............................................................................. 3 Sarah Taylor Cook 1 Toward a Practice of Status Treason: White Teacher Educators as Accomplices........................................................................................ 7 Ann Mogush Mason 2 Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image: How Teachers Speak About the Difference Between the Use of Photographs of War and Photographs of Lynching............................................................. 21 Brian C. Gibbs 3 Charting the Future: Policing and Surveillance in School Safety Discourse................................................................... 37 Timothy C. Wells



v

vi   Contents

4 Moral Education in Troubled Times: Insights from Barad, Levinas, and Baumann........................................................................ 51 Sijin Yan, Peter Scaramuzzo, Patrick Slattery, and Michael Clough Reflection: Behold Untold................................................................... 65 Diana Wandix-White Somewhere on the Road to Damascus............................................... 69 Brian Gibbs living in school...................................................................................... 73 Samuel Tanner Be careful what you wish for................................................................ 79 Sarrah J. Grubb

PA RT I I RECOGNITION: ACKNOWLEDGING AND RETHINKING THROUGH PRAXIS  81 Reflection: Moving From Activities to Activist................................... 83 Amy Shema 5 Creating Force Field: Rethinking Uses and Consequences of Anti-Oppressive Pedagogical Activities.......................................... 87 Pauli Badenhorst 6 White Teacher Educators, Black Teacher Candidates, and African American Language: Ideating Paradoxical Readings of African American Language in Teacher Education................... 101 Laura A. Taylor and Zachary A. Casey 7 We Can Theorize in a Classroom All Day, but Nothing Beats Experiencing the Real Thing: Experiential Learning in Preservice Preparation...................................................................119 Tiffany Karalis Noel 8 Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education: Teaching Sensitive Topics in Troubled Times.................................. 129 Michael Takafor Ndemanu and Camea L. Davis 9 Our Stories As Curriculum: Queering Autoethnography, Curriculum Development, and Research......................................... 141 Michelle L. Knaier

Contents    vii

Reflection: Teaching and Writing as Activism: Can Scholars Be Too Literal in Post-Truth Trumplandia?.......................................... 157 P. L. Thomas The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)............................ 165 Brian Gibbs

PA RT I I I THE WOUNDS: HEALING OF SELF AND COMMUNITY  173 Reflection: Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom: Opportunities and Challenges...................................... 175 Deborah Bennett and Simone Pilon 10 Critical Hip-Hop: Pedagogy of the Populace................................... 183 Kevin W. Clinard 11 Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy: Arts-Based Approaches to Pedagogy for Privileged Learners................................................. 199 Shalin Lena Raye 12 Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye: Exploring Recent Shifts in LGBTQ+ Representation, Agency, and Intersectionality in Pop Culture.................................................................................... 213 Cole Reilly 13 Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy: Story Circles, Dialogue, and Complicated Conversations...................................... 237 Krystal A. Yañez-Medrano and Laura Jewett On Activism........................................................................................ 249 Camea Davis About the Contributors...................................................................... 251

This page intentionally left blank.

INTRODUCTION

We began the call for this book by asking authors to ideate on activism—to take up and seek to extend—the interbraided values from the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group’s espoused mission and vision, collocating activist ideologies, theoretical traditions, and practical orientations as a means of creatively, reflectively, and productively responding to the increasingly dire social moment. This moment is framed by a landscape denigrated beyond even Pinar’s (2004) original declaration of the present-as-nightmare. The current, catastrophic political climate provides challenges and (albeit scant) opportunities for curriculum scholars and workers as we reflect on past and future directions of our field, and grapple with our locations and roles as educators, researchers, practitioners, and beings in the world. These troubled times force us to think critically about our scholarship and pedagogy, our influence on educational practices in multiple registers, and the surrounding communities we claim to serve. This is where the call began: from a desire to think through modern conceptions regarding what counts as activism in the fields of education, curriculum, and pedagogy, and to consider how activist voices and enactments might emerge differently through curriculum and pedagogy writ large. A guiding source of inspiration for this book, weaving among the emerging themes between the collected manuscripts, reflections, and poems, was a passage in Sara Ahmed’s (2013) book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. In this passage, Ahmed works through the complicated relationship between the testimonies of pain that injustice causes, the recognition of this pain, and

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages ix–xiii Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

ix

x   Introduction

the potential of these wounds to move us into a different relationship with healing (p. 200). The chapters, reflections, and poems within this volume, thus, effect a collective ideation on how specific cultural politics and deleterious ideological formations—racism, colonialism, homophobia, ableism, to name only a few—persist and mobilize. The authors seek to expose and name some of these injustices, asking readers not only to see and hear these experiences, but to inhabit our complicities in their promulgation. It is important to acknowledge that these named social troubles do not exist in isolation, and will enmesh, weave, wind, and entangle with one another. The section headings parallel Ahmed’s (2013) own ideations: testimony, recognition, and wounds, not as a formula to follow as an activist call, or as a model for a means to a more just end, but as a way to engage in these issues as a trope of activist confrontation of readers who are, as many of our authors suggest, complicit in maintaining many of these social troubles. The chapters do not need to be read in any particular order, though the ordering of the chapters moves from the naming of social troubles, to showing how teaching, research, and theory ask us to take a more active role in recognizing and acknowledging the prevalence of these issues, and then theorizing ways to engage the wounds. PART I: TESTIMONY: WITNESSING, EXPOSING, AND REVEALING INJUSTICES Drawing on Ahmed’s (2013) understanding of testimony, she explains that “testimony as a form of healing” is not in itself “therapeutic,” but that “the telling is also about witnessing, which makes demands on others to hear, but which does not always get a just hearing” (p. 200). The contributing authors to this volume answered the book’s call in ways similar to Ahmed’s (2013) work, asking readers to bear witness to the emotional testimonies, experiences, and inquiries that unmask implicit and explicit forms of oppression. Conceptually, witnessing is not a new approach to challenging oppression as authors such as Simon and Eppart (1997), Felman and Laub (1992), and Oliver (2001, 2004) have all called upon this term to discuss how testimony ought to be received within an ethical exchange. For Felman and Laub (1992), in particular, witnessing testimony always enacts a pedagogical relationship—one characterized by an abundance of dissonance, rather than the congruence typically sought within educational settings (p. 53). Witnessing cannot involve the collecting of the Other’s stories as if they were objects distinct from our own bodies. Witnessing involves orienting toward and opening to the trauma of history and its crawl across the present. Thus, the pedagogical aim of witnessing does not

Introduction    xi

involve the betterment of the self-as-isolate, but rather, an extension of the self-in-relation—a reworking of identity that sees identity and body as contingent, entangled, and embedded constructs. Authors in this section enact these demands on their readers, producing inquiry and theorization—stories—that seek more than attention or self-reflection; they demand response on the social level. PART II: RECOGNIZING: ACKNOWLEDGING AND RETHINKING THROUGH PRAXIS The authors herein challenge our scholarship, teaching practices, and research, even when we see these acts as a collective effort toward more just social ends. What is notable about the parallels to Ahmed’s (2013) approach to justice is the way the authors do not call on people to become activists as a result of hearing testimony, but rather to move into different relationships with the pain people have experienced. Specifically, Ahmed (2013) asks for the pain of injustice, specifically “colonization, slavery, and racism” to be recognized: Recognition of injustice is not simply about others becoming visible (though this can be important). Recognition is also about claiming that an injustice did happen; the claim is a radical one in the face of the forgetting of such injustices. Healing does not cover over, but exposes the wound to others: the recovery is a form of exposure. (p. 200, emphasis added)

In this section, the authors engage a form of recognition, or re/cognition, a re-membering of pedagogical approaches and research methodologies, and the implications of these troubled times on us, on our own bodies, our classrooms, and our field. Many of these authors discuss classroom practice, wherein the commonsense imaginary of schooling incorporates curricular innovation via processes of assessment and inquiry. However, what schooling has largely failed to notice is the rot in its foundations—a blight that identifies school as the engine of colonialist, nationalist, racist, and normative ideological formations. In addressing these issues via the rubric of witnessing, however, the rot becomes the wound—the site of entry for collectivized conversations and plans for revitalized action. Recognition, then, is not only about visibility to those with privilege or validation of experiences by those in power, but is about how power is used through pedagogy to amplify these voices.

xii   Introduction

PART III: THE WOUNDS: HEALING OF SELF AND COMMUNITY The authors answered this call of engaging notions of activism in ways that urge readers to bear unflinching witness to the wounds of injustice. Furthermore, they addressed how the contemporary moment needs radically different modes and tactics for addressing these wounds’ growing expanse. Much like Ahmed (2013) suggests, the authors share stories, expose pain, and ask readers to bear witness. They seem to ask readers to not only listen, but to recognize what is going on in our field, to acknowledge it, to hear it, and not to look away. Ahmed (2013) writes, It’s not that the wound is exposed or that the skin is bleeding. But the scar is a sign of the injury: A good scar allows healing, it even covers over, but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body. (p. 202, emphasis in original)

The wound, thus, writes itself across the historical body of the Other. Scars stretch into a new ski(e)n, forming the liminal space between the interior of subjectivity and the harsh atmosphere that threatens to seep in, leaving in its wake the stasis of definition, classification, and subjugation. Ahmed (2013), thus, rejects simplistic designs on healing, as to cure these injuries is to subject them to erasure, to make them the abject and hidden, to bury them, still bleeding, in the fantasy of a past. Rather, for Ahmed, and for the work in the final section of this book, our task in ethical relation is to uncover the wound, to understand the production of the present-body as a negotiation of multiplicities of pasts and powers, and to recognize the culpability in the blood on our hands. Authors herein seek to infuse their curricular practices, projects, and imaginations with the knowledge of witnessing, and in doing so, to center woundedness as a pedagogy, rather than an abjection (Kristeva, 1982). TOWARDS A RECONSIDERED ACTIVIST ETHOS In order to recognize these injustices, we must be exposed to them and see them within their current moment of impact, not under the curricular safety of these issues being explained away via historicized narratives.  Even if we peek through horror-spread fingers at the wounds that are exposed, at least we are moving into a space of willingness to look. We must bear witness to the voices of these authors, the researchers, the teachers, the advocates, the angry, the abused; we must learn to hear these injustices. We are not engaging in activism through this act of witnessing. Listening alone

Introduction    xiii

is not activism. Witnessing alone is not activism. This collection may contain activist-informed voices, but no written word alone can do the work needed to address the damage of domination. That is the work of the collective,1 engaged in the reconstitution of the traumatic wound and a reinvention of our relationships in its wake. —The Editors Shalin Lena Raye, Purdue University Stephanie Masta, Purdue University Sarah Taylor Cook, Howard County Public Schools Jake Burdick, Purdue University NOTE 1. As a nod to the collectivist, anti-hierarchical approaches detailed by contemporary activists, such as the Invisible Committee (2009), we have elected to forego a Foreword to this text. The traditional function of the Foreword has been to validate the pages that follow via the legitimacy of the Foreword’s author’s measured success within a field. Rather than include this solitary voice of legitimacy, we instead want to allow the collective herein speak for themselves. This is not meant as an overarching critique; rather, we see this decision as a design choice that aligns with the call for this particular collection.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Routledge. Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York, NY: Routledge. The Invisible Committee. (2009). The coming insurrection. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay in abjection. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Oliver, K. (2001). Witnessing: Beyond recognition. Mineeapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oliver, K. (2004). Witnessing and testimony. Parallax, 10(1), 78–87. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? New York, NY: Routledge. Simon, R., & Eppart, C. (1997). Remembering obligation: Pedagogy and the witnessing of testimony of historical trauma. Canadian Journal of Education, 22(2), 175–191.

This page intentionally left blank.

PART I TESTIMONY: WITNESSING, EXPOSING, AND REVEALING INJUSTICES

Admittedly, it hurts to read the words; they move on me and move me. The stories, so many of them, are stories of grief, of worlds being torn apart. So cruel, this world. It is a world that I lived in. I remind myself of that. Yet I also lived in a very different world. Each story brings me into its world. I am jolted into it. I try and turn away, but you hold my attention. These are stories of separation and loss. These are stories of pain. My response is emotional: it is one of discomfort, rage and disbelief. The stories hit me, hurtle towards me: unbelievable, too believable, unliveable and yet lived. —Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 35–36

This page intentionally left blank.

REFLECTION

VIGNETTES Sarah Taylor Cook Howard County Public Schools

The following vignettes are stories derived from my work as an educator with middle school students and as a night-shift hospital interpreter. The grace of these youngsters envelopes me. It is my every day. * * * The yogurt the child was eating out of a small cup was almost gone; she wiped her mouth with the edge of her hospital gown. She wasn’t sleeping; she was cutting her arms at school. She didn’t need me to interpret; her mom did. I was at once patient, parent, and provider, mimicking tone, matching modismo with idiom, choking back tears, invoking my firm, grave teacher voice, as rage and despair hardened in my gut. The year before, this child was raped by the two men renting space in her home. One was sent back to Guatemala. The other man the child still sees in the neighborhood. Mom says, “your dad beat me and look at me now, I don’t cut myself. You have to overcome this.” The child can’t abide the dark. She stares up at the skylight in her bedroom; she says the glow from the city soothes her. It is a strategy she uses to keep her nightmares away. She’ll go back to school soon and she’ll not speak of this. She’ll soldier on. Maybe she’ll stop cutting herself. This won’t be included in her IEP. Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 3–6 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

3

4   Vignettes

* * * I subbed for a colleague the other day. One student solved a word search, his lentes de fondo de botella augmented the puzzle’s giant letters, reversed and upside down for me. He slowly crossed out words, copying from a picture on his phone. I told him even if he didn’t know the words, he could solve the puzzle on his own; I told him he didn’t need to copy, that he could search for pairs of letters. He slouched, pulled his hoodie over his head, and tugged at the strings to tighten it over his face, pop-bottle lenses betraying him. “My son wears it like that sometimes, too,” I said. “He lives in Mexico, doesn’t want to live up here.” “He should come here for the girls,” my student whispered through a smile. I showed him a picture of my son with his classmates, plaid pants, green polyester sweater, shiny shoes, hair cropped over the ears. “My dad died 2 years ago,” the boy said slowly, sitting up and removing his hoodie. “Do you want to know about it?” he asked in Spanish. “If you want to tell me, mi estimado,” I replied. “I was happy because my mom had food and ice cream that day. Then my dad got home. He used to drink beer, but it didn’t do anything to him, so he drank hard stuff and we had to get away. He hit her car with his car a bunch of times. My mom called the cops and he was locked up for, like, 12 days, then they sent him back to El Salvador.” “That must have been so scary, Felipe; I am sorry that happened to you.” He shrugged. “My dad’s sister wanted him to go see their mom, go to a party. He didn’t wanna go. But she obligarlo and so he went but he didn’t wear his seatbelt and he died in an accident.” “I am really sorry. Thank you for telling me about it, Felipe. Have you ever been to El Salvador?” “We were gonna go but we didn’t. I don’t wanna see those people.” He put his phone in his pocket, and solved the word search, looking for pairs of letters. * * * The little girl, hands on her knees, waits on the couch while her father walks with me to identify his brother. I keep my head down, eyes fixed on the dead man’s yellowing toe, and interpret his brother’s words to the physician. He wonders if it was a machete that did this to him. He sobs. We walk back to his daughter, sit on the couch, and discuss when they can recover her uncle’s body. The child’s eyes are wide and curious. She slouches,

Vignettes    5

making herself look so very small. She’ll go back to school on Monday. Will she share this during circle time? * * * Subbing, again, for an absent colleague, three children whirl into the room after the bell, their tornado striking a class barely settling in. Their assignment is to list their good habits on worksheets. As I circulate, I notice that about a third of the children have blank worksheets. The other children have written: I do my homework, I listen in class, I am respectful. “So,” I ask, “How many of you look after a little brother or sister in the afternoons?” Half a dozen 11-year-old hands shoot up toward the ceiling. “Alright. Let’s think about the habits you need to care of your siblings: You know how to keep someone safe, you know how to get help if you need it. You might know how to cook something up in the kitchen, which means you are creative. You may not get your homework done, but you are helping your family. You won’t find these good habits listed in your textbook. You think they should be? What you do is extraordinary. Your parents might not thank you for it because they need you to do it; looking after your sibling isn’t a choice but an obligation. And I am in awe of you.” “I take care of my baby sister and my momma just shouts at me,” one of the three human tornadoes exclaims, as he scribbles his list. I continued, “Some of you must keep secrets, which has a lot to do with trust. Some of your parents might ask you not to talk about their job, for example, which might be a surprise to other children here. But some parents might not have permission to work yet, and they do it to feed their family. That is a difficult secret to keep. It is a burden, but you carry it to keep your family safe.” Another child still had not written anything down. I squatted beside his knee. “Did I say anything that makes sense to you, Juan?” “I ain’t no snitch.” “No, you are not,” I confirmed. “AND I can cook,” he wrote. * * * I ask the child, “If you could change something in your life, what would you change? Like, I imagine you wish you didn’t have a mouse under the bed.” “No, that’s the way life is, there is a mouse under the bed.” * * * My daughter tells me about her day. She was singing in Spanish while the choir director organized her music on its stand. “Speak in English,” a fellow soprano leans into her ear. “What did you say to her?” I ask. “Nothing, mom. It’s not my job to make her not racist.”

6   Vignettes

* * * A mother, her blue, dead eye drooping, brings in her 10-year-old at midnight. “She is complaining about her arm,” she explains. “How do you rate your pain on a scale of 1–10?” the provider asks. “I dunno, four? It hurts here sometimes.” She points to her elbow. The x-ray reveals nothing. She’s being treated for depression and anxiety. There are men renting a room in her home. She sees a counselor each week at school. She smiles and tells us she gets good grades. Her mother still doesn’t know why her daughter’s arm hurts. They stare at each other as we close the door. * * * As part of our unit on family and relationships, we had been talking about vocabulary in Spanish to describe sexual orientation. Cristina hovers as I say goodbye to her peers. She leans into me and asks, “So I can just say it like that? Soy bisexual?” “¡Claro!” I say. She glows as she departs. “¡Adiós, profe!” * * * I head up to the labor deck and meet a new patient who is ready to deliver. I ask her where she is from, per the protocol. She explains she was a kindergarten teacher, the gang threatened her and her family. When she arrived to the United States, she was detained for 17 days. A week after her release, I stood next to her, where partners usually stand, holding one of her knees to her chest, my other hand serving as a stirrup for her foot, “uno, dos, tres, cuatro, puje, seis, siete, puje, nueve, diez, bote el aire, respire y . . . ¡a pujar! uno, dos, tres . . .”

CHAPTER 1

TOWARD A PRACTICE OF STATUS TREASON White Teacher Educators as Accomplices Ann Mogush Mason University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

ABSTRACT White supremacy has an incredible recuperative power in U.S. institutions. Collateral damage will be necessary if these institutions are to survive the transition to a more liberatory future. Here, I elucidate some pressure points in the shifts my own predominately White institution (PWI) has made in attempt to orient itself toward more liberatory practices. Through narrative storytelling, I call for teacher educators, as agents of PWIs, to consider what it could look like for us to engage in acts of status treason. Status treason first requires that we understand the ways in which our actions and ways of being most often uphold the White supremacist institution instead of the Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) we purport to be supporting. Upon that recognition, status treason then asks us to make principled decisions to place the interests, needs, and desires of BIPOC students above the demands of the institution.

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 7–19 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

7

8    A. M. MASON

LOCATING THE WORK OF DIVERSIFYING THE TEACHING FORCE This chapter challenges readers to imagine beyond well-worn strategies when it comes to addressing the rueful state of efforts to diversify the U.S. teaching force. Specifically, what happens when a predominately White teacher education program successfully recruits a small group of racially conscious African American women, only to place them with White cooperating teachers and/or university supervisors who do not demonstrate racial consciousness in their own work (e.g., Griffin, Watson, & Liggett, 2016)? How can teacher educators be both proactive about and responsive to moments when the instruction these students experience is not embodied or reflected by their mentors and/or the institutions in which they are placed? Often, such moments highlight the significance of historical oppressions in the lives of individuals and communities as they interact with institutions. Where do responsibilities fall in efforts to support teacher educator (in this case, dysconscious White cooperating teachers and/or university supervisors) learning while holding the needs and desires of minoritized teacher candidates and children in schools at the center? Finally, what might it look like for curriculum scholars to engage in acts of “status treason” in our choices to refuse some of the daily decisions that uphold White supremacy? All of these questions, and possible responses to them, guide critical curriculum scholars toward revived ways of seeing teacher education as a space that can build coalitions in community, growing from and toward activist orientations in teaching and scholarship. The well-documented but often inadequately historicized (for fuller treatments, see Watkins, 2001; Delpit, 2012) demographic gap between the predominately White teaching force and racially diverse children attending P–12 schools has led to widespread efforts to diversify teacher education programs (e.g., Bower-Phipps, Homa, Albaladejo, Johnson, & Cruz, 2013). For example, in Minnesota, an inter-institutional coalition formed in 2016 around a shared goal to influence legislation and institutional practices to increase the number of Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) earning teacher licensure (Chhuon, Spies, & Antrop-Gonzalez, 2017). The American Educational Research Association has hosted pre-conference gatherings aimed toward similar goals, and institutions of higher education and school districts alike have invested millions in recruitment and retention of new BIPOC teachers. However, these efforts are incomplete when they (a) are not met with the necessary ongoing funding and personnel to support them and (b) do not recognize and account for the Whiteness of the logics and practices within the receiving institution, whether a teacher education program or a school district.

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    9

Such efforts at diversifying the teaching force are similarly incomplete when they are not situated within historical contexts of settler colonialism and institutional racism that produced such depraved legacies as American Indian boarding schools and the dramatic reduction in Black teachers after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In addition, what often masquerades as justice-oriented “reform” in teacher preparation is often rooted in neoliberal logics that further enmesh our field in White supremacy and capitalism, in particular (Casey, 2016). I have argued elsewhere that White supremacy has an incredible recuperative power in U.S. institutions, and that collateral damage will be necessary if these institutions are to survive the transition to a more liberatory future. Here, I more deeply elucidate some pressure points in the small shifts my own institution has made in attempt to orient itself toward more liberatory practices. In Mason and Ngo (2019), we highlight a story about a teacher candidate we call Toni who experienced multiple forms of explicit and implicit racism during her time at my university. This chapter returns to Toni’s experiences, this time exploring some consequences of a “successful” effort to recruit and retain BIPOC teacher candidates, troubling the imbalance in costs and benefits for Toni and her fellow BIPOC teacher candidates compared to the White people who worked with them and the PWI that they attended. Ultimately, I call for teacher educators, as agents of PWIs, to consider what it could look like for us to engage in acts of status treason. Status treason first requires that we understand the ways in which our actions and ways of being most often uphold the White supremacist institution instead of the BIPOC people we purport to be supporting. Upon that recognition, status treason then asks us to make principled decisions to place the interests, needs, and desires of those BIPOC teacher candidates above the demands of the institution. TEACHER EDUCATION AS LINCHPIN Teacher education is a critical point of maintenance of and/or disruption to the way things work in U.S. schools. Just like P–12 teachers do, we communicate a wealth of information about our actual beliefs through the structures, content, and pedagogies we bring to our courses and programs. In other words, even when we make public statements in support of social justice efforts, our actions speak louder. Given this shaping power, critical scholars call for teacher education to more comprehensively build understandings of the broad reach of White supremacy into their work with teachers (e.g., Amos, 2016; Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016; Mason, 2016). Without explicit naming of the institution’s desire to both diversify its teaching pool and not fundamentally change itself in order to support those

10    A. M. MASON

future teachers, teacher educators are complicit in what Yoshino (2006) calls a demand to cover. A focus on recruitment and retention of BIPOC students like Toni and her classmates, without consistent and sustained work to reshape the organizational structures and practices that make our institutions so unfriendly to BIPOC students, only intensifies these demands. We have to see and name these circumstances in order to have any chance of changing them for the better. Presenting Toni’s story as I do here is my effort to allow readers to enter into her experience in a way that makes abundantly clear that Toni’s placement in and financial support throughout the program was only a small initial piece of the university’s responsibility to her as a Black student in an overwhelmingly White university and school system. When we stop there, as we often do, we fall perilously short. DILEMMA CASE AS METHOD The dilemma case method asks participants to share narratives that allow them to explore the dynamics of a teaching dilemma (Muth, Polizzi, & Glynn, 2007). I encourage my students—undergraduate, master’s level, and graduate students in elementary education—to focus on dilemmas that highlight topics, concepts, or themes that feel controversial, uncomfortable, or risky to them and/or to their students (Beaton, 2014). Grappling with dilemmas through writing, talking, and thinking shows the complexity of tackling specific dilemmas and related situations that may arise in students’ lives. They traverse ethical terrain that may otherwise remain unexplored (Flores, 2007), expanding the scope of their ethical decision-making and offering some protection against teacher attrition by allowing emerging teachers opportunities to expand their imaginative thinking about pedagogies and practices (Britzman, 2003; Fecho, Graham, & Hudson-Ross, 2005). Students in my classes write, discuss, and sometimes role play their dilemmas by first sharing a narrative about the event as they remember experiencing it. When the story reaches its critical peak, the storyteller “freeze frames,” pausing their truth-telling about something complex in their teaching and shifting into an imaginative space. In the written version of the assignment, I ask students to explore three possible ways they could respond to their dilemma, and to analyze the contours of each; in particular, I want them to spend this time grappling with the impact, influence, and transformative potential of their daily decisions as educators. In this chapter, I turn the dilemma case process on my own experiences as a teacher educator and educator of teacher educators, drawing also on Hill Collins’ (1990) assertion of “lived experience as a criterion for meaning” (p. 275). Thus, the dilemmas themselves constitute both my techniques and my data. As an entry point for introducing the concept of

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    11

status treason, this chapter analyzes a single dilemma about “Toni,” a Black student teacher who was put in a position where she was repeatedly unfairly asked to provide emotional labor for a White university supervisor. The dilemma I analyze in this chapter took place within the context of my work as a White cisgender woman administrator and faculty member in an elementary teacher education program at a large midwestern university. As director of elementary teacher education programs since 2015, I have worked with colleagues to grow toward a stronger justice orientation in our curriculum and pedagogy. This has included some notable shifts toward a justice orientation in several aspects of program structure and growing mechanisms for addressing ways that the institution and individuals within it are upholding racist and other marginalizing practices. In the meantime, students have expressed ongoing concerns in three key areas: (a) contradictions between critical perspectives developed in foundations classes and their articulation in methods and field experiences, what some BIPOC teacher candidates have aptly described as “false advertising” rooted in the program’s publicly stated justice-oriented vision; and (b) the actual practices and experiences students are often exposed to; and (c) our (I locate myself directly in the center of this) capitulation to perceived and actual institutional barriers to genuine justice work (Thornhill, 2015). As program director, my goal is to enter these complexities with honesty, humility, and a collective spirit. It is important to note that during the academic year when Toni was a teacher candidate (2017–2018), she was one of six students in our masters and initial licensure program who identified as African or African American. All six of these women were well-regarded students throughout our undergraduate program and came into the student teaching year ready to grow as critical elementary school teachers. All six of these women described extensive experiences of racism in their placement sites and through their relationships with the university. I focus on Toni’s stories in this chapter to illustrate the depth and significance of her experiences with a particular manifestation of racism in the supervisor relationship, but the breadth, severity, and commonplace nature of racism experienced by BIPOC teacher candidates cannot be overstated. Examples range from teachers’ lounge talk about how one woman didn’t need to work hard at student teaching site because her race would get her any job she wanted to hypersurveillance from a supervisor who consistently watched from her car as one teacher candidate entered and left the building. While some of these six women identified as immigrants to the United States, all attended at least part of their P–12 schooling in the United States. Love (2016) notes that state violence extends to the harmful experiences Black children often have in U.S. schools. Her notion of “spirit murder” is a lucid reminder of the incredible consequences of these violences. Toni

12    A. M. MASON

felt like, for her, schools had been safe enough places for her to consider building a career working in them; her spirit remained intact in many ways throughout her years in P–12 and higher education. However, this experience stretched her fortitude near its limit (Tolbert & Eichelberger, 2016). A NOTE ABOUT REPRESENTATION It is important for me to acknowledge that I name Toni in this chapter as a way to honor her particular contributions and the incredible emotional and other forms of labor she expended in the process of becoming a teacher. Toni is a pseudonym, of course, and I chose it for Toni when she told me she felt too much pressure to choose something meaningful for herself. However, I do not name the supervisor in this chapter for several reasons. One reason is simply that this is not the supervisor’s story. In some ways, I could choose to portray the supervisor as a White feminine trope in the way that African American women are often portrayed in White literature. She is interchangeable; at times she could be me, any of my White colleagues, or the White teachers who sat in classes with Toni and are now her colleagues in U.S. public schools. I use she/her pronouns for the supervisor because these are the pronouns used by an overwhelming majority of the people in this role at my university and in my community. While the story is particular, what happened between Toni and her supervisor is actually a single example of dehumanizing exchanges that play out between White educators and BIPOC all day, every day. Finally, from a purely functional standpoint, the work of a university supervisor is as an agent of the White supremacist PWI. The supervisor does not need a name. THE DILEMMA I met Toni in Fall 2015, when she was enrolled in the Introduction to Elementary Teaching course I was teaching that semester. While she knew that she wanted to teach young children, she was unsure about her major in elementary education because she was being heavily recruited by one of the well-known alternative teacher preparation programs that had an office on our campus at the time. Our first interaction outside of class involved a tense conversation about whether she should consider their advances. This conversation extended in the coming years, eventually involving my thendepartment chair who helped me locate the funds to provide Toni a full scholarship for her year in our teacher licensure program. The specific purpose of this scholarship was to woo Toni away from an alternative pathway and keep her in our teacher preparation program. While I never had her in

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    13

class again, Toni and I maintained a professional relationship throughout the remainder of her undergraduate years, through her 5th year MEd and initial licensure program, and we remain connected as she completes her first year of teaching elementary school. Code-meshing (Young, 2013) was an immediately noticeable feature of Toni’s way of being in and out of class. While it is fair to argue that all people code-mesh to some extent, the term refers most specifically to people whose home and community discourses differ from those expected in most White-normed school and other formal settings. Toni and many other linguistically and racially minoritized people in U.S. schools have always lived with the expectation that they know how to change how they use language in various settings. Toni has always been traditionally successful in school, and she maneuvered comfortably among Englishes, including those sometimes described as Black English and standard English vernacular. During her class with me in Fall 2015, Toni and I often engaged in complex back-and-forth conversations about the value and importance of codemeshing for teachers and students who are constantly shifting among and blending Englishes. As her instructor and as the director of the program in which she was enrolled, I outwardly celebrated the many ways that Toni’s subjectivities would provide windows and mirrors for the children she taught. She and I both reflected later that those conversations felt like performances for her predominately White classmates who had not previously thought about how a teacher’s use of language serves as a model of what is possible and what is allowed at school. This was the first time I remember being aware of the emotional labor that Toni was expending for the sake of White elementary educators’ learning. When the time came for her to use that specially created scholarship and enroll as a high-profile, celebrated member of our 2017–2018 initial licensure program cohort, Toni knew that she had validation to be herself in her yearlong student teaching placement. Being herself included, of course, an engaged habit of code-meshing. I have highlighted this background information about Toni’s relationship with the university in order to demonstrate the depth of her connection with individual representatives of the institution and the institution’s actual investment in her as a student. Toni was placed in a racially and socioeconomically diverse first-ring suburban elementary school with a university supervisor who was a middleaged White woman with decades of experience teaching and serving as an administrator in the same school district. Her cooperating teacher was a Black man who had a reputation for culturally sustaining practices, including code-meshing himself and working with his elementary students to understand the values of their own and their classmates’ linguistic practices. Toni and her supervisor developed a strong and connected relationship in the first 2 months of the program, often meeting at coffee shops and

14    A. M. MASON

checking in via phone in the evenings. This level of intensity between supervisors and teacher candidates is relatively common in our program, with supervisors playing a complicated role as confidante, guide, and translator between university and public school—as well as evaluator of the teacher candidate’s lesson plans and teaching. Notably, these people are almost always asked to write letters of recommendation when the teacher candidates they supervise begin applying for teaching positions. This constitutes significant additional work for supervisors, who typically work as graduate assistants or community faculty. Toni and her supervisor’s relationship shifted in November 2017 when the supervisor criticized Toni’s African American vernacular in casual speech during a one-on-one meeting. Toni identified this language policing as racist and became concerned about her ability to make it through the remainder of the year working with this supervisor. Toni first contacted a woman of color who served as a mentor to her and worked in a different department at the university. Eventually, she came to me to share what happened and how disturbed she was. (The specific event is analyzed in much greater detail in Mason & Ngo, 2019). The supervisor reacted quickly and emotionally with what has become popularly recognizable as White fragility (DiAngelo, 2018). The supervisor made it clear that she had been operating on an understanding that by supporting Toni as her supervisor, she was demonstrating her own anti-racism. The notion that she could make massive missteps and that she might not be equipped to fully support Toni sent her into a tailspin characteristic of White fatigue, which Flynn (2018) describes as a common state for White people learning about racism, when we understand the fundamental belief that racism is wrong but have not developed a systemic analysis—in other words, a White person who is experiencing White fatigue might believe that their intention to not be racist should absolve them of the deep self-work required to move closer to actually becoming anti-racist. The supervisor first asked if I could arrange for Toni to explain to her how her criticism of African American English was racist. When I told her it would be more appropriate for that work to be done among people who are paid for their work at the university than for her to ask Toni to do that work for her, she was willing to hear my feedback. The supervisor also committed to some self-reflection and independent reading to build her knowledge base about race and language in the United States. I used the term “emotional labor” several times during the conversation, and eventually she asked me to clarify what I meant; I felt like we had a fruitful conversation then about how the expectation of supporting White people’s learning about race so often demands additional unpaid work from people of color. The last thing she said during our phone call sticks with me: “I’m not going to get fired, am I?” Freeze frame.

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    15

AVAILABLE LOGICS At this point in a dilemma case analysis, I ask my students to pause the story as they recall experiencing it. From this point, we engage in an imaginative process through which we consider various possible outcomes of the story. Without necessarily revealing what they did do or what they plan to do, students explore various possible responses and the potential positive and negative consequences of those responses. So, in the days and months after this experience with Toni, I asked myself to consider those possibilities and their consequences. The first of the options I imagined, firing the supervisor and keeping Toni where she was, felt immediately impossible due to constraints in the contractual agreements for the supervisor role which the university had never imagined as a position one could be released from. Beyond that, I saw three options: we could decide to move Toni to a different site with a different supervisor, we could only reassign the supervisor, or we could educate the supervisor. Next, I asked myself to consider this question: How are Toni’s needs and desires attended to in each option? These possibilities would each require immense flexibility and emotional labor, given the intense expectations of the supervisor–teacher candidate relationship. Despite its complications, Toni had expended incredible energy toward her initial supervisor relationship already. On top of that, any option that involved releasing the supervisor from her position unleashed a host of other potential issues that could then be considered fireable offenses for other supervisors: This is a deeply concerning question to ask, but who would be left if we actually accounted for displays of racism as they occurred? In addition, it can be complicated to truly locate the “perpetrator” of racism in a White supremacist system–– what does the presence of a White supervisor who does not understand the basic premise of code-meshing say about the program that hired her, or the institution that hosts that program, or the licensing board that maintains our ongoing approval? Thus, given our unwillingness and inability to accept the collateral damage of firing a university supervisor, the remaining available logics will ultimately protect the institution above all else. In this respect, Toni is expendable and her supervisor is less so. The supervisor is an arm of the institution in a way that Toni cannot be. TOWARD STATUS TREASON Is there a fifth ending through which the individual supervisor, the institution’s relationship with the school district, or the institution itself carries the consequences in this situation instead of Toni? Where Toni stays where she is and others have to shift in order to better support her? Where White

16    A. M. MASON

supremacy experiences a demand to account for itself instead of Toni experiencing another demand to cover (Yoshino, 2006) or to provide free education and assuage the racialized fears of people who were socialized to believe that they are White (Coates, 2015)? To begin imagining what that accounting might look like, I introduce the concept of status treason. For curriculum scholars to imagine ourselves engaging in status treason, it helps to first build an image of the forces we would be engaging against. Indeed, it is only possible to be a traitor to something that is itself a present, powerful force. Status treason against White supremacy’s manifestations in institutions demands acknowledgement of the multitudinous ways that White supremacy is constantly reproduced in and through those institutions. With status treason available as a thinking tool, we can better understand ourselves as otherwise always acting or in-acting in complicity with normative White supremacy. Put another way, when we aren’t actively and intentionally working against White supremacy, we are allowing its maintenance. I am putting forward status treason as a tool for thinking that may help White teacher educators recognize more of the constant daily decisions we make that uphold aspects of White supremacy. For example, when we serve on committees that grant scholarships or fellowships to graduate students with limited guidance regarding what a successful proposal should look like and we don’t consider how these students are already situated within the university and other marginalizing structures, we are using our status to maintain the existing system. When students bring repeated concerns about a colleague and we defer to the colleague’s description of the students as unfairly demanding or misunderstanding of their pedagogy, we privilege the interests of the institution over the expressed truths from individual students. While it would be simplistic to suggest that disrupting either of these scenarios could set our institutions on anti-racist paths, we also must recognize how our behavior within our institutions does as much to maintain White supremacy as our scholarship might aim to dismantle it. As I introduce and begin to work with the possibilities of status treason, it is important to avoid conflation with previous considerations of race treason by scholars like Ignatiev and Garvey (1997). In particular, my proposal for status treason does not go so far as to suggest a flattening of status roles in the way that race treason aimed for White people to disavow our whiteness— and thus all of the histories that shaped it. Rather, I aim for status treason to present a way of thinking about maneuvering within existing structures that afford White people with faculty appointments a particular form of power. Related, my intent in naming status treason as the work of White teacher educators is intentional. This is not because BIPOC cannot or should not engage in it—quite to the contrary; one of the best examples I have come across during this theorizing process has been a Black scholar who consistently finds and/or creates funding opportunities for Black graduate

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    17

students, most of whom are not even students in this scholar’s program. Nevertheless, I pose status treason as primarily White people’s work because of the ways White academics can often be positioned within our institutions toward having more capital to spend than our colleagues who are BIPOC do. So, unlike race treason, which attempted to imagine a world without whiteness, status treason consists of an acknowledgement of present machinations of White supremacy and encourages individual White people in positions of institutional power to recognize where we can wield our status as a resource in pursuit of actual shifts in power dynamics. This is not in deference to power structures, but in recognition of how we are differently positioned within them at this moment in time. Status treason is a temporary stopgap. If it is a helpful concept for readers in this volume, I hope that some future generation of curriculum scholars can view it as a sobering relic of history. For example, perhaps someday it becomes normal for White people to engage in pedagogies like Tanner (2018) and his students’ playwriting and production of The Whiteness Project, through which White high school students experienced a perpetual “permission to be confused” in service to the expanding complexity of their racial understandings. If these pedagogies take hold and become as normal as observing mealworms or the monarch metamorphosis process in elementary school, the status that comes with a professional position like mine may not need to be disrupted in the ways I am conceiving of here. Someday we may understand differently how every move we make is connected to the unjust systems in which we’re all suspended (Geertz, 1973), and that we consent to constraint with every inaction. Nevertheless, there are many possible futures in which power flows differently through society. Individual acts of status treason, through which White teacher educators center the needs and interests of their BIPOC students over the demands of the institution, may be one way to make space for power to begin moving differently, and for those new futures to take hold. REFERENCES Amos, Y. T. (2016). Voices of teacher candidates of color on white race evasion: ‘I worried about my safety!’ International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(8), 1002–1015. Beaton, J. (2014). Perceiving professional risk in five stories. Qualitative Inquiry, 1–12. Bower-Phipps, L., Homa, T. D., Albaladejo, C., Johnson, A. M., & Cruz, M. C. (2013). Connecting with the “other” side of us: A cooperative inquiry by self-identified minorities in a teacher preparation program. Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2013, 29–51.

18    A. M. MASON Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach. Albany: State University of New York Press. Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chhuon, V., Spies, P., & Antrop-Gonzalez, R. (2017, April 5). Teachers of color and American Indian descent in Minnesota are crucial. Star Tribune newspaper. Retrieved from http://www.startribune.com/counterpoint-teachers-of-colorand-american-indian-descent-in-minnesota-are-crucial/418270663/ Coates, T-N. (2015). Between the world and me. New York, NY: Spiegel and Grau. Delpit, L. (2012). Multiplication is for White people. New York, NY: The New Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for White poeple to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fecho, B., Graham, P., & Hudson-Ross, S. (2005). Appreciating the wobble: Teacher research, professional development, and figured worlds. English Education, 37(3), 174–199. Flores, M. T. (2007). Navigating contradictory communities of practice in learning to teach for social justice. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 38(4), 380–402. Flynn, J. (2018). White fatigue: Rethinking resistance for social justice. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books. Griffin, L. B., Watson, D., & Liggett, T. (2016). “I didn’t see it as a cultural thing”: Supervisors of student teachers define and describe culturally responsive supervision. Democracy and Education, 24(1), 1–13. Hill Collins, P. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Ignatiev, N. & Garvey, J. (Eds.) (1996). Race traitor. New York, NY: Routledge. Jupp, J. C., Berry, T. R., & Lensmire, T. J. (2016). Second-wave White teacher identity studies: A review of White teacher identity literatures from 2004 through 2014. Review of Educational Research, 20(10), 1–41. Love, B. L. (2016). Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(1), 22–25. Mason, A. M. (2016). Taking time, breaking codes: Moments in white teacher candidates’ exploration of racism and teacher identity. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(8), 1045–1058. Mason, A. M., & Ngo, B. (2019). Teacher education for cultural and linguistic diversity in the united states. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.297 Muth, K. D., Polizzi, N. C., & Glynn, S. M. (2007). Case-based teacher preparation for teaching controversial topics in middle school. Middle School Journal, 38(5), 14–19. Tanner, S. J. (2018). Whiteness, pedagogy, and youth in America: Critical whiteness studies in the classroom. New York, NY: Routledge. Thornhill, T. (2015). Racial salience and the consequences of making white people uncomfortable: Intra-racial discrimination, racial screening, and the maintenance of White supremacy. Sociology Compass, 9(8), 694–703.

Toward a Practice of Status Treason    19 Tolbert, S., & Eichelberger, S. (2016). Surviving teacher education: A community cultural capital framework of persistence. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 19(5), 1025–1042. Watkins, W. H. (2001). The White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865–1954. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Yoshino, K. (2006). Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights. New York, NY: Random House. Young, V. A. (2013). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching, and African American literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 2

VIOLENCE, HORROR, AND THE VISUAL IMAGE How Teachers Speak About the Difference Between the Use of Photographs of War and Photographs of Lynching Brian C. Gibbs The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

ABSTRACT Using Simon’s (2014) framework of a pedagogy of witnessing that describes “curatorial practices” and their different effects, this article describes how teachers teaching war and teachers teaching lynching near historic lynching sites decide to use visual images. Using data from two case studies (Stake, 1995) this manuscript describes the similarities and differences in the use of visual pedagogy. Teachers teaching war to the children of soldiers displayed a deep reticence toward the use of the visual image in their teaching of war. As one indicated, “Most photos offer a critique of war . . . any critique of war could get a student emotional response . . . and be seen as anti-Trump.” Teach-

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 21–36 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

21

22    B. C. GIBBS ers teaching lynching near historic lynching sites showed much less reticence using violent images often and intentionally to “show the horror and violence inflicted” as one participant indicated. These teachers left lynching as isolated historical events with no connection to present movements and events.

The first time I experienced horror I was 12 years old. It was the summer between 6th and 7th grade. It was early in the summer when it was warm but not oppressive in the Miami Valley of Cincinnati, Ohio where my family lived. The windows were open, not the steamy days that were coming that caused the air conditioner to thump and sweat. My parents were out for the evening, my sister at my grandmother’s, and my brother and his friend were watching a movie—the 1970s’ Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The film was about pod people from outer space who took over humans and made them into mindless drones. A few survivors had learned how to act like the drones and Donald Sutherland was one of the survivors. The last few minutes of the film shows him walking around Washington, DC undisturbed by the pod humans. A woman, another survivor that he had interacted with earlier sees him and approaches him displaying emotion, happy to see him. As she approaches, he stares, raises his arm, points his finger and screeches. She screams as the credits role and the film ends. Something about the ordinariness of the scene, my, and I assume most viewers’ assumption, was that the Sutherland character had survived. Then there was the shock that somewhere, somehow, his body had been invaded. We did not see it. It was this disruption of my assumption of normalcy, my innate belief that he had survived, had persevered through it all, which shook me. As usual, I did not sleep that night. Interestingly, I have revisited that film throughout my academic career. When I became a history teacher and eventually, perhaps inevitably a teacher educator, I understood early the value of the good story or the story well told (Barton & Levstik, 2004) but also the necessity of the horror story. HISTORY AS HORROR STORY History of the United States, when told honestly, is a horror story (Zinn, 1990). The story of history involves murder, torture, rape, death, destruction, famine, genocide, and atrocities on a grand scale. While there is resistance, growth, and change, this often happens in reaction to the horror. War, upon which most social studies textbooks, standards, and curriculum are organized (Noddings, 2005, 2008) entails death, murder, rape, genocide, bombings, burnings, and destruction of humanity. The narratives of triumphs, the civil rights movements, including the Black freedom struggle,

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    23

indigenous rights, women’s movement, action towards LGBTQAI+ equality all arose from lynching,1 murder, rape, and decades of death and discrimination. Textbooks, standards, tests, and often teachers (Leahey, 2010; Loewen, 1995) bleach the historical narrative to make it palatable, but the omissions develop largely untrue stories. The narrative developed is nationalistic, a story of unfolding greatness and growth away from missteps and difficulty (Epstein, 2009, Leahey 2010) rather than a more complicated and complex story. As a high school social studies teacher, my students explored horror often. They experienced horror, actually felt it, I have come to believe, only once. I was teaching the use of nuclear weapons, nuclear war strategy, and the use of nuclear weapons as threat and deterrent. When they realized how many active nuclear missiles there were still in existence, how many of them were pointed at the United States, how quickly they would arrive in Los Angeles, and how unlikely the government was to tell us, my students shared with me for weeks afterwards the nightmares they experienced and the worry they had when they looked into the sky. Through the study of nuclear war, students discovered a very real threat to their day-today lives that they had no control over. Horror had descended upon them. Guided by the question “How much horror should high school students be exposed to through the use of photographs and the visual image?” this manuscript details how social studies teachers choose to use or not use horror through photographs and the visual image. Impacted by the ideology and politics of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), community (Liston & Zeichner, 1991), unique pressures of national politics (Rogers et al., 2017; Sondel, Baggett, & Hadley-Dunn, 2018) and their own understandings of student need, teachers struggled to make what they considered to be the right choice. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: A PEDAGOGY OF WITNESSING • • • •

Photographs/images used to instill knowledge of historic or past wrong Photographs/images used to indicate the horror and violence of what was done Photographs/images not used in such a way to deepen the desecration of victims Photographs/images used to push viewers to act to disrupt or change what is being depicted • Photographs/images arranged/ordered intentionally, teaching students how to see, to accomplish the above

Figure 2.1  A pedagogy of witnessing.

24    B. C. GIBBS

Simon’s (2014) conceptual framework of a pedagogy of witnessing will be used as an analytic tool. Simon argues that the “public presentation of violent images” can “unstick the present” pushing us and as Simon says, “impelling forward” toward the work yet to be done today (p. 2). He argues that remembrance as public acts can accomplish a critical awareness and understanding rather than just a self-referential remembering. This examination of historical photographs, Simon argues, can be a praxis of public history that can “reopen” and allow for a re-examining of the problem that can lead to growth, movement, and ultimately change (p. 4). As Simon notes, the display of gruesome, violent, and horrific photos cannot be taken lightly and much consideration must be given to how they are displayed in different social and historic spaces. There are possibilities of trauma, Simon argues, but this comes not from the artifacts themselves but from “one’s own experience” (p. 11) of the exhibition of the photographs themselves. Therefore, much consideration must be given to how the photographs are used and arranged. As Simon notes, engagement with difficult photographs can be a “troubling gift” (p. 12) that causes the facing of difficult truths. The purpose of photographs in the understanding of difficult history is to “disrupt prevailing discourses” (p. 16) and in many cases silences. It is in the witnessing however, that knowledge, understanding, and the possibilities of forward movement are joined. METHODOLOGY This chapter developed from two larger case studies of social studies teachers (Stake, 1995; Yin, 1989, 2003). The first case study examined how teachers taught war to the children of soldiers during a time of war. There were nine teacher participants who were interviewed twice in a semi-structured format (Yin, 1989). Five of these teachers were observed teaching war between 7 and 10 times over the course of one academic year. Eleven teachers were interviewed for the study on the teaching of lynching. Each of these teachers was interviewed twice in a semi-structured (Stake, 1995) format lasting between 90 and 180 minutes each. Additionally, two of these teachers were observed teaching lynching, one over a 5-day period the other for 3 days. Field notes were written for both studies after each interview to record sights, sounds, smells, teacher dress and disposition, and other specific event details that can help me better understand what the teachers are saying and experiencing (Creswell, 2013).

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    25

CULTURAL SPACES AND SOCIAL CONTEXT The social context and social conditions of schooling heavily influence the curriculum taught and the pedagogy employed (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). This was quite true for all the teachers in both studies. Recently published studies have indicated that the period directly prior to and since the presidential election have seen increased bullying, tension, and fear as students who are recent immigrants, of color, religions other than Christian, LGBTQ, amongst others, have seen and felt increased tension and harassment (Costello, 2017; Rogers et al., 2017). This increase has been so damaging that one study calls for a pedagogy of trauma (Sondel et al., 2018) to help both students and teachers heal from the harshness of the school environment. Teachers are fearful (Costello, 2017; Gibbs, 2019; Rogers et al., 2017; Sondel et al., 2018) of “ending up on a right wing website” as one teacher recently told me, of being censored, punished, or losing their jobs. FINDINGS The nine teachers involved in the study on the teaching of war taught war very carefully. They generally taught war without controversy adhering closely to what the state and county standards told them to. There was fear of community retribution, as well as a fear that trauma could be inflicted on students for teaching war with a more critical edge. Typical images were used, such as ones in textbooks, but these are largely devoid of controversy or horror. The 11 teachers involved interviewed for the lynching study used images of horror quite readily. The teachers teaching lynching taught it as an exclusively historical event. They did not connect lynching to the police murders of African American men, to the Black Lives Matter movement or any other present day racial violence. With the exception of one, the teachers taught lynching as a Southern event against Black men mostly not connecting it to lynching in the Northern states or as a weapon used against Chinese and Mexicans in the West and Southwest. VISUAL IMAGE AND THE TEACHING OF WAR Ms. Kate described teaching a World War I trench “experiential”2 where students “experienced” what it might have been like in the trenches during the war. She found it added realism for students and proved to be a useful tool for students remembering intricate details of content. In the experiential, the desks are pushed together to simulate a trench, students made

26    B. C. GIBBS

“battlefield accessories” then sat in the trench while she read excerpts from All Quiet on the Western Front (1987) and were shown slides of WWI combat. When asked which slides she chose, “None that were horrifying,” she indicated, “None that would give nightmares . . . that’s just not appropriate.” The slides she showed me were typical WWI textbook fare and the ones that the History Alive program had provided. Her activity always received high marks from students and was something they looked forward to in class. A grandmother of a student, not a parent who was active duty or retired complained to the principal who told Ms. Kate to void the lesson. She has not done it since. The complaint was registered 7 years ago. The complaint, Ms. Kate indicated, focused on her use of “violent images that would give students nightmares and fear for their family’s safety.” This was a common fear teachers raised, complaint, not from a parent but from a community member. During interviews and classroom observations teachers rarely used photographs or film of wars from the Vietnam War forward. As one participant indicated, “When the uniforms begin to look like the uniforms of their fathers, teaching gets well . . . tricky.” The photos and films teachers used were similar to those used by Ms. Kate, curricula designed for mass usage across the country and the world, designed like textbooks to not offend and therefore offer critique of no one (Leahey, 2010; Loewen, 1995). Still as Kellner (1995) argued, “Students are bathed in media” and some might say saturated. While the teachers intentionally kept the visual image out of the classroom, their students indicated they saw violent images of war nearly every day. As one student said, “How cannot I not see them? The news is everywhere, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook . . . I use Snapchat to send messages because at least there I’m safe.” By “safe,” she meant unlikely to see violent images. Students throughout the study indicated that the avoidance of images of horror in class did not keep them from seeing them. Instead, what not seeing the images did was prevent students from fully understanding the images, learning how to analyze the images, and then make sense of the images. Despite the claim that teachers kept images of horror out of the teaching of war, there were two images used repeatedly. The first was a drawing of the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine and the second was a selection of Matthew Brady Civil War photos. Teachers used both of these photos in some capacity in all classrooms observed. The U.S.S. Maine The image of the U.S.S. Maine explosion is an exemplar of yellow journalism. Used by William Randolph Hearst to sell newspapers and stoke war, the drawing shows the explosion in dramatic fashion. An explosion full of

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    27

fire and smoke emanating from inside the ship complete with images of sailors being thrown into the heavens. The depiction was created to spread outrage and it did. On six different occasions, I saw the image of the Maine used but never was the image interrogated or examined as a depiction of the horror of war. Nor was it even unpacked to think through the comment that this image makes on war generally. In all six cases, it was a slide in a PowerPoint of the history of the Spanish–American War, delivered quickly. The slide was typically on the screen for seconds and used as both an example of yellow journalism and one of the key reasons for war. The image on its face is horrifying, depicting a dramatic act of violence that led to the deaths of 266 sailors and marines. As it is a ubiquitous image, it has made it into many if not most American textbooks near the paragraph that describes the Spanish–American War. This it seems has diminished teacher’s understanding of its horror. The exploitation of this image led to the deaths of 4,500 Americans (including the Philippines end of the war) and untold numbers of Spanish, Cubans, and Filipino soldiers and civilians. Whether this image was the penultimate push into war or not is likely still debated and likely will be. It is, however, an image of terror, brutality, and horror left unpacked and unexamined. One more image in the lives of students, “literally bathing in images” (Kellner, 1995, p. 23) left untaught. When pushed on this seeming contradiction, not wanting to show images of horror and violence but then doing so quickly and obliquely, teachers responded in two general and different ways. One teacher, Mr. Gretch represents the majority of responses, which was shocked at the description that the image involves horror and violence. He said, Really? This drawing of the main? I don’t see that as horror or horrifying . . . I mean you can see the sailors and all, but it’s not like their bodies are being blown apart. There’s no arms ripped off . . . no legs ripped off . . . no screams of agony. I mean this image is everywhere. Let’s see there’s . . . I mean you can see twelve bodies flying in the air but it’s not horrifying, it’s cartoonish almost.

For Mr. Gretch, the image itself, though depicting an act of war, was without horror and violence and therefore not of value to analyze. It is, as he continued in the interview, “A data point. Something to show when I’m lecturing about the war and yellow journalism. That’s really its only value.” When pushed and asked if it was a worthy document to examine, to teach students to learn about fake news (Rogers, 2018), teach propaganda directly (Vinson & Ross, 2003), or teach the skills of the historian (Wineburg, 2001), Mr. Gretch responded in the negative. “No,” he said. “Doing that digs up all the violence and I guess it gets at the horror. Why would I do that to these kids?” The “these kids” statement at the end of his comment was one repeated by multiple teachers during the course of the study. Their argument seemed to be why would I bring so much horror so close to home?

28    B. C. GIBBS

The counter argument could be that honesty and given an opportunity to process this difficult history, providing students with the skills to examine visual images could be a gift and could lead to healing. Matthew Brady Photographs The other set of photographs used often (observed used 4 times in different ways during classroom observations) were Matthew Brady United States Civil War photographs. The photos had two different displays, either as part of a lecture on the history of the American Civil War, showing camp scenes and images of famous generals, or in a Google folder that students accessed and answered questions in response to and then discussed them in a class session. Like the textbook providers (Leahey, 2010; Loewen, 1995), teachers left out the more graphic photos of the Brady collection, such as photos of battlefield dead. Like the textbooks themselves, the photos were used to provide content to be absorbed and consumed rather than evaluated. The opportunity for analysis of the photos or of teaching a richer more complicated story, were typically lost. When asked why the “darker” photos were not used, several teachers echoed the oft heard response, “Why would I do that to these students, especially now?” The one time that photos on war were critiqued and connected to the present happened completely by accident. Ms. Smith’s intent was what she called a “marination discussion” where students kicked around the content material to make certain students understood it. What happened was thoroughly unexpected. The students connected the material to their parents as soldiers and engaged in a spirited and difficult discussion of media representations of war. On the day of the discussion students sat in a circle and Ms. Smith asked for a first comment. A male student spoke first indicating his surprise at the amount of down time and time spent in camp by soldiers during wartime. A female student responded almost immediately, “Talk to your parents. After all they see, they need it.” She spoke directly to the lived existence of her classmates. It touched the edges of the horror of war. Ms. Smith indicated later she was surprised that this happened. She said she does not worry about teaching war until “the uniforms of the soldiers begin to look like their fathers,” typically World War II and forward. Ms. Smith said students approach her about worries and trauma involving their parents, but she avoids it in her classroom teaching, unsure, she said, how she would handle a whole class discussion of the horror or worry about parents and other loved ones in the military. With little teacher input or direction, students spent the rest of class, about 40 minutes, critiquing the media coverage of our current wars, the ones involving their parents and loved ones. Students examined and

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    29

discussed the Brady photographs themselves only briefly instead using them as a springboard to the present to discuss what of wars should be shown and what should not. Students commented on the television media heavily almost universally agreeing that Americans who got their news only from the television were “uninformed and ignorant.” The students believed that television news manipulated emotions and was a business as opposed to a news delivery service. There was an agreement that the news coverage should honor their parents and their sacrifice but students differed greatly as to what that meant. It was a missed opportunity. If the students had been honestly taught about the horrors of war and taught how to analyze and digest difficult images of war and conflict, it may well have helped them have a better understanding of their lived reality. The students were aware of the horror of combat, of what their parents were asked to do, and were feeling and discussing it, largely outside of the classroom. It should have been an intentional and purposeful part of the classroom instruction. VISUAL IMAGE AND THE TEACHING OF LYNCHING Teachers teaching lynching near historic lynching sites had different perspectives on the use of visual images depicting horror. With the exception of one teacher and another teacher who seemed to change her mind midinterview, most teachers believed in a full-throated use of them. As one participant indicated: Look, all of our students are attached to their phone. They see horrific images all the time with absolutely no filter. You ask if I use the pictures (of lynching)? Absolutely. I have to use them to break through, get them (students) to understand, to feel it.

All nine of the teachers who used lynching photographs in their teaching cited similar arguments. It was a variation on what I call the “kids today” argument. Students are different, they are emotionally distant, they are immune to the horrors. One teacher added a quite strong turn of phrase, “I mean these kids are living on a burning, dying planet . . . everyday . . . to get them to care about anything, I need to use everything.” When asked why teachers did not connect lynching to violence against Blacks today, I received quizzical looks. Answers including self-preservation, inappropriate for their student body, not connected to standards, too political, and too indoctrinational. The teachers seemed to think of lynching as a horrific historical event that had been largely removed from history, seen as too controversial to teach, too horrific to imagine, and so that was

30    B. C. GIBBS

enough. Their concern was focused on teaching the act itself and had not sought out or recognized present connections. When asked if lynching photos could be juxtaposed to images of present day police violence, the teachers answered with an almost unanimous no. Using the lynching photographs were complex enough it seemed. There was some variation in how they deployed the photographs in their instruction. As Simon (2014) argues, how photographs are arrayed in a space decides how they will be received and what impact they will have. Lynching was typically part of the story of particular instructional units rather than the story. Only three teachers constructed complete units of instruction focused on lynching, the majority embedding it within units on racial justice or civil rights to help students understand the dramatic need for rights and protections. Most of the teachers used the photographs as part of PowerPoint slides. The teachers would define lynching, give a bit of a historical narrative of it, some explaining that lynching involved more than just hanging and would then show various lynching photos. The photos typically focused on Black men hanging from their necks but they would often also show, typically more quickly the charred remains of a burnt body to display variants of the types of lynching. The latter photos were usually flashed on the screen quickly then removed. Only one teacher hung the photographs around the room and asked students to do a gallery walk, completing a chart analyzing the surroundings, the people witnessing the event, the age of the murder victim, and other information. The teacher said she had planned to have three class periods do this, but was overwhelmed by the horror on display after two classes engaged in the activity. She said, I thought that would help them wrestle through the difficulty of this topic, maybe even get at some of the personal issues around race and violence. That happened a bit, I think . . . but the students were so quiet, mostly engaged in the photographs I think, but weighed down by the horror that was all around them.

Teachers indicated they liked using PowerPoint for lynching photos because they could control the time of exposure. The teachers were convinced that this allowed them to provide information, expose students to the image and then remove as needed. The two teachers observed for this study had two drastically different approaches to the use of images in the displaying and distilling of the horror of lynching. One teacher, Mr. Carrol, uses images with the intention of instilling feelings of horror, while Mr. Jones refuses to use photographs at all, instead taking a mile high view of lynching and using an historic film.

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    31

Mr. Carrol Mr. Carrol is a tall Black man with an infectious grin and exuberant approach to life and teaching. He came to teaching late, after careers in sales, business, and as a member of the local parks department. Always in love with history he came around to teaching as a career, just 4 years ago now in his middle thirties. He teaches in a rural,3 mostly Black section of his home state, in the community he was raised and still lives in. The county surrounding Mr. Carrol’s community is segregated along school district lines. The city school district is mostly White and mostly middle class and above. High achieving Black students can attend the school, but few do, as students feel disconnected, unwanted, and unsupported.4 Mr. Carrol teaches 6th grade world history to his mostly Black students. Though he teaches world history he stretches the standards, a bit to add a week of local history focused on lynching and anti-Black violence. The unit is entitled, “A History of Anti-Black Violence in Smith County.”5 It is a week of brutal history presented through PowerPoint lecture and photo examination. The students sit largely mesmerized during the week of instruction. Raucous and rambunctious groups of students who have a strong relationship with Mr. Carrol are used to “messing with him” as they say, talking and laughing with good-natured teasing being passed back and forth between teacher and student. During this unit, “Mr. Carrol is different,” the students tell me. More serious, sadder, perhaps more clearly determined. The history he teaches is not just of the lynching that happened locally, but also of the long history of racism from 1867 forward. While no photographs of the two lynchings exist to Mr. Carrol’s knowledge, he uses several lynchings within their home state to give students a sense of the violence that occurred. The students express dismay audibly many times during the lessons but stay mesmerized to the pattern, performance, and storytelling of Mr. Carrol. The largest student response is to the lynching photos themselves. Several students gasp, with several students sucking in air, saying “Oh God” and making other exclamations. The unit ends with a discussion of a hate crime that occurred in the early 2000s but is disconnected from the lynching itself. The lecture and series of lectures provides a series of horror stories and macabre images but has no through line, no storyline that connects them all. It was in a sense one horror story after another, well told but with no sense of a larger historical connection between them and with no story of interruption or disruption (Apple, 2014) or possibilities of resistance historically or in the present.

32    B. C. GIBBS

Mr. Jones Mr. Jones took a different approach than Mr. Carrol. Rather than cement lynching in the American South, he began with a film. A White man who teaches mostly White students in a largely White county in the South. He began his unit with the film, The Oxbow Incident (2004), based on the book of the same name. The basic outline is that two drifters arrive in a small town at about the same time that word comes that a local rancher has been murdered. A posse is quickly formed and three men are found with the cattle. They are hanged but found to be innocent later. While watching the film, students were asked to keep a chart describing the action of each character and their feelings about them over time. Mr. Jones leads a discussion the following day, debriefing the film and giving some history on lynching using a website that details a map of every known lynching in the United States. He indicated, “I want the students to understand, that lynching and mob violence is more than a Southern problem and more than a Black and White problem.” Although he used to, Mr. Jones now refuses to show images of lynching to his students. This came after a speech he attended by a history professor at a local university who studies lynching. The professor argued that using the photographs of the dead is a re-exploitation and he refuses to engage in it. Primary source documents, storytelling, narrative, all of these Mr. Jones thinks can be just as powerful as the visual image and just as visceral. To have the impact he wants lynching to have he has to be more thoughtful in his exploration and examination of this topic with his students. When pushed about his students stumbling upon images of lynching on the internet either accidentally or on purpose and being unprepared for them, his response is blunt: “We don’t analyze enough art or propaganda or photographs enough in here [his class], but they’ll know what’s happening. They’ll have the wider broader view.” DISCUSSION Images were used either too little or too much. None of the teachers struck the balance that the pedagogy of witnessing (Simon, 2014) calls for. The teachers used images with little intentionality to provide knowledge, instill an understanding of the violence and horror inflicted, and while there was an effort to get students to know and better understand what happened, none of the teachers pushed students to either work towards ending war nor race-based violence as a pedagogy of witnessing calls for (Simon, 2014). The teachers either used the images to instill fear and horror or as a prop. None of the teachers taught the students how to view the images either. There was

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    33

no purposeful teaching of how to view an image, breakdown a photograph, interrogate what is being represented, the argument being made. Images in the Teaching of War In the teaching of war, teachers avoided using images, or they used images as a crutch, a visual representation of content they delivered rather than as something to engage, dissect, or analyze. As is called for in a pedagogy of witnessing (Simon, 2014), the teachers avoided using images to instill knowledge of historic wrongs. In regards to the teaching of war, the images further explained content, but did not complicate it or disrupt the dominant narrative. When images were used depicting violence, such as the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine, students were not pressed to explore this, again using the image as something to look at while the teacher delivered content. Though quite accidentally, the teachers did follow the third guideline in the pedagogy of witnessing, which is that images not be used to deepen the desecration of victims. As the historical narrative was sanitized, there was no need to guard against furthering the inhumanity of the victims of violence. That is unless the avoidance of using images without introducing the violence and horror inflicted upon humans could be seen as a further desecration. Even in the one instance when students proved they were interested in and ready to have a conversation about the horror and violence of war, the teacher let the conversation happen but did not build from this. She neither taught students the skills of visual analysis nor arranged for another deep discussion on visual image and war nor as the pedagogy of witnessing calls for, did she use the images, nor the students’ momentum to change or interrupt the wars currently engaged by the United States. Students learned little from the visual images themselves. Images are to be placed in order thoughtfully and with intentionality to help students see the images thoroughly and to aid in the accomplishment of a true pedagogy of witnessing. Other than depicting snippets of historical narrative, there seemed to be little thought given to the ordering of the images at all by any of the teachers teaching war. Image and the Teaching of Lynching In the teaching of lynching, most teachers used the visual image as a teaching tool to push the students to experience the visceral, the violence, and the horror. This is called for in a pedagogy of witnessing, where images are intended to display more easily, what was done, the violence that occurred.

34    B. C. GIBBS

The teachers did not intentionally teach students how to better understand the photos but used them to inflict feelings of horror within their students. Though there is evidence that students were moved by the images, none of the teachers used this connection to the violence to teach how to disrupt the current violence against communities of color in the United States or the similar horror and violence being inflicted upon communities worldwide. There was evidence of a careful choosing of images, an intentional ordering to deepen student understanding. Mr. Carrol chose images directly out of the history of the community in which he taught. Mr. Carrol did this over the course of a week of instruction, using specific images and history directly connected to the students’ broader community. The students expressed disgust, outrage, and anger, fulfilling a piece of a pedagogy of witnessing but left with no direction on where to focus that anger, or how to use their rage. He did not as the pedagogy of witnessing calls for encourage nor teach his students to seek to disrupt racial violence, but allowed students to simmer in rage. It could be said that Mr. Carrol in his zeal to have students be affected by the horror of lynching furthered the desecration of the victims. They were in essence showpieces in a horror show. With both teachers, the photographs shocked the students and they served to deepen their understanding of the events, but did little to propel them towards action or a solution. They were instead saddened by the images rather than moved forward by them. If Mr. Jones had used elements of a pedagogy of witnessing, his students may have been more prepared for when they came across these images, as they are easily accessible via the internet. In his avoidance of the visual images of lynching, he used few elements of a pedagogy of witnessing; leaving his students unprepared for the realities, they would face in the outside world, but perhaps more perniciously, at the hands of their own keyboards. CONCLUSION Images of war and violence surround us. They stand ready to greet us on our phones, televisions, and computer screens. Students need to be prepared for them. They need an understanding of how to analyze them, gain knowledge from them, and use them in their lives. The highest level of terror is when we realize that what we thought we knew we do not, what was once ordinary is no longer. It is an unsettling horror that grows with the realization and understanding of change. Violent images and images filled with horror do that. They deepen and darken what we already know or thought we knew leaving us in an unsettled place. As Sontag (2003) has argued, the hope and possibility of the violent image, the photograph of horror, is that it propels us forward into action. As she added, the image

Violence, Horror, and the Visual Image    35

itself cannot and will never do this. It must be accompanied in this case, by direct, intentional teaching. The horror, the violence of the past can have a significant meaning and can cause great change in our present. NOTES 1. Lynching here is defined as extra-judicial mob murder. Though lynchings have taken place throughout the United States it is primarily thought of as a Southern phenomenon, particularly in the post Civil War years to middle 1960s. Lynching is typically thought of as an illegal hanging most often of an African American man accused of attempting or committing rape against a White woman. Lynchings have also involved burnings, shootings, beheadings, and other forms of violence as well. Lynchings have also murdered women, children, Latinx, Asians, Jews, and other groups (Dray, 2002). 2. Experientials are simulated learning experiences which place students in historical events as much as possible within a classroom setting to give students an experience that they can attach content knowledge to. The experiential she used was taken from the History Alive Program https://www.teachtci.com 3. The nearest motel is 27 miles away from his school site and the nearest restaurant is 11 miles from his school. 4. This information was provided by Mr. Carrol, then supported by four other teachers, two parents, and a guidance counselor at his school. 5. This county is a pseudonym.

REFERENCES Apple, M. (2014). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203814383 Barton, K., & Levstik, L. (2004). Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Costello, M. (2017). The Trump effect: The impact of the presidential election on our nation’s schools. Retrieved from http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/ general/SPLC%20The%20Trump%20Effect.pdf Creswell, J. (2013). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing between 5 approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Dray, P. (2002). At the hands of persons unknown: The lynching of Black America. New York, NY: Random House. Epstein, T. (2009). Interpreting national history. New York, NY: Routledge. Gibbs, B. (2019). Patriotism, pressure, and place: Civic agency in base country. Peabody Journal of Education, 94(1), 97–113. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and postmodern. London, England: Routledge. Leahey, C. (2010). Whitewashing war: Historical myth, corporate textbooks, and possibilities for democratic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

36    B. C. GIBBS Liston, D., & Zeichner, K. (1991). Teacher education and the social conditions of schooling. New York, NY: Routledge. Loewen, J. (1995). Lies my teacher told me. New York, NY: Touchstone. Noddings, N. (2005). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education, (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Noddings, N. (2008). Critical lessons: What our schools should teach. London, England: Cambridge University Press. Remarque, E. M. (1987). All quiet on the Western Front. New York, NY: Ballantine. Rogers, J. (2018). Education for “not being duped” in an era of fake news: Insights from John Dewey and Paulo Freire, In C. Torres, (Ed.), The Wiley handbook of Paulo Freire (pp. 291–304). San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Rogers, J., Franke, M., Yun, J., Ishimoto, M., Diera, C., Geller, R., . . . Brenes, T. (2017). Teaching and learning in the age of Trump: Increasing stress and hostility in American high schools. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access. Simon, R. I. (2014). A pedagogy of witnessing: Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sondel, B., Baggett, H., & Hadley-Dunn, A. (2018). “For millions of people this is real trauma”: A pedagogy of political trauma in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Teaching and Teacher Educationm, 70, 175–185. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. New York, NY: Picador. Stake, R. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. New York, NY: Routledge. Van Tilburg Clark, W. (2004). The Oxbow incident. New York, NY: Random House. Vinson, K., & Ross, W. (2003). Image and education: Teaching in the face of the new disciplinarity. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking: And other unnatural acts charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Yin, R. (1989). Case study research: Design and methods (Rev. ed.). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Yin, R. (2003). Applications of case study research (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Zinn, H. (1990). A people’s history of the United States. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

CHAPTER 3

CHARTING THE FUTURE Policing and Surveillance in School Safety Discourse Timothy C. Wells Arizona State University

ABSTRACT The practice of data mining in educational research has been both praised for its ability to efficiently extract large swaths of information and critiqued for operating on questionable legal and ethical grounds. It is within this tension that the present chapter explores the discourse of data mining in education. Specifically, this chapter explores how an initiative to mine data from high school students’ text messages adopts a kind of activist discourse; however, this discourse is attuned not to democratic practices or marginalized populations but to a hegemonic branding of safety. It is from this framing that similar data mining endeavors result in the practices of policing and surveillance, which further reinforces the vulnerable status of many marginalized students. Ultimately, this chapter raises questions about the value of research and interventions that not only neglects curriculum and pedagogy but also the lives and experiences of the people most affected.

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 37–49 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

37

38    T. C. WELLS

In a talk given at Harvard University, noted professor of statistics, David Donoho (2015) sparked fervor in expressing concern over the growing field of data science.1 For Donoho, data science combines statistical procedures with machine learning, yet it marks a problematic shift from the field of statistics. In traditional statistics, as well as much of social science, the intent of the research is to provide explanation and understanding. In the more recent field of data science, the intent is prediction and preemption. For Donoho, this shift turns the field away from an intellectual project of knowledge generation and understanding and towards a commercial project concerning industrial needs, skill sets, and interventions. The drivers of the field are privatized with less allegiance to collective value or understanding. It might also be said that this shift further marginalizes the need for critical understanding and the value of questioning the taken-forgranted and seeming inevitable aspects of our society, something of central importance for educators, curriculum inquiry, and activism. What is of interest in the present chapter is less the statistics—data science divide—and more the implications of commercially driven predictive and preemptive practices, specifically those in discussions of school safety. Both fields of school safety research and data science have found prominence within academic and mainstream culture, yet they remain largely unquestioned. The purpose of this chapter is to examine critically the discourse at the intersection of these two fields. In doing so, this chapter focuses on Nancy Lublin’s (2012) TED Talk, “Texting That Save Lives,” which advocates for the mining of text message data to prevent violence in schools. I argue that Lubin’s discourse invokes a kind of top-down policing activism, neglecting the voices and experiences of those most vulnerable to her interventions, specifically communities of color. However, Lublin is not alone in this as many other data mining projects function in a similar fashion, which this chapter seeks to demonstrate. First, this chapter critically reviews research on school safety and the emergent field of educational data mining, identifying challenges, contradictions, and marginalization within the field. Next, this chapter discusses Gee’s (2014) social practice approach to discourse analysis as a way to better understand the ideas and practices underlying language. Then, this chapter analyzes Nancy Lublin’s (2012) TED Talk, uncovering the beliefs and orientations that enable the data mining—school safety discourse. The chapter concludes with a discussion of problems and potential that this field has for educational inquiry. THE FIELD OF SCHOOL SAFETY The field of school safety research has grown considerably in the past three decades, with topics ranging from mass shootings and violence to

Charting the Future    39

interpersonal conflict and classroom management. Concerns over school safety have prompted growth in the field; however, a critical reading of literature illuminates not just the statistical trends but also challenges, contradictions, and marginalizations that the field operates upon. It is these aspects, namely the contradictions and marginalizations, that I find important for understanding the context and status of school safety research. The foremost contradiction that school safety research resides upon is the lack of alignment between the perceived and experienced realities of school violence. This is represented in two pieces of data: the first finds individuals’ reports of feeling threatened at school on the rise (Mayer & Furlong, 2010); the second finds violent crime (in and out of schools) on the decline (Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski, & Jimerson, 2010). In fact, violent crime in school is lower than it has been in close to three decades (Kann et al., 2018). This contradiction, the rising concern over violence, while actual violence declines, likely suggests multiple things. One reading might be that collective attitudes towards violence has changed: Any violence is now too much violence and is in need of our full attention and action. While this collective shift in attitude may be true, most mistakenly believe that school violence is on a significant rise, and especially so with gun violence (Center for Homeland Defense & Security, 2019). It is this contradiction that underlies the growing field of school safety research. However, conceptions of violence in schools can be thought of rather broadly, which is something not fully captured in the perception data. Often ideas about what constitutes school violence favors large-scale extremes (i.e., school shootings) over smaller, everyday acts of violence (i.e., bullying; Mayer & Furlong, 2010). So, while the prevalence of homicides in schools remains quite rare, the prevalence of bullying, experienced by about one quarter of students, remains quite frequent (Hymel & Swearer, 2015). A particularly problematic finding in bullying research is how the data break down amongst students who identify as LGBTQ. These students report being bullied at a rate 3 to 4 times greater than their peers (Kosciw, Greytak, Zongrone, Clark, & Truong, 2018). When considering research and public conversations about violence in schools, the nature of bullying as highly intertwined with LGBTQ prejudice remains absent.2 This is one way in which the sensationalizing of large-scale school violence discredits and marginalizes the experience of LGBTQ students. Furthermore, the lack of centering LGBTQ students in thinking about school violence interventions, particularly in anti-bullying interventions, might explain the challenges the field experiences in finding successful interventions (see Bradshaw, 2015). It is this difficulty in finding solutions to the perceived problem of school violence that has prompted researchers and school officials to explore new and different directions.

40    T. C. WELLS

One particularly influential direction draws on the growing field of educational data mining. Unlike the highly structured and intentional techniques of traditional data collection, data mining employs “exploratory and unsupervised” methods to collect considerably larger amounts of data (Hassani, Saporta, & Silva, 2014). While educational data mining focuses on schooling data (Romero & Ventura, 2010), researchers are increasingly turning their mining practices to extra-curricular and non-school based data (Slater, Joksimović, Kovanovic, Baker, & Gasevic, 2017, p. 98). As Shade and Singh (2016) report, within the last few years, educational researchers as well as private companies have designed programs to mine the social media data of students in order to provide schools with the means to monitor their activities. In the name of school safety, such programs attempt to not simply study but actively intervene in educational settings, reflecting larger trends in data science away from causal inferencing (i.e., traditional statistics) towards prediction (see Donoho, 2015). It is this emphasis on prediction that changes the nature of data science research. The result is a field of study that lends itself quite readily to preemptive action and intervention, actions that should be approached with considerable skepticism, especially when dealing with underaged youth. It is here that I find the need for a reexamination of the discourse and practices of those operating at the intersection of data mining and school safety research. School safety research exists on contradictory premises and tends to marginalize the everyday violence experienced by LGBTQ youth. When coupled with the preemptive endeavor of data mining practices, questions about school safety research and its practices seem all the more pertinent. Therefore, this chapter explores the worldviews and correlating practices that data mining—school safety research seeks to enact. A better understanding of the theories and practices underlying this field will assist in determining not just the efficacy of such approaches but, importantly, the ethical value upon which such fields reside. To address these issues, I explore in depth the language of Nancy Lublin’s (2012) TED Talk on the mining of text message data, a project intent on “saving lives” and protecting students in schools. As I demonstrate below, Lublin’s proposal is endemic of many other social media data mining projects. Yet, her project prompts concerns not simply over its predictive efficacy but also about the collateral dangers associated with the mining and monitoring of youth data. First, however, I discuss the theories of language that informed this chapter. SOCIAL PRACTICE APPROACH TO LANGUAGE As a guiding theoretical and methodological lens, this research employs Gee’s (2014) social practice approach to language. Gee holds that language

Charting the Future    41

is fundamentally social, and that the meaning of language is made in and through social practices. Practices here are understood as the activities and agreed upon conventions that govern language use. When a speaker employs particular language practices that speaker engages in something more than the transfer of ideas; it is an attempt—consciously or not—to enter and maintain access to a network of others. In this attempt to access others, the use of language “says things” but it also does things and, importantly, creates a kind of being (i.e., an identity). Gee describes this multifaceted approach as the “saying-doing-being” of language. The doing and being of language become just as important as the saying. This social practice approach holds particular importance for discourse analysis. The way that a speaker uses language to enact a particular practices, worldviews, and identities takes center stage in the analysis. The focus is on what Gee (2014) terms the “building tasks” of language: how language actively constructs practices and beings in the world. To assist in the process of discourse analysis, Gee suggests a series of concepts, two of which (Social Languages and Intertextuality) I found particularly helpful in this analysis. The first, social languages, alternatively thought of as genres, refers to the relevant varieties of language within a piece of language. Reading for social languages means reading for the grammatical patterns—word use, syntax, tone—that the speaker employs. The second, intertextuality, refers to the borrowing or switching between different social languages. Reading for intertextuality means reading for the ways a text alludes to or quotes other sources. What is important with each of these tools is that they can be used to determine how a speaker uses language to enact particular identities and practices within their world. Such identities and practices always have social and political implications, which is an essential reason that discourse analysis remains important. Therefore, in this chapter, I find Gee’s concepts of social language and intertextuality helpful in understanding the ideals and practices that accompany the school safety—data mining discourse. As a productive text to analyze this discourse, I make use of Nancy Lublin’s (2012) TED Talk video titled, “Texting That Saves Lives.” Her talk is not only widely viewed but it also reflects the ideals and values of others operating within the data mining field. In the following sections, I address Lublin’s talk, her plan to mine text message data, and the ideas and likely practices that follow from her orientation. ANALYSIS OF LUBLIN’S TALK Lublin’s (2012) TED Talk revolves around her plan to mine text message data from a crisis text message hotline. Although the crisis text hotline

42    T. C. WELLS

already exists, the innovation comes in Lublin’s plan to mine the hotline’s data. She envisions students, mostly teenagers, texting the hotline when they experience a crisis, bullying, or an abuse of some sort. Her hope is that the data from the hotline will register incidences of bullying and abuse, providing a database to intervene and stop such behavior from ever occurring. Yet, a deeper analysis suggests that Lublin employs linguistic moves in order to enact a particular identity (social science informed activist) with particular practices (policing and surveillance). It is this that I attempt to unpack in the following section, especially attending to Lublin’s use of social languages and intertextuality. Social Language Speakers use grammatical patterns (i.e., word choice, syntax, tone) to enact particular identities and position themselves within particular social groups. These grammatical patterns are what Gee (2014) refers to as social languages. Others have referred to these patterns as “speech genres” (Bakhtin, 1986). Social languages provide one window into the practices and worldviews that a speaker attempts to enact with their language. Since speakers don’t always speak as directly as they could, social languages become an important way to read between the lines, inferring context and meaning. This is certainly the case in Lubin’s (2012) TED Talk. In the following, I explore two distinct social languages that Lublin enacts: the presentational and the activist. It is through these social languages that Lublin assembles her data mining project. The more apparent of the two social languages is Lublin’s use of presentational language: how she fits her talk within the TED genre. Most TED Talks are short and motivational; Lublin’s (2012) talk lasts just over 5 minutes. The talk also reflects common rhetorical moves in academic presentations, consisting of a problem statement, a catalyst, a crisis, an evaluation, and a conclusion (Rowley-Jolivet & Carter-Thomas, 2005). In addition to the academic features, Lublin reflects specific rhetorical features of the TED Talk genre (Ludewig, 2017), with provocative ideas and grandiose claims (i.e., the text message data will “[chart] the future” and “save more lives than penicillin”; Lublin, 2012). This visionary, sales-pitch-type language aligns with how the TED organization envisions its speakers: “[Our presenters] invent world-changing devices and create ground-breaking media. They are trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons, and geniuses” (TED Conference LLC, n.d., para. 3). When Lublin aligns her language with the presentational style of the TED organization, she receives a significant platform and status (“trusted”; “convention-breaking mavericks, icons, and geniuses”) to share her ideas. With this recognition,

Charting the Future    43

it makes sense for Lublin to not completely buck the TED style. However, as is often the case, an individual’s use of language contains multiple social languages. These different social languages further align a speaker with social groups and practices. The second social language worth noting is her activist language. Yet, for the moment, consider it a kind of convention breaking informalism. It can be found in both the content and style in which she speaks. Consider how she speaks without guard about issues of trauma and abuse. Many social language conventions relegate talk about trauma to the private sphere. Eschewing such conventions, Lublin speaks bluntly about the traumatic messages that her organization receives (e.g., “the boys call me faggot”; “I was cutting . . . [and] I started again an hour ago”; “He won’t stop raping me”; Lublin, 2012). This informality is evident in other ways at different moments of the talk. For instance, she expresses annoyance with mainstream culture and corporate entities: To most of you this is a device3 [ holding a phone] to buy, sell, play games, watch videos; While people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend . . . or for Target to know when it’s time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team. (Lublin, 2012)

Such statements are followed with her own contrasting stance, suggesting that mainstream uses of phones, texting, and data collection remain trivial. What is informal is the annoyance that Lublin performs. It seeps through her language as she emphasizes and draws out each bothersome entity (device, buy, sell, play games, watch videos, Facebook, Target, and dude). She seems content not only in her opposition to bothersome entities but also to the formality of language. How does Lublin’s social language help in understanding the larger discourse of school safety and data mining? The answer lies in the social positioning that Lublin attempts. While informal language can be found in numerous social groupings, Lublin’s informalism suggests a kind of activism. This is seen when Lublin takes an opportunity to express frustration in simply treating students: “I’m not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. I want to prevent THIS SHIT from happening” (Lublin, 2012). Note the informal language as well as the activism. Treating symptoms is less important than “prevent[ing] THIS SHIT from happening.” In many ways, Lublin’s activism is a progressive activism: She expresses skepticism of Facebook, Target, mainstream technology, and “dude culture.” It is this activist identity that her informal social language affords. Ultimately, however, the importance of social languages lies in the beliefs and practices that the language invokes. While time limited Lublin’s talk, excluding much of the operational details behind her plan, some of these

44    T. C. WELLS

practices can be inferred from the different language sources that she draws upon. This is termed intertextuality and is explored in the following section. Intertextuality Intertextuality refers to the intersection and mixing of different language sources within a single text. Following Gee’s (2014) use of social languages, intertextuality can be thought of as the “borrowing” of different grammatical patterns and speech genres within one’s language. The use of intertextuality signals a sense of solidarity with different social groupings. It allows the speaker to tie outside individuals, practices, and beliefs to the discourse at hand. Lubin’s use of intertextuality draws on two specific social languages: social science and policing. Understanding how she uses each language helps in understanding how Lublin envisions the enactment of her data mining project. Throughout the talk, Lublin (2012) deploys language familiar to the social sciences. This is seen early on in how she discusses the frequencies with which teenagers text message, stating “the average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month” and “texting has a 100 percent open rate” and “texting actually over indexes for minority and urban youth.” Regularly Lublin (2012) references scientific findings (“We’re finding [text messages] 11 times more powerful than email), data (“so think about the data from a crisis text line” and “imagine having real time data on every one of those issues”), and percentiles (“the murder rate fell 60%). The specialist language of social sciences can render status and legitimacy to one’s language. When Lublin invokes this discourse, it similarly elevates her status and legitimacy. A problem arises, however, with too much academic language. Just as the use of social science can legitimate one’s language, it can also alienate the intended audience when it becomes jargon-laden and abstract. Lublin seems attuned to this tension. As with her use of the social sciences, she equally expresses a kind of skepticism of the very task of research. This is seen in the following quotes: So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape. No census. Maybe there’s some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. Or maybe there’s some anecdotal evidence. Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. (Lublin, 2012)

Here Lublin (2012) suggests that no census on abuse and trauma exists, and that if a census does exist (“maybe there’s some studies, some longitudinal studies”), it is ineffective because it costs too much money and time, or it’s simply anecdotal. This sentiment of skepticism to the very

Charting the Future    45

practice of social science is familiar and is often held by outsiders to academic research, even regularly by those that are disconnected (or alienated) from the university system. This is the tension that Lublin navigates: inbetween the data-rich field of social science and the everyday skepticism of academia. Ultimately, I believe Lublin sides with the academic skepticism, which is partly explained through her deployment of the second intertextual discourses, that of policing. The discourse of policing comes up midway through the talk. It is what Lublin invokes as evidence of effective data mining. She states, So think about a cop. There’s something in New York City, the police did it. . . . They started crime mapping, and so they started following and watching, . . . petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things, charting the future, essentially. And they found things like when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60%. (Lublin, 2012)

If, from this passage, the role of policing is still not apparent, consider the following passage in which Lublin describes how she envisions her data effecting change: You could inform legislation, you could inform school policy. You could say to a principal “you’re having a problem every Thursday at three o’clock. What’s going on in your school?” You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. (Lublin, 2012)

From these passages, we can infer some of the values and intentions Lublin sees in her data mining plans. She juxtaposes the practices of policing and surveillance with data mining. While data mining, or rather data collection, has traditionally been associated with the social sciences, the internet has provided access to massive influxes of data, expanding who engages in the practice. Yet, unlike a social scientist whose interest in data is to understand or explain, Lublin’s interest lies in safety by way of policing and surveillance. We see this both in her skepticism of “longitudinal studies that cost lots of money and time” and in her suggestions that the text message data be used to hold principals accountable (i.e., “What is going on in your school?”; Lublin, 2012). It is this emphasis on safety that positions Lublin outside of traditional social science research and in a realm of what might be called intervention or activism.

46    T. C. WELLS

DISCUSSION The concepts of social language and intertextuality provide a window into understanding not just the meaning of Nancy Lublin’s talk but also the types of practices and social positioning that she seeks to enact. They are a window into what Gee (2014) refers to as the “saying,” “doing,” and “being” of language. As the previous sections demonstrated, Lublin positions herself as a social activist, invoking social science discourses in order to justify the practices of policing and surveillance. However, Lublin’s interest in social science departs from traditional interests—those of explanation and understanding. Instead, Lublin’s interest is in social change. Yet, as I seek to demonstrate, Lublin’s interest in social change neglects the voices of those most affected and risks further marginalizing people of color. It is in this approach, top–down activism, that embodies not only Lublin’s talk but much of the data mining field. Consider Lublin’s (2012) use of the New York Police Department as an example of how data can be effective. She describes the NYPD’s implementation of Compstat, a data-driven program that tracks crime throughout the city. This is the data that the department uses to determine and then surveil high-crime areas. As Lublin tells us, the implementation of Compstat dropped the city’s murder rate dropped 60%. What is important here is less that these crime statistics are widely disputed (see, e.g., Levitt, 2004) and more that this data-driven, preemptive model of policing has resulted in decades of racial discrimination and police violence (Center for Constitutional Right, 2012). It is the foundation that programs like Stop-and-Frisk have been built upon. What Lublin ignores in her use of police department narratives is the outrage and protest that communities of color have directed towards such practices. At the very least her use of these policing narratives reflect a lack of attunement to the people that are most affected by such interventions. If there are questions as to whether Lublin’s program would be any different, consider how she responds to the text message mentioned above about the kid not wanting to go to school. The text message reads: “I don’t want to go to school today, the boys call me faggot.” Lublin’s (2012) response appears later in the talk, stating: “I’m actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school.” The initial message is an example of homophobic teasing that is all-toocommonly experienced by students in schools. Being that it was sent to a crisis line, it might also be an example of how few outlets teenagers have to talk about their problems. What it is not an example of is a student requesting an adult to intervene on his or her behalf, yet as Lublin plans to take this data directly to the authorities (“legislators” and “principals”), this is apparently what will happen. She disregards, or at least does not care to

Charting the Future    47

present, what specifically the student was requesting. This lack of attention risks not only further marginalizing students with interventions that they did not request but also unleashing the same discriminatory tactics that followed the police departments use of Compstat. Now consider that Lublin isn’t alone in her approach to school safety. As Shade and Singh (2016) report, a host of companies exist with the similar aim of keeping schools safe through data mining. These companies contract with school districts to monitor and track students’ online activities. Their websites reflect the same activist and interventionist language intent on keeping schools safe through the mining of their students’ data. More broadly, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the growing field of data science, which frequently employs data mining, increasingly operates with predictive and preventative goals (Donoho, 2015). It is this predictive focus that lends itself in problematic ways towards preemptive practices and interventions. Questions remain as to whether these programs can not only be legally and ethically implemented, but also be conducted with attention to the voices and requests of students. As of now, this is far from settled. What I think Lubin’s talk and the much broader movement towards data science prompts is a concern for practices that simply operate from the top– down. These are practices that neglect the experiences and voices of the people most affected. Lublin’s interest in safe schools should be commended, as should her interest in protecting students experiencing bullying and abuse. Yet, school interventions that fail to foreground the students and their interests need to be questioned. This is equally true of data science and, specifically, data mining research. Its attempt at prediction and active intervention remains not only intellectually problematic but also socially problematic. Such issues cannot be overlooked. Educators should be wary. CONCLUSION This chapter took a critical look at the discourse intersecting the field of data science and school safety research. It was argued that school safety research exists on contradictory premises—rising concern over violence, while actual violence is on the decline—that emphasize high profile violence (i.e., homicides), while marginalizing the daily violence that youth, especially LGBTQ youth, experience. It is with this contradiction and concern over marginalized youth in mind that I sought to re-examine the beliefs, values, and practices that underlie this field. To do so, I analyzed the Nancy Lubin’s TED Talk on the mining of teenagers’ text messages in order to prevent violence in schools. Her talk represents one example of a growing subsect of school safety research that invokes data mining practices. Following on Donoho (2015), I suggested that this subset of research reflects

48    T. C. WELLS

a larger shift in the field of data science away from traditional intellectual concerns and towards more immediate commercial concerns. It is a shift that lends itself to the goals of prediction, preemption, and intervention, something problematic when operating solely from the top-down, through policing and surveillance. This is precisely how Lublin’s plan and data mining projects generally operate: through the discourse and practices of policing. Such practices have a long, sustained history of violence enacted against marginalized communities, specifically communities of color. These practices need to be questioned, not because safety is unimportant but because safety has too often neglected the voices of those most affected by its interventions. The goals of data science and its predictive orientation concern the future, presupposing the needs and values of the present. It is these presupposed and often negated aspects of our present that remain vitally important for conversations on curriculum. It also remains vitally important for conversations of school safety. NOTES 1. According to Donoho (2015), “Data Science amounts to a superset of the fields of statistics and machine learning which adds some technology for ‘scaling up’ to ‘big data’” (p. 1). The term is often used synonymous with “big data” and “data mining.” 2. One example of this is the special issue on school violence in the journal Educational Researcher. Bullying was the focus of a single article, with concerns about LGTBQ students only mentioned in passing. 3. Italicized words indicate that Lublin placed extra emphasis on the word in the sentence.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Borum, R., Cornell, D. G., Modzeleski, W., & Jimerson, S. R. (2010). What can be done about school shootings? A review of the evidence. Educational Researcher, 39(1), 27–37. Bradshaw, C. P. (2015). Translating research to practice in bullying prevention. American Psychologist, 70(4), 322–332. Center for Constitutional Rights. (2012). Stop and frisk the human impact: The stories behind the numbers, the effects on our community. New York, NY. Retrieved from https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/08/the-human -impact-report.pdf

Charting the Future    49 Center for Homeland Defense & Security. (2019). [Bar graph of number killed in school shootings by year: 1970–2019]. K–12 shooting data base. Retrieved from https://www.chds.us/ssdb/number-killed-by-year/ Donoho, D. (2015, September). 50 years of data science. Tukey Centennial Workshop. Princeton, NJ. Gee, J. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Hassani, H., Saporta, G., & Silva, E. S. (2014). Data mining and official statistics: The past, the present and the future. Big Data, 2(1), 34–43. Hymel, S., & Swearer, S. M. (2015). Four decades of research on school bullying: An introduction. American Psychologist, 70(4), 293–299. Kann, L., McManus, T., Harris, W. A., Shanklin, S. L., Flint, K. H., Queen, B., . . . Lim, C. (2018). Youth risk behavior surveillance—United States, 2017. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 67(8), 1–114. Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Zongrone, A. D., Clark, C. M., & Truong, N. L. (2018). The 2017 national school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in our nation’s schools. New York, NY: GLSEN. Levitt, S. D. (2004). Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s: Four factors that explain the decline and six that do not. Journal of Economic Perspective, 18(1), 163–190. Lublin, N. (2012). Texting that saves lives [TED Talk]. Retrieved from https://www .ted.com/talks/nancy_lublin_texting_that_saves_lives/transcript Ludewig, J. (2017). TED Talk as an emergent genre. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 19(1), 1–9. Mayer, M. J., & Furlong, M. J. (2010). How safe are our schools? Educational Researcher, 39(1), 16–26. Romero, C., & Ventura, S. (2010). Educational data mining: A review of the state of the art. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews), 40(6), 601–618. Rowley-Jolivet, E., & Carter-Thomas, S. (2005). The rhetoric of conference presentation introductions: Context, argument and interaction. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 15(1), 45–70. Shade, L. R., & Singh, R. (2016). “Honestly, we’re not spying on kids”: School surveillance of young people’s social media. Social Media + Society, 2(4), 67–85. Slater, S., Joksimović, S., Kovanovic, V., Baker, R. S., & Gasevic, D. (2017). Tools for educational data mining: A review. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 42(1), 85–106. TED Conference LLC. (n.d.) Conferences. Retrieved from https://support.ted .com/hc/en-us/articles/360004233094-Speaking-at-TED

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 4

MORAL EDUCATION IN TROUBLED TIMES Insights from Barad, Levinas, and Baumann Sijin Yan Texas A&M University Peter Scaramuzzo Texas A&M University Patrick Slattery Texas A&M University Michael Clough Texas A&M University

ABSTRACT Moral crises in the current global context are proliferating. Escalation of ultranationalism, environmental degradation, and the mass movement of people fleeing violence, poverty, and deadly pollution, coupled with indifIdeating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 51–63 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

51

52    S. YAN et al. ference to vulnerable refugees and fear of immigrants are all reshaping the human condition on the planet. We witness increasingly pronounced desires to denigrate and homogenize human others and a collective failure to sufficiently respond to the environmental precariousness of the present day. This chapter intends to consider the possibility of opening up new spaces for the cultivation of subjectivities directed toward alleviating human and nonhuman suffering. In particular, we turn to Karen Barad’s new materialism, Emmanuel Levinas’s moral imperatives, and Zygmunt Bauman’s postmodern ethics for a robust and fresh approach. While recognizing the pitfalls of classical liberal education and the urgent need to radically reshape the enterprise of education through Levinas’s phenomenological project of embodied intersubjective interactions at the precognitive core, we argue that Barad’s agential realism goes further and provides a posthumanist extension of the notion of responsibility through exploring the nature of entangled intra-activities. In the end, we contend that moral education that addresses the contemporary crises requires the habitual and continuous response to the inviolable command from the human and nonhuman alterity and at the same time a refusal to take categorical differences as fundamental.

MORAL EDUCATION IN TROUBLED TIMES: INSIGHTS FROM BARAD, LEVINAS, AND BAUMANN One of the reasons why moral education is profoundly intricate is that the human situation educators and students face is constantly morphing. When Zygmunt Bauman argues for a renewal of ethical landscape in education that can tackle a series of never-before-encountered challenges, he is also hyper cognizant of the situation that there is no static recipe for moral action and long-term strategies of life in the age of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2005). From a Baradian perspective (Barad, 2007), the transformations of the world with which we intra-act are both ontologically indeterminate and epistemologically uncertain. This requires us to continue generating calls both old and new and providing fresh responses to the ethical challenges of the present day. LEVINAS AND THE DANGER OF ONTOLOGISM Recently, there are growing worries in both social sciences and public discourses about collective failures in fulfilling the fundamental ethical task of recognizing others’ humanity in the age of resurgent ultranationalism (Jeckson, 2018; Montano, 2019). We are confronted with the naked reality of immigrant children going through traumatic experiences of the fragmentation of families at the border (Mousin, 2019; Simha, 2019), the upsurge of derogatory languages in schools against minority students (Huang &

Moral Education in Troubled Times    53

Cornell, 2019), rises in hate crimes across the globe (Levin & Reitzel, 2018), and the neoliberalization of public education which functions as a pivotal medium to serve underserved groups of students (Fraser & Taylor, 2016). Reading Emmanuel Levinas’s penetrating diagnosis of a worried conservatism (Levinas & Hand,1990; Levinas, 1935/2003) that plagued Europe around 1935, we can easily identify a familiar figure of a “Western man” still haunting the contemporary cultural and political landscape with a desire to close on and rest upon the purity and integrity of the “I,” a complacency in the same, a liberalist dream to become radically free from the constraints and relations in the world (Levinas, 1935/2003, p. 49), and a nostalgia of a lost, privileged past (Levinas & Hand, 1990). Eyal Rozmarin (2007) summarizes this idea clearly with regard to Levinas’s (1935/2003) critique in On Escape: The modern notion of the subject is insecure and anxious facing a world that is uncertain and therefore threatening to his unstable sense of dominance. He would like to feel self-sufficient, unneeding, indifferent, and unaffected by this world. But he does not; he is troubled by the unknown, particularly by the future, which threatens the present where his power manifests. (p. 335)

As scholars and educators, it might be disheartening to witness that the ideological sources of violence articulated and analyzed by Levinas as a figure of the “post-WWII anti-totalitarian thought of continental philosophy” (Zhao, 2016, p. 323) are still lingering and proliferating within current social moments of dire consequence. However, this situation may also be educative in terms of destabilizing a grand linear narrative of progression which we often inadvertently assume, showing that we are not radically advanced from past problems. The current moral crises in education also sets the condition for educational researchers to engage what Patrick Slattery (2017) articulates as the backward glance. “The backward glance transforms our lives” (p. 188) because it “illuminates aspects of our autobiography and our culture that remained hidden or unrecognizable” (p. 189). Thus, recognizing new crises as continuous with a longer history of imperialism, colonialism, and racism, we set the starting point of this chapter as an engaged response to the grave injustice of the present time, and includes taking seriously Levinas’s warning of the violent potentials within Western metaphysics as the ontology of a being concerned with its own being. In fact, this ontologism still intensely undergirds the current social milieu and poses challenges to the democratic and livable future. In 1934, shortly after the Nazi’s ascendance to power and Heidegger’s official commitments to the Nationalist Socialist party, Levinas published an essay named Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism in Esprit, a progressive Catholic journal, to explore the root cause of Hitlerism. Then, 56 years later, before the translation and republication of this essay in Critical Inquiry (Levinas &

54    S. YAN et al.

Hand, 1990), he offered a prefatory note in the text signifying that this interrogated question as being far-reaching and continuous with his lifetime work toward phenomenological theorization of face-to-face encounters, the original site of revelation, and the responsibility for the Other (Davidson, 1990). As Strhan (2016) illustrates, “His conceptualization of human subjectivity, language, and knowledge as beginning with ethics was determined by his experience of National Socialism, both feared and mourned” (p. 15). Levinas summarizes his diagnosis of the source of these series of tragedies: The conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of Elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy has not sufficiently insured itself. The possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being . . . that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself as free. (p. 63)

For Levinas, Hitlerism does not simply reside in human beings’ accidental foolishness, temporal insanity, or the fallibility of human reasoning. Rather, the enterprise of Western philosophy has disturbing and unresolved defects that distinctly breed multiple possibilities for the re-emergence of Hitlerism. Particularly, this “Elemental Evil” is related to the ontology of a being concerned with being, which is the metaphysics conducted by an insular being who is obsessed, concerned, and worried about his or her own being with individual freedom as the highest ideal. One of the central consequences of this ontologism is the fertilization of violence toward other-than-self. This egocentric intentionality drives an isolated being to feel powerless in the face of many Others, such as the irrevocability of time, the restraint of physical body, and the incomprehensible human Others. To reconcile this sense of powerlessness, one must establish an ideal self that is free from all the bondage and chains generated from the perceived Other. When someone’s attention is completely absorbed by the “mineness” of his or her own existence, coupled with the Hobbesian enculturation for competing “my place under the sun,” as Levinas (1935/2003) states, “One could think and feel only that which exists or is supposed to exist” (p. 71) and holding the affirmed beliefs in one’s rights over others’ suffering. Thus, Levinas (1990) conceptualizes violence as following in Difficult Freedom: Violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act: as if the rest of the universe were there only to receive the action; violence is consequently also any action which we endure without at every point collaborating in it. (p. 6)

Moral Education in Troubled Times    55

One of the major educational implications of Levinas critique over the years in philosophy of education is to think whether classical liberal education can create the ethical subject that turns to the massive human and nonhuman suffering in the contemporary world. For example, Denise EgéaKuehne (2008) once interrogated the violence inherent in one of the core concepts of American education as the struggle to affirm oneself and one’s right. Chinnery and Bai (2008) also caution against the individualistic ethics that begins from and returns to one’s self in education. Indeed, if the barbarism of Hitlerism was ostensibly caused by poorlyinformed citizens voting against some universal ethical principles and their own interests (sometimes unknowingly going against their best self-interest, too), then the issue can be ameliorated through providing equal educational opportunities for citizens and re-emphasizing a type of schooling that cultivates rational autonomous beings who are able to make moral decisions through reason. Yet, history has provided overwhelming cases in which elite and educated people pursue personal interests without regard for or at the expense of the suffering people. Moreover, the declining climate shows that even the best education fails significantly in terms of cultivating moral subjects. Perhaps classical liberal education with primary emphasis on rationality and autonomy does not prevent or even contribute to the creation of egoists par excellence—one is equipped with a high level of professional skills to maximize personal interests. Levinas’s phenomenological project of describing human embodied, intersubjective existence may be able to direct us toward new possibilities in education. His notion of responsibility as a persecutory command wherein I am held hostage by the Other to the point of being responsible for the Other’s very responsibility opens up the ethical turn in education. His notion of responsibility should not be understood in terms of causation and culpability. It is not that I am responsible in the sense that I have caused certain people’s abject situation and thus am guilty, such as “I am responsible for my mint plant’s death for not giving it enough sunshine and water.” Instead, it is responsibility in the caring sense. For example, when one sees a drowning person, he or she feels obliged to help even at the risk of his or her own life. Recognizing responsibility is to recognize the human face of the Other commands me to care for her or him, to let the being-for-theother override one’s concern for oneself. Educational research on Levinas’s relevance to educational reform has been flourishing over the years with insights such as teaching as face-toface ethical encounter with students (Egéa-Kuehne, 2018), education that recognizes the uniqueness of each individual (Biesta, 2010; Zhao, 2012), Levinas’s conception of unconditional responsibility for the Other as opposed to right talk (Chinnery & Bai, 2008), and the significance of religion as a cultural form that engenders ethical agents (Katz, 2013).

56    S. YAN et al.

THE LOOMING ECOLOGICAL CRISIS While taking upon Levinas’s critiques and the positive project of phenomenological ethics, we are also in urgent need of an ecological and posthumanist extension of the Levinasian notions of responsibility and relationality. Living in the age of Anthropocene where human and nonhuman ongoingness is at stake in ecological disequilibrium (Haraway, 2016), we are still continuously engaging, whether consciously or unconsciously, with detrimental patterns of production and consumption. In endorsing a collective subjugation of the environment to human beings, we, as subjects of the environment, drive ourselves to exist within a condition of un-livability in return. On March 13, 2019, the United Nation published the sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO) titled Healthy Planet, Healthy People, produced by 250 scientists and experts from more than 70 countries. The GEO illustrates the unnerving results: Human activities are causing increasing amounts of pollution, to the extent that this is now recognized as the biggest single risk to human health worldwide (Landrigan et al., 2018) . . . Diseases related to air pollution caused 9 million premature deaths in 2015, accounting for 16% of all deaths globally (Landrigan et al., 2018) while in some countries, hazardous air pollution has forced schools to close (Sastry 2002; Li et al., 2014; British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2016; Reuters 2017). (p. 4–10)

The GEO (2019) also warns that “in the absence of an adequate response, a changing climate could lead to a pre-modern world of famine, plague, war, and premature death” (p. 24). The contrast between the immediacy of existential threats caused by environmental calamity and the massive delaying of action is appalling, posing grave ethical questions to the enterprise of education regarding the collective inability to be sufficiently responsive and responsible toward other-than-human, nonhuman, and human-as-decentered ways of being and aspects of life. On the other hand, this crisis also foregrounds the centrality of education in re-examining the classical humanist foundation of cultures. Curriculum theorist, Chet Bowers, whose career has centered on the intersection of ecology and education, underscores humans’ relationship to nature, the commons, and ecological stewardship. For Bowers (1995), the educator is obliged toward helping students acquire an historical understanding of cultural/ecological relationships, including the metaphorical frameworks that influenced critically important cultural developments in the past should now be seen as an essential responsibility of teachers. Helping students understand how the dominant culture developed along the pathway of basing progress on the

Moral Education in Troubled Times    57 degradation of natural systems is only half of the teacher’s curricular responsibility. The other half confront teachers with even greater challenges because it involves the identification of practices and patterns both in the dominant and marginalized culture groups that are ecologically sustainable. (p. 133)

Bowers’ work is part of the scholarship groping toward provoking teachers to broaden societal understandings of interconnectedness in the world-becoming, expose power dynamics of ecological exploitations and vulnerabilities under imperialism, and respond to the urgent need of reinterpretation of relationality in classrooms. As William James (1899) contends in What Makes a Life Significant, “Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new ones into view” (p. 83). In this article, we believe that Barad provides a striking attentiveness to an ethical dynamic that includes other-than-humans by providing an engaged theorization of connectivity, categories, and the relations between ethics, ontology, and epistemology. TOWARD A BARADIAN ECOLOGICAL EXTENSION OF RESPONSIBILITY There has been a paucity of research in education that extends Levinasian ethics to the Other-than-human sphere through Karen Barad. One scholarship of this kind is Betsan Martin’s article (2016) “Taking Responsibility Into All Matter: Engaging Levinas in Indigenous and Quantum Thought for Matters of the 21st Century,” in which she juxtaposes Levinas with the Maori society and Barad’s philosophy of science. She argues that instead of centralizing the notion of the human face and circumscribing the range of responsibility only to the human Other, we need to emphasize Levinas’s break with the totality of being to broaden the horizon of the infinite Other so as to guard against the enclosure in being. We join Martin in facilitating bridge-building projects between Levinas and Barad to address the multilayered crises that figure the current situation. Yet the linkage between Barad and Levinas is not without controversy. At the end of her influential work Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2004) unexpectedly takes a Levinasian turn while illustrating her agential realist account of the ethics of mattering. Jarrett Zigon (2017) contends that Barad’s connection to the Levinasian notion of responsibility is a sign of her failed post-humanist attempt to construct an alternative to humancentrism. Specifically, he proclaims, Barad’s adoption of Levinas is problematic in that Levinas’ conception of responsibility is always “human-centric, indeed metaphysically individualistic” (p. 61). In particular, he interprets Levinas as following:

58    S. YAN et al. For Levinas, it may be the case that everyone is obliged with responsibility, but the key claim Levinas makes is that one always bears full responsibility for the Other, and not, as we might hope, mutual responsibility for one another. Indeed, such mutuality is impossible for Levinas, as the Other is always infinitely separated from oneself along an infinite curvature of intersubjectivity. This is an infinite curvature that, like Descartes’s infinite curvature between the human subject and the God forecloses any possibility, mutuality, or reciprocity, or being-with. It is this human-­centric, indeed metaphysically individualist, notion of responsibility that Barad adopts as the main ethical and political ­conclusion for her posthuman agential realism. (p. 61)

For Zigon (2017), the reason why both Levinas and Barad are “metaphysical individualists” stems from their refusal of reciprocity and their theorization of responsibility as asymmetrical. Based on this interpretation, he believes that Barad ultimately takes the difference between human and other-than-human as fundamental and essential. Is Barad’s embrace of Levinas a mere misstep in the quest for extending responsibility toward the other-than-human? It is argued in this chapter that this criticism discloses erroneous understandings of key connections and differences in Levinasian and Baradian ethics. For Levinas, the concepts of mutuality and especially being-with offered by Zigon are exact manifestations of metaphysical individualism because they require a self-sufficient ego that is automatically responsible before even entering into the intersubjective relation. As we have elaborated in the previous section, since the early period of his career, Levinas has expressed profound worries about any theory that begins with a pre-existing and distinct “I,” an ontologism—the ontology of a being that is concerned with its own being. The language Zigon uses in this comment—beingwith—is a specifically Heideggerian mitsein which Levinas both implicitly and explicitly tries to overcome in his entire career after the rise of Hitlerism. In Existence and Existents, Levinas (1978/2001) critiques that “like in all philosophies of communion, in Heidegger sociality is completely found in the solitary subject. The analysis of Dasein, in its authentic form, is carried out in terms of solitude” (p. 98). That is, being-with discloses the solitariness of Dasein. For Levinas, the singularization of the responsible self is achieved through the substitution for the Other. As Lisa Guenther (2009) rightfully points out “singularity is not something that belongs to the single individual; it requires and sustains plurality, for no one can be faced or encountered alone” (p. 169). Barad continues the deconstruction of metaphysical individualism and contests the preconception of taking categorical differences as fundamental and essential. She approaches this issue through her interdisciplinary work in quantum mechanics and philosophy. As a physicist, Barad begins her journey from Niels Bohr’s challenges of metaphysical individualism—the belief

Moral Education in Troubled Times    59

that the world is composed of attributed entities with inherent boundaries apart from one another—in the indeterminacy principle. While addressing the problem of measurement as a fundamental issue in the philosophy of science, Bohr argues that the advances in quantum mechanics taught us the paradigm-shifting lesson of the inseparability between the knower and the known and that nature of which we as observers are a part (Bohr, 2010). In other words, knowing is co-constitutive to the thing that is to know. As Barad (2007) provocatively claims, “Experimenting and theorizing are dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning” (p. 56). Barad then introduces a set of terminologies central to agential realism: entanglement, intra-activity, and exteriority within. For her, “to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence” (Barad, 2007, p. ix). The neologism “intra-action” is a necessary concept for countering the celebrated notion of “inter-action” in describing relationalities. Interaction is the communication between entities with inherent separation. It assumes the ontological independence among the interacting agents. Yet intra-action entails that the entities or properties of entities (identity) only emerge within the relationship. Entanglement and intra-action direct us toward a refutation of the traditional, Western understandings of exteriority as fixed and absolute, since exteriority and interiority emerge through and are part of the ongoing entangled intra-activity. Following Levinas’s reversal of ethical theories’ modernist adherence to the ontology of presence as prior to ethics, Barad extends the notion of responsibility to a new level: For Barad, the ongoing entangled intra-activity is simultaneously an ontological, epistemological, and axiological issue, requiring not only giving the beings in the ongoing entangled intra-activity its due, but also to give them justice and responsibility. After referring to the Levinasian notion of responsibility, she claims, Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish. Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. We need to meet the universe halfway, to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming. (Barad, 2007, p. 396)

Reading Barad, Zigon proceeds from Barad’s claim of the ubiquity of ethical calls and the obligation to respond to his interpretation that “humans must take on more responsibility than any other,” and then to a perplexing conclusion of “human exceptionalism.”

60    S. YAN et al. Despite this metaphysical humanist leveling, Barad nevertheless maintains a privileged and exceptional place for humans in her supposedly posthuman world. For although all existents have responsibility and are accountable “for the becoming of the world,” humans must take on more responsibility than any other. And here we return to human exceptionalism. (Zigon, 2017, p. 60)

Perhaps Zigon refers to the asymmetrical moral relation within ethical encounterings—an idea rooted in the Baradian lineage of Levinasian ethics since, in the previous criticism, he also criticizes the lack of reciprocity within Barad-Levinasian ethics. Yet, the asymmetrical moral relation within ethical encounterings does not mean reciprocity is forbidden. But rather, as Levinas clarifies in his interview, “I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair” (Levinas, 1982, p. 98). Whether the Other chooses to respond ethically or not does not eradicate my obligation. It does not automatically give the “I” a moral or ontological high ground. Similarly, what a Baradian extension of the Levinasian ethics requires is humans’s responsiveness and responsibility toward the nature of which we are a part. It does not necessitate human-exceptionalism. Perhaps the other-than-human is also enacting ethical intra-activity with the human. But it is not the prerequisite for recognizing our own obligations. On the other hand, Zigon’s prioritization of equal responsibility is potentially dangerous because it may result in requiring reciprocity as the precondition for one to respond to the immediacy of an ethical command—a skepticism that can replenish excuses for the refusal of action just like the liberal contractarian tradition in the face of the suffering of the Other. As John Llewelyn (1991) in The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience argues that “to suppose that appraisal is the primary business of ethics is to confuse ethics with economics, with business” (p. 260). Requiring reciprocity and equal responsibility before any idea of sacrifice and taking care of the Other may be a path toward an economy of mutual need and the devastation of the ethical. EDUCATION AS ENCOUNTERING THE ELEMENTAL OTHERNESS 295. “Mine, thine.”—“This dog is mine,” said those poor children; “that is my place in the sun.” Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth. —Pascal, 1852, p. 56

Blaise Pascal’s prescient proverb strikingly identifies the cause of contemporary moral crises in education regarding the prevalence of human and nonhuman sufferings and environmental catastrophes. He points out the immediate connection between conatus essendi— the right to be—and the unavoidable, relentless, and escalating violence ensued. Either, educators

Moral Education in Troubled Times    61

are going to radically reshape the enterprise of education through the negation of the doctrine of universal self-interest and take on a BaradianLevinasian encounter that overrides egoism in the face of human and nonhuman others, or the future is ill-fated. Even a good-natured liberal education that wholeheartedly devotes itself for the cultivation of the capacity to engage in rational social decision-making may not fundamentally tackle the problem—we are living in a world where sober and highly educated individuals can (and often do) still choose to stand up in front of human and nonhuman violence. What is lacking is a development of ethical sensibilities and educational processes that prioritize continuous, habitual practices of giving ethical responses to the command of the infinite Other, be it the human or the other-than-human. Perhaps the recognition of our infinite responsibilities while encountering Other as quotidian elements of everydayness is profoundly overwhelming. Moreover, Barad and Levinas teach us that even if we failed to meet the ethical calls, obligations still do not fade away. Thus, education for cultivating subjectivities directed toward alleviating human and nonhuman sufferings requires a recognition of the human finitude in moral practices and a determination to “stay with the trouble” as Donna Haraway (2016) indicates. In Postmodern Ethics, Zygmunt Bauman (1993) analyzes the modernist quest for order and certainty and the false dream to escape from the messiness, ambivalence, and chaos of human life. We cannot afford to sanitize the untidiness of life anymore. Cris Mayo (2017) rightfully points out that “we are never far from this kind of trouble no matter what kinds of relationships we might explore. Our complicities in injustice, missteps, pollution, and anthropogenic climate change are the contexts of all our acts” (p. 367). There is no moral code or single method that teaches us how to fulfill the ethical response in the face of the radical Otherness. No defined “todo list” can direct students toward some specific essential ethical tasks to accomplish in order to be good. Moral education in troubled times necessitates openness to the unknowable and the unknown. But this does not subsume despair. Rather, it encourages an ethical humility before the immeasurable and irrevocable command of the infinite Other. REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19(2), 121–158. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (2005). Education in liquid modernity. The review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, 27(4), 303–317.

62    S. YAN et al. Bohr, N. (2010). Atomic physics and human knowledge. Mineola, NY: Courier Dover. Bower, C. (1995). Educating for an ecologically sustainable culture: Rethinking moral education, creativity, intelligence, and other modern orthodoxies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Biesta, G. (2010). Education after the death of the subject: Levinas and the pedagogy of interruption. In Z. Leonardo (Ed.), The handbook of cultural politics and education (pp. 289–300). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Chinnery, A., & Bai, H. (2008). Justice in the name of the other: Levinas on rights and responsibility. In D. Egéa-Kuehne (Ed.), Levinas and education: At the intersection of faith and reason (pp. 240–253). New York, NY: Routledge. Davidson, A. I. (1990). Introduction to Musil and Levinas. Critical Inquiry, 17(1), 35–45. Egéa-Kuehne, D. (Ed.). (2008). Levinas and education: At the intersection of faith and reason. New York, NY: Routledge. Fraser, H., & Taylor, N. (2016). Neoliberalization, universities and the public intellectual: Species, gender and class and the production of knowledge. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Guenther, L. (2009). “Nameless singularity”: Levinas on individuation and ethical singularity. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14(1), 167–187. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Huang, F. L., & Cornell, D. G. (2019). School teasing and bullying after the presidential election. Educational Researcher, 48(2), 69–83. Jackson, L. (2018). ‘The best education ever’: Trumpism, brexit, and new social learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(5), 441–443. James, W. (1899). On some of life’s ideals. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions. Katz, C. E. (2013). Levinas and the crisis of humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levin, B., & Reitzel, J. D. (2018, May). Report to the nation: Hate crimes rise in US cities and counties in time of division and foreign interference. Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. San Bernardino: California State University. Levinas, E. (1982). Ethics and infinity—Conversations with Philippe Nemo. (R. A. Cohen, trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press Levinas, E. (1990). Difficult freedom: Essays on Judaism (S. Hand, Trans.). London, England: Athlone. Levinas, E. (2001). Existence and existents (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. (Original work published in 1978) Levinas, E. (2003). On escape (B. Bergo, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published in 1935) Levinas, E., & Hand, S. (1990). Reflections on the philosophy of hitlerism. Critical Inquiry, 17(1), 63–71. Llewelyn, J. (1991). The middle voice of ecological conscience: A chiasmic reading of responsibility in the neighborhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, B. (2016). Taking responsibility into all matter: Engaging Levinas for the climate of the 21st century. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(4), 418–435.

Moral Education in Troubled Times    63 Mayo, C. (2017). From the editor: Trouble and learning—Renewing relationality in times of disconnection. Educational Theory, 67(4), 365–369. Montano, S. (2019). Addressing White supremacy on campus: Anti-racist pedagogy and theological education. Religious Education, 114(2), 1–13. Mousin, C. B. (2019). Rights disappear when US policy engages children as weapons of deterrence. AMA Journal of Ethics. 21(1), 58–66. Pascal, B. (1852). Pensées. Paris, France: Dezobry et E. Magdeleine. Rozmarin, E. (2007). An other in psychoanalysis: Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of knowledge and analytic sense. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 43(3), 327–360. Simha, S. (2019). The impact of family separation on immigrant and refugee families. North Carolina Medical Journal, 80(2), 95–96. Sjögren, H. (2014). Educable futures?: Managing epistemological uncertainties in sustainability education. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 1(2). The University of Nebraska Press. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu. edu/article/565699. Slattery, P. (2017). “I am nature”: Understanding the possibilities of currere in curriculum studies and aesthetics. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 14(3), 184–195. Strhan, A. (2016). Levinas, Durkheim, and the everyday ethics of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(4), 331–345. United Nations Environment Programme. (2019). Global environment outlook GEO 6: Healthy planet, healthy people. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Program. Zhao, G. (2012). Levinas and the mission of education. Educational Theory, 62(6), 659–675. Zhao, G. (2016). Levinas and the philosophy of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(4), 323–330. Zigon, J. (2017) Two. attunement: Rethinking responsibility. In S. Trnka & C. Trundle (Eds.), Competing responsibilities: The ethics and politics of contemporary life (pp. 49–68). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

This page intentionally left blank.

REFLECTION

BEHOLD UNTOLD Diana Wandix-White Texas A&M University

In March 2017, I traveled to Atlanta, GA to participate in the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) annual conference. The conference theme was “Problematizing (In)Equality,” which essentially asks us to address the paths of “exclusion and inclusion that in historical and contemporary terms impede and advance educational justice . . .” (Comparative and International Education Society, 2016, n.p.). I attended several interesting presentations on the topic, but I was most struck by something I heard and witnessed while on a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. Outside the King center is a beautiful statue of an African man, with his arms outstretched toward the sky, holding an infant in his hands. The monument, Behold, is symbolic of the ancient African ritual of lifting a newborn child to the heavens and speaking the words, “Behold the only thing greater than yourself.” As an African American, I first became aware of this practice while watching the television production of Alex Haley’s Roots with my parents when I was 9 or 10 years old. It was significant, meaningful, and beautiful. As I was walking past the monument, a tour guide, a middle-aged White man, casually pointed out Behold to his group of followers: “This is the Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 65–67 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

65

66    Behold Untold

sculpture like what Mufasa did in ‘The Lion King.’” That was the extent of the tour guide’s revelation to his audience. I was appalled. Initially, I questioned whether or not I was being overly sensitive; but I don’t think so. Kivel (1996) comments, “When people of color are angry about racism it is legitimate anger. It is not their oversensitivity, but our [White people] lack of sensitivity, that causes the communication gap” (p. 93). Yet, what was I to do? So many questions ran through my mind. Should I have interrupted the guide’s presentation to enlighten him and the tourists? Was that my place? Should I have complained to a supervisor? Was it passive ignorance due to a lack of education, or active ignorance due to disrespect and indifference towards the Black experience that led the guide to reduce the significance of this monument to a scene from a Disney movie? Can we go all the way back to this man’s school years and blame the absence of books like Roots, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass—An American Slave, Invisible Man, Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the Western canon? After all, neglecting the experiences of African American people in school curriculum is not only detrimental to African American youth, but also to children of other races who cannot understand their own identity absent knowledge and appreciation of others (Bennett, Gunn, Gayle-Evans, Barrera, & Leung, 2018; Larrick, 1965/2005; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 2008). Additionally, exclusion of the history and contributions of people of color is an arrogance that ultimately leads to the miseducation of all children who continue to be poorly prepared for a pluralistic society. Ultimately, this marginalization leads to what Pierce called a “mundane, extreme environment in which the many forms of racism and oppression are an ever-present part of daily living rather than occasional hazards” (as cited in Tatum, 1999, p. 9). The only way to stop these daily microaggressions is to address them. I truly believe that it is our country’s systemic racism which neglects the historical narrative of people of color and eschews the inclusion of culturally sensitive curriculum and pedagogy in our schools that produces individuals who are oblivious to the cultural significance of a magnificent bronze sculpture dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, I didn’t approach the guide, nor did I complain to a supervisor. Instead, I wrote about the experience in my journal, I shared it with my academic community of friends, and I use it as additional motivation in my efforts to fight for diversity in curriculum, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and equity in education.

Behold Untold    67

REFERENCES Bennett, S. V., Gunn, A. A., Gayle-Evans, G., Barrera, E. S., & Leung, C. B. (2018). Culturally responsive literacy practices in an early childhood community. Early Childhood Education Journal, 46, 241–248. Comparative and International Education Society. (2016). Call for papers. Retrieved from CIES 2017 conference: http://www.cies2017.org/conference-info/ Kivel, P. (1996). Uprooting racism. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society. Larrick, N. (2005). The all-white world of children’s books. Retrieved from The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection website: http://www.unz.com/print/ SaturdayRev-1965sep11-00063 (Originally published in 1965) Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (2008). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York, NY: Peter Lang Tatum, B. D. (1999). Assimilation blues, Black families in White communities: Who succeeds and why? New York, NY: Basic Books.

This page intentionally left blank.

SOMEWHERE ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS Brian Gibbs The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

it happened in Durham which was surprising to me in more urban spaces I find the racism to be less overt more below the surface more simmering I was driving with my daughter when they passed me two riders, two motorcycles with patches of white supremacist affiliation stereotypes: large long bearded black booted women riding on back I would have paid no mind save the flag large and white with red trim floating from a pole off the back of one bike white with a red X the original flag of the confederacy

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 69–71 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

69

70    Somewhere on the Road to Damascus

wrestling with how to respond a surprise I hadn’t been expecting concerned about my daughter’s safety and my own I was two cars behind an African-American man and his wife likely in their mid 60s if not older pulled up next to them a red light and the man’s window down he could have pulled forward instead left three car lengths “I’d like to understand you son. Can you explain all this to me?” he asked a broad smile on his face left arm on the window head leaning out without sarcasm or malcontent in his voice speaking instead with strength and humility. He had glasses and a hat His wife a church hat and dress as she leaned over to say hello fully they looked at the man on the motorcycle I couldn’t hear everything street noise distance but the cyclist answered at least at first with a stare meant to intimidate I assume the driver met this look with a smile. “My people came out of a plantation in Winston-Salem, at least in the modern era, from Ghana before that and Olduvai Gorge before that. But that’s where we all came . . . ya know Africa.” the cyclist revved his engine loud but the man kept leaning out the window and kept talking as the light was changing the man said, “I’ve enjoyed speaking to you. But I have to tell you your time is over. It was actually over in 1868.

Somewhere on the Road to Damascus    71

I actually believe your time, this time you’re representing here never was. I’d like to believe you’ll come to that realization on your own. But if you don’t,” this part spoken as they were pulling away, “there will be people like me to remind you . . .  and help educate you along the way.”

This page intentionally left blank.

LIVING IN SCHOOL Samuel Tanner Pennsylvania State University Altoona

1 some people in school   have it better than others, nobody in school has it very good, children grow up to become adults   in school— sometimes i’m human in school, sometimes i’m something else, but i’ve spent lifetimes growing up   in school, i’ve been so many people in human relation with adults, in human relation with children, sometimes i’m something else, there’s a distant, heavy melody   in school— adults know the song by heart, so they speak confidently, a teacher says something   and then it’s true,

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 73–77 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

73

74    living in school

administrators, parents,  politicians, one adult after another, one thing instead of another until   children are dying in school— 2 i’m very social,   and very just,   and very fair, so i wrote that i   was committed to social justice in my   cover letter, all my facebook posts   confirmed it, my op-ed piece and article   sealed the deal, my justness was so just, i had figured school out,   (so very smart), so you’d be well served to bring   me in into your school, because i’m very fair, and very just,   and very social— 3 “so justice doesn’t make sense,”   she said, the distinguished professor in a small   conference room at a major university, surrounded by other distinguished professors,   “just doesn’t make sense”— brett kavanaugh, gilles deleuze,   and felix guattari, they were in the room too, alive in lines of flight, trying out lines of flight, in posthuman relation to their   yesterday relationships   with lines of flight—

living in school    75

i was there too, a soon-to-be distinguished professor in a small   conference room at a major university surrounded by distinguished professors, ideating on troubles in troubled times— 4 later, at improv practice on   thursday night, it was snowing outside i was in a warm room   with other people— the ice caps are melting, some people can breathe, other people can’t, i tried to erase myself anyway, traces of ideated identity,   time spent being me, spent time playing at being   other people, taking up and extending   other people, people who were and are   and will be, people i imagine and people   who live in me, the other people played with me— ridiculous, silly, and stupid, we aren’t ourselves, we are somebody else, something different is   being created here, this isn’t school, this is something else— 5 she told me that my teaching   was inappropriate, this distinguished high school teacher   in a fluorescent classroom, surrounded by posters,

76    living in school

  how to split infinitives,   how to conjugate verbs,   to thine own self be true, “you need to grow up,”   she sang, filling out rubrics, assessing me, such an adult in such an   adult space— i was thirty-three, dangling from the tree, the crows gnawing on   my childish flesh, something was dying, i knew that it was, one person i was let it die, one person didn’t, something else is   always created— these distinguished teachers   in distinguished schools, committed to social justice, they’re really making a difference— 6 later, at an improv show on   friday night, i played with   the distinguished teacher, “you need to grow up,”   i told a child who’d lit the school on fire, my voice was a mountain,   my song too, the audience howled with laughter, i moved around the stage, a clueless adult speaking confidently   as though something were true, something else was moving now, something that felt more just,   this wasn’t school—

living in school    77

7 children grow up to be adults   in school, there are places where adults   turn into children, and sing different songs, borrow from settled melodies, sing something else that allows   for something else— sometimes i’m an adult, sometimes i’m a child, sometimes i listen to the song   and sometimes i sing— don’t speak so confidently, don’t says something   to make it true, one person and another, one thing and another thing until   children are alive in school—

This page intentionally left blank.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR Sarrah J. Grubb Indiana University, Kokomo

When you teach in relationship With students And they realize You do love them  Authentically And that you believe They know TRUTHs Even though They might not Have the words   The words that we   The words that we use To explain it When they find the words When they learn the words Oh! (the words) They share themselves back And you can’t pretend now that You don’t KNOW. Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, page 79 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

79

This page intentionally left blank.

PART II RECOGNITION: ACKNOWLEDGING AND RETHINKING THROUGH PRAXIS

To recognize the injustices of colonization as a history of the present is to rewrite history, and to reshape the ground on which we live, for we would recognize the ground itself as shaped by such histories. If the violence of what happened is recognized, as a violence that shapes the present, then the “truths” of history are called into question. —Sara Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 200

This page intentionally left blank.

REFLECTION

MOVING FROM ACTIVITIES TO ACTIVIST Amy Shema The College at Brockport

When people ask what I teach and I respond, “Education,” this is often followed up with, “I know you are at the university, but what do you teach?” This question implies, what subject area or field is my specialization. To which I explain that I teach teachers. Just as this can be a revelation to others that teaching is in itself a field of study, I too am surprised that others are unaware of the years of training, preparation, and schooling required to be a teacher—and that is before a teacher’s first year in the classroom. As a critical theorist and educator, I am often caught in the ethical paradox of critiquing a historically marginalizing institution that perpetuates privilege and reifies structures of injustice, while preparing the next generation of teachers to participate in that system and doing so within the safety of the academy. Education has an additional layer of complexity due to the fact that most of our teacher candidates have already participated in the same institution of schooling for their formative years. Therefore, teacher education is the simultaneous peeling away of layers of misinformation, a series of activities to make the implicit explicit, and calling into question fictional truths.

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 83–85 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

83

84    Moving From Activities to Activist

It is in this space of disequilibrium that we ask teacher candidates to take everything that they thought they knew about education, throw it into the air, and trust that what falls lands in a place that is more accurate than before. As a teacher educator, students often enter my Education and Society course unaware of the complex social-political climate of schools and education. They know that there are “problems” in education, but commonly lack the historical intricacies that inform and enable current inequities. We spend the first few weeks discussing the history of public schools, key figures and ideas, and then take a critical dive into various issues. Many are shocked at the history not taught in schools including the Native American Boarding Schools, intentional housing segregation as a result of red-lining, and numerous “manufactured crises” as Berliner and Biddle (1997) describe. Novice teachers are often consumed with the detailed operations of the classroom. The lesson plans, seating charts, behavior management plans, schedules, and so forth. This is completely logical. These are the elements of teaching that they have most clearly witnessed and can name. These are also aspects that are more easily observed, critiqued, and able to adjust. Similarly, when it comes to “content,” students return to the lesson plans, goals, objectives, and standards. The class I teach is not a methods class per se, it is in the category of social foundation. The overarching questions for the semester, “What is the purpose of school?” and the corollaries, “What was the purpose of school?” and “How has it changed; or has it?” are to me more apropos to understanding a system, than drafting the perfect lesson plan. This is in part, because lesson planning focuses on details; the pieces. Yet when we take a step back to see the proverbial forest, we engage in valuable conversations that are grounded in social justice education, anti-bias education, emancipatory pedagogies, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and the like. The step back, permits students to conceive of teaching as more than an accumulation of activities, and allows them to visualize teachers as activists. During class discussions, students agree that utilizing the Sapon-Shevin (1991) model for C.I.V.I.C.S education (courage, inclusion, value, integrity, cooperation, and safety) could profoundly change student and teachers’ school-based experiences in a positive way, yet they often revert back to “the lesson plan.” Similarly, when discussing anti-racist education and funds of knowledge, students agree that yes, we should be honoring and utilizing various ways of knowing, but how are they supposed to “fit it in” with all of the other requirements. Herein lies the problem. Social justice cannot just be an add-on feature to a lesson plan. Nor can including food, flags, and festivals be considered to be adequate for multicultural education. This example is analogous to a school building a ramp and claiming to be an “inclusive” school. Being inclusive requires a deeply rooted belief in everyone’s right to experience life with dignity and humanity. Inclusivity

Moving From Activities to Activist    85

is a mindset and way of being, not a combination of strategies teachers use from a “toolbox.” Correspondingly, authentic activism is grounded in beliefs and principles that permeate how one views, engages with, and makes sense of all other aspects of life. Which means that in teacher education, teaching about social justice and anti-bias practices are nothing more than add-ons if we are not embodying them in our own teaching practice. This is Freire’s praxis. In other words, we have to be the curriculum we teach, particularly when advocating for equity, justice, and doing what’s right for children. REFERENCES Berliner, D., & Biddle, B. (1997). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on American’s public schools. White Plains, NY: Longman. Sapon-Shevin. M. (1999). Because we can change the world: A practical guide to building cooperative, inclusive classroom communities. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 5

CREATING FORCE FIELD Rethinking Uses and Consequences of Anti-Oppressive Pedagogical Activities Pauli Badenhorst The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

There’s a million mouths to feed And I’ve got everything I need I’m breathing And there’s a hurting thing inside But I’ve got everything to hide I’m grieving. —Eurythmics, I Saved the World Today

A graffiti slogan scrawled by contemporary British street artist and political activist, Banksy, reads: “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie” (Banksy, 2006, p. 188). By implication, this metaphor for a passivity accompanying personal awareness of privilege echoes Wilder’s (2018) claim that it is “easy to fall into a rut of woke passivity, where one pays lip service to social issues because to not do so is socially unacceptable” (para. 2). Banksy’s terse play on irony also aptly presents three constituent characteristics of privilege that are problematic

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 87–99 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

87

88    P. BADENHORST

when they coincide: [A1] The ability to recognize disparities in the world, [A2] leading to a passive response, [A3] that re-centers the self as primary concern. In the current chapter, privilege as an often-predominant focus of social justice work in education will be critiqued, and especially antioppressive pedagogical activities focused on unpacking racial privilege (see McIntosh, 1989). One of these activities, the Privilege Walk, will be deconstructed relative to its consequences that include: [B1] spotlighting and commodifying marginalized students, [B2] oversimplifying social disparities, [B3] a static framing of deficit, and [B4] a dominant centering of structural advantage over anti-oppressive resistance. As an alternative, the chapter describes—through allusion to an undergraduate university course on anti-oppressive pedagogy—how the author and a group of students created an activity, Force Field. This pedagogical activity engages an active, relational, more nuanced approach to better making sense of oppression in the world (Kumashiro, 2000), and how oppression runs throughout the personal and public spheres of social life. In an emergent manner, this activity highlights [C1] the need for intersectional and contextual fluidity, [C2] reckoning with privilege as requiring the accompanying need to reckon with power and positioning, and [C3] ongoing dialogic reflection and negotiation among activity participants. As such, Force Field aids in the sociopolitical development, perspective shifting, and critical consciousness raising (Freire, 2000; Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015; Watts, Williams, & Jagers, 2003) of student teachers, adding a political dimension of the teacher as transformative intellectual (Giroux, 1985) to existent literature on critical reflexive practices (Schön, 1983; Brookfield, 1995) among practicing and aspiring educators. THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS McIntosh’s (1989) article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—groundbreaking at the time it was penned—has exercised a profound influence over the manner oppression is thought about in education. In it, McIntosh identifies the primary cause of the persistence of racial oppression as rooted in White people’s failure to recognize their own privilege, or social and material advantages and entitlements: White oblivion pertaining to White privilege. She likens White privilege to the metaphor of “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” (McIntosh, 1989, para. 3). McIntosh’s proposed remedy is for White people to acknowledge and describe their unearned White privilege, believing such confession will lead to anti-racist action. Unfortunately, while McIntosh recognizes racism is primarily comprised of invisible systems and institutions as opposed to mere

Creating Force Field    89

individual acts, her predominant focus on White privilege as both cause and remedy largely leads back to an individualizing of racism through the very act of confession required by her approach. In particular, McIntosh’s supposed remedy of the White privilege confessional runs counter to Bonnett’s (1997) insistence that White confession all too often results in moralizing discourse comprised of “self-generated altruistic interest for ‘others’ as well as for ‘White people’s’ own moral well-being” (p. 182). Confession, then, risks offering the passivity of premature individual redemption in the face of pernicious, persistent active systems of White supremacy that produce racialized violence and brutality en masse. Such critique of White confession as cul-de-sac has also been amplified by Lensmire et al. (2013) who note that McIntosh both assumes that a lessening of privilege for White people will equate to a direct lessening of oppression for Black and Brown peoples while implying that White people recognizing their privilege will axiomatically yield the overcoming of systems of racial oppression (p. 413). Lensmire et al. (2013) proceed to discuss how a predominant focus on White privilege is counterproductive to sustainable antiracism work in that it both detracts from the more active, communal work of dismantling structures of White supremacy, and essentializes a binary racialized worldview of oppression that ignores how White supremacy also dehumanizes White people. Consequently, Lensmire et al. (2013) foreground “the need to displace white privilege from the center of antiracist work in teacher education and to focus instead on white supremacy” (p. 428), as well as complexify the oversimplified idea of White people as “the smooth embodiment of privilege” (p. 429). THE PRIVILEGE WALK The foregoing critical theoretical discussion holds practical implications for pedagogy, especially within teacher education. In particular, the critique of privilege-saturated approaches to anti-oppressive pedagogy needs to be applied to that staple of social justice activities—the Privilege Walk. At the time of writing, a simple Google search of the joint keywords “privilege walk” produced over 65 million search results, with many of these providing stepby-step instructions for how to conduct the activity. Inspired by McIntosh’s (1989) list of 26 examples of White privilege, the Privilege Walk utilizes a checklist of statements that traditionally spanned across the identity fields of race, gender, and socioeconomic status, however more recently criteria such as sexual orientation, religion, and physical ability—as examples— have also been included. Participants are read a number of statements such as “If you were ever stopped or questioned by the police because they felt you were suspicious, take one step backward” and “If you studied the

90    P. BADENHORST

culture or the history of your ancestors in elementary school take one step forward.” Participants then respond to prompts by moving either forwards or backwards, and in so doing create a binary spatial-linear representation of inequality between those who are supposedly privileged (at front) and those who are disadvantaged (at back), while many participants are left to hover in the uncertain terrain of the middle. Clearly, one of the overriding successes of the Privilege Walk has been its break with more traditional book-and-chalkboard modes of instruction through the kinesthetic utilization of space and movement that imbue the activity with a multimodal, personalized feel. However, it is also as a result of such movement, namely learners eventually being stationed in static and oversimplified positions, that serious problems with the activity become apparent. In this chapter, effort will be made to unpack, analyze, and critique these problems in order to set the context and tone for the pedagogical intervention that will be discussed in the penultimate section. Adequately understanding the problem is, after all, a dialectic prerequisite for conceptualizing its practical remedy. Relying on extensive reflective notes I took following the last time I implemented the Privilege Walk activity, and its accompanying debrief, I recall a class I taught in the Fall of 2014 and in which I implemented the Privilege Walk. It was during an undergraduate teacher education class comprised almost exclusively of young White women that serious problems surrounding the Privilege Walk manifested. Hosted at a large, predominantly White public U.S. university, this class set out to advocate for linguistically and culturally diverse learners. Here, following implementation of the Privilege Walk, a young Black woman ended up right at the front of the class (privileged). A young White woman from a poor, rural background, in turn, ended up right at the back (disadvantaged)—her words spoken quietly near the conclusion of the activity still audible in my mind, “. . . feel so awkward.” As I would later establish after numerous lengthy conversations, the particular upbringing of the young Black woman enabled her to think very positively about her background which she openly characterized as privileged: private school K–12 attendance that allowed highly-articulate command of the English language; wealthy, graduate school-educated parents who taught exceptionally progressive gender values and self-confidence to their daughter, and a White affluent suburban upbringing that left this young Black woman often feeling more excluded by her Black peers at church who accused her of pretentiously talking White than by the White people that inhabited her surrounds. Insightful regarding her Black heritage and history, she also however expressed awareness that her upbringing had caused tensions in her experience of Blackness. Since I previously had adapted and allocated the amount of Privilege Walk statements equally among the four categories of race and ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and linguistic background, this particular young Black woman reported

Creating Force Field    91

herself as advantaged in at least three of the four categories, compared to the White young woman who reported herself as disadvantaged relative to at least three of the categories. This young White woman, I later learned, hailed from a rural Pennsylvania blue-collar background marked by a father who had been retrenched years prior in the failing coal mining industry in which their family had worked for generations (Isenberg, 2016). The majority of the class, for their part, found themselves located in a very indeterminate middle position. While the Privilege Walk stresses recognizing one’s privilege, three larger practical problems surfaced following this activity during the debriefing session. First, many in this class of almost exclusively White students now felt justified in making the larger social claim that historically-determined, persistent, highly structural racial disparities are being unrealistically hyped up since the exercise had supposedly proven that Black people can also be most advantaged and White people disadvantaged. Here, the singular context of the activity was used as a generalizing lens through which to interpret the larger social landscape. Second, while participants were involved in individually recognizing their privilege during the activity, the static field that had been created after the activity gave rise to certain students at the binary advantaged/disadvantaged extremes being spotlighted and embarrassed in public. In particular, the spotlighting of students whose racial, gendered, socioeconomic, and other identities are marginalized holds potential for the dual experience of personal shame and being shamed. Third, that most students found themselves located in the indeterminate middle space by the end of the activity raises the open question of what transformative epistemic value they were able to take from the experience. Were they just average, everyday, good-to-do White people (Sullivan, 2014) somewhat privileged, but not particularly so? How could a course instructor debrief such problems? After reflecting on this activity and debrief, I realized that my deployment of the Privilege Walk as intended means of engaging forms of oppression and identity violence had inadvertently given rise to the enactment of unforeseen forms of violence (Grosz, 1998) within our class. Consequently, I decided to abandon its future implementation on three theoretical grounds: 1. The Privilege Walk spotlights marginalized identity students and uses them as commodity for the supposed betterment of identity dominant students. Here, I wish to draw a parallel to Brown and Parker’s (1989) discussion of the double bind traditional Christian theological framing of suffering that produces society’s “chosen victims” (p. 13). According to this scheme, only a victim, in whose suffering we are somehow implicated, has the power to confront us with our guilt and move us to new action. Applied to the Privilege Walk, the suffering

92    P. BADENHORST

of those under systems of domination—their victimization—supposedly serves to persuade the dominant to become more caring and empathetic. Consequently, marginalized people come to be cast as dependent on the graces, mercy, and kindness of dominant people. The double bind here is that the suffering of the marginalized that is pitied is simultaneously spotlighted and required in order to initiate change among the dominant. A further adverse outcome of this scheme is that the focus is not primarily on bringing an end to forms of domination and the sufferings these enact, but rather on the moral redemption and appeasement of the guilt of the dominant. In this regard, Hoagland (2007) counters: “It is not the other person’s need that requires our sense of benevolent charity, as ethical treatises suggest, it is rather our sense of benevolent charity that requires the other person’s need” (p. 103). Consequently, the idea of privilege is complexified in that those who seemingly appear privileged often operate from within an invisible psycho-emotional context of deficit (Thandeka, 1999). 2. The Privilege Walk presents an oversimplified, one-dimensional landscape of oppression and social disparities. Crenshaw (1989) has underlined how the experience of marginalization and associated forms of violence is experienced in a compounded, amplified manner by people who share more than one non-dominant identity. As example, the social effects of a Black transgender woman’s dualmarginalized intersection of race and sexual orientation will be experienced as radically different compared to a White woman who is gender-conforming. While the Privilege Walk pays lip service to the existence of multiple identities, it fails to contend with complexities and extenuations that arise when identities intersect around the same social agent. Consequently, participants are left with a linearbinary view of oppression that fails to highlight how identities are positioned in relation to one another in a dynamic, complex social field. Here, the plural and complex nature of oppression (Kumashiro, 2000) is left under explored. 3. The Privilege Walk centers passive structural privilege/disadvantage; not power as diffuse and relational. Alternatively stated, the Privilege Walk locks some participants into a determinist, static formation that foregrounds deficit and neglects resources of power. Foucault (1976) draws attention to the diffuse and open-ended nature of power, so that forms of power exist both among the dominant and subordinate. Here, power is not the possession of a privileged few, so much as the exercise of political influence through social practices and relations. Accordingly, Hoagland (2007) points out that one can “be both subordinated and resistant. One can be

Creating Force Field    93

both silenced and speaking” (p. 106). Consequently, the binary poles of the Privilege Walk are not capable of demonstrating how, for instance, different marginalized peoples occupy substantial quadrants within a social field that is latent with covert forms of power rooted in strategic mobilization and collective action. These critiques, in turn, worked to inform the development of a new activity, Force Field, that is here tendered in response to the call issued by Lensmire et al. (2011, pp. 428–429) that educators engaging anti-racist teaching write about their development of contextualized pedagogies. THE CREATION OF FORCE FIELD Inequities, and their ensuing iniquities, are not always apparent, and consequently require concerted, strategic pedagogical intervention that is aware enough of itself to prevent the reification of new forms of inequity/iniquity within the classroom. Following the jettison of Privilege Walk from my pedagogical repertory, I began to contemplate how many of the insights I had accumulated in the wake of its demise could be applied to the development of a potentially new activity that would strive to overcome many of the epistemological and ethical blind spots uncovered. While other educators have considered learner-focused modifications to the Privilege Walk (Bolger, 2018), I was also especially keen to explore activity-related possibilities that would disrupt the deleterious express focus on privilege while still maintaining the creditable spatial and embodied characteristics of the Privilege Walk, since engagement with issues of equity and social justice in the classroom often tends to take on the rather abstract form of conceptual readings-cum-discussion. Berila (2016, pp. 33–62) calls for bringing the body back into social justice-focused learning on account of the fact that both unlearning and the creation of new liberatory possibilities are interrelated embodied processes (p. 34) that optimize learning. Force Field is an activity that incorporates both the body, movement, and space, as well as more traditional learning practices such as reading and discussion. This activity is under ongoing development, and has experienced numerous modifications since it was first introduced in an antiracism-focused teacher preparation course I produced and taught at a large predominantly White U.S. public university in Fall 2016. For instance, I had originally named the activity The Power Grid, yet later decided on the name Force Field because the idea of a grid carries association of static, symmetric structure that doesn’t accord with the dynamic, negotiable nature of social relations. My subsequent adoption of the conceptual metaphor of field was partly inspired by Bourdieu’s (1993) theorization of field

94    P. BADENHORST

as a historical, nonhomogenous social-spatial arena in which social agents and their positions are located. However, unlike Bourdieu—whose Marxian worldview reflects a binary determinist, asymmetrical grasp of power relations—I ascribe to a more heterogenous rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) understanding of the social field as constituted by identities that are complex, interrelated, and ever shifting (Hall, 1996). Furthermore, whereas a name like Power Grid emphasized power as the explicit focal point, Force Field instead allows for an implicit understanding of forces exerted by social agents upon one another within a dynamic social field that is comprised of the past, present, and future. Here, power [future] exists in relation to privilege [past] and positioning [present] relative to multiple identities that, at times, intersect. Leading up to the activity, and in addition to our central course reading (Coates, 2015), our class invested significant time in exploring a number of intersectional themes as these relate to race and racism. For instance, readings from bell hooks’ (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry (2007), and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris’s (2015) Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, helped to raise awareness of the compounded forms of physical and emotional violence to which Black and Brown girls and women are subjected on account of their combined racial and gendered phenotypes and identities. Diamond and Bainbridge’s (Bainbridge et al., 2010) film Reel Injun encouraged reflection upon the stereotyping and marginalization of indigenous peoples of North America, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s (see mipdo, 2014) speech at the Montgomery State Capitol after the March from Selma to Montgomery worked to highlight the complex historical interplay between race, racism, and social class. In my experience doing classroom work around matters of identity, the formula of activity followed by debrief often requires significant pre-activity exploration of themes to be engaged during the activity in order to ensure that learners are able to engage the activity with sufficient clarity and depth. Prior to the activity, I developed a number of basic identity configuration examples—such as Black college-educated homosexual, rural Muslim woman wearing hijab, and White Christian man—that would be used during the exercise. Here, I was conscious to provide an array of both dominant, normative—such as White (Thandeka, 1999), straight (Butler, 1990), and Christian (Jun, Jones Jolivet, Ash, & Collins, 2018)—and marginalized identity markers such as recent immigrant from Latin America (Strom & Alcock, 2015), Muslim wearing a hijab (Kincheloe, Steinberg, & Stonebanks, 2010), and heavily-accented non-native speaker of English (Lippi-Green, 2012). Later, during class, learners worked to generate their own ideas for identity configurations. Once a sufficient number of configurations had been generated, these were randomly divided among participants on a one-per-person

Creating Force Field    95

basis. We then headed out as a class onto a sprawling campus lawn adjacent to the main university building. With leaves on the ground a crisp yellowbrown, and the dry perfume of the gentle autumn breeze brushing our bodies, we spread ourselves out in a random circular assemblage. Learners were encouraged to take a few moments to imagine themselves into the intersectional persona they were to represent for the exercise. In this regard, learners were not representing themselves, but instead being challenged to grapple with particular social constraints and affordances associated with various identity intersections. By implication then, interpretive social claims arising from the activity are informed by the larger field and the perspectives of all participants. Among others, this exercise—largely inspired by political philosopher John Rawls’ (1971) thought experiment of the veil of ignorance whereby social subjects envision restorative, equitable social practices from the hypothetical vantage point of their marginalized positioning—aids in deconstructing the determinist impression that socially disadvantaged subjects are hopelessly locked into marginalized positions. Later, learners described—and embellished, as needed—their identity configurations to those standing in general proximity to them. An obvious advantage of this approach is that it avoids the spotlighting and related commodification of students. Due to the reality that the Privilege Walk requires learners to respond to a set of broad questions relative to their experiences in life, some learners are often hesitant to honestly react to questions since ending up positioned right at the front (supposedly very privileged) or back (supposedly underprivileged) of the Privilege Walk linear-binary queue holds its own potential for shame and shaming. Once learners were acquainted with the various in situ identity configurations, they engaged in negotiation and dialog with those around them in order to arrange themselves relative to others. The catch here is that every time learners would position themselves in the field, they would encounter new identity configurations in the process of positioning so that the mindfulness-based (Berila, 2016) practice of negotiation and dialog was ongoing. In this regard, learners were granted the opportunity to repeatedly consider the relationships of numerous identities relative to multiple other identities. Here, identity positionings never assume indeterminacy as learners come to recognize that all identities impact and stand in relation to other identities. Once the process appeared to be saturated and learners expressed confidence that their positioning in the field was most tenable relative to their arrangement alongside other identities, individuals—still standing— were encouraged to share around their respective identity configuration positioning, and to justify how their identity positioning related to those of other identity configurations in immediate proximity to themselves. Here, clear identity striations became evident in the way the field had arranged itself, and such deployment came to represent the social field of the present

96    P. BADENHORST

day. Significantly, activity participants were instructed to consider how their positioning (present) in the field relative to others had arisen through unearned historical privilege (past) and how both their privilege and positioning, in turn, enabled or constrained the opportunity to exercise social and economic influence—power (future)—relative to dominant norms. This triadic engagement with positioning, privilege, and power allows for greater grasp of the ongoing, historically informed nature of the means through which oppression operates across intersectional lines, and is implicated in the subsequent marginalization of peoples in the present and future. More recently, I have begun to experiment with different time-based framings of oppression while implementing the Force Field activity. For instance, relative to the racial phenomenon whereby groups—such as the Irish (Ignatiev, 1995) and Jews (Brodkin, 1998)—previously considered either non-White or lesser White gradually are grafted into Whiteness, I may provide examples of dates (1892) or events (arrival at Ellis Island). Activity participants, in turn, use these time-based markers to better analyze how social groups and agents often have complex relationships to oppression, moving from positions of experiencing oppression to positions of oppressing Others. Identities are therefore demonstrated to be highly complex and identity positionings dynamic. Furthermore, unlike the Privilege Walk that leaves some participants with little more than a realization of Okay, so I’m privileged! (Wilder, 2018) and others with a morbid reminder of their marginalization, Force Field— by the very account of its engagement with the domain of power which is diffuse and open-ended (Foucault, 1976)—allows for an added layer of activity that draws attention to the pliable nature of identity positioning. Here, the passivity of privilege is accounted for but not centered as primary concern. Consequently, learners in the field were asked to consider and discuss what forms of power, and even resistance (Toshalis, 2015), were available to them. For instance, participants positioned on the periphery were prompted to consider modes of power—such as Hip Hop and grassroots communal solidarity—that challenged deficit models, and participants towards the more dominant center of the field were asked to consider how Whiteness or English monolingualism, as examples, were riddled with multiple epistemic and ethical omissions and occlusions. Therefore, power as the active ability to exercise social influence is engaged, including among subaltern perspectives. Towards the end of the activity, I introduced larger concepts like White supremacy and patriarchy to the field, and participants deliberated regarding the types of interpretations that structures and shifts within the field allowed us to make. In summary, Force Field circumvents a number of the pitfalls of the Privilege Walk. First, larger social claims are informed by the entire field and the perspectives of all participants. Second, participants are not spotlighted or commodified so that a select few may learn. Third, identity positionings

Creating Force Field    97

never assume indeterminacy as learners come to recognize that all identities impact and stand in relation to other identities. Fourth, identities are demonstrated to be highly complex and identity positionings dynamic. Fifth, the passivity of privilege is accounted for but not centered as primary concern. Sixth, power as the active ability to exercise social influence is engaged, including among subaltern perspectives. CONCLUSION This chapter has critiqued the overtly privilege-focused approach of an antioppressive pedagogical activity known as the Privilege Walk by demonstrating how this activity often enacts an oversimplified, indeterminate view of oppression that spotlights and commodifies various students. A number of epistemic and ethical problems with the Privilege Walk were underlined. As an alternative, an activity dubbed Force Field was introduced. This activity seeks to circumvent the deleterious effects of the Privilege Walk by, among others, decentering disparities between actual student identities and instead supplementing an exclusive focus on privilege with engagement with positioning and power. Hereby, learners are able to critically interrogate past, present, and potential future implications for social agents constituted by an array of dominant normative and/or marginalized identity intersections in a manner that challenges their awareness and perspectives of the social world. Clearly, Force Field is a work in progress, and the activity benefits from participant creative input and ideas in the immediate local context within which it is applied. While Force Field is but one example of practical anti-oppression pedagogy, it complements equally-necessary antioppression pedagogical strategies such as reading and class discussions. In this regard, educators are encouraged to further develop and contextualize the ideas here tendered, aware of Marx’s (Marx & Engels, 1848/2014) observation that revolutions—implying classroom-based revolutions comprising unlearning and learning—are gradual and incremental processes of that societal change, more just and humane, to which we aspire. REFERENCES Bainbridge, C., Din, R., Fon., C., Ludwick, L., Olsen, C., Symansky., & Webb, E. (Producers), & Diamond, N., Bainbridge, C., & Hayes, J. (Directors). (2010). Reel Injun [Motion picture]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada. Banksy. (2006). Wall and piece. London, England: Century. Berila, B. (2016). Integrating mindfulness into anti-oppression pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.

98    P. BADENHORST Bolger, M. (2018, February 16). Why I don’t facilitate privilege walks anymore and what I do instead. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@MegB/why-i-dont -won-t-facilitate-privilege-walks-anymore-and-what-i-do-instead-380c95490e10 Bonnett, A. (1997). Constructions of whiteness in European and American antiracism. In P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. London, England: Zed. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. Cambridge, England: Polity. Brodkin, K. (1998). How Jews became White and what that says about race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Brown, J. C., & Parker, R. (1989). For God so loved the world? In J. C. Brown, & C. Bohn (Eds.), Christianity, patriarchy, and abuse: A feminist critique (pp. 1–30). New York, NY: Pilgrim. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge. Coates, T.-H. (2015). Between the world and me. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1(8), 139–167. Crenshaw, K., Ritchie, A., Anspach, R., Gilmer, R., & Harris, L. (2015). Say her name: Resisting police brutality against Black women. New York, NY: African American Policy Forum. Retrieved from http://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/55a810d7e4b058f342f55873/1437077719984/ AAPF_SMN_Brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Foucault, M. (1976). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Continuum. Giovanni, N. (2007). The collected poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998. New York, NY: HarperPerennial. Giroux, H. (1985). Teachers as transformative intellectuals. Social Education, 49(5), 376–379. Grosz, E. (1998). The time of value: Deconstruction and value. Cultural Values, 2(2/3), 190–205. Hall, S. (1996). Introduction: Who needs identity? In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 1–17). London, England: SAGE. Hoagland, S. L. (2007). Denying relationality: Epistemology and ethics and ignorance. In S. Sullivan, & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 95–118). Albany: State University of New York. hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York, NY: Routledge. Isenberg, N. (2016). White trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America. New York, NY: Viking. Jun, A., Jones Jolivet, T. L., Ash, A. N., & Collins, C. S. (2018). White Jesus: The architecture of racism in religion and education. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Creating Force Field    99 Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R., & Stonebanks, C. D. (Eds.). (2010). Teaching against islamophobia. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kumashiro, K. (2000). Toward a theory of anti-oppressive education. Review of Educational Research, 70(1), 25–53. Lensmire, T. J., McManimon, S. K., Tierney, J. D., Lee-Nichols, M. E., Casey, Z. A., Lensmire, A., & Davis, B. M. (2013). McIntosh as synecdoche: How teacher education’s focus on White privilege undermines antiracism. Harvard Educational Review, 83(3), 410–431. Lippi-Green , R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York, NY: Routledge. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2014). The Communist manifesto. New York, NY: International. (Originally published in 1848) McIntosh, P. (1989). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace & Freedom (July/August). Retrieved from https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/ 10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf mipdo. (2014). Rare—MLK, Jr. on how the races were kept from unifying in postCivil War America [Audio recording]. Retrieved from https://soundcloud. com/mipdo/rare-mlk-jr-on-how-the-races Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books. Strom, M., & Alcock, E (2015). Floods, waves, and surges: The representation of Latin@ immigrant children in the United States mainstream media. Critical Discourse Studies, 14(4), 440–457. Sullivan, S. (2014). Good White people: The problem with middle-class white anti-racism. Albany: SUNY. Thandeka. (1999). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. New York, NY: Continuum. Toshalis, E. (2015). Make me! Understanding and engaging student resistance in school. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education. Watts, R. J., & Hipolito-Delgado, C. P. (2015). Thinking ourselves to liberation?: Advancing sociopolitical action in critical consciousness. The Urban Review, 47, 847–867. Watts, R. J., Williams, N. C., & Jagers, R. J. (2003). Sociopolitical development. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1/2), 185–194. Wilder, C. (2018, December 3). I’m privileged: Now what? [Online periodical]. Retrieved from https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2018/12/im-privileged -now-what

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 6

WHITE TEACHER EDUCATORS, BLACK TEACHER CANDIDATES, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE Ideating Paradoxical Readings of African American Language in Teacher Education Laura A. Taylor Rhodes College Zachary A. Casey Rhodes College

ABSTRACT In this chapter, we engage in multiple readings of teaching and learning about African American Language (AAL) with/as White teacher educators working with White, Black, and Latinx students in an undergraduate teacher education program. We focus first on the radical intentions embedded within the fight to have AAL recognized as a legitimate language of students in U.S.

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 101–117 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

101

102    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY schools. Next, we trouble AAL as (possibly/potentially) essentialist. Drawing from the voiced experiences of Black students in our program who rejected the concept as derogatory, we consider how the teaching of AAL (particularly as White teacher educators in a majority Black city and school system) can function to construct the speech practices of Black students as backward, other, and alien all while recentering Whiteness. Finally, we ideate on the paradoxical nature of AAL as simultaneously legitimizing and othering the linguistic practices of Black students within the conditioning logics of White supremacy and capitalism.

I used to notice how one of my friends in high school, who was Black, would talk differently with his Black friends than he would in class or with me. It wasn’t like wrong or anything, I just thought it was interesting. —Katelyn I don’t know if I think it’s a language. It’s just how everybody speaks sometimes. —Janelle

A few weeks into the semester, students in my course—Reading, Writing, and Urban Schools—were discussing the intersections of language, literacy, and culture. Through readings and course activities, they had been exploring the historical, political, and social dimensions of language and literacy, focusing on how differing definitions of these concepts have been used to create boundaries and hierarchies. Embedded within these discussions of culture were both explicit and implicit attention to intersections with race and White supremacy, due in part to the course’s location. The course was part of an undergraduate teacher education program within a predominately White liberal arts college in the Southern United States. Yet, the college was situated within a majority Black city, and the program was preparing teachers to work in a school district where approximately 75% of both the teacher and student populations are Black. In this particular class session, they were considering literacy from an anthropological perspective, considering ethnography as a tool for understanding language and literacy as cultural practices. After small groups shared noticings from the ethnographic studies of literacy and language practice they had read, I asked students to bring this lens of cultural practice to their own experiences, considering how dimensions of their sociocultural identities, including race, class, gender, and sexuality, were enacted through language and literacy. In the ensuing discussion, several White students brought up topics of language variation and AAL in particular when recounting instances from their K–12 schooling where they observed Black students engaging in code-switching. At the close of class, I noted that the next class session would focus on those topics of language variation and

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    103

AAL, examining the intersections of language, identity, culture, and power. Later that same day, two Black students in the course came to my office to discuss their concerns about the class discussion. This meeting prompted me to have further conversations with Zachary Casey, co-author of this chapter, about the tensions that arose when they, as White teacher educators, engaged with topics surrounding AAL in their courses. It was this series of interactions that prompted the exploration of teaching AAL shared in this chapter. We use these interactions, and particularly the voiced experiences of Black students, to ideate on the intersections of race, language, and power within teacher education. We do so as two White teacher educators who strive to enact anti-racist and anti-capitalist pedagogies (Casey, 2016) in our work with White, Black, Asian American, and Latinx students. While recognizing that all speakers practice linguistic variation, both authors identify primarily as Mainstream United States English speakers (Lippi-Green, 2012), or what is more commonly referred to as “standard” English.1 Here, we engage in multiple readings of these experiences, first exploring the radical intentions embedded within the fight to have AAL recognized as a legitimate language for students in U.S. schools. Next, we trouble teaching about AAL, considering how this teaching can function to construct the speech practices of Black students as backward, other, and alien, all while recentering Whiteness. Finally, we ideate on the paradoxical nature of AAL as simultaneously legitimizing and othering the linguistic practices of Black students within the conditioning logics of White supremacy and capitalism. AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS The language variety we focus on in this chapter has alternatively been named African American Vernacular English, African American English, Ebonics, and Black Language (Cooks & Ball, 2010). Here, we use the term AAL to recognize it as a language variety in its own right, rather than a derivative or variant of “standard” English. While this language has been practiced in the United States for centuries, it was not until the second half of the 20th century that sociolinguists began formally studying its features (Baugh & Smitherman, 2007). Aligning with disciplinary norms, these early investigations made visible the descriptive grammar of AAL, identifying how particular features, such as the use of multiple negation, were used in consistent ways (Labov, 1969, 1972; Wolfram, 1969). These analyses documented AAL as a systematic, rule-governed language, running counter to dominant discourses positioning AAL as merely slang or incorrect usage of “standard” English. Further research on AAL expanded documentation

104    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY

of AAL’s distinct features while exploring its historical development and possible ties to West African languages (Baugh, 1984, 1999; Dillard, 1972; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Smitherman, 1977, 2006; Wolfram & Thomas, 2002). This research found that distinct features of AAL were not merely grammatical, but also included particular phonology, or pronunciation; lexicon, or vocabulary; and forms of discourse (Ball, 1996; McWhorter, 2001; Smitherman, 1977). The naming of this language variety as AAL by sociolinguists was meant to imply not that all African Americans spoke AAL, but rather to recognize that it was a language primarily practiced by African American individuals and communities. As is the case with all language practices, the practices of and discourses about AAL intersect with structures and discourses of White supremacy and capitalism. Both the practice of and discussions about AAL are examples of what Alim (2016) calls “racing language” and Rosa (2019) terms “sounding like a race.” In other words, AAL is deeply intertwined with Blackness (Johnson, Jackson, Stovall, & Baszile, 2017), serving as both a tool of White supremacy and an act of resistance to it (Baker-Bell, Paris, & Jackson; 2017; Rickford & Rickford, 2000). Given the role schools play in transmitting hegemonic language ideologies (Lippi-Green, 2012), AAL has been a significant topic of study in educational research. One strand of research has repeatedly found that teachers often hold negative attitudes towards AAL (Bacon, 2017; Blake & Cutler, 2003; Godley, Carpenter, & Werner, 2007; McBee Orzulak, 2015; Whittingham, Hoffman, & Rumenapp, 2018). Mirroring general attitudes towards AAL in the United States, these studies find that teachers tend to view AAL not as a legitimate language variety, but instead as an incorrect use of “standard” English. Yet, there is a parallel literature making visible the linguistic genius (Alfaro & Bartolomé, 2018) of students who speak AAL and exploring how teachers might leverage these students’ linguistic repertoires in the classroom (Alim, 2004, 2005; Ball, 1996; Boutte & Johnson, 2013; Dyson & Smitherman, 2009; Martinez, 2017; Vetter, 2013; Young, Barrett, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2015). Informed by sociolinguistic understandings of all language varieties as equal in linguistic terms (Lippi-Green, 2012), this research has illustrated the skilled and dynamic ways AAL speakers use both AAL and “standard” English to express themselves while navigating raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that denigrate their linguistic repertoires. While a full review of the literature on AAL and education is beyond the scope of this chapter, we find that both theorizing and research on AAL in schools is oriented towards positioning AAL as a legitimate language practiced by U.S. students. While scholars take different stances towards how AAL relates to “standard” English, there is a broad unifying theme around countering hegemonic discourses that suggest the practice of AAL, and

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    105

by extension its speakers, as deficient. Instead, this literature insists upon not only the legitimacy of AAL but also on the linguistic resources held by speakers of AAL, in turn calling upon teachers and students to recognize and build upon these students’ existing strengths. Yet, we must place both the intentions and conclusions of this literature alongside the voiced experiences of Black students in our program who rejected AAL as a derogatory concept. In the following section, we draw from these voiced experiences to explore how the teaching of AAL might function to recenter Whiteness and position the linguistic practices of Black students as Other. CRITICAL READINGS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE IN TEACHER EDUCATION It was my engagement with this theory and research on AAL that led me to introduce sociolinguistic understandings of language variation, and AAL in particular, in my courses focused on literacy teaching and learning. Because most of the students in the course were intending to become teachers in their city’s predominately Black public school district, I chose to center AAL in discussions of language variation in order to support students in exploring the intersections of language, identity, and White supremacy. The course was held within a predominately White college, with a student body that was 72% White, 8% Black, 5% Asian, and 4% Latinx. In my course, four students identified as Black, eight as White, two as Latinx, and one as biracial. In the ensuing class discussions, Latinx and White students in the course expressed positive orientations towards AAL, aligning sociolinguistic understandings of AAL with the asset-oriented and culturally relevant pedagogical philosophies embedded in their teacher education program. Similar to how both Dr. Casey and I had previously approached the concept, we appeared to automatically view the recognition and use of AAL in classrooms as a liberatory practice. However, as noted in the introduction, three of the Black students in the course approached me after class to discuss their concerns regarding both the concept of AAL and the class discussion of it. The students wanted to know more about the historical and theoretical development of AAL, expressing skepticism about how the concept appeared to inaccurately link race and language. I shared with those students a brief explanation of the development of AAL within the sociolinguistics literature, as well as my pedagogical reasons for exploring AAL in the course. Responding to the students’ felt tensions about the topic, I also made revisions to my plans for the course, working to address their concerns through lectures and discussions in subsequent course sessions. Despite these conversations, however, tensions remained. This experience prompted Dr. Casey and I to engage in further conversations about the challenges and limitations

106    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY

of teaching AAL as White teacher educators, conversations which in turn prompted this chapter. Our first methodological influence is practitioner inquiry (see Casey, 2011; Dinkelman, 2003; Joyner & Casey, 2015; McManimon & Casey, 2018). We see this work as linking theory and practice, by using theoretical tools from curriculum theory (Pinar, 2004; McManimon & Casey, 2018) to better inform our work and understandings as practicing teacher educators. Prior to the conversations that prompted this chapter, both of us viewed teaching about AAL as explicitly liberatory. In many ways, we took for granted that discussions of AAL would be viewed by students as aligned to the program’s anti-racist pedagogical orientation. However, the conversations recounted here have allowed us to recognize complexities in teaching about AAL that we were not previously aware of. Here we have worked to construct composite narratives for the purposes of protecting our students’ identities, as well as to ensure that the depth and complexity of their contributions can be approached in the space of this chapter. We see this compositing not as representative, but rather as deeply particular instances of the complicated and messy reality of teaching and learning about AAL in our institution. In this way we are also methodologically influenced by Stake’s (1995) notion of an “intrinsic” case study, wherein researchers investigate a case for its own sake. Here, we have composited what we consider to be multiple micro cases, that we have worked to theorize and thematize together so as to represent the complexity and sophistication of our students’ critiques in ways that spur theoretical understandings that can better inform our work in teacher education around questions of, and contestations about, AAL. African American Languag as Essentializing One set of concerns that was raised centered on the extent to which AAL accurately represented the language practices of our students and their communities. Janelle, a Black woman in her final year of an elementary teacher education program, voiced this in two ways. On the one hand, she pointed out her many experiences with Black people who did not use or speak AAL. On the other hand, she noted that some of the linguistic features identified as AAL were used by many speakers, both Black and White. She cited as an example the word “finna,” used to mark a future planned action (Wolfram, 2008), as a particular example of a word that “everyone uses.” While approaching the issue in different ways, both critiques focus on the extent to which AAL is correctly understood as a unique language distinct from “standard” English. In doing so, Janelle drew upon her own lived

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    107

experiences to identify a consequence of, and perhaps even a weakness of AAL being developed within the disciplinary confines of sociolinguistics. The field of sociolinguistics was developed by linguists who believed there was a need to study language use in daily life rather than to study idealized notions of language, the preferred focus of study for that field. In doing so, early sociolinguists used quantitative techniques focused on identifying distinctions between individual dialects. Such techniques were arguably necessary to counteract hegemonic discourses that viewed language varieties like AAL as merely incorrect uses of “standard” English. Yet, this focus on identifying the unique features of each dialect led sociolinguists to construct borders between individual dialects as a tool to reinforce the legitimacy of those dialects previously considered “non-standard” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2008; Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2008). As Janelle’s experiences make clear, such distinctions may be useful in scholarly arguments, but the resulting representations of discrete dialects do not represent the variability of language in practice. All speakers practice language variation, engaging in what is sometimes termed style-shifting (c.f. Alim, 2004) in order to construct meanings and identities within their immediate interactions. Mirroring Janelle’s critiques, research confirms that usage of linguistic features of AAL is not unique to Black speakers (Paris, 2009) but instead that all speakers engage in hybrid language practices drawing from multiple language varieties (Dyson & Smitherman, 2009; Snell, 2013). From their examination of the circulation of power at play in this construction of linguistic differentiation, Irvine and Gal (2000) offer a lens to understand the hegemonic language ideologies at play in this distinction between research and practice. They identify several means through which ideologies construct borders, two of which are particularly relevant here. The first, iconization, notes how “linguistic features that index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representations of them, as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence” (p. 37, emphasis added). In other words, certain linguistic practices become associated with particular social groups; in this case of AAL, the use of particular pronunciations and grammatical constructions come to be viewed as inherent to Black people. We can see iconization at play even in the naming of AAL, explicitly tying this set of linguistic features to a racial group. Working in tandem with iconization is erasure, or the disregarding of variation within language practice. In seeking to categorize (and in many cases legitimize) nondominant language varieties, sociolinguists necessarily simplified the complex realities of language as practiced in everyday life. In order to convincingly argue for AAL as a discrete dialect, variations between both speakers and in the repertoires of individual speakers had to be minimalized. Quantitative statistical approaches to sociolinguistics contributed

108    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY

to this tendency, situating such variation as outliers to be disregarded in analysis. Thus, both erasure and iconization have been at play in sociolinguistic research on AAL, simplifying complex linguistic practices into more essentialized versions that could be captured for analysis and publication. Like early sociolinguists (c.f. Labov, 1972), I introduced AAL to my students as a discrete language variety in order to bolster its legitimacy as a rule-governed language. Many White students (including Katelyn, whose comments initiated the chapter) readily took up this understanding of AAL, positioning AAL as a language that was valid but also distinct from their own. While this view of AAL intends to align with an asset-oriented approach to students’ linguistic practices, it also serves to erase the variability of linguistic repertoires of Black individuals and communities through both iconization and erasure, lumping together (Leone-Pizzighella & Rymes, 2018) the practices of a geographically, socially, and economically diverse group based solely on their race. African American Language as Othering Makayla, a Black woman in her third year of an elementary teacher education program, raised a second set of concerns in teaching about AAL within our program. She expressed discomfort with how a shared reading (Baker-Bell, 2017) represented grammatical features of AAL (termed Black language in that text). The text, written primarily for White teachers working with Black students, included two tables with definitions and examples of both grammatical features of AAL (e.g., habitual be; regularized agreement) and modes of discourse (e.g., signifyin’; semantic inversion) from sociolinguistic research. It should be noted that a later section in the text also included “code-switching charts” contrasting “informal” and “formal” language taken from another text (Wheeler & Swords, 2006), which I reproduced in order to critique that text’s conflation of AAL and “informal” language. Makayla, however, expressed discomfort with both sections, particularly noting that the technical representations of AAL served to make alien some of her own typical language practices. She also voiced strong critiques of another course text which connected the historical development of AAL to slavery (Genishi & Dyson, 2015). There are parallels between Makayla’s concerns and those voiced by Black preservice teachers in Kondo’s (2019) analysis of their experience in a racially diverse multicultural education course. Kondo recounts the unease felt by those Black teachers during a class session on language variation, in which a teacher of African descent centered conversation around what he termed Ebonics. The teacher educator, who self-identified as an Ebonics speaker, compared features of AAL with “standard English,” or what

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    109

he referred to as the language of wider communication (see also Smitherman, 1995), and he argued that all teachers working in urban areas should be familiar with AAL. Despite the apparently asset-oriented approach to AAL that the teacher educator presented, many of the Black teachers were concerned that their White peers would continue to view AAL through a deficit lens, an outcome documented in similar studies of teacher education courses exploring this topic (Bacon, 2017; Haddix, 2008). They also expressed discomfort with the centering of Black people in that course session and the persistence of a Black-White binary underlying the course’s exploration of culture. Kondo (2019) theorizes this experience as an example of Front Streeting, or “the vulnerability teachers of color experience when their minoritized identities are fetishized in diversity classrooms, through an expectation of confirmed lived experiences or expert knowledge of their demographic groups” (p. 11). In an interview with Alim (2012), prominent researcher of AAL, Geneva Smitherman expressed similar concerns for AAL research to be “sensationalized and exotic” (p. 366) when not situated within an expansive understanding of Black culture and the lived experiences of Black people. This experience of fetishization or exoticism seems to be at play in Makayla’s experience. Unlike the experience of Black students in Kondo’s (2019) study, Makayla was not explicitly identified by myself as an AAL speaker in course discussions. However, the experience of seeing language practices familiar to her dissected and analyzed in a course text seemed to produce a similar outcome. Rather than having her lived experience recognized and affirmed, the experience served to make Makayla feel both spotlighted and othered in relation to her non-Black peers in the course. The tension Makayla feels is one that animates virtually every facet of our program: An ambivalence that must be constantly (re)negotiated as we seek to affirm an explicit commitment to our majority Black public school partners while working in an historically White liberal arts college. In the section that follows, we ideate on this tension with explicit attention to the simultaneity of legitimating and othering that AAL as a concept and as a part of multicultural teacher education curriculum offers. Ideating Paradoxically: African American Language as Legitimating and Othering More than one thing can be true at the same time. Yet when I first thought about the critiques offered by Janelle and Makayla and approached Dr. Casey for support in thinking through anti-racist pedagogical responses, both of us sought to find a single answer that could account for these critiques leveled at AAL. Our impulse was to look for gaps in

110    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY

how the concepts were presented or identify micro-agressive moves made by myself as instructor or by other students in the course. Initially, we approached it as a problem of presentation: If AAL could be presented better, these critiques would disappear. The more we discussed Janelle and Makayla’s critiques, however, the more convinced we became of their profundity and resonance. African American Language cannot avoid the potential traps of othering, because the need to mark out AAL as a legitimate and worthy language is only present in contexts wherein such legitimacy has to be argued for. In other words, AAL would not need to be discussed as evidence of Black linguistic genius if hegemonic logics about language in the United States did not close off all but one official and “standard” way of conceptualizing American English. While we wanted to find a way for Janelle and Makayla to not feel alienated and essentialized in course discussions of AAL, we came to understand that their reactions are all but inevitable in our present political moment of ascendant White supremacy and White nationalism. And in recognizing this, we no longer wanted to explain away these feelings, but rather engage them directly. This follows the work of Kevin Kumashiro and his notions of teaching “paradoxically” (Kumashiro, 2009). Kumashiro argues that it is the very things we do not want in our teaching that we need to make explicit to our students. For White teacher educators working with Black teacher candidates, this means describing the ways that our own racial identities impact and determine both our own sense of our actions and beliefs as well as how those actions are read and interpreted by our students. He further argues that teaching comes with a great amount of “unknowability”—we can never know everything our students are learning, and “teaching” becomes impossible if by teaching we mean a teacher who sets out knowing exactly what students will learn and then finds ways to understand that students learned exactly what it was she set out to teach. Kumashiro argues instead that we teach paradoxically, knowing full well that we will never have full access to everything our students are taking from their engagement with us and our courses, yet striving to build capacity toward anti-oppressive outcomes all the same. Teaching paradoxically has corollaries to theorizing our teaching paradoxically. While we as White teacher educators approached the teaching of AAL as an automatically liberatory practice, Janelle and Makayla’s critiques allowed us to recognize that such teaching will not always feel liberatory for all students. Despite the anti-racist intentions in the sociolinguistic literature on AAL and in our pedagogical decisions to include this literature in our courses, students may feel othered or essentialized through these discussions. These responses to AAL cannot be avoided by presenting AAL in different ways. Instead, such responses are unavoidable when teaching

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    111

about AAL within a White supremacist context. This is why we have come to understand Janelle and Makayla’s critiques as signaling a simultaneity: African American Langauge as a concept is at the same time essentializing and liberatory. It is both, in the same breath, in the same moment, and if we fail to account for this simultaneity, we run the risk of closing off possibilities for learning and for growing our capacity to resist dehumanization and actualize humanizing outcomes. It becomes critically important, however, to distinguish the boundaries of such paradoxical analyses and approaches. The risk in such work is to spin out of control into a kind of relativism that sees endless interpretations as evidence for the impossibility of any sort of material analysis. It is the materiality of AAL as embodied practice that becomes the limit for this sort of relativistic gesture. African American Language is not only a theory or theoretical language, it is an embodied discoursal practice lived out in scores of communities across the United States. It is thus real in the material sense, even though attempts to completely encapsulate it are foolhardy and essentializing. This reality calls us to articulate the ways that language variability is always-already evidence of uneven power relations. For Grossberg (1996), “Power is located precisely in the struggle to forge links, to direct the effective identity and relations of any practice, to articulate the existence, meanings, effects, and structures of practices which are not guaranteed in advance” (p. 165, emphasis added). It is these links between AAL and our oppressive past and present that create the contested and conflictual interpretations we have worked to theorize here. Grossberg argues further, on anti-essentialism, that we must “accept that there are no guarantees of identity or effects outside of the determinations of particular contexts” (p. 165). We thus see AAL as contextually bounded in ways that quick interpretations can too often miss. In insisting on the legitimacy of AAL, we conjure a contested terrain wherein different dialects and ways of speaking and knowing are in conflict and competition. Legitimacy in this way is akin to privilege. Those who speak language varieties with the least amount of privilege, following Delpit’s (2006) concept of the culture of power, are often most aware of the contested and uneven space of languages and the need to argue for legitimacy in the first place. On the other side of the spectrum, those whose language is most privileged are most likely the least aware of language as always-already political; that their language is “standard” functions as permission to engage any other varieties as ultimately little more than backward and incorrect variations of their own dialect. Yet in this case it is not White “standard” English speakers voicing critiques of AAL as backward or incorrect, but rather Black students with long and complex relationships to AAL as speakers, interlocutors, and participants. If we follow Kumashiro’s (2002) conviction that oppression is always citational—an act or discourse feels oppressive because it cites past

112    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY

oppressions—then any effort to mark out Black ways of being and knowing as other or different citationally produces links to past oppressions that were premised on said difference and otherness. Even if such moves are on the side of growing anti-racist consciousness and on creating more opportunities for historically marginalized students to use their cultural assets to learn in powerful ways, the very act of marking Black people as other and different citationally links us back to de jure segregation, rape, mutilation, and the whole of White supremacist violence on Black peoples for the past 4 centuries on this continent. It does not matter if the authors who put forward the theory or interpretation are Black, or if they are from the community they are theorizing. Such arguments reek of stereotypical White defensiveness: Arguing that scholars cannot have meant to alienate or essentialize those they are writing about because they are of that same community is the anti-intellectual equivalent of defending White racism with “but I have Black friends.” While knowing more about the texts and authors we read can support us to develop more sophisticated and complex interpretations, desiring to remove any and all oppressive possibilities can become an oppressive endeavor in and of itself. This means that we must be on guard, particularly as White teacher educators working with teacher candidates of color in a majority Black urban school district context, for the ways that our work is always already ripe for citational oppressions and that efforts to avoid such moments might well function on the side of domination. We cannot approach the critiques raised by our students as problems of presentation or accuracy. We cannot develop a set of “best practices” for teaching about AAL or teaching for justice more broadly (Philip et al., 2018). Instead, we should recognize our Enlightenment-era hangover of desiring one accurate and universal account of any and all social events as a residue left by White supremacy as a technology of terroristic oppression and nation-making. While we can affirm on a theoretical level that there are always as many worthy interpretations of an event as there are interpreters, we rarely persist in this inbetween space as teacher educators. We desire closure and completeness, and therefore ambiguity and ambivalence are to be resisted if not outright avoided. What might happen if we took unknowability and ambivalence as critically important components to our engagement in critical teacher education spaces? How might that change what it means to learn how to teach, or what it means to be a teacher educator? Such questions take on newly critical significance in the wake of the Trumpocene and rising White supremacist terrorism and nationalism. While we are not here arguing that such questioning functions as a direct countermeasure to White supremacy, we argue that we cannot mobilize the same hegemonic notions that created our overwhelmingly oppressive social reality in order to undo it. Lorde’s (1984) insistence that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    113

house” is more often cited than practiced as an approach to theorizing our own work and activity. Mobilizing this critical Black feminist insight more in our work as curricular theorists and teacher educators can offer additional strategies of self-reflection and critique that can spur more humanizing and complex pedagogies. “When we study BL [Black language]—ANY language really—we need to be cognizant that we’re not just studying the language but the people who speak the language” (Alim, 2012, p. 366). We are never only teaching ideas when we engage questions of language, dialect, and power. We are teaching and learning about people, present or not present in our classrooms, and as such we are engaged in political struggles over meaning, legitimacy, and representation (Taylor, Khan Vlach, & Mosley Wetzel, 2018; McBee Orzulak, 2015). We hope that our account of our coming to understand critiques of AAL paradoxically can support others not only in terms of teaching and learning across difference but can also support the ongoing work of dismantling the over-determined White supremacist ways of being and knowing that dominate the fields of both sociolinguistics and educational research. Janelle and Makayla can teach us a great deal, especially about the ways that no matter how confident we might feel in our inclusiveness and our sophisticated and scholarly ways of presenting materials, we are never divorced from the whole of social reality, from the context(s) we are working in, and from an oppressive past that is always already present in our linguistic now. NOTE 1. We place “standard” in quotations marks to signal the ways that such notions of what counts as “standard” function in ways that normalize Wwhite ways of being, speaking, and knowing as a taken for granted norm from which all other social actors are always-already found lacking by comparison (Casey, 2015; 2016; Lipstiz, 2006; Thandeka, 2001).

REFERENCES Alfaro, C., & Bartolomé, L. I. (2018). Preparing ideologically clear bilingual teachers to recognize linguistic geniuses. In B. R. Berriz, A. C. Wager, & V. M. Poey (Eds.), Art as a Way of Talking for Emergent Bilingual Youth (pp. 68–83). New York, NY: Routledge. Alim, H. S. (2004). You know my steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

114    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY Alim, H. S. (2005). Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher, 34(7), 24–31. Alim, H. S. (2012). Interview with Geneva Smitherman. Journal of English Linguistics, 40(4), 357–377. Alim, H. S. (2016). Introducing raciolinguistics: Racing language and languaging race in hyperracial times. In H. S. Alim, J. R. Rickford, & A. F. Ball (Eds.), Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our ideas about race (pp. 1–31). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bacon, C. K. (2017). Dichotomies, dialects, and deficits: Confronting the “standard English” myth in literacy and teacher education.  Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 66(1), 341–357. Baker-Bell, A. (2017). I can switch my language, but I can’t switch my skin: What teachers must understand about linguistic racism. In E. Moore Jr., A. Michael, & M. W. Penick-Parks (Eds.), The guide for White women who teach black boys (pp. 97–107) Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Baker-Bell, A., Paris, D., & Jackson, D. (2017). Learning Black language matters: Humanizing research as culturally sustaining pedagogy. International Review of Qualitative Research, 10(4), 360–377. Ball, A. F. (1996). Expository writing patterns of African American students.  The English Journal, 85(1), 27–36. Baugh, J. (1984). Black street speech: Its history, structure, and survival. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baugh, J. (1999). Out of the mouths of slaves: African American language and educational malpractice. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baugh, J., & Smitherman, G. (2007). Linguistic emancipation in global perspective. In H. S. Alim & J. Baugh (Eds.), Talkin Black talk: Language education and social change (pp. 115–131). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Blake, R., & Cutler, C. (2003). AAE and variation in teachers’ attitudes: A question of school philosophy? Linguistics and Education, 14(2), 163–194. Boutte, G. S., & Johnson, G. L. (2013). Do educators see and honor biliteracy and bidialectalism in African American language speakers? Apprehensions and reflections of two grandparents/professional educators. Early Childhood Education Journal, 41, 133–141. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2008). All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4), 401–431. Casey, Z. A. (2011). The fight in my classroom: A story of intersectionality in practitioner research. Inquiry in Education, 2(1), Article 3. Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapitalist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and resistance in education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cooks, J., & Ball, A. F. (2010). Research on the literacies of AAVE-Speaking Adolescents. In L. Christenbury, R. Bomer, & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent literacy research (pp. 140–152). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Delpit, L. (2006). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press. Dillard, J. L. (1972). Black English: Its history and usage in the United States. New York, NY: Random House.

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    115 Dinkelman, T. (2003). Self-study in teacher education: A means and ends tool for promoting reflective teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 54(1), 6–18. Dyson, A. H., & Smitherman, G. (2009). The right (write) start: African American language and the discourse of sounding right. Teachers College Record, 111(4), 973–998. Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. Genishi, C., & Dyson, A. H. (2015). Children, language, and literacy: Diverse learners in diverse times. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Godley, A. J., Carpenter, B. D., & Werner, C. A. (2007). “I’ll speak in proper slang”: Language ideologies in a daily editing activity. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(1), 100–131. Grossberg, L. (1996). History, politics and postmodernism. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp.  151–173). New York, NY: Routledge. Gumperz, J. J., & Cook-Gumperz, J. (2008). Studying language, culture, and society: Sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology?  Journal of Sociolinguistics,  12(4), 532–545. Haddix, M. (2008). Beyond sociolinguistics: Towards a critical approach to cultural and linguistic diversity in teacher education. Language and Education, 22(5), 254–270. Irvine, J. T., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35– 84). Santa Fe, NM: James Currey. Johnson, L. L., Jackson, J., Stovall, D. O., & Baszile, D. T. (2017). “Loving Blackness to death”: (Re)imagining ELA classrooms in a time of racial chaos. English Journal, 106(4), 60–66. Joyner, J. S., & Casey, Z. A. (2015). Growing pains: Reflections at the intersection(s) of pedagogy and self-study in Whiteness research in education. Inquiry in Education, 7(1), Article 2. Kondo, C. S. (2019). Front streeting: Teacher candidates of color and the pedagogical challenges of cultural relevancy. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 50(2), 135–150. Kumashiro, K. K. (2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Kumashiro, K. K. (2009).  Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice. New York, NY: Routledge. Labov, W. (1969). A study of non-standard English. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, ERIC Clearinghouse for Linguistics. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leone-Pizzighella, A., & Rymes, B. (2018). Gathering everyday metacommentary: A methodology to counteract institutional erasure. Language & Communication, 59, 53–65. Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York, NY: Routledge.

116    L. A. TAYLOR and Z. A. CASEY Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in Whiteness: How White people profit from identity politics. New York, NY: Temple University Press. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Martinez, D. C. (2017). Emerging critical meta-awareness among black and latina/o youth during corrective feedback practices in urban English language arts classrooms. Urban Education, 52(5), 637–666. McBee Orzulak, M. J. (2015). Disinviting deficit ideologies: Beyond “that’s standard,” “that’s racist,” and “that’s your mother tongue.” Research in the Teaching of English, 50(2), 176–198. McManimon, S. K., & Casey, Z. A. (2018). (Re)beginning and becoming with white practicing teachers: Notes on an educational foundations and curricular approach to antiracism and professional development. Teaching Education, 29(4), 395–406. McWhorter, J. H. (2001). Word on the street: Debunking the myth of a “pure” standard English. New York, NY: Basic Books Paris, D. (2009). “They’re in my culture, they speak the same way”: African American language in multiethnic high schools. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 428–448. Philip, T. M., Souto-Manning, M., Anderson, L., Horn, I., Andrews, D. J. C., Stillman, J., & Varghese, M. (2018). Making justice peripheral by constructing practice as “core”: How the increasing prominence of core practices challenges teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0022487118798324 Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Rickford, J. R., & Rickford, R. J. (2000). Spoken soul: The story of Black English. New York, NY: Wiley. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of latinidad. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Smitherman, G. (1995). Students’ right to their own language: A retrospective. The English Journal, 84(1), 21–27. Smitherman, G. (2006). Word from the mother: Language and African Americans. New York, NY: Routledge. Snell, J. (2013). Dialect, interaction and class positioning at school: From deficit to difference to repertoire. Language and Education, 27(2), 110–128. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Taylor, L. A., Khan Vlach, S. K., & Mosley Wetzel, M. (2018). Observing, resisting, and problem-posing language and power: Possibilities for small stories in inservice teacher education. Linguistics and Education, 46, 23–32. Vetter, A. (2013). “You need some laugh bones!” Leveraging AAL in a high school English classroom. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(2), 173–206. Wheeler, R. S., & Swords, R. (2006). Code-switching: Teaching standard English in urban classrooms. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Paradoxical Readings of African American Language    117 Whittingham, C. E., Hoffman, E. B., & Rumenapp, J. C. (2018). “It ain’t ‘nah’ it’s ‘no’”: Preparing preschoolers for the language of school. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 18(4), 465–489. Wolfram, W. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Wolfram, W. (2008). Urban AAVE grammar. In E. W. Schneider (Ed.), Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. Wolfram, W., & Thomas, E. R. (2002). The development of African American English. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Young, V. A., Barrett, R., Young-Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K. B. (2014). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching, and African American literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 7

WE CAN THEORIZE IN A CLASSROOM ALL DAY, BUT NOTHING BEATS EXPERIENCING THE REAL THING Experiential Learning in Preservice Preparation Tiffany Karalis Noel University at Buffalo

ABSTRACT This chapter will discuss a teacher educator’s experience teaching Multiculturalism, a required foundational course for preservice teachers (PSTs), and Literacy Methods, a required final-year course for PSTs during the 6 weeks preceding their student teaching, throughout the highly politicized years of 2015–2018. As a result of coincidental timing, many PSTs enrolled in the final Literacy Methods course were the same PSTs the author had previously

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 119–127 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

119

120    T. KARALIS NOEL worked with in the foundational Multiculturalism course. Through the use of narrative inquiry, the author had the opportunity to better understand why PSTs felt inadequately prepared to implement neoteric, justice-oriented pedagogy as emerging teacher candidates, given the prolonged and problematic gap between their enrollments in each course. Based on PSTs’ narratives surrounding inadequate practical application opportunities to employ equity-focused pedagogy throughout their teacher preparation, this chapter will discuss strategies for enhancing coursework to better prepare emerging teacher candidates to implement critical, culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy across the content areas.

From 2015 to 2016, at the onset of “troubled times” in our political climate where phrases such as “I just feel like everything’s moving backwards” and “I don’t think I can or even want to deal with the anxiety of working in the current conditions of education” were not uncommon, I taught several sections of a multiculturalism in education course at a large R1 Midwestern university, where many of the enrolled students were first or second-year PSTs. During a time when Donald Trump and his administration intentionally pursued a variety of methods for turning 21st-century progressivity on its head, it was evident through their reflections and in-class discussions that the election and its eventual outcome elicited harmful effects on PSTs’ personal and professional confidence. As students, teachers, and concerned citizens experienced an upsurge in hateful rhetoric and attacks on minority communities, 79% of teachers reported that since Trump took office, students expressed concerns for their communities at local, national, and global levels. In the same survey of 1,535 teachers, 51% reported that students experienced increased levels of stress and anxiety, 44% reported that the tensions negatively affected student learning, and 20% reported “heightened polarization and incivility in their classrooms” (Kamenetz, 2017, p. 1), which made the teaching of a course focused on exploring various facets of multiculturalism and their implications for teaching practice more imperative than ever. As an emerging teacher educator, although challenging at times, it was a tremendous privilege to teach this essential course during an especially critical period. Throughout the Multiculturalism course, we focused on equity and critical literacy, examining what it means to be a justice-oriented teacher within a stratified educational system. Some of our activities included class discussions, journal reflections, and fieldwork experiences that asked students to: analyze and interpret the historical, philosophical, and sociocultural foundations of multicultural education; analyze how structures of race, class, gender, ability, and sexual orientation work to create relations that privilege some and deny opportunity to others; evaluate and interpret the ways in which schooling influences and is influenced by equity issues; and participate in campus events sponsored by various minority groups to think

We Can Theorize    121

critically about how identity shapes experience. By encouraging students to constantly reflect and participate in small- and large-group discourses surrounding critical pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching—that is, a pedagogy that recognizes the importance of including students’ cultural references in all aspects of learning—many students’ fears and anxieties related to student- and in-service teaching surfaced (Ladson-Billings, 1994). As a result of their disclosures, a foundation was built for me to better understand the patterns related to what they were really concerned about learning prior to their enrollment in the next course they would take with me throughout their preservice journey. From 2017 to 2018, I taught several sections of an intensive content area literacy methods course, which was typically one of the last courses that PSTs were required to take during the first 6 weeks of their 16-week student teaching experiences. In this course, we focused on approaches to content instruction that cultivate the skills for enhancing leading-edge critical literacy across a multitude of content areas. Or, in other terms, moving the reader’s focus away from the “self” and “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations” (Anderson & Irvine, 1993, p. 82). As a result of coincidental timing, many of the students enrolled in the Literacy Methods classes were the same students I previously worked with in the Multiculturalism classes during their earlier undergraduate years. Because of this, I had the opportunity to better understand the areas where they felt inadequately prepared to be effective, efficacious, and justice-oriented teacher candidates, which some students attributed to the prolonged gap between their enrollments in each course. For example, while some students expressed a disconnect between learning about the importance of equity-focused pedagogy and learning how to concretely weave those principles into their instruction during practicum, others expressed disappointment toward their practicum experiences, some of which involved few observations without any opportunities for co-teaching or other instructional exercises. Once I determined the pattern that students felt there were insufficient opportunities to practically apply the knowledge gleaned throughout their equity-focused, critical literacy-based coursework, I revamped the Literacy Method’s curriculum to address their vocalized apprehensions. Inspired by their concerns, as one salient approach, I wove narrative inquiry into my pedagogy and students’ in-class activities to garner profound insights into how I could shape coursework to reinforce PSTs’ self-efficacy beliefs. In an effort to use that information to inform my future practice, I took note of their common refrains: I’m trying to teach a book, but half the students in my class only speak Spanish. My school can’t even afford enough copies of the English version. I wasn’t

122    T. KARALIS NOEL prepared to deal with this kind of situation. I’m struggling to put the pieces together of what I learned in my teacher education program. I’m constantly hearing about all the sad things that are going on with my students from immigration issues to foster care and drug abuse problems. How can I expect them to focus on schoolwork? I wasn’t prepared to deal with this kind of situation.

While culturally responsive teaching used to focus primarily on curriculum (Gay, 1975, 1980), the concept has evolved to focus on the pedagogical responsibilities and expectations of the instructor (Gay, 2013). As I reflected on my instructional experiences throughout both the Multiculturalism and Literacy Methods courses, I feared that while I may have been teaching critical theories and concepts using course resources such as textbooks, scholarly articles, and current events—especially once responses to the incidents of the most recent election crept into classroom discussions—I may have inadvertently neglected to provide PSTs with ample opportunities to apply those theories to practice. As emerging teachers, I anticipated that increased experiential learning opportunities to enhance culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy would provide PSTs with elevated confidence, cognizance, and tangible strategies for how to yield generative impacts and transfer the exercised instructional methods into their final-semester student teaching experiences and first-year in-service experiences, thereafter. So, in tandem with ongoing reflective debriefing, I implemented two applied learning-based activities into the Literacy Methods course curriculum in an effort to examine shifts in their self-efficacy beliefs: case method and experiential exercises. CASE METHOD IN TEACHER EDUCATION Historically, despite exposure to multicultural literature and workshops, PSTs have faced challenges in shifting their attitudes and pedagogical methods to meet the needs of diverse learners (McDiarmid & Price, 1993). According to Richardson (1990), in order to enhance their culturally responsive and sustaining teaching methods, PSTs must have practical experiences that require them to problem-solve challenging dilemmas, as well as the opportunity to reflect on what they know and value about their teaching methods. Sudzina (1993) called attention to the increasing demand for PSTs to “respond to the diverse learning needs of tomorrow’s students” and proposed the use of case studies as a learning approach to empower PSTs to “deal more sensitively and competently with all students” (p. 3). Building on 1990s teacher education developments, more recently, Gorski and Pothini (2014) provided pre- and in-service teachers with a series of

We Can Theorize    123

realistic and complex case studies related to educational equity and justice. Supporting their model with prior research focused on theory to practicebased approaches to inequitable classroom conditions (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Leonard & Cook, 2010), each case encourages teachers to assess their own implicit biases while reading about everyday examples of racism, sexism, homophobia, language bias, and other oppressive constructions, as well as consider how they might respond to and resolve challenges to create and sustain equitable learning environments for all students (Gorski & Pothini, 2014). Subsequently, each case concludes with a series of questions to facilitate further discussions—a guide which was especially helpful when I decided to implement Gorski and Pothini’s (2014) case studies in the Literacy Methods course. During each class period, I used a variety of approaches to provoke students’ engagement with numerous realistic case studies that would, in turn, serve to strengthen their equity literacy—that is, “the knowledge and skills we need as educators to be a threat to the existence of bias and inequity in our spheres of influence” (Gorski & Pothini, 2018, p. 10). Some days, I grouped students with different partners—typically groups of two or three—so that they could read through the cases together and generate a list of follow-up questions and practical strategies to offer potential solutions to problematic dynamics related to social and cultural conditions. Other days, I created a “speed dating” structure, where students were split into inner and outer circles and provided with approximately seven minutes to discuss each case and generate resolutions. Since the inner circle students were responsible for working with the same case during the entire exercise, they were expected to present their compiled lists of potential strategies and solutions which evolved through discussions with every outer-circle student. Once the rotating outer-circle students returned to their original seats, the activity segued into a whole-class discussion. Rather than producing a “here’s how to fix everything” handbook, however, the process was particularly intended to help PSTs develop “the ability to do everything we [teachers] do with equity in mind” (Gorski & Pothini, 2018, p. 10). As an example, Gorski and Pothini’s (2014) book opens up with a story about Samantha, a gifted 7th grade student whose grades are suffering for reasons beyond her control, such as needing to babysit and care for her younger siblings while her parents work multiple minimumwage jobs to make ends meet. Rather than offer a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, the authors present questions to inspire critical thinking and reflection on popular immediate reactions that readers might have such as, “It’s the parents’ fault” or “If [the parents] cared about [Samantha’s] education . . . they would insist that she do her homework” (Gorski & Pothini, 2014, p. 3). Examples of the critical questions include, but are not limited to: What would you do in the immediate term? Would you adjust

124    T. KARALIS NOEL

your policies to accommodate Samantha? How would you respond in the longer term? How might you adjust the way you assign homework or calculate grades? How would you use what you’ve learned to become a more equitable educator, not just for your current students, but your future students? (Gorski & Pothini, 2014). Throughout this ongoing process of critical thinking and deliberating, I observed and took note of students’ positive reactions to the case study exercises which involved statements such as: I’ve heard horror stories about things like that happening in classrooms, but never really knew how to handle it. I’m glad we not only talked about the issue, but how to actively respond to it if we’re ever in that situation.

EXPERIENTIAL EXERCISES IN TEACHER EDUCATION Throughout the activities that involved PSTs generating practical strategies and solutions to issues of justice presented in realistic case studies, I observed attitude shifts in their verbal and written reflections. Most students expressed appreciation for the opportunity to consider real-world scenarios they may not have considered without the case activities, as well as increased confidence in how to approach complex and challenging situations using a variety of strategies, which they garnered through conversations with their classmates and additional course resources. Again, I took note of students’ common refrains: The case studies have been really helpful for me. Talking about issues of justice is really important and I love that I’ve had the opportunity to do that a lot throughout my college experience. But as someone who is going to be a teacher, just talking about the issues isn’t enough. I need to know what to do when I see and experience those issues in the classroom. I can’t just freeze up or pretend like it’s not happening, the way people in other professions might be able to do.

While many PSTs’ reflections included some version of the encapsulation above, many students also emphasized the need for ongoing practical application of their newfound knowledge: “We can theorize in a classroom all day, but nothing beats experiencing the real thing.” Since the primary purpose of the Literacy Methods course was to support PSTs in developing foundational literacy methods to teach literacy effectively across the content areas, which research reveals is a challenge for many teachers (Bos, Mather, Dickson, Podhajski, & Chard, 2001; Joshi et al., 2009; McCutchen & Berninger, 1999), it was imperative to develop experiential exercises that would allow PSTs to practically apply both foundational literacy skills and equity literacy approaches to fulfill course expectations while also addressing students’

We Can Theorize    125

concerns. While I did not have the time nor resources to provide students with additional fieldwork or practicum experiences, I took advantage of the two 4-hour class periods I spent with them each week to create a series of experiential learning opportunities with the hope that it would boost PSTs’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding their ability to implement critical, culturally responsive, and sustaining pedagogy in their lessons and unit plans. Rather than reading and discussing the research-based definitions of what it means to be culturally responsive, this time, they were going to confront the barriers that discouraged their instructional efficacy. To facilitate an experiential learning initiative, I developed team- and independent-teaching activities from a model that required PSTs to first work in small groups, then individually, to identify educational needs of particular social groups (many of their ideas were pulled from personal experience and/or the case studies we had been working with), analyze the issues using relevant literature, propose possible solutions, and implement proposed solutions through the delivery of actual lessons (Gao, 2015). Throughout the process, students had multiple opportunities to practice actually teaching their personally developed lessons—something they frequently referenced as being underprovided throughout their teacher preparation—followed by whole-class, small-group, peer-to-peer, and self-reflections about successes and challenges of the lesson, as well as additional factors and accommodations to consider when revising the lesson plans for future use. In their lessons, students were motivated by their aforementioned refrains. Rather than expressing self-loathing feelings about past pedagogical challenges, students developed and executed lessons that were well-equipped to handle the challenges presented by under-resourced environments, classrooms inclusive of English language learners, and students whose day-to-day concerns extended far beyond whether or not they had time to finish their homework, to name a few specific examples. By using this method, the PSTs were essentially designing their own case studies through experiential learning exercises, which would then serve as a basis for future discussions, supplemental activities, and opportunities to critically examine the relevance and interweaving of foundational and equity literacy across the content areas. Although it was not experiential learning in the conventional context of student teaching, it was an opportunity for emerging teacher candidates to exercise and reflect on the practical application of their pedagogical knowledge as a prelude to the student teaching experience. MY IDEATION While my pilot design of the case method implementation and experiential exercises was not without flaws, by the end of the course, I observed

126    T. KARALIS NOEL

reflective verbal and written expressions of confidence from most students such as: “I feel so much better now that I’ve actually taught a few lessons from my content area with these equity-focused considerations in mind. It helped me see where there are still holes in my pedagogy and lesson planning methods.” It was reflections such as these which stimulated the foundation for what would ultimately become my dissertation on examining teacher candidates’ self-efficacy beliefs in relation to teacher preparation. Based on the outcomes of the classroom exercises described here, the findings of my dissertation, and personal experiences as a preservice teacher and teacher educator, I emphasize the ongoing need to not only stimulate critical conversations surrounding pedagogical ideation in troubled times, but initiate increased opportunities for PSTs to apply their newfound insights to practice in the classroom: Teacher educators can no longer simply teach how to structure a lesson plan or outline the basics of reader-response theory; we have to assist our graduates in developing professional identities that leave them feeling happy and satisfied, but that also result in good teaching and systemic improvement. (Alsup, 2006, p. 195)

By providing PSTs with additional opportunities to discuss, practice, deliberate, and reflect on critical aspects of their own pedagogy before they are flung into their student teaching classrooms, they may be more likely to enter their student teaching experiences and beginning years as teachers with enhanced approaches to implement equity-focused pedagogy and, accordingly, increased confidence in their skillset. REFERENCES Alsup, J. (2006). Teacher identity discourses: Negotiating personal and professional spaces. New York, NY: Routledge. Anderson, G., & Irvine, P. (1993). Informing critical literacy with ethnography. In C. Lankshear & P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bos, C., Mather, N., Dickson, S., Podhajski, B., & Chard, D. (2001). Perceptions and knowledge of preservice and inservice educators about early reading instruction. Annals of Dyslexia, 51(1), 97–120. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Constructing 21st-century teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(3), 300–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487105 285962 Gao, X. (2015). Promoting experiential learning in pre-service teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 41(4), 435–438. Gay, G. (1975). Organizing and designing culturally pluralistic curriculum. Educational Leadership, 33, 176–183.

We Can Theorize    127 Gay, G. (1980). Ethnic pluralism in social studies education: Where to from here? Social Education, 44, 52–55. Gay, G. (2013). Teaching to and through cultural diversity. Curriculum Inquiry, 43, 48–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/curi.12002 Gorski, P., & Pothini, S. G. (2014). Case studies on diversity and social justice education. New York, NY: Routledge. Gorski, P., & Pothini, S. G. (2018). Case studies on diversity and social justice education (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Joshi, R. M., Binks, E., Hougen, M., Dahlgren, M. E., Ocker-Dean, E., & Smith, D. L. (2009). Why elementary teachers might be inadequately prepared to teach reading. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 392–402. Kamenetz, A. (2017, October 26). Teachers report stressed, anxious students in the “age of Trump.” Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/10/26/ 559914440/teachers-report-stressed-anxious-students-in-the-ageof-trump Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Leonard, E. C., & Cook, R. A. (2010). Teaching with cases. Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism, 10, 95–101. McCutchen, D., & Berninger, V. (1999). Those who know, teach well: Helping teachers master literacy-related subject-matter knowledge. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 14(4), 215–226. McDiarmid, G. W., & Price, J. (1993). Preparing teachers for diversity: A study of student teachers in a multicultural program. In M. J. O’Hair & S. J. Odell (Eds.) Diversity and teaching: Teacher education yearbook I (pp. 31–59). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Richardson, V. (1990). Significant and worthwhile change in teaching practice. Educational Researcher, 19(7), 10–18. Sudzina, M. R. (1993, February). Dealing with diversity issues in the classroom: A case study approach. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Teacher Educators, Los Angeles, CA. Retrieved from the ERIC database. (ED354233)

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 8

TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES IN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION Teaching Sensitive Topics in Troubled Times Michael Takafor Ndemanu Ball State University Camea L. Davis Georgia State University

There is no gainsaying that the United States has witnessed a major surge in hate crimes since 2016 (Beirich, 2019). The crimes are perpetrated mostly by fringe elements who are members of the dominant groups against the dominated groups, related to race, immigration, LGBT, and religion. Students commit some of these hate crimes. A legitimate question as to whether these students are receiving quality education that prepares them to live in harmony with people of all racial and cultural backgrounds in a

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 129–140 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

129

130    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS

pluralistic society has to be asked. How are teacher education programs preparing preservice teachers to teach K–12 students about diversity and social justice? What effective pedagogic methods are needed to educate preservice teachers in ways that transform the quality of their own learning experience in diversity and equity issues so that they can, in turn, transfer quality knowledge about human diversity to their own students? Grounded in transformative learning theory (Mezirow et al., 2000; Cranton, 2006) dialogic discourse (Bakhtin, 1981), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 1989), critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), and attraction theory (Ortlieb, 2014; Schachter & Singer, 1962), this chapter discusses a myriad of critical instructional strategies. These strategies promote transformative learning during these troubled times in a required multicultural education course offered in a predominantly White university in the Midwest to mostly preservice teachers with sophomore standing. The teaching philosophy undergirding these transformative pedagogies is predicated on our belief that effective teachers are most often reflective thinkers. To attain veritable transformative learning outcomes in these troubled times, instructors need to adopt a radical approach to teaching that deviates from the outmoded transmission instructional approach by embracing a multifaceted constructivist approach to teaching which is learner-centered and learner-driven. Drawing from attraction theory (Ortlieb, 2014; Schachter & Singer, 1962), this chapter offers curricular and instructional activities that attract and retain students’ attention to the issue at hand. No matter how sensitive and infuriating topics in a multicultural education course are to students, a reflective instructor is capable of designing the lessons in a way that attracts and stimulates students’ attention as well as captivates their minds to think critically. Vygotsky (1956) asserts that effective teaching can only occur when it “awakens and rouses to life those functions which are in a stage of maturing” (p. 278). Thus, within this backdrop in our instructional setting, the instructor assumes the role of an engaged facilitator guiding the dialogue by asking probing questions and providing historical and social contexts through relevant texts, scholarly articles, current events, statistics, and attention-getting video clips followed by critically reflective discussions. Given the limited scope of this chapter, we focus on two major themes of our pedagogy in a multicultural education course: Diversity News Digest and documentary viewing. Thus, these two main pedagogic tools discussed in the subsequent paragraph constitute the nexus of this chapter. Consistent with attraction theorists’ recommendations, we use documentaries as an instructional strategy since they serve as catalysts for a robust debriefing transactional discourse. They elicit students’ feelings and discoveries, which lead to knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer from one context to another. Meanwhile, Diversity News Digest, which is the other pedagogical tool explored in this chapter, is student led. It is an activity

Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education    131

involving current events, which requires students to take turns researching and presenting mind-jolting current news articles or news clips pertaining to human diversity. The purpose is to generate a stimulating and respectful discourse that can bring about a positive shift in peers’ thought processes. Our varied pedagogies applied in teaching a multicultural education course cultivate critical consciousness in our preservice teachers and prepare them to respond effectively to a plethora of culturally (in)sensitive issues prevalent in P–12 school settings these days. Diversity News Digest is particularly important because it renders the multicultural education course curriculum current and relevant. Students who initially thought some of the “isms” covered in the course readings were irrelevant, outdated, or biased toward White people or men respectively, begin to discover the currency of these problems and the urgent need to address them effectively. When students are able to choose the content of a curriculum on touchy topics and engage their peers in it successfully, the rate of resistance to the course content, especially on the specific topic the student presented, is likely to drop significantly. We have noticed tremendous improvement in students’ attitudes toward the course when we reorganized this course to incorporate Diversity News Digest and documentaries. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Mezirow et al. (2000) defines transformative learning as “the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mindsets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action” (p. 7). In the same line of thinking, Cranton (2006) posits that transformative learning leads to a change of self-perception because when someone retools their “habits of mind, they are reinterpreting their sense of self in relation to the world” (p. 8). Mere lectures may not bring someone to critically question their beliefs, assumptions, and values. Most often, it requires one or more of the following instructional approaches: simulation, role-play, watching a documentary, or critical analysis of news articles coupled with thoughtful debriefing to bring someone to a new reality. Although it is a truism that international travel broadens the mind, not everyone can afford a plane or bus ticket, in addition to other travelrelated expenses, to make a trip to another city or another country. Hence, in a multicultural education course, bringing the world into the classroom through current news articles, documentaries, video clips, and artifacts is critical in a transformative learning process. Considering that in a multicultural education course, one major learning objective is to introduce

132    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS

students to the prevalence of multiple perspectives on key societal issues, there is no better way to design the course content with the literature and material that promote multiple ways of knowing. As Cranton (2006) contended, some of the events that orchestrate transformative learning are unexpected, devastating, painful, and the transformative process tends to be self-directed. This is why sticking to one way of teaching is very detrimental to the knowledge acquisition process in a multicultural education course. Transformative learning has to trigger critical self-reflection that can culminate in self-direction (Cranton, 2006). For Kolb (1984), reflection that is connected with experience is an important aspect of the learning process. With teenage learners who have not had many life experiences, it is hard to imbue transformative learning skills in them since idealism dominates their views. Using Diversity News Digest activity and watching videos relevant to the pressing issues of our time can trigger reflection that is more critical as well as elicit empathy and compassion that could bring about transformative learning outcomes in learners. STUDENTS AS CO-CURRICULUM DESIGNERS OF A COURSE According to Mezirow et al. (2000), the outcome of transformative learning has to involve action, the urge to want to act by solving the problem. To get students interested, motivated, and engaged in a course content pertaining to racial privilege, for instance, highly depends on the quality and variability of engaging instructional approaches as well as on the delivery styles of the instructor. In an attempt to help students become major stakeholders in learning sensitive topics on human diversity and equity issues, we created a learning activity titled, Diversity News Digest which is described as follows in the course syllabus: There are so many newsworthy stories about human diversity that happen on a regular basis nationwide and worldwide. Some stories elicit feelings of ecstasy while others resuscitate melancholy and despondency. You will identify one of those stories in the news or events in your community and engage your peers with it for 10 to 15 minutes during the class. As you prepare to lead the class on a topic of your choice, address the following questions in your preparation and in your paper: Why did I choose the story? What shift in perspective can this story engender? How can we, future teachers/social workers, benefit from the story? Be prepared to engage your peers with thoughtprovoking questions as well as answer their questions. Your topic must be clearly relevant to these course goals/objectives; thus, it should relate to race, ethnicity, linguistic diversity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)abilities, sexism, and socioeconomic diversity. You are encouraged to share your

Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education    133 presentation material with the instructor(s) for feedback prior to the day of the presentation. (EDMU 205 syllabus)

The purpose of encouraging students to share their materials prior to their presentations is not to censor their proposed contents but to ensure that the articles or video clips they select for class discussions are challenging enough to get students thinking critically, are relevant to the course, and are well-sourced. The questions embedded in the instructions of the activity are designed to help students develop consciousness that is more critical during the lesson planning process. Racial, gendered, socioeconomic, and linguistic group membership influences the dimensions of our lived experiences (Sleeter, 2008) and makes our perspectives be divergent and convergent depending on the similarities and differences of those experiences. In the next few paragraphs, we share sample topics and lessons students proposed and presented in class between 2016 and 2019. The first news article is titled, “Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect Makes Court Appearance; Feds Seek Death Penalty” (Carissimo, 2018). The presenter was Shelbi (name altered). She started the presentation by giving a brief summary of the article in which she presented the facts in the article and then proceeded to explain why she chose this topic and this article out of so many. I chose this story because it is relevant to our class readings about human diversity. I think many Americans are unaware of the hate that is present in our communities; I was unaware that the hatred against Jewish people is current. I’ve always learned about anti-Semitism in history classes or within the context of attitudes of people in the Middle East toward Jews not in the United States. I don’t think Americans realize how much violence is in our country or how high our rate of hate crime is. Teachers need to be aware of these hateful attitudes. We need to be prepared to have open and honest conversations about the tragic events that are taking place. In the last few years, the number of hate crimes have increased, so we need to be able to talk about why they are increasing. Students need to be able to feel like they can talk to teachers about any discrimination that they see or are facing themselves.

The last segment of her presentation focused on discussion. Shelbi projected the following two questions on the board: How should educators respond after an event like this occurs in the community or country? How do we address the issue of growing hate all over the country in our classrooms? This was a student-centered, inquiry-based instructional model, in which the student engaged her peers with an authentic problem. As instructors, we probed when there was need to ensure that deeper learning was taking place. The discussion on this topic of hate was enriching. The currency and frequency of anti-Semitism in the United States was surprising to many

134    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS

students. For lack of space, we will not dwell on the responses of students during the discussion. In another Diversity News Digest related to White supremacy, a student called Gloria (name altered) used the following two related articles talking about a 17-year old boy in Charlottesville, Virginia who recently posted a threat promising “ethnic cleansing in my school” on African Americans and Latino Americans on 4chan, an anonymous web forum where hate rhetoric proliferates. The first article published on March 27, 2019 by Samantha Baar in a local newspaper called C-ville News is titled “Racist Threat Reverberates: Schools Closed, Teens Arrested, Students Protest” while the second one was published by The New York Times by Sarah Mervosh on March 22, 2019 titled, “Teenager Arrested in Charlottesville After Racist Online Threat Shuts Schools for 2 Days.” On giving the class a brief overview of the articles’ contents, Gloria stated that the threat caused all Charlottesville’s schools to be shut down for 2 consecutive days until the suspect was arrested. Because of the incident, Black Student Union (BSU) staged a walkout the following week. The president of the BSU shared a list of demands that needed to be addressed to make students of color in Charlottesville’s schools feel safe and included in their schools. The list included the hiring of more teachers of color and a more in-depth teaching of African American history. Gloria wrote in her reflection following her presentation, I chose this article because over the recent years, I have noticed a pattern of behavior of people in power dismissing hateful and violent acts by arguing that there are bad or good people on both sides of the situation when it is not the case. For example, in reacting to the Charlottesville riots President Trump blamed “both sides” for violence at the rally by stating, “There are not very fine people on both sides of this issue.” This type of behavior is dangerous because it means that Trump tolerates terrorism and White supremacy groups but not the people who are fighting against it. Although the Black Student Union of Charlottesville stepped up and stated their demands for change, their ideas can be easily overlooked because the people in power do not care to bring real change when they choose to tolerate racism and not help those who are oppressed. As a future speech-language pathologist, I will be working closely with children in my daily work and I believe it is important to discuss topics of race with them, especially when instances of racial acts of violence on the media are on the rise. While discussing this with them, it is critical for all teachers, social workers, and speech pathologists alike to not dismiss racism, and to not put the blame on those who are victimized because it sends students the message that racism is okay.

Gloria has a great point on the need to eschew the false equivalence about the hateful racist attacks of White nationalist, White supremacist, and neo-Nazis groups against people of color in which politicians fallaciously equate racist

Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education    135

movements to anti-racist movements. The former wants to see the people of color dead while the latter wants everybody to live in peace and harmony. There is nothing “fine” about a movement that espouses hate toward other people based on their skin color and religion. Anti-racist counter-protesters are an embodiment of a morally upright society. They stand for the values of happiness, equality, and justice for all that any family, education, and religion ought to uphold in a society with its moral compass intact. One other student-led conversation was about transphobia and the title was “Kids’ Book About Transgender Child Prompts School Districts to Drop Out of Reading Challenge.” Transphobia can be defined as a spectrum of negative attitudes, feelings, deficit theories, subtractive beliefs, and action toward a transgender person. It could manifest itself in the form of fear, anger, disgust, physical or verbal abuse, exclusion, or taunting directed at a transgendered person. There is no gainsaying that transgender people still face pervasive discrimination nationally. Bathroom bills is one clear example of laws that are used to humiliate and dehumanize transgender people. The student who presented this article was called Sarah (name altered). In this article, the author reports that two school districts in Oregon were withdrawing their schools from a state-wide reading challenge called the “Battle of the Books” because one of the books titled, George by Alex Gino, was based on a transgender child. The districts had been competing in the challenge for several years but made their decision based on the first ten pages of the book. A letter to parents stating the reason for the withdrawal partly read, the “content is not addressed in our district curriculum at the 5th-grade level.” The specific controversial page in the book is when reference is made about George, a boy transitioning to a girl that he was flipping through a teen girl’s magazine imagining himself to be like the female models on the pages. The superintendent thought, “This would be very difficult for a parent to explain this to a child.” In a released statement, the author said, “My book will not make anyone transgender, but it can help make people trans-aware, and bring connection to those who already are trans, and I believe that those are good things. I don’t believe that there’s any age before which it is appropriate to learn compassion.” Sarah shared her immediate reaction when she first read the article in a one-page reflection, submitted as was the custom for every presenter of the Diversity News Digest. Her reflection here is very similar to her concluding thoughts after leading her peers in the transphobia discussion After reading the article, I was shocked and sad about the idea that a competition that I competed in my 7th and 8th grade years, was being taken from students based on ONE of the many books on the 2018–2019 Battle list. I was even more surprised at the fact that the reason for the withdrawal was from something that had to do with the identity of a child character. I think it’s actually extremely important for schools to allow children to start learning

136    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS about transgender identity at a young age because it may help to stop the stigma that surrounds this group of people and let the younger generations learn to be loving and accepting of their peers, regardless of their identities and sexual orientations. And I think it is important for us as educators to help normalize this for the sake of future transgender and LGBT students. Because we have allowed society to shape the way we view this group of individuals, they face extreme adversity and even children as young as third graders are struggling with trying to understand themselves. If we take away the idea that being transgender is bad, we can help shape the next generation’s views on the matter and normalize it.

Her views here were shared by most of her peers who actively participated in the discussion. For all our experience teaching the multicultural education course to over 95% White preservice teachers in the Midwest, it is rare to come across a student who chooses to present on a topic in which the author of the article supports exclusion on the basis of the victim’s identity. There is a tendency for students to disagree on the appropriateness of the learner’s age to learn certain content about human diversity rather than on the appropriateness of the content itself. A plethora of topics has been covered since we introduced the Diversity News Digest in our multicultural education course. The broad topics have ranged from racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, classism, hate crime bill (Bangert, 2018), sexism, White nationalism, LGBTQ issues, bathroom bills, anti-Semitism (Hassan, 2018), Confederate flag (Adeola & Davis, 2017), sexist/racist dress code (Nittle, 2018), sex education (Sciacca, 2018), disabilities, mass incarceration, immigration, Oscar nomination and diversity question, linguistic diversity, to teacher diversity (Miller, 2018). As stated earlier, this chapter focuses on two key ways that we have found to elicit more transformative outcomes in the learning process on pressing topics of our times. After exploring sample articles used by students to lead discussions in the Diversity News Digest, it would be important to share with readers some pedagogic strategies we employ in film watching to bring about significant transformative influence in learners. Whether the documentaries are current or dated, the issues they explore are very relevant to the socioeconomic and political problems of our times. Owing to lack of space, we will discuss just one of the documentaries and its impact on shifting student’s deficit thinking and subtractive beliefs about people who are presumed to be different and deficient, and thus deserved to be hated by some members of the dominant groups. The documentary is entitled 13th (DuVernay & Moran, 2016). It is a documentary in which filmmaker Ava DuVernay chronicles the history of racial inequality in the United States. The documentary focuses on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans and other people of color. The documentary is named after the 13th

Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education    137

Amendment of the American Constitution, which forbids involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime. The film views the foregoing exception as a loophole in the amendment that has been exploited by unscrupulous politicians to enslave Black men through mass incarceration. The film uses imagery, music, narrative, and facts from the nation’s leading prison abolitionists and researchers to chronicle the history of various legislations that has supported the unjust mass incarceration of African Americans. When the landmark film was first released, it was national news on major African American media outlets. Unfortunately, prior to watching it in class, few White students in our multicultural education course knew about the film’s release. In addition to the content of the documentary, the pedagogy used to present the film to students was expressly designed to engender transformative outcomes and develop preservice teachers’ reflective, critical consciousness. First, prior to the class session in which the film was viewed and discussed, required readings and reflection questions were assigned to equip students with a shared language to navigate the discourse on prisons, legislations on crime, the so-called “war on drugs” and its connection to urban schooling. Next, the documentary was shown during class time together. This is significant because we wanted students to experience the film in a safe, community of critical thinkers as opposed to watching it individually at their leisure because they could choose to watch just excerpts; seek out unreliable, alternative sources; or engage in other acts of resistance or selfshaming. In the classroom environment, we were able to curate the viewing experience as facilitators. This experience included watching segments of the documentary, pausing for written reflection, then opening the space for discussion. During the written reflection, students were asked open-ended questions such as “What most resonates with you and why?”; “What questions do you have?”; “Whose voices were featured?”; “Whose voices were missing?”; “What challenged your thinking/beliefs?”; and “What new knowledge do you gain from watching this film?” The discussion segments were broken into a variety of forms including pair-share conversations, self-selected affinity groups, small groups of four, and assigned mixed pairing in which students with demonstrated differences in opinion were grouped to discuss challenging topics. At other times during the viewing, we offered activities that gave a public poll of the room about a topic from the film and used the poll to inform critical reflection and discussions to highlight how troubling times are and related to various kinds of diversity; this one is about race discussion of the film. For example, we used the “cross the line” activity to have students’ physical location on a spectrum in the classroom represent how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements related to the film. For example, “All criminals should be punished” was a statement for which there was

138    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS

much debate when the term criminal is critically analyzed to reveal the bias systems that define one act as a criminal one for Black or Brown people but the same act as one of survival or bravery for White people layered with political and historical realities. During this activity, students were probed to share their thinking and allowed to adjust their thinking as they listened to their peers. The goal was for students to critically interrogate and interpret their own thinking while listening to the thoughts of their peers. One memorable segment of the film is when President Nixon’s’ war on Black men, disguised as the war on drugs was connected to President Ronald Reagan’s politics. Many White students discussed how they had never heard President Reagan being discussed critically. They shared how they thought of him as an American hero and how their grandparents had pictures of President Reagan hanging in their homes similar to how African Americans had pictures of President Obama hanging in their homes. During this discussion, while White students had only heard glowing tribute about Ronald Reagan, an astonished African American male student, of the same age group as the White students, said he had never heard anything positive about President Reagan in his home or community growing up. This classroom moment provided a microcosm of the divergent lenses Americans use to interpret the political and social worlds we live in along racialized lines. The same story, same legislation, were seen from two very different perspectives. Documentary viewing coupled with critical reflection and discussion illuminated the different narratives that inform decision-making, assumptions, and bias. Understandably, some instructors may worry about the value of using class time for documentary viewing. As a class, we also discussed the significance of viewing a film together versus merely reading and discussing. Students reflected that the film conquered stronger emotions and put names and faces of real people to the facts while also being more comprehensible and directly linked to relevant issues in the present moment. As instructors, we choose to support student learning through the discomfort and ask probing questions that supported criticality and consciousness raising that linked prior knowledge to new knowledge. CONCLUSION The current social climate is riddled with overt oppression of people who inhabit numerous, diverse identities that characterize the troubled times in which we continue our work as scholars and educators. It is crucial that we confront (in)sensitive topics using transformative pedagogies that grant access to deep critical thinking and reflection so that our students are equipped to interpret these times in ways that resist injustice and champion

Transformative Pedagogies in Multicultural Education    139

a pluralistic, just society. Student-led curricula design through Diversity News Digest presentations and reflective, collaborative documentary viewing are two tools that can be adapted for use in a variety of content areas that consider human diversity and examines the sociopolitical present and past that contextualize all fields of study. The transformative pedagogies reflected on in this chapter challenge instructors of multicultural education and other relevant subjects to support students in critically engaging with the contemporary, real world issues of our troubled times without sanitizing them or fearing that the political climate is too toxic to bring into the classroom. As instructors, we must be aware of the nuances and current events happening in the society and help students make connections between the present and the historic. Empowering students to bring new curricula to the course and lead discussions and reflections also position us as learners. Transformative pedagogical strategies have implications beyond the confines of our college classrooms that expand into the citizenry where our students will live and work as decision makers, voters, and community members capable of first identifying injustice when they see it and next continuing to study and reflect until they are prepared to participate in active resistance to injustices. Thus, teaching using transformative pedagogy works to transform not only the learning and teaching experiences but fundamentally alter the troubled society we live in by equipping students and instructors to live and work as critically reflective change agents. REFERENCES Adeola, L., & Davis, V. T. (2017, September 6). Confederate flag banned at lapel high school causes chaos between student groups. The Indy Channel, RTV6. Retrieved from www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/madison-county/ confederate-flag-banned-at-lapel-high-school-causes-chaos-between-student -groups Baar, S. (2019, March 27). Racist threat reverberates: Schools closed, teens arrested, students protest. C-Ville News. Retrieved from https://www.c-ville.com/ racist-threat-reverberates-schools-closed-teens-arrested-students-protest/ Bakhtin, M. M., & Holquist, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bangert, D. (2018, November 15). Hate crime bill: If not now, ‘when, Indiana?’ asks lafayette sen. Ron Alting. Journal & Courier. Retrieved from https://www .jconline.com/story/news/2018/11/15/sen-ron-alting-follows-up-indiana -hate-crime-bill-promise/2011768002/ Beirich, H. (2019). Rage against change. Intelligence report, 166. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/intelligence_report_166.pdf Carissimo, J. (2018, October 29). Pittsburgh shooting suspect makes court appearance; Feds seek death penalty. CBS News. Retrieved from https://www

140    M. T. NDEMANU and C. L. DAVIS .cbsnews.com/live-news/pittsburgh-shooting-synagogue-today-suspect-robert -bowers-squirrel-hill-live-updates-2018-10-29/ Cranton, P. (2006). Understanding and promoting transformative learning: A guide for educators of adults. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass. DuVernay, A. (Director), & Moran, J. (Composer). (2016). 13th [Motion Picture]. United States: Library of Congress. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Hassan, A. (2018, November). Photos of more than 60 students giving apparent Nazi salute is being investigated. The New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/us/nazi-salute-wisconsin-students.html?rref= collection%2Ftimestopic%2FRace%20and%20Ethnicity&action=click&content Collection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest &contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97, 47–68. McLaren, P. (1989). Critical pedagogy and the postmodern challenge: Towards a critical postmodernist pedagogy of liberation. Educational foundations, 3(3), 29. Mezirow, J., & Associates. (2000). Learning as transformation: Critical perspectives on a theory in progress. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mervosh, S. (2019, March 22). Teenager arrested in Charlottesville after racist online threat shuts schools for 2 Days. The New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/charlottesville-schools-closed-threat.html Miller, C. C. (2018, September 10). Does teacher diversity matter in student learning? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/ upshot/teacher-diversity-effect-students-learning.html Nittle, N. (2018, September 13). Students are waging war on sexist and racist school dress Codes and they’re winning. Vox. Retrieved from www.vox .com/the-goods/2018/9/13/17847542/students-waging-war-sexist-racist -school-dress-codes Ortlieb, E. (2014). Attraction theory: Revisiting how we learn. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2). 71–87. Schachter, S., & Singer, J. E. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69, 379–399. Sciacca, A. (2018, September 26). Controversial sex education program faces changes in Contra Costa County schools. The Mercury News. Retrieved from https:// www.mercurynews.com/2018/09/24/new-sex-ed-program-faces-changes -in-contra-costa-county-schools/ Sleeter, C. (2008). An invitation to support diverse students through teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(3), 212–219. Vygotsky, L. S. (1956). Izbrannie psibhologicheskie issledovania [Selected psychological research]. Moscow, Russia: Izdateel’stro Akademli Pedagogicheskikh Nak.

CHAPTER 9

OUR STORIES AS CURRICULUM Queering Autoethnography, Curriculum Development, and Research Michelle L. Knaier Purdue University

ABSTRACT Performing autoethnographic explorations may provide multicultural teacher educators with opportunities to examine their own multicultural identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, exceptionality, religion, sexual orientation, and gender) and how their identities may intersect with, and may impact, curriculum development. Based on literature reviews and analysis, and on my ongoing experiences of developing and performing queer multicultural teacher education curricula, I advocate for queering autoethnography and using it as a method for curriculum development. In this chapter, I highlight the importance of identity awareness (of self and others) in multicultural education and show how it is cautiously supported by a queer theory framework. I then apply these ideas to the curriculum development practices of teacher educators. It is my hope that others will perform queer

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 141–156 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

141

142    M. L. KNAIER autoethnographic explorations to better understand their multicultural identities; to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions through the appreciation of various perspectives and performances; and to recognize that identities, as well as curriculum, are fluid. By doing so, they may actively prepare themselves, and ultimately their students, to effectively navigate within, and hopefully change, the current unwelcoming heteronormative social climate.

As a queer multicultural educator, my knowledge, experience, and identities impact my work, including how I develop and perform curriculum. It is because of the inability to separate my personal self from my professional self (and all my other selves), that I recognize why my identities (e.g., race/ ethnicity, socioeconomic status, exceptionality, religion, sexual orientation, and gender) matter when I create curriculum, and why engaging in queer autoethnographic practices during curriculum development is significant. Based on literature reviews and analysis, and on my ongoing experiences with developing and performing queer multicultural social justice teacher education curricula, I advocate for queering autoethnography and using it as a method for curriculum development—thus, simultaneously queering the act of curriculum development. In this chapter, I broadly discuss multicultural education, queer theory, and autoethnography, and some of the ways they intersect with each other, identity awareness, and curriculum development. I first highlight the importance of identity awareness (of self and others) in multicultural education. Then I show how practicing identity awareness is supported by a queer theory framework—though not without caution. Finally, I share my queer autoethnographic approach to curriculum development, thus applying these ideas to teacher educators. I conclude that the queerness of teachereducator autoethnographic performances may nurture identity awareness and may show how identities intersect with curriculum development—a notion that may not be fully realized by some curriculum workers. IDENTITY AWARENESS WITHIN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION The importance of identity awareness (of self and others) is a consistent thread throughout multicultural education literature in the United States (Banks, 2006b; Gollnick & Chin, 2004; Grant & Sleeter, 2011; Howard, 2006; Nieto & Bode, 2012). For example, Banks (2006b) asserts that “an individual must clarify his or her own sense of ethnic and personal identity before he or she can positively relate to individuals who belong to other ethnic and racial groups” (p. 75). Moreover, many scholars agree that teachers must know who they are and who their students are—while understanding the changing nature of and fluidity of identity—if they are going to be successful (Banks,

Our Stories As Curriculum    143

2006b; Gollnick & Chin, 2004; Grant & Sleeter, 2011; Howard, 2006; Nieto, 2010; Nieto & Bode, 2012). Certainly, teacher preparation education ought to emphasize practices in self-awareness and the importance of being aware of, and teaching in connection to, student identities. It is important to acknowledge that the need for identity awareness within multicultural social justice teacher education (see, Grant & Sleeter, 2013; Nieto & Bode, 2012) stems, in part, from often innocent limitations that preservice or new teachers bring to the field. Nieto and Bode (2012) point out that most teachers are sincerely concerned about their students and want very much to provide them with the best education possible. Nonetheless, because of their own limited experiences and education, they may know very little about the students they teach. As a result, their beliefs about students of diverse backgrounds may be based on spurious assumptions and stereotypes. (p. 6)

These limitations, however, can be overcome. As Baker (1973) explains, “The purpose of multicultural education is to make individuals aware of the diversity reflected by individuals, groups, and communities. It encourages an understanding and appreciation of similarities and differences among cultures” (p. 306). Indeed, teachers may understand themselves and their perspectives, and may have a greater chance of understanding and appreciating the perspectives of their students, by exploring both how they (the teachers) identify and the intersectionality of these identities— thus developing tools to implement effective multicultural social justice curricula. And of course, these understandings and explorations apply not only to students and teachers, but also to teacher educators and developers of multicultural social justice teacher education curriculum. To be sure, each of the elements of multicultural education (e.g., antiracist, responsiveness, and social justice; see Banks & McGee Banks, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Grant & Sleeter, 2013, respectively), along with an understanding of intersectionality (see Lorde 1984, 1988; Mayo, 2014), should be prominent within a multicultural social justice teacher education classroom. Each of these elements compliments and reinforces the others. But further, identity awareness—a practice that most people, including educators, do not nurture—must also be cultivated. As teacher educators, we too, need to struggle to understand our own identities, how they intersect, and how they affect or impact our behavior and perspectives—including our curriculum development. The first step in employing a multicultural social justice education is recognizing societal injustices and how our own personal beliefs and identities contribute to maintaining or challenging the status quo—even within our own classrooms. Undoubtedly, awareness is an important step, but it is merely the beginning toward real change. We

144    M. L. KNAIER

must act. One way we can do this is by queering our curriculum—and our curriculum development practices. QUEER(ING) EXPLORATIONS OF IDENTITIES . . . We all look at the world through theoretical lenses, frameworks, or perspectives. We may utilize more than one lens at a time or strictly adhere to one framework as we analyze our world. We may not know how to identify this framework or even be aware that it exists. Our perspectives are formed through our experiences, knowledge, and identities. Even before I heard the term “queer theory,” I practiced it as my worldview. And the more I learned about queer theory (see Butler, 1990; Cohen, 2005; Mayo, 2014) the more it seemed to “fit” me—and the more its relevance to identity awareness became clear (see Fifield & Letts, 2014; Letts & Fifield, 2000). The intent of queer theory is to “problematize” societal assumptions, constructions, and attributes of sex, gender, and sexuality (de Lauretis, 1991). Queer theory is a performative, academic pursuit (Britzman, 1995). Queering, or to queer, is to take action against the heteronormative status quo (Mayo, 2007). Thus, it is through the queering of analyses, conversations, and learning spaces that educators and students are encouraged to queer their own thinking and perceptions of themselves, others, and their environment. Furthermore, implementing queer curriculum may bolster learners to explore their identities and the ways in which these identities intersect and impact each other. Queer theory bucks against the norm—and so do I. For example, I started questioning the quintessential gender norm at a very young age. As a young girl, I questioned why I had to, and in fact refused to, wear dresses— wearing them made me so unhappy. They did not reflect who I was. But the norm was for little girls to wear pretty dresses on Easter Sunday, for example. Indeed, I did not (and still do not) have an affinity for sociallynormative girl (or woman) things, like dolls (and babies). I share part of my story of gender aversion in “What Makes Girls and Boys So Desirable?: STEM Education Beyond Gender Binaries”: As a child, I did not play with dolls. Instead, I played tackle football with the boys from the neighborhood. I created zoos with blocks and little plastic animals. I designed racetracks in the sandbox for my matchbox cars. During my adolescent years, I recognized that, unlike my sister, I did not have an affinity toward babies. I never had the desire to become a mother, and so many times my mom and aunts would say to me, “Wait until you’re older. You’ll change your mind.” Then they would laugh. This always upset me. I felt like they were not listening to me. (Knaier, 2019, p. 209)

Our Stories As Curriculum    145

I felt like I did not fit in or belong. The reality is: I did not, and still do not, fit in with my extended biological family. I am a genderqueer atheist who hails from a heteronormative, Catholic family. Luckily, I was able to find my queer, chosen family—a family that “fits” me. But what about those children who do not fit in at home or at school? Young people (like my young self) rarely get to choose their family or the schools they attend. Further, these schools are often settled into their heteronormative ways and are thus a breeding ground for bullying behavior (see Letts & Sears, 1999; Kissen, 2002; Kosciw, Greytak, Zongrone, Clark, & Truong, 2018). I was once convinced that LGBTQ-inclusive teacher education is key in promoting social justice and equitable education for LGBTQ youth (Knaier, 2017). However, after further research and engagement with multicultural education, queer theory, and autoethnography, I now understand that LGBTQ-inclusiveness is not enough. Building on my early research, and by uniting these disciplines—queer theory and multicultural social justice education—I now advocate for queer multicultural social justice teacher education. This is a critical approach that breaks down, and may reach beyond, rigid identity labels, and which may provide learners with opportunities to investigate ways to dismantle heteronormativity, rethink binary systems of identification, and deconstruct socially constructed identities in personal and meaningful ways. By implementing methods such as autoethnographic exercises, performers (e.g., teacher educators, preservice teachers) are given opportunities to engage in queer multiculturalism to explore their identities, by “examining . . . beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality and coming to terms with [their] comfort and knowledge (or lack thereof) about these topics and the epistemological implications that all of this has for each of us” (Letts, 2002, p. 124). By encouraging such explorations through the application of queer theory, teacher educators may question assumptions of and (de)construct identities while combating heteronormativity (Britzman, 1995). Further, when queer theory is applied to curriculum and its development, policies, beliefs, ideals, and norms attending to gender and sexuality may be deconstructed, allowing for the “opening [of] new social imaginaries” (Carrera, DePalma, & Lameiras, 2012, p. 1009). Indeed, if this queer approach to multicultural social justice teacher education is not implemented, the harmful heteronormative status quo will continue (Taylor, 2002). . . . BUT NOT WITHOUT CAUTION However, these examinations do not necessarily mean finding appropriate labels. Rather, it may mean finding that identities are much more complex than descriptive language allows. Ultimately, the key to the connection

146    M. L. KNAIER

of queer theory and identity may rest in exploring, but not essentializing, identity. Letts (2002) explains: Multicultural education as queer curriculum practice exceeds a focus on identities, individuals, or collectivities. It must move beyond the very important issues of [LGBTQ] people to also consider knowledge construction and validation, the allure of heteronormativity, the power of dichotomies, and critical textual practices. (p. 130)

Thus, merely knowing the identification categories in which students “fit” is not the secret ingredient to successful teaching (Letts & Fifield, 2000; Fifield & Letts, 2014). Examining and developing identity awareness may be consistent with an ultimate desire to move past identity labels and identity politics. The former may lead to the latter. Nonetheless, autoethnography may help in problematizing and exploring one’s personal identities. TEACHER EDUCATORS PERFORMING QUEER AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATIONS Autoethnography is a narrative approach involving “research, writing, story, and method that connects the autobiographical and personal to cultural, social, and political” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). Such narrative approaches have “the possibility to transform everyday experience into insights with cultural, social, and educational significance” (Phillion, He, & Connelly, 2005, p. 1). To do this, the autoethnographer systematically collects data via, for example, field notes, journals, and photographs; “attempts to achieve understanding through analysis and interpretation” by “focusing on understanding of other (culture/society) through self”; and “uses their personal experiences as primary data” (Chang, 2008, pp. 48–49) to tell their story. By using narratives, we constructively “remember the past, turn life into language, and disclose to ourselves and others the truth of our experiences” (Ellis, 2004, p. 127; Bochner, 2001). Ultimately, in practice, an autoethnographer critically reflects on a lived experience (e.g., developing curriculum) while interjecting cultural analysis and implications. Further, engaging in narrative research may change perspectives, ideologies, and actions. For example, Grace (2006) testifies that using autobiographical methods “is a quest to see whether [he has] reached a point where [his] own expanding knowledge, understanding, and experience enable [him] to be a self-accepting, inclusive educator” (p. 827). These methods offer “an opportunity to grow as a teacher educator”—one “who has transgressed his history of internalized and overt homophobia”—and “is no longer bounded by the toxic politics of heteronormativity that assumes and privileges heterosexuality” (p. 827). Indeed, many educators have used

Our Stories As Curriculum    147

autoethnographic methods to advance their self-awareness and, therefore, improve their teaching capabilities (Grace, 2006). A focus on self-awareness brings autoethnography and queer theory together. Murray (2015), a scholar of queer multicultural teacher education, explains that teacher candidates who examine “their own disposition” may address “queer issues in school even in the presence of self-conflicting ideological beliefs” (p. 35). Hence, by applying queer theory to multicultural teacher education, future teachers may practice self-awareness. Additionally, teacher educators Mulhern and Martinez (1999) attest that “the decision to include sexual orientation in [their] multicultural education courses was easy,” but that “teaching queerly required more than a conviction” (p. 255). Admittedly, they were “confronted with a lack of knowledge and remnants of the homophobia [they] had grown up with,” and they “had to peel back layers of fear and discomfort and educate [themselves]” (p. 255) to justly serve their students. Engaging in autoethnography is one way of “peeling back the layers” and educating oneself on these matters. QUEER(ING) CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT Teacher educators should engage in theory, but their work should also be reflective and pragmatic. By queering and using autoethnography for curriculum development, the act of curriculum development itself is queered, moving beyond theory and pragmatically applying queer research methods and frameworks. It is through autoethnography that the writer “engages in extensive self-examination and self-reflection, and purposively thinks about and includes extensive cultural and contextual description of his or her life” (Burke, Johnson, & Christensen, 2014, p. 453). Indeed, using autoethnography to develop curriculum includes addressing assumptions and biases, pondering word and resource choices, and posing difficult questions. In this way, autoethnography is a good fit for developing, and meeting the criteria of, queer multicultural social justice teacher education. Explorations of Identity Awareness Queer multicultural social justice teacher education is a critical approach that provides opportunities for and encourages educators to examine and (de)construct identity and its espoused privileges—thus allowing learners, in part, to investigate ways to dismantle heteronormativity, rethink binary systems of identification, and deconstruct socially constructed identities. To be clear, the practice of analyzing and (de)constructing our identities is a queer approach to learning. As a curriculum worker, I queer multicultural

148    M. L. KNAIER

social justice teacher education in a way that encourages learners to consider, question, and analyze how gender and sexuality—along with other multicultural identities (e.g., race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, exceptionality, religion, sexual orientation, and gender)—interact with, influence, and maintain social power and control. Presently, I am developing a queer curriculum titled Explorations of Identity Awareness. It is a set of lessons, or explorations, that provides opportunities to develop identity awareness (of self and others) as a means of promoting social justice. These lessons encourage critical reflection, storytelling with a purpose (e.g., examining, deconstructing, and eradicating potential hostile presumptions present in our heteronormative society and within ourselves), and practices of identity awareness with a goal of promoting a more accepting and socially just multicultural society. These lessons incorporate autoethnographic methods (e.g., storytelling, photo essays) that encourage students to explore their own identities (as a way of knowing others), to question assumptions about themselves and others, and to examine how their identities impact their teaching practices. The goal then is to share and reflect on these personal performances as curriculum. It is my hope that through writing and sharing their stories, students will make personal connections with each other, giving them a stake in what they are learning and how they are learning. Finally, the culminating performance, which is based on the lessons performed and shared, is developing a queer social justice multicultural teaching philosophy. Elements of Lessons Based on my teacher education and experiences as a classroom teacher and multiculturalism and education instructor, I include several elements in my curriculum (e.g., learning outcomes, assessments, performances, presentations). And although some would argue that adhering to such structure is not queer, I argue that although the elements are traditional, the criteria for several of the elements are quite queer. For example, the learning outcomes are rather ambiguous. In part they read: Through these performative autoethnographic methods, students (or explorers) may realize how each exploration (or lesson) provokes identity awareness, and that identity is complicated, fluid, and ever changing. In the end, explorers should practice identity awareness and may ultimately appreciate that they may never fully know, understand, or define themselves (or others).

Due to this ambiguity, I suggest that all the lessons be evaluated as (in) complete and/or (un)satisfactory instead of on a traditional grading scale. I understand that this may not be acceptable to some educators.

Our Stories As Curriculum    149

Each lesson consists of a performance prompt. For example, the “Lesson 4: Socioeconomic Status and the Arts” prompt reads: Explore your past and/or present socioeconomic status identity/identities in relation to the arts (e.g., writing stories or poetry; drawing or painting; photographing or digital designing; playing a musical instrument; or singing, acting, or dancing). Explore and reflect on how your socioeconomic status, along with other (multi)cultural beliefs, customs, and/or practices (or other aspects of your life), may have influenced your artistic self. You may conduct this exploration in various ways (e.g., storytelling, photo essay, poetry, song) and from many perspectives (e.g., as an artist, student, parent, art educator, your young self). When appropriate, include samples of artwork and/or performances.

My intent is that after brief in-class discussions to clarify the prompts, students choose how they want to perform the explorations—including which perspectives to take, the modes of exploration, and presentation styles. Educators should be open to all acceptable products, which include but are not limited to traditional essays, comic strips, short stories, poems, photo essays, auto/photovoice, food essays, videos, drawings, paintings, or other methods through which students can and want to conduct and communicate their explorations. Another queer aspect of these explorations is that work products should not be viewed as “finished” products. Students (and assessors) need to understand that these explorations will be the beginnings of self-awareness and will always be a work in progress. Finally, queering of the presentations should be encouraged. These performative autoethnographic presentations are personal representations and reflections of the students. Care should be practiced, and students ought to be supported as they decide when and how to conduct their presentations. My Performance One of my goals is to queer autoethnography itself, by using it to develop curriculum. As an autoethnographer, and a queer multicultural educator, I develop queer multicultural social justice teacher education curriculum by performing it, by analyzing the process through autoethnographic methods, and by adjusting the curriculum based on my analysis. Indeed, as a writer, researcher, and curriculum worker, my perspectives, personal beliefs, and foundational frameworks are always reflected in my work (see Knaier, 2017, 2019). I analyze the world, including readings, experiences, and photographs, based on my present knowledge and past experiences— just as a reader of my work would do. Moreover, I combine my story with

150    M. L. KNAIER

new knowledge as I am learning it, I reflect on past experiences as I read the world, and I negotiate an understanding of how I “fit” into the larger narrative. I recognize that all of these components impact my curriculum development processes. Further, I encourage teacher educators to also perform such practices. The lesson format for my Explorations of Identity Awareness curriculum intersects multicultural identities and concepts with social or cultural practices or ideals (e.g., intersectionality within activism and support groups, socioeconomic status and the arts, religion and mortality). More to the point, the pairing of multicultural identities with cultural practices that may be encountered by teachers within our educational system, as well as within their personal lives, formed the premise for many of my lessons. I envisioned this structure while I read Lorde’s (1984) essay, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Her words: Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. (p. 116)

This essay provoked me to reflect on my young self. As a poor, latchkey child, I often wrote poetry. All I needed was my notebook, a pen, and a bit of privacy. Thus, in developing Lesson 4, I performed it, reflecting on how poverty influenced my writings. In part I wrote: I grew up in a broken home—my parents divorced when I was 9. Throughout [my poetry] notebook I wrote a lot about relationships and the desire to “expand” them; I wrote about feeling secure; and I wrote about my inability to express my love and gratitude toward others—sentiments brought on by having an absent father and a hard-working mother. My poems also reflect a strong desire for being loved and accepted and the naivety of my young self. These poems are the epitome of low self-esteem and insecurity. It seems I spent my adolescent years searching for some sense of security—something I didn’t find until many years later.

Through sharing such self-realizations, I connect with my readers, and ultimately with my students. Lorde’s essay also made me think about my current artistic self. I am a photographer. Lorde (1984) writes: The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? (p. 116)

Our Stories As Curriculum    151

Lorde’s work encouraged me to compare, and reflect on, my young, poor artistic self, with my current, privileged artistic self—including the modes, subjects, and purposes of my art. In performing Lesson 4, I wrote: I have a hard time reconciling my current socioeconomic position, and a reflective look at my life’s journey may help me come to terms with my successes and tribulations. Soon I will develop a project that incorporates poem writing and photography. Something I can share with others—maybe something I can publish. The focus will be on hardships and successes throughout my life.

Through these reflections, I am prompted into action; these explorations are the beginnings of self-awareness. These unfinished products are prompts for life-long journeys of realizing who I am—and who we are. Finally, Lorde’s essay prompted me to clarify that through these lessons I am not asking the performers to separate out one identity from others, but maybe spotlight one within suggested cultural aspects. As Lorde (1984) explains: As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. (p. 120–121)

I want explorers to notice all their different selves and embrace the intersectionality of their selves while performing each of these lessons. Indeed, in using autoethnographic methods to develop this curriculum, I benefitted in these ways. For example, in performing “Lesson 2: How Do You Identify?” I realized my genderqueer-woman identity intersects with, and at times, overshadows, my other identities. I wrote: My genderqueer woman identity encompasses all other identities. For example, I am a genderqueer woman who suffers from depression and anxiety, who invests her money but also supports wildlife conservation efforts, who likes to watch horror movies, who is a cat mama, who is a business owner, who is a science educator, who is a fine art photographer, and who rides a motorcycle. I recognize that all these identities, or sub-identities, are reflective of my genderqueer self.

I understand the importance of my identities and their intersectionality— but it is my whole self that deconstructs identity labels, disrupts heteronormative assumptions, and nullifies binary identification systems.

152    M. L. KNAIER

My proposed method of queer curriculum development encourages me and other performers to act and to explore, to realize assumptions, to listen to and seek different perspectives, and to attend to the language that we use as direction and expression. When teacher educators perform these lessons (and the lessons they create), we are doing what we are asking our students to do. Indeed, this is queer. I am interested in developing multicultural education that advances student self-awareness—the kind of education that provides opportunities for future educators to examine and (de)construct identity and its espoused privileges, the kind of education that may increase my success as a teacher educator, and, certainly, the kind of education that would have provided the much needed support my young self deserved. And to do this, I must perform, realize, and listen. As a queer scholar, I actively explore ways to understand my identities (e.g., ethnicity, socioeconomic status, exceptionality, religion, sexual orientation, and gender), why I hold certain perspectives, and how these outlooks impact my teaching and curriculum development. And as I develop curriculum, I do this to better understand and deliver course content, and to better relate to my students. Though I concede that it is a personal choice to critically explore one’s identities, or to seek out methods with which to develop this awareness, I argue that it is the duty of teacher educators to practice these methods and, furthermore, incorporate these techniques into multicultural education courses—thus providing preservice teachers with tools for extending their identity awareness. I find that through performing the explorations I develop, I gain a better understanding of what I expect my students to do. This knowledge also provides insight for creating safe learning spaces where personal stories may be shared—stories which, at times, may highlight adversity, ignorance, and the distrust of others. Indeed, queering critical autoethnography and using it as a method to not only explore self-identity and elicit awareness as a means of knowing myself better, but also to construct a queer multicultural social justice curriculum, may result in knowing myself and, hopefully, students better. Grace (2006) recognizes the importance of such writing, stating: It helps me, and hopefully those who read my work, to come face-to-face with the intricacies of attempting to make meaning and sense of a queer life in educational and other structured sociocultural spaces. (p. 828)

The engagement between the researcher and the audience, and the actions taken by both, make autoethnography a powerful method. By sharing my story, I hope to encourage self-awareness and queer curriculum development within multicultural learning spaces.

Our Stories As Curriculum    153

CONCLUSION Over the years, Banks’ approach to multicultural education has evolved to fit the needs and realities of the field and of society (Banks, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2010, 2013). Further, as Banks (2006b) realizes the biographical journeys of researchers greatly influence their values, their research questions, and the knowledge they construct. The knowledge they construct mirrors their life experiences and their values. (p. 2)

However, these journeys are more than biographical (an account of one’s life). They are autoethnographical (connecting autobiographical stories to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings)—engaging and affecting the reader. Moreover, like queer theory, engaging in narrative research may challenge our assumptions and cause us to act. Learning from Banks, I understand that my work must evolve as society and culture change—for better and for worse. By shifting from an LGBTQinclusive framework (Knaier, 2017) to a queer multicultural social justice approach (introduced here), I am actively changing my curriculum and its development. By connecting our personal experiences with the curriculum, and by making our personal experiences the curriculum, we can make connections with each other and have a stake in what we are learning and how we are learning. Queer autoethnography allows for flexibility in these inquiries, reflecting changes in our identities, perspectives, and self, as well as the ways we perceive and interact with others. These explorations will ultimately impact how we develop and deliver curriculum. Ultimately, these lessons in identity exploration are not about me, the instructor, delivering lectures; they are about me learning alongside my future students. Learning about and from each other and our experiences. Such practices may even include using teacher educator-generated autoethnographies in tandem with student-generated performances as curriculum within multicultural teacher education courses as a way of further developing identity awareness (of self and others). It is imperative that our stories are the focus of our learning in order to advance identity awareness as a means of promoting social justice. Although I have not yet employed this recently developed curriculum, when I do, I plan to reflect on how my methods work within the context (and the classrooms) of the troubled times we currently face. For now, it is my hope that teacher educators perform autoethnographic explorations to better understand their multicultural identities; to deconstruct heteronormative assumptions through the appreciation of various perspectives and performances; and to recognize that identities, as well as curricula,

154    M. L. KNAIER

are fluid. By doing so, they may actively prepare themselves, and ultimately their students, to effectively navigate within, and hopefully change, the current unwelcoming heteronormative social climate. REFERENCES Baker, G. C. (1973, December). Multicultural Training for Student Teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 24, 306–307. Banks, J. A. (1988). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. Multicultural Leader, 1(2), 1–3. Banks, J. A. (1993). The canon debate, knowledge construction, and multicultural education. Educational Researcher, 22(5), 4–14. Banks, J. A. (1994). Multiethnic education: Theory and practice (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Banks, J. A. (Ed.). (1996). Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Banks, J. A. (1999). Multicultural citizenship education. In B. D. Day (Ed.), Teaching & learning in the new millennium, (pp. 54–61). West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi. Banks, J. A. (2004). Multicultural education: Historical development, dimensions, and practice. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 3–29). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Banks, J. A. (2006a). Cultural diversity and education: Foundation, curriculum, and teaching (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Banks, J. A. (2006b). Race, culture, and education: The selected works of James A. Banks. New York, NY: Routledge. Banks, J. A. (2010). Series forward. In G. Gay (Author), Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research and practice (2nd ed.), (pp. ix–xiii). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Banks, J. A. (2013). Multicultural education: Characteristics and goals. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (8th ed.; pp. 3–22). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Banks, J. A., & McGee Banks, C. A. (Eds.). (2016). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (9th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Bochner, A. (2001). Narrative’s virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(2), 131–157. https:// doi.org/10.1177/107780040100700201 Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Carrera, M., DePalma, R., & Lameiras, M. (2012). Sex/gender identity: Moving beyond fixed and ‘natural’ categories. Sexualities, 15(8), 995–1016. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Our Stories As Curriculum    155 Cohen, C. J. (2005). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics? In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology (pp. 21–51). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer theory: Lesbian and gay sexualities: An introduction. Differences, 3(2), iii–xviii. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Fifield, S., & Letts, W. (2014). [Re]considering queer theories and science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 9(2), 393–407. Gollnick, D. M., & Chinn, P. C. (2004). Multicultural education in a pluralistic society (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Grace, A. P. (2006). Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada. Teaching and Teaching Education, 22, 826–834. Grant, C. A., & Sleeter, C. E. (2011). Doing multicultural education for achievement and equity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Grant, C. A., & Sleeter, C. E. (2013). Race, class, gender, and disability in the classroom. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (8th ed.; pp. 59–82). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Howard, G. R. (2006). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Johnson, R. B., & Chritensen, L. (2014). Educational research: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kissen, R. M. (2002). Getting ready for Benjamin: Preparing teachers for sexual diversity in the classroom. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knaier, M. L. (2017). A place where they can be themselves: Issues of LGBTQ students [Revisited]. In E. A. Mikulec & P. C. Miller (Eds.), Queering classrooms: Personal narratives and educational practices to support LGBTQ youth in schools (pp. 11–25). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Knaier, M. L. (2019). What makes girls and boys so desirable? STEM education beyond gender binaries. In W. Letts & S. Fifield (Eds.), STEM of Desire: Queer Theories in Science Education (pp. 209–221). Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill. Kosciw, J. G., Greytak, E. A., Zongrone, A. D., Clark, C. M., & Truong, N. L. (2018). The 2017 national school climate survey: The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth in our nation’s schools. New York, NY: GLSEN. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. Letts, W. (2002). Revisioning multiculturalism in teacher education: Isn’t it queer? In R. M. Kissen (Ed.), Getting ready for Benjamin: Preparing teachers for sexual diversity in the classroom (pp. 119–131). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Letts, W., & Fifield, S. (2000, April). Sexualities, silence, and science teacher education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. Letts, W. J., & Sears, J. T. (Eds.). (1999). Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister/outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing. Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays by Audre Lorde. Ithaca, NY: Fireband.

156    M. L. KNAIER Mayo, C. (2007, March). Queering foundations: Queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender educational research. Review of Research in Education, 31, 78–94. Mayo, C. (2014). LGBTQ youth & education: Policies & practices. New York, NY: Teachers College. Mulhern, M., & Martinez, G. (1999). Confronting homophobia in a multicultural education course. In W. J. Letts & J. T. Sears (Eds.), Queering elementary education: Advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling (pp. 247–256). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Murray, O. J. (2015). Queer inclusion in teacher education: Bridging theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Nieto, S., & Bode, P. (2012). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Phillion, J., He, M. F., & Connelly, F. M. (2005). The potential of narrative and experiential approaches in multicultural inquiries. In J. Phillion, M. F. He, & F. M. Connelly (Eds.), Narrative & Experience in Multicultural Education (pp. 1–14). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Taylor, C. (2002). Beyond empathy: Confronting homophobia in critical education courses. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 6(3/4), 219–234.

REFLECTION

TEACHING AND WRITING AS ACTIVISM Can Scholars Be Too Literal in Post-Truth Trumplandia? P. L. Thomas Furman University

Low self-esteem and doubt are evil, tiny demons, and both have plagued me throughout a career in education, first as a high school English teacher for 18 years and now currently in my 17th year as a college professor in teacher education and first-year writing: Are teaching and writing activism? Compounding those feelings have been the era under Donald Trump as president during which the public in the United States has had to confront the power and tensions with activism. The activism connected with race and racism across the nation also prompted for me a question about what exactly counts as activism as well as what are our moral obligations when faced with bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all forms of oppression. To do nothing, to strike the “I’m not political” pose, we must admit, is itself a political act, one that tacitly reinforces the status quo of oppression

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 157–163 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

157

158    Teaching and Writing as Activism

and inequity. To proclaim “I don’t see race” is to be complicit in the very racism those who claim not to see race pretend to be above. Activism broadly is taking action for change, and despite the cultural pressure that teachers somehow stand above activism and politics, despite the perception that writing is not action, both teaching and writing are types of activism—although each of us who are teachers and writers has decisions about how that looks in our own careers and lives. For me, the urge to teach and write is grounded in confronting a world that is incomplete, inadequate, and then calling for a world that could be. TEACHING AND WRITING AS ACTIVISM More than a decade after I began teaching high school English, I discovered critical pedagogy and  social reconstructionism  during my doctoral program—and was able to place my muddled and naive efforts at teachingas-activism into a purposeful context. As a K–12 teacher, I always held tight to the autonomy of my classroom to do what was right by my students—usually against the grain of the school and the community, and often in ways that were threatening to my career. The curriculum we offer our students and the pedagogy we practice are activism if we embrace that call. Instead of the prescribed textbook and reading list, I augmented what my students read and pushed each year to change, to expand the required reading lists to include women and writers of color. My first quarter of American literature began with Howard Zinn’s reconsideration of the Columbus discovering America myth and then built on adding Margaret Fuller to the traditional examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The second half of that first quarter focused on Gandhi’s non-violent non-cooperation as well as an expanded sub-unit of Black thought—including Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. We considered whose voice matters, and why, along with complicating the often oversimplified presentation of MLK as the only Black voice in U.S. history. In the 1980s and 1990s of rural upstate South Carolina, these texts and conversations were rare and hard for my students, resisted and rejected by the community (my birth town), and challenging for me as a becoming-teacher. And much of this I did badly despite my best intentions. Beyond my classroom, as department chair, I worked to de-track our English classes as much as possible (reducing the levels from 4 to 3), but also ended the practice of multiple texts per grade level that in effect labeled our students walking down the hallways. I also had the department stop  issuing grammar and vocabulary texts to all students, moving those

Teaching and Writing as Activism    159

texts to resources for teachers who wished to use them. Then, I did not think of that teaching as activism, however. So I share all this not to  pat myself on the back, but to acknowledge now how our teaching can—and I would argue must—be activism. To detail what teaching-as-activism looks like in the day to day. I share also to note that when working within the system as it is handed to us, we are being political in that we are complicit when we passively work as agents of practices that are a disservice to our students, and ourselves. Activism is teaching for that which we want to be and thus against that which we witness as wrong. None of this is easy or comfortable, and I recognize in hindsight, to work against the system has real costs, even if we do not lose our jobs, which of course serves no one well. My journey to embrace writing as activism was much slower developing, but along the way I have shifted much of my energy toward public work because I believe that also to be activism—raising a voice in the pursuit of change, putting ones name behind words that challenge. But it is the writing as activism, and making myself public, that gives me greater pause because writing is a solitary and often isolated thing (although teaching is often a profession in which we are isolated from each other, and fail in teaching in solidarity because of that dynamic). My dual vocations  as teacher/writer are significantly impacted by my privilege as well as the perceptions that teaching is not/should not be political and that writing is not really putting one bodily into the fray. Thus, my vigilance lies in setting aside paternalistic urges, working beside and not for, and seeking ways in which my unearned privilege can be used in the service of others who are burdened by inequity. As teachers and writers, are we activists, then? I say that we can be, that we must be. But how that looks is ours to decide; grand and small, our impact on the world is in our daily actions, our daily words. And I am always, always anchored in my high school classroom, where my efforts to open the world to my students, to foster in them a belief that the world can be different, the world can be better were often subtly taped to my wall—the words of Henry David Thoreau (1982): Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. (p. 125)

I think to be a teacher is to confront our doubts, to break through the stigma we may feel about our desire to make a difference, to change the world, to be activists. These doubts and these callings are shared by writers as well, I believe. Yes, teaching and writing are activism, activism we should be proud to own. However, to move beyond the classroom into the broader world is an act that is certain to create its own controversy.

160    Teaching and Writing as Activism

CAN SCHOLARS BE TOO LITERAL IN POSTTRUTH TRUMPLANDIA? Recently, I was invited to join a class discussion of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale  in a local International Baccalaureate (IB) high school class. For many years, I taught the novel in my Advanced Placement course, and in 2007, I published a volume on teaching Atwood’s writing. During the discussion, one very bright and engaged student eagerly noted that Atwood evokes elements of communism in her novel. The use of the term “communism” prompted me to offer a gentle reframing—that the student probably was recognizing elements of totalitarianism, elements often blurred into the mainstream American  pejorative  use of the word “communism” (see also “socialism” and “Marxism”). This is an important moment, I think, in understanding how academia works: Language and the teasing out of ideas are often  laborious, if not  tedious. While teaching first-year writing especially, but in most of my courses, I stress that college students need disciplinary awareness—how each discipline functions and why—and typically emphasize that academics are prone to carefully defining terms, and then holding everyone to those precise meanings. Political, media, and public discourse, however, tend along a much different path. Language and terminology are treated with a cavalier disregard for meaning. Misusing a term or making a false claim is quickly glossed over before railing against the initial false claim. Because of that gap between academia and the so-called real world, some educators and scholars call for the importance of public intellectuals grounded in academia. Public scholarship, however, remains controversial within the academia and tends to be received with  disdain  and  condescension  by politicians, the media, and the public. It is at those last two points that I want to emphasize why Sam Fallon’s (2019) “The Rise of the Pedantic Professor” has been so eagerly embraced by some in the academy and many in the public sphere. At its core, Fallon’s argument poses this: To read the work of humanities scholars writing for a general audience is to be confronted by dull litanies of fact: a list of the years in which Rome’s walls were breached by invaders (take that, Trump), an exhaustive inventory of historians who have dunked on Dinesh D’Souza, a bland recounting of witchhunting in 17th-century New England. (para. 6)

These public humanities scholars, Fallon argues, “tend to collapse discursive arguments into data dumps,” and are failing their mission with “academic literalism” (para. 9).

Teaching and Writing as Activism    161

In the traditional norms of the academy, Fallon’s (2019) charges reinforce arguments that scholars should remain (somehow) above activism and public engagement, often expectations for being apolitical, objective, or neutral. Fallon also is providing ample fodder for politicians, the media, and the public who marginalize professors and scholars as merely academic, pointy-headed intellectuals making much ado about nothing. As an educator, scholar, and writer, a career spanning 4 decades, I have strongly rejected both of these norms, and I have increasingly recognized that public work by scholars is far more important than our traditional scholarship, which is often behind paywalls and read by only inners, if at all. I think that the gap between the academy and the public not only can be bridged in terms of how we navigate language and ideas, but it must be bridged—especially now that we have entered post-truth Trumplandia (Goering & Thomas, 2018; Thomas, 2017). Consider the current uses and framing of the terms “socialism” and “infanticide.” The bright IB student mentioned above is a typical example I confront in all of my students, and throughout public debates, especially social media. While I absolutely recognize that academics can be pedantic, so precise that all meaning and discourse are rendered meaningless to dayto-day existence, I believe Fallon is making a serious mistake of extremes: Academics have obligations to their disciplines  and  the public, but their public discourse must always remain in any scholar’s lane while balancing the norms of disciplinary discourse with public accessibility. Do some academics fail at this tightrope act? Of course. But words matter, and starting with jumbled terms and meanings serves no one well. The public academic is poised to slow down debate while also clarifying what exactly we are saying in terms of cultural ideologies and public policy. Doesn’t it seem important to confront that a significant number of voters in 2016 angrily voted against Obamacare while themselves benefitting from the Affordable Care Act—casting votes grounded in a garbled and self-defeating state of not knowing what terms mean? Doesn’t it seem dangerous for one political party to drum up fear of infanticide, when infanticide isn’t occurring? Wouldn’t this country benefit from a fact-based (even literal) discussion of women’s health and reproductive rights, prenatal care, and abortion? I find it troubling that all throughout formal education from K–12 through undergraduate and graduate education, we hold students to higher standards of discourse than we do politicians and the media. I also have little patience for people who cannot accurately define “socialism,” “communism,” or “Marxism,” but feel compelled to reject these ideologies with unwavering certainty. It seems, in fact, that no one can be too literal when most public discourse wallows in the mud of being both wrong in the use of language and

162    Teaching and Writing as Activism

dishonest in the ideologies and arguments being made for promoting public policy that directly impacts how any of us navigate our lives. If we need more evidence, the rising public responses to the new tax codes pushed through by Republicans and Trump offer a jumbled and disturbing picture. Many tax-paying U.S. citizens have a weak understanding of taxes, one oversimplified as the “refund” (let me nudge here: this isn’t any different than oversimplifying and misusing “socialism”). Many in the United States should be angry about the new tax code, but most complaining about the consequences of those changes are doing so in ways that are lazy and simply flawed. If we backed up this outrage over lower tax refunds, we could have a much more substantive and possibly effective discussion about payroll deductions (most were reduced under the tax changes, thus people received more money per check over the year, which itself would lead to lower refunds), tax burdens among different income brackets, and the needlessly complex industry of preparing and submitting our taxes. Not unrelated, Republicans have misrepresented calls for 70% marginal tax rates for the very wealthy (about 16,000 Americans out of 127 million households)—again an effective strategy because most people do not understand the literal (and tedious) reality about how marginal tax rates work. And this brings me back to Atwood’s novel and the class discussion. Much of Atwood’s (1986) work as a writer is about language, the use of language to control and the possibility of language to unmask, to liberate not only ideas but people. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a few select women control other women through language manipulation. The handmaids are trained by Aunts, who instill the propaganda: There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it . . .  We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. (pp. 24, 25)

But it may be more important here to emphasize Atwood’s (1986) examination of how Gilead came about. Offred explains about her life before Gilead: We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. . . . The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

Teaching and Writing as Activism    163 We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of the print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. (pp. 56–57)

This is a novel about people being cavalier about language and thus about the human condition. This novel is a call for the dangers of not being literal enough. Humanities professors wading into the public debate and their “dull litanies of fact” are simply not the problem facing us today. Can scholars be too literal in post-truth Trumplandia? No, and beware anyone who would argue otherwise. REFERENCES Atwood, M. (1986). The handmaid’s tale. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Fallon, S. (2019, March 1). The rise of the pedantic professor: When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-the-Pedantic/245808/ Goering, C., & Thomas, P.L. (Eds.). (2018). Critical media literacy and fake news in post-truth America. Boston, MA: Brill. Thomas, P. L. (2017).  Trumplandia: Unmasking post-truth America. New York, NY: Garn Press. Thoreau, H. D. (1982). The journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. 13. Layton, UT: Peregrine Smith Books.

This page intentionally left blank.

THE WOMAN OF LA MANCHA (CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL) Brian Gibbs The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

they say that when she began she was not who she would become she was inspired but ignorant she was dedicated but out of touch but she grew she read she asked she explored the neighborhood the people she was different not from there but open, asking it became part of her

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 165–172 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

165

166    The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)

this was her madness they would say later in part she howled for the neighborhood she was not from she became different arriving early leaving late always under darkness on a mid 80s Honda she drove way too fast Rocinante she was called bugs smashed on the helmet scarf hung round her neck though it could not be seen all knew a smile hung on her face she did a wheelie that one time in the parking lot she was written up for not the last time she learned how to not follow the rules how to teach how her students’ needed with verve, yes with passion, yes but wrapped around them she asked questions thematically combined curriculum connected social studies to math to English to science to health but always back to the neighborhood to her students to their families she was written up most for not following the curriculum for engaging in “disruptive pedagogy”

The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)    167

for “staying after hours” it was really jealousy colleagues embarrassed administrators she never fought it saying “thank you” when they were handed to her she smiled instead and continued on doing the same as she did before she gained her footing her sea legs some would say after just a few years it was books bought questions asked her own curriculum written or the beginnings of this what was always there was a burning fury to be better to matter to have impact to be seen as something by her students the light would burn in her classroom long after the others the dooers the stayers the impassioned those who would be her friends but not enough time students come first “I’m writing my own curriculum!” happy hour occasionally but not enough

168    The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)

to maintain fledgling friendships and so she passed into mystery our woman of La Mancha Senior High her legend draped and inspired by this mystery of her work her dedication her sacrifice her success her students learned and they loved her and other schools heard too “sure they can come” she would say about teachers from other schools “I can’t go there, too much to do” most often said over her shoulder others can grow she believed but why do they want to see me? all I did was read, experiment and grow found time for the students and they for me learned how to ask the right questions the ones that set their souls on fire to know to understand race class power gender

The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)    169

sex oppression resistance all studied all explored all know all applied “everyone can do it” she said they just have to wonder and want to Dulce she had known forever but not that way until her husband past they could be seen in the mornings before school and sometimes leaving together but never in school Dulce was younger by quite a bit and the woman it seems while in love recognized the difference that time she would say was for the “dragons” when the words rolled out they upticked to a fever pitch asked to lead: the department the professional development her answer was “no” said as if the question

170    The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)

were inherently ridiculous “that’s not the work I do” was sometimes added but most often inferred no one knew her but everyone knew her “slaying dragons” she would say when asked what she did and she was right the dragons existed they included fear anger ignorance misunderstanding and she worked at slaying them all she took students into the neighborhood to explore and give back not once with permission when questioned the response was the same “permission to go into their own neighborhood?” she ended as she had begun the Woman from La Mancha she had appeared in the beginning and so unappeared in the end the year ended with the usual good byes to students well wishes and all but the room had been emptied

The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)    171

of the well read books the student art the musical instruments the paint the paper the three typewriters she had “just because” but she did not return neither did Dulce her classroom in her honor was never used again empty as if waiting teachers who sought her out at her home reported it too was empty not sold not rented but empty as if waiting La Mancha Central was never the same which was good the teachers missing her seemed to work harder to bring her spirit back there was more paint more discussion more neighborhood explorations more joyful irreverence so her spirit her belief then never truly left they tell me that early in the mornings if you’re there alone you can hear her motorcycle

172    The Woman of La Mancha (Central High School)

roaring just around the corner they say on quiet afternoons you can just almost hear the sound of her voice and her students in joyful conversation just almost but not quite

PART III THE WOUNDS: HEALING OF SELF AND COMMUNITY

Our bodies have been shaped by their injuries; scars are traces of those injuries that persist in the healing or stitching of the present. This kind of good scar reminds us that recovering from injustice cannot be about covering over the injuries which are the effects of that injustice; signs of an unjust contact between our bodies and others. So “just emotions” might be ones that work with and on rather than over the wounds that surface as traces of past injuries in the present. —Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 202

This page intentionally left blank.

REFLECTION

CREATING A GENDERINCLUSIVE ROMANCE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM Opportunities and Challenges Deborah Bennett Berklee College of Music Simone Pilon Berklee College of Music

In February 2019, the Académie Française, the organization that is charged with matters relating to the French language, approved the feminization of professions, setting the stage for both male and female titles for all professions (Académie Française, 2019). This much-overdue modernization of the French language to reflect all members of a society whose motto is “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity), could be seen as only a step towards true equality as it implies a gender-binary society. Gender inclusivity in Romance languages involves a number of challenges. While this step towards feminization in French helps address one Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 175–181 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

175

176    Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom

issue, other hurdles remain in place. The feminization of professions does not address concerns such as the masculine form of words being used as the gender-neutral form, essentially bestowing primacy on the male form of the word. Some advocates in Spanish have argued for using both the male and female versions of words in documents and speeches: “Consejo de Ministras y Ministros” rather than “Consejo de Ministros” for example (“Should Spain’s Constitution,” 2019). However, this type of language is viewed as cumbersome. Most importantly, the question of whether it is even necessary to create more inclusive language, and whether these efforts can go “too far,” underscores the resistance to change that exists. Perhaps one answer to the problem lies in a third way—the generation of gender-neutral terminology. This would not only move language away from masculine-centric terminology, but it would also simplify language and avoid the need to specify gender. The creation of gender-neutral pronouns and agreements would have the benefit of being truly inclusive as these terms could be used for transgender and gender non-binary people, but such change is only being discussed informally. Language academies outright refuse to even consider modifying language to create neutral terms, insisting that the masculine is inherently neutral and any new form would go against the morphology of the language (“¿Lenguaje inclusivo?,” 2018). As we wrestle with these linguistic challenges, clearly there are deeper concerns regarding society, sexism, and gender discrimination. As the question of whether language should even be inclusive plays out, and how change might constitute a threat to the integrity of language and to societal norms, the call for gender-neutral language appears to be truly transgressive to some. At the same time, transgender and gender non-binary people exist in every culture, in every language, and the words used by and about them reflect their own sense of identity and society’s acceptance of their existence and right to self-determination. While this topic is not discussed widely in other countries, it has been addressed in academic, political, and private spaces in the United States and some norms have begun to be adopted, albeit informally, with regard to gender-neutral pronouns. Creating inclusive instructional environments has become an important topic in higher education, and grammatical norms have been established (University of Minnesota, n.d.). As a result, many educators have begun to solicit name and pronoun preferences from students in order to address people as they address themselves and to normalize the practice of not assuming binary gender identities. In a Romance-language classroom, where everything from the people to the desks are gendered, and where all nouns agree in gender with their modifiers, identity takes on another dimension. Unlike German, where a neutral form already exists, Romance languages are almost exclusively binary: masculine/feminine. The question therefore arises of how we, as

Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom    177

instructors, create an inclusive environment where the masculine does not have greater importance than the feminine and where students who do not identify as male or female feel accepted. In order to investigate this question, we applied for an Inclusive Pedagogy Grant from the Faculty Development office at our institution. Our goal is to research gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language in Romance languages. Our main focus is on French and Spanish, the two languages taught at our institution. Specifically, we aim to • research how gender-inclusive and gender-neutral language is being used in informal and formal settings in countries where Romance languages are spoken; • gather ideas and suggestions from our community and address cross-cultural and cross-linguistic concerns; • determine what norms have been developed in or outside the Academy; • develop standards and curricula for teaching gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language in French and Spanish at our institution; • share knowledge and best practices with students, staff, and faculty about the range of possibilities for description of self and others; and • utilize instructional materials to uphold and honor the equity policies of our institution in respecting students of all gender identities. We proposed a two-pronged research approach: a literature review to determine what initiatives are already in progress and a series of meetings with international students at our institution to determine what was happening in practice. Our literature review revealed that while some changes are happening in both French and Spanish to create more gender-inclusive options, little is being done with gender-neutral language beyond work in universities and by LGBTQIA-rights groups. A survey conducted in France in 2017 by Harris Interactive revealed that 41% of people were familiar with the concept of inclusive language although only 12% truly understood what it meant. That same study showed that 75% of people are open to the idea of inclusive language. However, this survey only pertained to gender-inclusive language, not gender-neutral language (Harris Interactive, 2017). In French, there are two main approaches to creating gender-neutral language. The first is to use punctuation. For instance, rather than saying étudiant (masculine) or étudiante (feminine), neutral forms such as étudiant.e or étudiant* can be used. It is also possible to write étudiant.e.s or étudiant*s in the plural forms. The same approach can be taken when it comes to agreement with adjectives, as in “les étudiant.e.s intelligent.e.s” or “les étudiant*s intelligent*s.” The definite articles “le” (masculine) and “la” (feminine) can become “le.la” or “le.a.” While these approaches are

178    Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom

primarily designed with feminization in mind, they also result in reducing the binarity. The other approach in French has been to create new pronouns, such as the third-person pronouns “al,” “iel,” or “ille” (singular) and “als,” “iels,” and illes” (plural); “elleux” instead of “eux and “elles” (they/ them); and “ceuzes” or “celleux” instead of ““ceux” and “celles” (these/ those). Agreement for adjectives can be achieved by adding “æ” to the end of the word, as in “intelligentæ” (Bonneville, 2017; Les Salopettes, 2017). Similarly, in Spanish, it is easy to find examples of gender-neutral language in informal spaces online. In the United States, the term “Latinx,” which is gender neutral, has become standardized to refer to anyone who is of Hispanic or Latin American origin, but is deemed to be a very American term (Reyes, 2017). However, in Spanish speaking countries, other options have surfaced, not only words for describing nationalities and ethnicities, but any gendered noun, pronoun, article, or modifier. For example, as with French, the use of punctuation has been suggested: l@s niñ@s instead of los niños/las niñas (Bosque, n.d.). The question that arises is, of course, pronunciation of the @ sign in spoken language. Other suggestions include using “e” instead of the binary o/a for endings of most parts of speech (“Gender Neutral Language,” n.d.). Instead of using “él” or “ella” (he/ she), one could use “ele” or “elle” for pronouns; instead of using “el” or “la” (the), one could use “ele” for articles. Modifiers would then agree and use “e” as an ending instead of “o” or “a.” One complication in this model is that sometimes words ending in “e” are already gender neutral and sometimes words that end in “a” are gender neutral, which could lead to the question of whether one would change a word like “dentista,” which is used in both the masculine and feminine, to “dentiste” to be consistent with other changes. Presently, each Spanish-speaking country seems to be approaching the question independently with no coordination. Countries from Spain to Chile are grappling with the what, why, and ifs of genderinclusive and gender-neutral terminology. Meanwhile, the Royal Academy of Spanish (RAE) refuses to take on the issue. As cis-gender educators in an American context, this leaves us with a thorny question; namely, is it hubris to think that we can or should create a set of norms for gender-inclusive and gender-neutral terminology to be used in our American contexts to address our non-binary population? Also at issue is whether this would constitute cultural expropriation. In order to answer this question, we turned to Romance-language speakers at our institution to solicit their opinions. We brought together students to learn about their home countries and communities, and how gender inclusivity/neutrality are discussed. Students from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Italy, Los Angeles, and Mexico participated in the forum. We asked them to share

Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom    179

• anecdotes about gender-inclusive and gender-neutral language usage in their friend and family circles, but also in academic and professional settings; and • suggestions for respecting both non-binary members of our community and the cultural and linguistic heritage and autonomy of countries where Romance languages are spoken. Specific questions for the session included: • Is there is an Academy that regulates language in your country? How does that institution influence the way people use language in academic, professional, and personal settings? • Do you believe language can be shaped and molded by the average person or does it have to come from a higher authority? • What conversations are happening in your country about genderinclusive language? • What conversations are happening around gender-neutral language? Are any new pronouns and endings for adjectives being used? In addition, students from Chile, Quebec, and Spain, who were not present at the meeting, contributed notes on the questions posed. Several students discussed the challenges of changing a language. Some had seen newly proposed words in writing, but weren’t sure how to pronounce them. A small number of students were aware of gender-neutral language in their mother tongue, such as “obrigade” as a gender-neutral form of “obrigado/obrigada,” thank you, in Portuguese. These students were the exception. Others stated that the question of gender-neutral language is not discussed in their home countries and, when it is, it is often with derision. Students from Latin America commented that there are more fundamental challenges to address, such as poverty, and that the LGBTQIA+ community is more concerned about their basic rights and personal safety. Others commented on the generational divide and that older people are struggling to understand queer culture in general as well as the distinction between gender and sex. Students reacted strongly to proposed gender-neutral subject pronouns such as “elle” in Spanish, saying that it sounds like a foreign language. Several students commented that the questions we were posing were very American-centric. While some students suggested that their societies simply were not ready for this conversation or that it needed to start in a very elemental place, others said it was happening anyway, whether people liked it or not. One student said they did not need society to understand or approve the changes; people in their community were experimenting and playing with language to suit their own needs and others should simply get up to speed.

180    Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom

Our initial research has revealed that this conversation is in its earliest stages. There is a dearth of academic research on the topic and language academies refuse to participate. As a result, more questions than answers have been generated. In order to create a more inclusive environment for our students, might we be guilty of cultural expropriation? Should two cis-gendered, American professors lead the charge on this complex issue that crosses linguistic and cultural borders? Do larger conversations about the legitimacy and necessity of such changes need to take place in-country to generate momentum amongst native speakers? Should norms be established locally or globally? In order to answer these questions, we have generated this reflection to open the conversation to academics across the country and globe. At our own institution, our next step is to hold a forum with queer and non-binary students, both American and international, to solicit their ideas and suggestions for how to address linguistic, pedagogical, and cultural concerns in Romance-language instruction. As we gather more data from informal and formal sources, we expect more questions, as well as answers, to surface. REFERENCES Académie Française. (2019, February 28). La féminisation des noms de métiers et de fonctions [pdf file]. Retrieved from http://www.academie-francaise.fr/ sites/academie-francaise.fr/files/rapport_feminisation_noms_de_metier_ et_de_fonction.pdf Bonneville, F. (2019, January 10). Éviter de se faire soigner en français quand on ne se sent ni femme, ni homme. Radio-Canada. Retrieved from https://ici.radio -canada.ca/nouvelle/1145786/transgenres-non-binaires-ontario-canada -langue-francophone-soins-sante?fbclid=IwAR3in5ur9lXs0IV0aKPMZ4am3t _h1DYvd8CE5RpxCFwAFzChrEfXnInG6Cw Bosque, I. (n.d.). Sexismo lingüístico y visibilidad de la mujer* [pdf file]. Retrieved from http://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Sexismo_linguistico_y_visibilidad_ de_la_mujer_0.pdf Gender Neutral Language in Spanish Nonbinary Wiki. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender_neutral_language_in_Spanish Harris Interactive. (2017, October 18). La population française connaît-elle l’écriture inclusive? Quelle opinion en a-t-elle? Etude pour mots-clés. Retrieved from http:// harris-interactive.fr/opinion_polls/lecriture-inclusive/ ¿Lenguaje inclusivo? RAE se refirió al uso de las letras E y X en el debate de género. (2018, June 15). Retrieved from https://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/ sociedad/sucesos/lenguaje-inclusivo-rae-se-refirio-al-uso-de-las-letras-e-y-x-en -el/2018-06-15/163125.html Les Salopettes. (2017, September 27). Petit guide pratique de l’écriture inclusive. Retrieved from https://lessalopettes.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/ petit-guide-pratique-de-lecriture-inclusive/

Creating a Gender-Inclusive Romance Language Classroom    181 Reyes, R. A. (2017, November 6). To Be Or Not To Be Latinx? For Some Hispanics, That Is the Question. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/ news/latino/be-latinx-or-not-be-latinx-some-hispanics-question-n817911 Should Spain’s Constitution be Gender Neutral? (2019, July 9). Language Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.languagemagazine.com/2018/07/19/should -spains-constitution-be-gender-neutral/ University of Minnesota Student Writing Support. (n.d.). Nonbinary gender pronouns. Retrieved from http://writing.umn.edu/sws/quickhelp/grammar/ nonbinary.html

This page intentionally left blank.

CHAPTER 10

CRITICAL HIP-HOP Pedagogy of the Populace1 Kevin W. Clinard Independent Scholar

Hip-hop is a body of knowledge more vast and encompassing than even many of its practitioners—one that students often comprehend better than their teachers. —Jeff Chang, 2013

Rap is something you do. Hip-hop is something you live . . . You are not just doing hip-hop. —KRS-One, 2001, Get Your Self Up

Critical hip-hop is a viable and active social, cultural, and political space in which the radical reimagining of our society is deliberate in its resistance to dominant, hegemonic prescriptions of what our society ought to be. While the analyses and activism of various hip-hop artists have been profound in both the depth of their criticism and radical re-imagination, their viability in the Academy is often under-recognized, if not outright ignored. As a result, critical hip-hop and critical academic scholarship are often seen as estranged social disciplines. However, critical hip-hop constitutes a

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 183–198 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

183

184    K. W. CLINARD

particularly popularized form of public pedagogy that has had a profound impact on the out-of-school curricular development of many individuals’ lives. This essay explores the potential for a synthesis of the two in scholarly, social, and activist spaces, particularly in light of the current sociopolitical moment. SETTING THE STAGE In writing this chapter, I hope to expand hip-hop’s notion as a viable source of sociocultural theorizing, pedagogical power, and curricular creation within the existing structures of curricular and pedagogical theorizing, practice, and praxis. I will go about accomplishing the first by analyzing and establishing precedent—though I am arguing that hip-hop’s viability in dominant academic spaces is largely underutilized, that is not to say that there is no existing research on hip-hop. On the contrary, a number of scholars have made notable contributions to the integration of hip-hop oriented methodologies and academic scholarship, however, the extent to which mainstream academia has acknowledged hip-hop as a viable source of academic knowledge falls far short of what it could be and what it ought to be. After establishing and analyzing precedent, I will work to define a number of terms that will be used in subsequent pages in this essay. I take the time to define these terms for a couple of reasons: Fundamentally, the ascription of meaning to language is a particularly malleable process—that is, an understanding of terminology can be deeply subjective in nature. As William G. Lycan (2000) points out, “nearly every English sentence has more than one meaning” (p. 164); I argue that so, too, does nearly every word. While this subjective malleability greatly enhances the variety of educational experiences that one may have on a given topic (even within the confines of a given sentence), it can also have the effect of complicating what may otherwise be a more precise discussion. In defining terminology to be used, I hope to clarify the ways in which the respective terminology is to be used in the context of this work. Another reason that I take the time to define terminology is that I hope to give context to the ways in which the terminology exists relationally towards one another, particularly that language which one might seldom find in academic discussions (i.e., “hip-hop”). After defining the terminology, I will work to establish a theoretical basis for the expansion of hip-hop, and critical hip-hop in particular, into critical academic spaces, with particular foci on the analysis of ways in which this expansion (or, perhaps, integration) challenges the structure of the field’s dominant epistemological and ontological structures, especially in light of

Critical Hip-Hop    185

recent research regarding the necessity of such challenges. Furthermore, I will argue that, at least in some particular spaces, critical hip-hop constitutes critical academic scholarship in its own right. After establishing this theoretical basis, I will go deeper into the idea that critical hip-hop constitutes academic scholarship. Following this, I will analyze the particular power and possibility that critical hip-hop carries with it in terms of its status as a particular popularized source of public pedagogy and its nature as a form of public, sociocultural, political, and activist-oriented research that has broad appeal in the larger society and in particular to segments of the population that are often outside the confines of traditional academic scholarship. After analyzing critical hip-hop as a particularly popularized form of public pedagogy, I will look at the ethical dimensions of the integration of critical hip-hop and critical academic scholarship, with a particular look at the necessity of messiness in academic scholarship and research (Love, 2017). Finally, I will conclude with riffs and reflections on hope and possibility, specifically regarding the ways in which collaborative efforts of critical hip-hop and critical academic scholarship can transform our society’s ontological and epistemological structures in ways that benefit the people. PRECEDENT Over the past several years, there have been a number of scholars who have contributed to a fledgling, yet growing literature base regarding hip-hop’s potential as a source of educational performance and curricular development. Much of this has been within or near the domain of hip-hop based education, a term broadly describing the collective efforts of scholars and practitioners to implement hip-hop based pedagogies in school-based and non-school-based educational spaces (Love, 2015, p. 108; Hill, 2009a, p. 3). Hip-hop based education has made significant efforts across a range of formal and nonformal academic subjects that include literature (Hill, 2009a), composition (Rice, 2003), early childhood and elementary education (Love, 2015), urban education and teacher education (Akom, 2009; Hill, 2009a; Bridges, 2011; Petchauer, 2011; Hill and Petchauer, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Love, 2015; Emdin, 2016; Emdin and Adjapong, 2018), STEM-based education (Emdin, 2010; 2013; Adjapong and Emdin, 2015), feminism (Pough, Neal, & Morgan, 2007; Brown, 2009; Love, 2012), queer studies (Hill, 2009b; Kruse, 2016; Love, 2017), popular cultural studies (Stovall, 2006), and counseling education (Levy, 2018), among others. In addition to the efforts made by hip-hop based educators, there has been some scholarship in more theoretical dimensions of educational research as well as academic research in general. These include transnational

186    K. W. CLINARD

research in education (Porfilio and Viola, 2012), poetic analyses (Bradley, 2017), social and cultural histories and historiographies (Rose, 1994; 2008; Kitwana, 2002; Chang, 2005; 2007; Asante, 2008), hip-hop biography (Dyson, 2006), reflective analyses (Dyson, 2010), ethnographic research (Dimitriadis, 2014), lyrical analyses (Au, 2005), religious studies (Dyson, 2007), and intersectional research (Porfilio, Roychoudhury, & Gardner, 2014), among others. DEFINING THE TERMS As one begins to engage in a discussion or an analysis on a particular topic, it is often worthwhile to come to a common understanding of the terminology to be used, in order to prevent potential misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the concepts discussed. As such, I wish to define a number of terms relative to how those terms will be used within the context of this essay. It is important to note that these are not intended to be definitions of the terms in a broad context, rather, they are attempts to clarify how these terms will be used in this essay in particular. Hip-Hop Hip-hop here refers to a culture and a music characterized by five main elements: rapping and MCing, DJing, breakdancing/B-Boying and BGirling, graffiti art, and a deep knowledge of one’s self and of one’s social and cultural histories (Love, 2012, p. 5) and which is rooted in an historical and cultural expression of Black aesthetics (Williams, 2010, p. 221). Critical Hip-Hop Critical hip-hop is a subsection of hip-hop writ large that refers specifically to those particular dimensions of hip-hop that incite and compel its audience to both question and critically analyze the way the world is, as well as dream and (re)imagine how the world could be and ought to be. Critical hip-hop also refers to specific instances that incite and compel its audiences as well as its creators to challenge and work toward the reconceptualization of the sociocultural milieu in which they exist. It is important to point out that critical hip-hop does not necessarily refer to all rap music or even all hip-hop in general. Rather, it refers to a particularly critical subsection of the music and culture. Indeed, much of what constitutes critical hip-hop is what is referred to as “underground”—hip-hop

Critical Hip-Hop    187

music that exists outside of a major record label—however, there have also been some instances of critical hip-hop music that have entered the hiphop mainstream (and on a major record label) while maintaining their criticality. Public Pedagogy This essay builds upon the work of Sandlin, Schultz, and Burdick in their 2010 Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling in its understanding of what public pedagogy is and in its belief in its necessity in enacting substantive societal change. As such, it conceptualizes public pedagogy as a multifaceted, multi-disciplinary, social, political, and revolutionary process through which official knowledge (Apple, 1993) is decentered, fundamental assumptions about “what counts as pedagogy” (Sandlin et al., 2010, p. 4, emphasis in original) are called into question, and critical dialogues on the nature of educational practice and praxis are opened up and (re)examined “both within and outside of schools” (p. 4). CURRICULUM This essay conceptualizes curriculum through a broad understanding of the word that understands curriculum to be far more than subject matter or that which is covered in the “official” (Apple, 1993) curriculum of schools. Rather, curriculum occupies a series of multifaceted journeys and quests to uncover meaning in life—and, indeed, the question of what makes a life worth living (Schubert, 2010b, p. 10). As such, it makes coming to a certain definition of the word difficult indeed, so rather than attempting to embark on The [kind of] Quest for Certainty that Dewey warned us about in 1929 (Dewey, 1929), I ask that the reader engage in what Schubert calls “a productive uncertainty” (Schubert, 2009, p. 8): an understanding best exemplified by Dead Prez when they say “we think we found the absolute truth/but only to discover/it’s a labyrinth/we go from one maze into another/so many chambers and angles/peelin’ the onion layers” (Dead Prez, 2012, Overstand)—that curriculum is a definition that is best understood as continually evolving, perhaps uncovering two questions for every one that it answers. This is not to say that this “productive uncertainty” is devoid of organization, however, I harken toward the image (and the sound) of a jazz musician improvising—navigating skillfully through a milieu of historical themes, harmonic and melodic considerations, oftentimes deeply complex and quickly evolving chordal changes and modular structures, rhythmic

188    K. W. CLINARD

and tempo-based considerations, as well as those which emerge out of the melodic/harmonic conversation that is happening in the present moment ( Jones, 2015) between musicians on stage—as well as that which emerges from the unspoken conversation held between performer and audience. As such, one might argue that curriculum emerges and evolves in a parallel, improvisatory manner, through its historiographic “Journeys of Expansion and Synopsis” (Schubert, 2010a), that it constructs and co-constructs itself through a variety of curricular landscapes (He, Schultz, & Schubert, 2015, p. xxiii), curricular commonplaces (Schwab, 1969; 1970; He et al., 2015), curriculum venues (Schubert, 2010c), and through a number of curricular orientations (Schubert, 1986; Watkins, 1993), interweaving and integrating in ways perhaps most concisely understood through the conceptualization of the field into its central questions (Schubert, 1986, p. 1; He et al., 2015, p. xxiv). A THEORETICAL BASIS One might ask: Why would one combine such seemingly disparate concepts as hip-hop and pedagogy? Or those of hip-hop and curriculum? This is a legitimate question to ask as both duplets certainly fall outside of the field’s dominant epistemological bases as well as conceptualizations of its dominant ethoses or ethical considerations (to the extent that, to many, hip-hop conjures up images of drug abuse, graphic violence, glorification of wealth and waste, and discriminatory attitudes towards women, among other vices commonly associated with the music and the culture). To the epistemic point, I believe that in a field historiographically characterized by expansion and synopsis (Schubert, 2010a; Brown & Au, 2014), it is important for curriculum scholars and researchers to engage in both. As such, this chapter seeks to be both a point of expansion and a call for further expansion of hip-hop and its related epistemologies into the academy writ large and into the fields of curriculum and pedagogy specifically. Furthermore, the call to challenge the dominant ontological structure of the field’s epistemology through the curricular injection of hip-hop related epistemologies constitutes the kind of Charles Mills (1998) informed revisionist challenge that Anthony Brown and Wayne Au call for in their 2014 “Race, Memory, and Master Narratives: A Critical Essay on U.S. Curriculum History” (Brown & Au, 2014), as well as recent calls to “brown” the field of curriculum studies (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2015). In addition to contributing towards the expansion of the field’s conceptual epistemic bases, the integration of critical hip-hop based epistemologies (Brown, Brown, & Rothrock, 2015, p. 212) into the broader epistemei

Critical Hip-Hop    189

of curriculum studies and critical pedagogy, as well as those of academic scholarship in general, present viable, practical spaces of contribution and theoretical frameworks through which activist pedagogies are developed and performed. Perhaps the central, defining features separating critical hip-hop from hip-hop writ large lie within its conceptual and philosophic foci on social change, critical political thought and action, the revelation of harmful propaganda, critical revolutionary interpersonal praxis, deliberate social re-imagination, the sustainable development of self, and a steady focus on making these happen in reality—and not at the expense of one’s self or of one’s community. As such, critical hip-hop remains among the most underutilized sources of critical construction and problem solving among academics in general. CRITICAL HIP-HOP AS CRITICAL ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP I do not believe it is a misguided assertion to say that at least some instances of critical hip-hop constitute critical academic scholarship in the most full, legitimized sense of the phrase. Or, if this is too extreme to consider, there are certainly at least some instances of critical hip-hop that constitute academic scholarship to a similar extent to which other, parallel activists, musicians, poets, artists, and popular social commentators do the same. In other words, many readers would not give it a second thought if excerpts from Malcolm X’s speeches or writings or if Maya Angelou’s poetry, screenplay writing, or speeches were used alongside other scholarly sources in a research paper on civil rights and the civil rights movement, Black epistemology, revolutionary political thought and activism, or in any number of other research areas in which their respective contributions provide insight, and add to the overall understanding and development of/on a particular subject. This is true despite neither one having received formal education at the doctoral-level or having been formally trained in doctoral-level research methodologies. Indeed, one might argue that their contributions to the research far exceed those of many individuals who have been the recipients of such advanced levels of formal education. However, many of the same readers who would welcome a reference to the work of James Baldwin or Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) might not be so quick to receive one from KRS-One or Immortal Technique—indeed these might even be unfamiliar names to such readers. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons: First, the academic contributions of such artists deserve a level of recognition in academic spaces commensurate with the viability of their work to contribute meaningfully to such spaces. Their current status occupying as an “other” in education

190    K. W. CLINARD

(Brown, 2005, p. 289) falls short of this goal, and in an era of increasingly dire social risk and consequences, it is dangerously myopic to continue to ignore the contributions of parallel actors, scholars, and thinkers because they happen to fall outside of education’s mainstream. As Clinard (2017) remarks, In the quest for significant societal change, it is insufficient for various social factions to exist in a parallel, un-tandem, relation to one another. Rather, it is of utmost importance that the various dissenting factions organize and collaborate in unity if they are to make significant strides towards a more just, more peaceful, more loving society and world. (p. 19)

As such, I argue that the integration of hip-hop based epistemologies (Brown et al., 2015, p. 212) into critical academic spaces has the potential for a complementary effect, whereby each has the potential to add to the depth, breadth, scope, and impact of each other. Indeed, several critical hip-hop artists already draw explicitly from the work of critical academic scholars (see Dead Prez’s reference to Frantz Fanon in their Information Age song “Intelligence is Sexy” [Dead Prez, 2012] or Constant Flow’s reference to Noam Chomsky on his 2014 Ascension album’s song titled “Young Lords” [Constant Flow, 2014] for just a couple of examples of direct references; also see Immortal Technique’s “Conquerors” on The Martyr [Immortal Technique, 2011], which features an extended excerpt from a speech by John Henrik Clarke). Additionally, there are a number of albums which feature guest spots or direct contributions on the albums themselves from critical academic scholars (see Cornel West’s contributions on Brother Ali’s “Letter to my Countrymen” on his Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color album [Brother Ali, 2012] and Immortal Technique’s “Sign of the Times” from The Martyr [Immortal Technique, 2011], for examples). Cornel West’s three hip-hop albums, Sketches of My Culture (West, 2001), Street Knowledge (West, 2004), and Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations (West and BMWMB, 2007) represent significant contributions in this tradition, the latter of which features many collaborations with critical hip-hop artists. Lauryn Hill’s (1998) The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is an eponymous reference to Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) The Miseducation of the Negro. While these and other examples are powerful in the depth of their contribution, they represent only the beginning of what could be and what ought to be; furthermore, they represent only a small fraction of critical hip-hop writ large. Indeed, critical academic scholarship still falls outside of critical hip-hop’s mainstream, just as critical hip-hop continues to fall outside of critical academia’s as well.

Critical Hip-Hop    191

CRITICAL HIP-HOP: A PARTICULARLY POPULARIZED FORM OF PUBLIC PEDAGOGY Another reason the artificial dichotomization between critical hip-hop and critical academic scholarship is unfortunate lies in the depth and the breadth of critical hip-hop’s wider popular appeal among the general public. While the majority of critical hip-hop falls outside of hip-hop’s mainstream, its level of popularization far exceeds that of the majority of critical academia, and indeed, the majority of academia writ large. At the time of the writing of this essay, critical hip-hop mainstay, Immortal Technique, has 498,409 monthly listeners on Spotify alone (Spotify, 2019b), while duo Dead Prez have 593,164 (Spotify, 2019a). KRS-One has 1,126,542 monthly listeners (Spotify, 2019c), and Kendrick Lamar, a critical hip-hop artist who is currently a central figure in hip-hop’s mainstream, has nearly 25 million monthly listeners (Spotify, 2019d) and his song “HUMBLE” off of his 2017 album DAMN (Lamar, 2017; recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music— the first hip-hop album to do so [The New York Times, 2018], the 2018 Grammy for Best Rap Album, and many other awards) has received more than 1 billion listens as of the time of this writing (Spotify, 2019d). It is important to emphasize here that these numbers represent listeners on the Spotify platform alone and thus represents only a fraction of the total impact these artists have on popular culture and society. How many academic scholars enjoy that level of popularity? How many academic scholars have that many people following their work at all? This is not a condemnation of academic scholars and their (relative lack of) widespread popularity in the culture overall. Rather, it is a call for scholars to acknowledge and respect the broad potentiality of the work of critical hip-hop artists in our culture and society. At the heart of critical hip-hop’s relatively broad popularity is its accessibility. Unlike much of its parallels in critical academic scholarship, one does not need a PhD, or any form of advanced training or education in order to understand its content. This accessibility is no accident, however, most critical hip-hop artists have no advanced formal education themselves; rather their educational journey is more like that of Malcolm X (see The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley [X & Haley, 1973] for more details on his journey); that is, one of self-education (not that this self-education necessarily happened in prison). This is not to imply, however, that critical hip-hop artists’ messages are somehow “dumbed-down” or intellectually inferior, rather, like the speeches and writings of Malcolm X, their messages are deliberately accessible, yet are deeply nuanced, complex, and creative in their writing, execution, and delivery. When rapping on the topic of the necessity of speaking informed truth (particularly in the sense of speaking truth to power), Immortal Technique remarks of his message, that “[it is]

192    K. W. CLINARD

improbable that the average intellect could understand/so I encrypted this into hip-hop that’s in high demand/and spread it through the ghetto of every city like contraband” (Immortal Technique, 2001, “Speak Your Mind”). This deliberate, sophisticated encryption into material digestible by the general public lies at the heart of both the power and the influence, as well as the popularization of critical hip-hop and its many messages. In addition, critical hip-hop’s popularity can be at least partially attributed to its particular appeal to young people and people of color—both of whom largely occupy “othered” status in education and academia writ large. This means that not only is critical hip-hop reaching a larger audience than mainstream academia through the merits of its popularity, but it is further accessing and educating subsections of the population that are often unreached by academia. ETHICS AND ETHOSES: AUTHENTIC MESSINESS IN RESEARCH AND SOCIETY A quick note regarding the ethical dimensions of critical hip-hop and its potentiality in relation to academia: As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there is some potential for concerns regarding the content of hip-hop; namely that, at least in the popular consciousness, it is often full of drugs, violence, misogyny, homophobia, hypermasculinized imagery, glorification of materialism, and any number of other vices that seem to go against not only what critical academic scholarship is aiming for, but also the purported ideals of critical hip-hop itself. The reality is, there is a certain degree of truth in this concern. However, the reality behind this concern only exists to the extent to which hip-hop is a microcosm of the society in which it exists. As Bettina L. Love writes in her 2017 article, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” “Hip hop’s innovative aesthetics were not created in a vacuum; America’s obsession with brand consciousness, anti-intellectualism, violence, homophobia, sexism, and materialism all frame hip hop” (Love, 2017, p. 542; hooks, 2004, as cited in Love, 2017; Rose, 2008). However, this apparent set of contradictions is not necessarily so; or, rather, these contradictions do not necessarily detract from the overall message of critical hip-hop’s core epistemologies and ethoses. Instead, it creates a particular “messy” (Love, 2017) methodological space in which “the interconnections, inconsistencies, and entanglements of qualitative analysis” (Love, 2017, p. 541) are wrestled with in a legitimized context—one that is reflective of the realities behind the ways in which our world and our society actually operate in all of their inherent messiness, rather than the proverbial “test-tube” research space which often isolates variables out of context

Critical Hip-Hop    193

and out of relevant existence. In other words, if we are to consider the contributions of critical hip-hop artists to be a legitimized form of research (and I argue that we should), then I argue that their apparent contradictory nature and their messiness are not only not detriments to their overall message and potentiality as sources of curricular and pedagogical knowledge and social re-imagination, but that they rather constitute significant assets. It places the context of their research, their art, within the spaces in which it actually operates and therefore achieves and operates within a level of proximity seldom reached by traditional academic research. This is not to say that problematic tendencies in the music and the culture ought to be ignored; to the contrary, I argue that critical hip-hop is a social and cultural space in which the problematic structures and aspects of both critical hip-hop and hip-hop writ large, as well as those underlying American society in general, are able to be wrestled with in deeply contextualized and legitimized ways. CONCLUSION: RIFFS AND REFLECTIONS ON HOPE AND POSSIBILITY At the heart of critical hip-hop’s potential as a source of curricular knowledge and sociopolitical transformation is its ability to generate hope and conceptualize on the depth of the possibility of what ought to be and what can be. This broad-curricular social re-imagination, through its popularization and its status as an accessible form of social research, constitutes a form of public pedagogy that has the potential to educate and transform the lives of its observers. This, then, allows critical hip-hop’s messages of hope and revolution to spread across the milieu of relevant epistemic bases that its message pertains to and to the individuals operating within these epistemic bases. When critical academic scholarship, and critical pedagogy and curriculum studies in particular, integrate critical hip-hop based epistemologies into their scholarship, an expansion of the scope and the structure of their work has the potential to occur. This expansion has the ability to challenge the dominant structures of “official knowledge” (Apple, 1993) and challenges the existing canonized knowledge that a field possesses (or perhaps is possessed by). At its fullest extent, the expansion of the ontological structures surrounding curricular knowledge and notions of “what counts” as research into spaces that traditionally exist outside of the fields’ dominant structures (such as critical hip-hop and its relevant epistemologies) has the potential to dis-integrate, subvert, and transcend the canonizing paradigm in the fields’ ontological structures. This, then, decenters knowledge and allows it to expand into grassroot spaces that then, in turn, expand the state of knowledge in education in

194    K. W. CLINARD

a pseudo-reciprocal effect—that is, both traditional forms of academic knowledge and those forms which exist outside of the mainstreams of academia benefit from their expansion into each other’s epistemic spaces both through the creation of collaborative partnerships in which both parties benefit, as well as through the narrowing of the notably arbitrary gaps that exist between them. By working in tandem, ideas can be generated that neither party would have created independently, and by doing so we “[break] the cycle of feeling stagnant” (Lamar, 2015, Mortal Man), creating the potential for a more just, more peaceful, more loving society and world through critical collaboration and mutual respect towards both the importance of and the contributions of one another. NOTE 1. This chapter is partially derived from a presentation titled “Critical Hip-Hop and the Pedagogy of the Populace” at the International Critical Media Literacy Conference, Savannah, Georgia, 2017.

REFERENCES Adjapong, E., & Emdin, C. (2015). Rethinking pedagogy in urban spaces: Implementing hip-hop pedagogy in the urban science classroom. Journal of Urban Learning Teaching and Research, 11, 66–77. Akom, A. A. (2009). Critical hip hop pedagogy as a form of liberatory praxis. Equity & Excellence in Education, 42(1), 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10665680802612519 Apple, M. W. (1993). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York, NY: Routledge. Asante, M. K., Jr. (2008). It’s bigger than hip hop: The rise of the post-hip-hop generation. New York, NY: St. Martins Griffin. Au, W. (2005). Fresh out of school: Rap music’s discursive battle with education. Journal of Negro Education, 74(3), 210–220. Bradley, A. (2017). Book of rhymes: The poetics of hip hop. New York, NY: Basic Civitas. Bridges, T. (2011). Towards a pedagogy of hip hop in urban teacher education. The Journal of Negro Education, 80(3), 325–338. Brother Ali. (2012). Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color [MP3]. Minneapolis, MN: Rhymesayers Entertainment. Brown, A. L. (2005). The “other:” Examining the “other” in education. In S. J. Farenga & D. Ness (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Education and Human Development (pp. 289–292). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Brown, A. L., & Au, W. (2014). Race, memory, and master narratives: A critical essay on U.S. curriculum history. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 358–389. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/curi.12049

Critical Hip-Hop    195 Brown, K. D., Brown, A. L., & Rothrock, R. (2015). Culturally relevant pedagogy. In M. F. He, B. D. Schultz, & W. H. Schubert (Eds.), The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education (pp. 207–214). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Brown, R. N. (2009). Black girlhood celebration: Toward a hip-hop feminist pedagogy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Constant Flow. (2014). Ascension [MP3]. New York, NY: Viper records. Chang, J. (2005). Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York, NY: St. Martins Press. Chang, J. (2007). Total chaos: The art and aesthetics of hip-hop. New York, NY: Basic civitas. Chang, J. (2013). Foreword. In M. L. Hill & E. Petchauer (Eds.), Schooling hip-hop: Expanding hip-hop based education across the curriculum (pp. vii–ix). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Clinard, K. W. (2017). Critical hip-hop and the pedagogy of the populace. International Critical Media Literacy Conference. Savannah, GA. Retrieved from https:// digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2017/2017/19 Dead Prez. (2012). Information Age [MP3]. New York, NY: Krian Music Group. Dewey, J. (1929). The quest for certainty: A study of the relation of knowledge and action. New York, NY: Putnam. Dimitriadis, G. (2014). Framing hip hop: New methodologies for new times. Urban Education, 50(1), 31–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085914563185 Dyson, M. E. (2006). Holler if you hear me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books. Dyson, M. E. (2007). Between god and gangsta rap: Bearing witness to black culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Dyson, M. E. (2010). Know what I mean? Reflections on hip hop. New York, NY: Basic Civitas. Emdin, C. (2010). Urban science education for the hip-hop generation. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Emdin, C. (2013). The rap cypher, the battle, and reality pedagogy: Developing communication and argumentation in urban science education. In M. L. Hill & E. Petchauer (Eds.), Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum (pp. 11–27). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood . . . and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Emdin, C., & Adjapong, E. (Eds.). (2018). #HipHopEd: The compilation on hip-hop in education. Brill, The Netherlands: Sense. Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2015). Browning the curriculum: A project of unsettlement. In M. F. He, B. D. Schultz, & W. H. Schubert (Eds.), The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education (pp. 416–423). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. He, M. F., Schultz, B. D., & Schubert, W. H. (2015). The SAGE guide to curriculum in education. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Hill, L. (1998). The miseducation of Lauryn Hill [MP3]. Philadelphia, PA: Ruffhouse Records. Hill, M. L. (2009a). Beats, rhymes, and classroom life: Hip-hop pedagogy and the politics of identity. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

196    K. W. CLINARD Hill, M. L. (2009b). Scared straight: Hip-hop, outing, and the pedagogy of queerness. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 31(1), 29–54. doi:10.1080/10714410802629235 Hill, M. L., & Petchauer, E. (Eds.). (2013). Schooling hip-hop: Expanding hip-hop based education across the curriculum. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. hooks, b. (2004). We real cool: Black men and masculinity. New York, NY: Routledge. Immortal Technique. (2001). Revolutionary Vol. 1 [MP3]. New York, NY: Viper Records. Immortal Technique. (2011). The Martyr [MP3]. New York, NY: Viper Records. Jones, O. O. J. L. (2015). Theatrical jazz performance, Àse, and the power of the present moment. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Kitwana, B. (2002). The hip hop generation: Young Blacks and the crisis in African American culture. New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books. KRS-One (2001). The Sneak Attack [MP3]. New York, NY: Koch Records. Kruse, A. J. (2016). “Therapy was writing rhymes”: Hip-hop as resilient space for a queer rapper of color. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, No. 207–208, Winter/Spring, 101–122. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. Lamar, K. (2015) To pimp a butterfly. [MP3]. Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Los Angeles CA: Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope Records, and Top Dawg Entertainment. Lamar, K. (2017). DAMN [MP3]. Santa Monica and Los Angeles, CA: Top Dawg Entertainment, Interscope Records, and Aftermath Entertainment. Levy, I. (2018). Aligning community defined practice with evidence based group counseling: The hip hop cypher as group counseling. In #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-Hop in Education (pp. 97–100). Brill, The Netherlands: Sense. Love, B. L. (2012). Hip hop’s li’l sistas speak: Negotiating hip hop identities and politics in the new South. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Love, B. L. (2015). What is hip-hop-based education doing in nice fields such as early childhood and elementary education? Urban Education, 50(1), 106–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085914563182 Love, B. L. (2017). A ratchet lens: Black queer youth, agency, hip hop, and the black ratchet imagination. Educational Researcher, 46(9), 539–547. https:// doi.org/10.3102/0013189x17736520 Lycan, W. G. (2000). Philosophy of language: A contemporary introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. Mills, C. W. (1998). Blackness visible: Essays on philosophy and race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Petchauer, E. (2011). I feel what he was doin’: Responding to justice-oriented teaching through hip-hop aesthetics. Urban Education, 46(6), 1411–1432. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0042085911400335 Porfilio, B. J., & Viola, M. J. (2012). Hip-hop(e): The cultural practice and critical pedagogy of international hip-hop. New York, NY: P. Lang. Porfilio, B. J., Roychoudhury, D., & Gardner, L. M. (2014). See you at the crossroads: Hip hop scholarship at the intersections: Dialectical harmony, ethics, aesthetics, and panoply of voices. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.

Critical Hip-Hop    197 Pough, G. D., Neal, M. A., & Morgan, J. (Eds.). (2007). Home girls make some noise! Hip-hop feminism anthology. Mira Loma, CA: Parker. Rice, J. (2003). The 1963 hip-hop machine: Hip-hop pedagogy as composition. College Composition and Communication, 54(3). https://doi.org/10.2307/3594173 Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Rose, T. (2008). The hip hop wars: What we talk about when we talk about hip hop—and why it matters. New York, NY: Basic Books. Sandlin, J. A., Schultz, B. D., & Burdick, J. (2010). Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling. New York, NY: Routledge. Schubert, W. H. (1986). Curriculum: Perspective, paradigm, and possibility. New York, NY: Macmillan. Schubert, W. H. (2009). Love, justice and education: John Dewey and the Utopians. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Schubert, W. H. (2010a). Journeys of expansion and synopsis: Tensions in books that shaped curriculum inquiry, 1968–Present. Curriculum Inquiry, 40(1), 17–94. Schubert, W. H. (2010b). Outside curricula and public pedagogy. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling (pp. 10–19). New York, NY: Routledge. Schubert, W. H. (2010c). Curriculum venues. In C. Kridel, Encyclopedia of curriculum studies (pp. 272–274). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Schwab, J. J. (1969). The practical: A language for curriculum. School Review, 78, 1–23. Schwab, J. J. (1970). The practical: A language for curriculum. Washington, DC: National Education Association. Spotify. (2019a). Dead Prez. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/artist/2UBt 0GWBuPVXlPisRvWzlD Spotify. (2019b). Immortal Technique. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/ artist/7h8ja4JSORo2sXJPmCXRxa Spotify. (2019c). KRS-One. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/artist/2gINJ 8xw86xawPyGvx1bla Spotify. (2019d). Kendrick Lamar. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/artist/ 2YZyLoL8N0Wb9xBt1NhZWg Stovall, D. (2006). We can relate: Hip-hop culture, critical pedagogy, and the secondary classroom. Urban Education, 41(6), 585–602. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0042085906292513 The New York Times. (2018, April 16). 2018 pulitzer prize winners: Full list. The New York Times, p. A24. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/ business/media/pulitzer-prize-winners.html Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72–89. Watkins, W. H. (1993). Black curriculum orientations: A preliminary inquiry. Harvard Educational Review, 63(3), 321–338. West, C. (2001). Sketches of my Culture [MP3]. New York, NY: Artemis Records. West C. (2004). Street Knowledge [MP3]. Rancho Murietta, CA: ROC Diamond Records.

198    K. W. CLINARD West, C., & BMWMB. (2007). Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations [MP3]. Beverly Hills, CA: Hidden Beach Recordings. Williams, L. (2010). Hip-Hop as a site of public pedagogy. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of public pedagogy: Education and learning beyond schooling (pp. 221–232). New York, NY: Routledge. Woodson, C. G. (1933). The mis-education of the negro. Washington, DC: Associated. X, M., & Haley, A. (1973). The autobiography of Malcolm X: As told to Alex Haley. New York, NY: The Ballantine.

CHAPTER 11

AFFECTIVE SITES OF PUBLIC PEDAGOGY Arts-Based Approaches to Pedagogy for Privileged Learners Shalin Lena Raye Purdue University

In our current cultural climate, where voices and bodies are rising up—or kneeling—in protest against racial inequality, police violence, hate speech, and religious discrimination, there are emerging alternative narratives defending nationalism, individualism, and freedom of (any) speech. In a socalled “post-truth era,” where it is becoming more common to maintain sexist, White supremacist, Islamaphobic, and homophobic ideologies (to, sadly, only name a few), educators and educational researchers need to rethink what knowledge is valued and what “counts” as pedagogy, without conflating the outcomes of our critical approaches to teaching and research with “activism.” With these rising racial and cultural tensions emerging across the nation, on higher education campuses and within our surrounding communities, educators will soon need to broaden conceptions

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 199–212 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

199

200    S. L. RAYE

of critical pedagogy, aim to challenge some of the ideologies within current theoretical frameworks, and open space to ideate on the knowledge that is valued within our pedagogical approaches, especially within our current political landscape and with learners who might actively resist the social justice tenets of critical pedagogy. Educators need to be mindful of the various ways that people with privilege lay down epistemological barriers that contort and marbleize discursive, affective, and ideological ways of knowing. As educators, we need to call into question our own discursive ways we use privilege to protect ourselves and our students from emotional forms of knowing and feeling the injustices around us, and examine why we slide in and out of discourses of awareness, responsibility, and action. In this chapter, I will theorize how affective forms of knowledge can move between individuals and communities in ways that go beyond the capacity of formal education, but that educators and researchers can draw on to inform our pedagogy differently within social justice-oriented classrooms. I explore how public art as a site of affective education, in particular, might challenge and interrupt oppressive discourses held primarily by audiences with racial, religious, and economic privileges that ideologically sustain oppressive discourses within American culture. Exploring these affective and educative spaces of activism might help educators figure out what to do with emotions and emotional fallouts that happen when students from dominant and privileged sociocultural groups engage in social and cultural issues (Boler, 1999). I first examine some challenges of critical pedagogy as the primary approach for teaching anti-oppression and equitable education to privileged learners. I then turn to current work being done at the intersection of arts-based research, affective/embodied knowledge, and public pedagogy for social change, to look at how and under what circumstances art can be pedagogical for understanding complex emotional experiences of injustice, as well as how this medium can engage larger populations in public contexts in dialogue about experiences of oppression and injustice. I am not suggesting that art, alone, can lead to social change, but rather that there is a potential for art to function as an emotive site of pedagogy that absorbs audiences in nontraditional forms of learning that favor noncognitive and nonrational ways of knowing by rousing sensate, aesthetic, and emotional ways of being in the world. NEOLIBERAL AND AFFECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES Mark Olssen and Michael Peters (2005) describe a shift in higher education from educational inquiry (“intellectual enquiry”) to one that centered performance and measurable outcomes, which stems from innovations in technology and globalization, but as a result, sparked a neoliberal ideology

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     201

(pp. 313–314). They define neoliberalism as a “politically imposed discourse” which provides autonomy for the individual as an actor in the economy, limits government and state power, and emphasizes “choice, consumer sovereignty, competition and individual initiative, as well as those of compliance and obedience” (Olssen & Peters, 2005, p. 315). As these values dominate the culture of our economy, and informs how education is structured, it also informs how educators conceptualize “what counts” and what knowledge is valued so that students, educators, and researchers can participate successfully within this economic structure. What results is an educational structure that aligns with neoliberal, outcomes-based educational models. Approaches to education that are informed by neoliberal logics reinforce an assumption that there is a best way to teach, that a specific approach, structure, and language will lead to enhanced learning. More than this, however, is the underlying assumption that there are right answers for engaging students in discussions about social injustice and anti-oppressive education. Educators need to begin asking many important questions about how neoliberal influences on student understandings about the purpose of education impact the ways they come to social justice education. How might critical pedagogy be subjected to the same outcomes-based model students have been trained for in their K–12 classrooms, and how might this impact students from privileged positions differently than those from marginalized groups? How might an educational epistemology that assumes there is an objective truth that we can attain, impact the way social justice is addressed through critical pedagogy with a similar epistemological approach? The “outcome” to this approach would require of students to replace one “truth” about the world with another, more socially appropriate “truth.” This epistemic underpinning, if applied to critical pedagogy, holds a risk of conflict with personal beliefs and values, and for students who already have an epistemic position that there is a single truth about the world, it asks them to replace one truth (their own) with the idea that the world is not entirely as they thought. This also begs the question that if truth can be subjective, perhaps an epistemological shift is required if social justice pedagogies can take root. I want to be careful to note that critical pedagogy is important and necessary, but when working within this particular political climate, and with students from various privileged groups, within an academic environment driven by a neoliberal framework, it is important to be aware of how critical pedagogy can be appropriated as a tool of neoliberalism if we do not remain critical of its underlying epistemological and axiological underpinnings. When educating students in privileged groups, there may be more going on than simply emotional responses to social justice and diversity practices. These emotional responses are likely a result of an axiology that

202    S. L. RAYE

reflects neoliberal ideology, and educators need to theorize how this ethos might contribute to the ways in which students in privileged groups deal with their emotional resistance and responses to justice, diversity, and inclusion practices, and how these responses may be a form of maintenance of the status quo within various spaces of learning. THE LIMITATIONS OF RATIONALITY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION Pedagogical approaches that emphasize personal transformation, one individual at a time, assume that social change will follow. This is often a result of Freirean-based pedagogies that seek to develop critical consciousness, encourage individual transformation, and press for social action (Freire, 1970/2006). These approaches have traditionally been used with students who are part of minoritized groups, as was Freire’s vision in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. However, within many university spaces, learners are predominantly members of dominant, and often multiply privileged groups. While Freirean approaches to social justice education are extremely necessary with students who are minoritized, these same approaches need to be further theorized with students from privileged groups. These students do not inherently take up learning about oppression and social justice in the same way that minoritized students do (Allen & Rossatto, 2009; Boler, 1999; Ellsworth, 1989; Zembylas & Boler, 2003). As a result, these teaching practices are not producing the same sense of urgency for social change. The aim of these discursive and rational pedagogical approaches rests in the hope that if they are exposed to the material, they will be and do better. Often, critical pedagogy practices have as an end goal “transformation” that requires an individual to undergo a change in mindset, an awakening to a new way of seeing the world (to become “woke”), but often, this approach produces troubling emotions in the learning process that this approach to pedagogy cannot handle well within the classroom space (Zembylas, 2014). This emotional fallout has the potential to lead to the need for students or educators to silence what they view as problematic or troubling emotions, especially if they directly counter or threaten the pedagogical goal of transformation (Boler, 1999; Pennington, 2007; Potter, 2015; Stauber, 2017). What traditional approaches to critical pedagogy overlook is what to do with the emotional fallout that results from challenging deeply rooted socialized ideologies that feel like “truth” (Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2014; Zembylas & Boler, 2003). It may not be enough to assume that raising awareness to social problems through cognitive and rational teaching approaches is enough to counter the epistemic emotionality—and in today’s political climate, a deeply entrenched neoliberal epistemology—that emotionally and ethically transform

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     203

learners to act in ways that oppose social injustices. Instead of silencing problematic emotional knowledge, we can use and center these emotions as educative, felt, affective ways of moving students into a new way of being with and experiencing knowledge of oppression (Ahmed, 2004; Boler, 1999; Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013). Within social justice education, emotions can become a contentious presence in the classroom. If ignored, these emotions can move students into spaces of resistance where their previously held understandings endure and continue to reinforce the status quo. In a post-truth culture, the concept of “rational” thinking becomes subjective when feelings and beliefs function as a proxy for “truth.” WITNESSING AS PEDAGOGY Someone who does not have lived experience of racism cannot “know” racism through cognitive means alone. They may be able to understand the causes of racism, the impacts of racism, its psychology, its history, and its political manifestations in systemic forms. They may even be able to understand and come to know the concept of and even some experiences of discrimination. A main feature of critical pedagogy is to do much of this cognitive work, but exposure alone does not mean students will come to “know” racism. Sara Ahmed (2004) suggests that exposure to oppression needs to be ongoing, an iterative process: “The work of exposure is not over in the moment of hearing: often such testimonies have to be repeated, again and again” (p. 200). She further argues that exposure to pain can become appropriated by those who wish to heal the pain and move on (Ahmed, 2004, p. 35). Moving on should not be the goal to understanding the pain of others. She suggests that we enter into a different way of understanding these wounds: But our response to how the other’s pain is appropriated as the nation’s pain, and the wound is fetishized as the broken skin of the nation, should not be to forget the other’s pain. Our task instead is to learn how to hear what is impossible. Such an impossible hearing is only possible if we respond to a pain that we cannot claim as our own. (Ahmed, 2004, p. 35, emphasis in original)

If we center troubled knowledge as educative, we can engage it as a part of our individual and cultural fabric, like a palimpsest, where troubling knowledge is still present and made visible, even as new knowledge is written in over it. The new knowledge doesn’t actually remove the old, and removal should not be the aim. Both are present and visible. We should not press to unlearn problematic knowledge, but understand and feel it as part of our cultural historicity to contextualize the way power works within us on emotional and affective levels. The educative end goal may not even be for “understanding” or to resolve the tension that these knowledges create,

204    S. L. RAYE

but rather to create through this tension a dialogue, and the potential to move us into ways of being with cultural knowledges instead of seeking to erase them. The goal of critical work should be to move students into different ways of understanding emotional knowledges, especially the deep emotional attachments that contribute to the oppression of other bodies, to begin to understand emotions as a form of cultural knowledge. Of course, there are ethical considerations for pedagogies that challenge personal beliefs and worldviews. If we make visible the lived experiences of oppression, there are emotional risks to mitigate, that surface from both those who are marginalized as well as from those with privilege. Megan Boler (1999) advocates for a making visible a “collective witnessing,” of the emotions that surface from this kind of education (p. 174). She suggests an approach to understanding the world around us the need to open a space of witnessing through a pedagogical approach to use when working with individuals who experience an emotional fallout that results from “the emotions that often arise in the process of examining cherished beliefs and assumptions” (p. 176). She advocates for “a pedagogy of discomfort [that] emphasizes ‘collective witnessing’ as opposed to individualized self-reflection” as a “collectivized engagement in learning to see differently” (p. 176). This is done by making emotions, even ones that might be considered problematic or troubling, visible in educative spaces. Julia G. Brooks (2011) argues that we may intellectually examine and learn to “see” issues of social justice in our classrooms, but this process of making visible these issues cannot overlook the importance of the emotions involved in this learning process: In order to disrupt the process of prioritizing cognition over emotion in the context of dialogism, it seems important that instructors be willing to explore and engage how to deal with and honor the discomfort of all participants in the classroom to the end of avoiding the sort of violence that might ultimately be feeding students’ unwillingness to risk. (p. 56)

The idea is not to cover the emotions or the histories that inform these responses, but to make them visible. Making these emotions visible means addressing these pedagogically, within the space of the classroom, or beyond, both through discursive and nondiscursive means, to allow for the hearing of troubled knowledge (Ahmed, 2004; Zembylas, 2013) to be engaged by audiences who will struggle with the hearing. ART AS ACTIVIST PEDAGOGY Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) addresses a tension in justice-oriented approaches to education that rely on cognitive or “common sense” approaches to critical pedagogy, “especially those whose works engage issues of cultural

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     205

difference, social responsibility, and violence and who think that linear, purely cognitive approaches to alleviating racisms, sexisms, and other oppressive structures have failed or proven to be woefully inadequate” (p. 62). With learners who cannot know oppression, these pedagogies that center cognitive and rational approaches to learning are, indeed, “woefully inadequate.” We need to begin questioning some theoretical understandings regarding the nature of knowledge, who produces it, who accesses it, and how we can come to know/experience this knowledge. A key component in this approach is not setting emotions and reason into a binary against one another, but acknowledging that these happen simultaneously. Stephanie Springgay (2011) asserts that “the affective is an attempt to shift from the ‘linguistic turn’ and an emphasis on discourse towards the senses and ethico-aesthetic spaces” (p. 67). This is a deliberate move beyond the discursive, using language and reason as ways of engaging in communication and understanding. Because many critical approaches to learning assume that knowledge, especially the “right kind” of knowledge, exists outside of ourselves, it becomes the responsibility of the educator to provide it through critical means. Activist art as an affective form of pedagogy must, inherently, have a different expected outcome from traditional forms of critical pedagogy that center a prefigured transformation as a primary pedagogical aim. Because art has the capacity to engage emotions in unpredictable ways, we cannot presume to know how art will affect a person’s encounter with it. There cannot be a predetermined assumption and outcome of “transformation” or “change.” Intending a specific outcome (like becoming “woke”) becomes just another neoliberal-based learning outcome and potentially a form of banking education that Freire warned against. Art has the potential to function as an emotive site of pedagogy that serves as a catalyst for moving people into alternative relationships with oppressive knowledge, not as a way to change minds as a starting point or as a “learning outcome,” but as a way to change the way people are moved into a relationship with this knowledge in different ways. Zorrilla and Tisdell (2016) focus on the role of art in critical public pedagogy and center their study on the conceptual artist, Luis Camnitzer, who acknowledges the potential of art to “open spaces”: Codes are exchanged and new meanings are formed and evolve as work, artist, and viewer come into relation. The budding may awaken viewer and artist to a new understanding of power imbalances, hopefully challenging ideology and perhaps affecting the status quo. (p. 285)

The notion here, that “codes are exchanged” and that viewers and artists are moved into a “new understanding” is in line with how Ahmed (2004)

206    S. L. RAYE

suggests we approach discourses regarding inequity and oppression. These new understandings via exchanged codes are not necessarily cognitive or verbal discourses, but can also take place within the medium of art. Zorrilla and Tisdell (2016) emphasize that “there may not be any verbal ‘dialogue’ in the public space, but we cannot assume that such counter hegemonic art is not affecting the development of critical consciousness” (p. 285). The arts, and visual art in particular, help do the work of exposure to catalyze learning through artistic medium, which may be able to explain the unexplainable with audiences via non-discursive and non-linguistically based forms of expression. This kind of relationship to difficult knowledge is particularly important for those within our community with various forms of privilege. Exposure can take various forms, within various educative sites, and can serve as a catalytic pedagogy for understanding in ways that move beyond traditional discourse-based forms of knowing. Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica Meiners draw on “sociologist [Avery] Gordon’s [1997] observation that those in privileged economic and social positions in Western post industrial nations actively chose a response of indifference or inaction to the social and economic crises that unfold” (p. 1). In “The Artistic-Aesthetic and Curriculum,” Maxine Greene (1977) identifies this inaction or passivity and the lack of urgency that may be inherent in our engagement with oppressive forces in our culture, which stems from “a sense of social structures and explanatory systems pressing down on human beings and rendering them passive: gazers, not seers; hearers, not listeners” (p. 284). Artist and scholar Suzi Gablik (1995) recognizes that “when there is no quick fix for some of our most pressing social problems, according to Lacy, there may be only our ability to witness and feel the reality taking place around us. ‘This feelingness is a service that artists offer to the world,’ she [Lacy] says” (p. 82). Greene (1977), suggests that we can come into the process of wide-awakeness through an intellectual and affective catalyst by integrating aesthetics into the curriculum to deepen a social sense of listening, though aesthetics are certainly not the only medium for priming social change: “I am not suggesting that the fostering of aesthetic experiences is the single way or even the primary way of opening critical perspectives” (p. 287). Rather, she suggests it is one way of many ways we can learn to listen to those in the world around us. For this to happen, we need to enter into a new relationship with some of the emotional wounds people experience. If ignored, these emotions can move us into spaces of resistance or erasure where previously held understandings continue to reinforce the status quo, or attempts to heal wounds leads to a desire for historical erasure. Wide-awakeness is not a result of being “woke” or a state of being we can achieve at all; it is an ongoing epistemological process. I am proposing that we focus less, however, on developing critical awareness, which is, in itself, an outcomes-based form of knowledge, and shift our

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     207

attention onto the ways we position ourselves in relation to the knowledge others hold and to learn, instead, how to bear witness. We need to change the way we think of knowledge, especially knowledge that is felt by those who experience oppression, not as something we can acquire, but as something we can experience through our proximity to the affect it produces. Ahmed (2004) suggests that these kinds of exposures and pedagogical approaches that engage emotions are not about moving on: The emotional struggles against injustice are not about finding good or bad feelings, and then expressing them. Rather, they are about how we are moved by feelings into a different relation to the norms that we wish to contest, or the wounds we wish to heal. Moving here is not about “moving on,” or about “using” emotions to move away, but moving and being moved as a form of labour or work, which opens up different kinds of attachments to others, in part through the recognition of this work as work. (p. 201)

We need to think about the relationship between individuals, communities, and the process involved in various ways of understanding one another. If these felt knowledges are not able to be acquired through discursive rationality, knowing becomes an embodied exchange, an affective social experience. ITERATIVE SITES OF EXPOSURE On the side of a brick building in Footscray, a small suburb of Melbourne Australia, there is a wall mural made up of images, captions, poetry, and art about living with physical and internal disabilities. What is captured in this mural are the highly emotional experiences of living in a social climate where the majority of the population are able-bodied. The mural was created by the disabled community to celebrate their lived experiences as “disabled” [community preferred terminology], but also to educate the surrounding public about the value of their lived experiences. The mural, as explained by the public artist Larissa MacFarlane in her blog about the piece, “seeks to change the way people think about and define disability, to break down and end the internalised shame among people with disabilities, and to promote the idea that disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity in which we can take pride” (MacFarlane, 2018, para. 4). A primary outcome of critical pedagogy is often to change the way people think about an issue, but it seems that simply telling people about the issue may not be enough to actually alter and interrupt deeply held socialized understandings about an issue, like disability. What the mural offers is an emotive space where the artist and community members sought to “create a public space for people to explore and share the power of identifying as disabled, and to tell our

208    S. L. RAYE

stories, together, in public, with pride” (MacFarlane, 2018, para. 3). The catalyst that this emotive space of art offers addresses both the pedagogical aim for privileged groups “to change the way people think about and define disability” and also “to break down and end the internalised shame among people with disabilities” (MacFarlane, 2018, para. 4). This aesthetic and affective space does more than simply “tell” through discursive and rational ways that there are troubling ways the disabled community is seen by the privileged group; it exposes learners (passersby) into sensate and affective spaces of knowing in an iterative way. This exemplifies how we might understand what Sara Ahmed (2004) means by “learn[ing] how to hear what is impossible” (p. 35, emphasis in original). The mural does not seek to help the able-bodied community “move on” with the pain of marginalization experienced within the disabled community. The mural seeks to expose people to this emotional space in a way that moves beyond telling, beyond traditional approaches to teaching about a social issue. This non-discursive form of communication and expression is, all at once, a creative, reflective, political, embodied, and emotional form of public pedagogy. Ellsworth (2005) opens the possibility for learning in spaces that are not only within institutional settings, and that these spaces of learning, that do not center cognitive approaches to the development of knowledge, have immense value: The nonrational, nonlinguistic, prelinguistic spaces and times at the frontiers of the cognitive are not empty, meaningless, irrational, irrelevant, or dangerous to teaching and learning. They are, rather, filled with other knowledges and practices that make all sorts of anomalous pedagogies thinkable and intelligible. (p. 97)

I see these public and aesthetic spaces of learning to be especially important when dealing with issues of social injustices, and especially with learners who do not have lived experiences of oppression, or worse, intentionally or unintentionally reproduce oppressive ideologies within their culture due to their privilege of unfamiliarity. Ahmed (2004) suggests it is possible for these embodied forms of knowledge to pass between bodies and objects, and that these can become “sticky” with affect: “Emotions can move through the movement or circulation of objects. Such objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension” (p. 11). Knowledge, in the form of affective, precognitive, nonlinguistic, felt knowledges, has the capacity to move or “stick” as the artist, the art, and the audience move into new ways of understanding one another. Springgay (2011) takes up Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to expand on the way affect circulates:

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     209 That because of the realization that affects link up with other affects—that affects are not benign or innate and given, but co-produced through proximinal encounters—then, how we understand affect shifts from something passively bound to the body to an event that is becoming. (Springgay, 2011, p. 79)

Art and the process of artistic creation are media through which affect, which is unable to be qualified or quantified, just felt, could be shared and experienced as embodied knowledge, to help make the ineffable, “known” or felt, if not understood, to those who cannot “know.” Gablik (1995) proposes that art may be able to move us into spaces of “empathetic listening” to shift us away from the emphasis placed on the individual to move into understanding other through the interaction art can enable (p. 82). She writes, “Empathetic listening makes room for the Other and decentralizes the ego-self. Giving each person a voice is what builds community and makes art socially responsible. Interaction becomes the medium of expression, an empathetic way of seeing through another’s eyes” (p. 82). Similarly, Estella Conwill Májozo (1995) sees the artist and art as a way to enter into intrinsic interconnectedness. She uses the convention of blues music—the call, answer, and release format—as a metaphor for the relationship between the artist, the art, and the audience: “The call is incited by the experiences we have with the world, by the human condition and predicaments” around us; the answer is the artist’s “response, the artist’s creation—the attempt to name, recognize, and instigate change” through art; and finally, the release is experienced as the community experiences art, which “allows them to enflesh the message and begin activating change” in their lives (Májozo, 1995, p. 91). This helps shift the way we understand how knowledge works within individuals and between individuals in sociocultural ways. Art that is produced for activism is different from art for solely aesthetic purposes (Dewhurst, 2014, p. 7), if such an art is possible. The intentionality of representation as a way to communicate a specific thought, message, or insight, positions the activist art in a way that is meant to be understood, to have impact, and to signify change. Dewhurst (2014) suggests that in activist art, the artists “took on the role of educators, seeking to facilitate a process of critical reflection and action with their imagined audience” (p. 89). If we are to move into these spaces of understanding, to really understand something, and to begin to feel a sense of urgency for social change, we need to find ways that transcend cognitive, rational, discursive ways of sharing and experiencing these difficult knowledges, otherwise, social change will remain only theoretical. We position education for social justice as a series of learning outcomes, of raised awareness, and reflection that leads to action. For oppressed learners, this is entirely appropriate. When we are working with learners who have privilege, the process of raising awareness can create an

210    S. L. RAYE

emotional response and the learning process can lead to an emotional fallout from this process of raising awareness, especially those who experience “defensive anger, fear of change, and fears of losing [. . .] personal and cultural identities” in the process of becoming aware (Boler, 1999, p. 176). As critical educators, we need to consider alternative pedagogical approaches. Awareness and witnessing is not an end point in the educative process; it is an ontological state of being that is, itself, tied to an epistemological process that is ongoing. Taking these theoretical approaches together, Boler (1999), Ahmed (2004), and Ellsworth (2005) give us tools to rethink discourses that privilege (for the privileged) ways of thinking about knowledge, our collective relationship to it, and how we can reconsider ways to engage it that decenters knowledge as an outcome and, instead, center the process of understanding in ways that transcend only cognitive forms of knowing. The pain of the telling, as well as that of hearing, the embodied forms of knowledge that oppressed individuals feel, that can come through the medium of art within our research, teaching, and community engagement, can help move us into a new relationship with understanding oppression as part of the ongoing and affective process of understanding the wounds oppression causes. Barone and Eisner (1997) suggest, that “each artistic modality represents a unique means for enhancing the educational perspectives of audience members by successfully communicating the ineffable dimensions of experiences within schools” (p. 101). It is this space of the ineffable, that Ahmed (2004) calls the impossible hearing, that I suggest the potential of activist art as an educative catalyst for thinking, understanding, and dialog about social injustice to create an opening for a pedagogy that engages the aesthetic-activist realm that positions students as witnesses who can experience, share, and learn to listen to the ineffable experiences of oppression. The potential of activist art to actively engage these discourses by making oppression visible and knowable in embodied ways, engaging the senses, the aesthetic, and the emotional forms of knowledge that may lead to a different way of understanding the issue in ways that traditional cognitive and rational modes of learning may not have the capacity to do. If we can shift the way we understand oppressive knowledge as something that can pass through individuals and communities, through a feeling that is not necessarily named or made cogent, perhaps we can open up new spaces where education can take an aesthetic shape and art can help move us into ways of experiencing oppression that does not rely solely on cognitive ways of understanding. Perhaps these are the spaces where social change is possible.

Affective Sites of Public Pedagogy     211

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP. Allen, R. L., & Rossatto, C. A. (2009). Does critical pedagogy work with privileged students? Teacher Education Quarterly, 36(1), 163–180. Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (1997). Arts-based educational research.  Complementary methods for research in education, 2, 75–116. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Brooks, J. G. (2011). Bearing the weight: Discomfort as a necessary condition for “less violent” and more equitable dialogic learning.  Educational Foundations, 25, 43–62. Dewhurst, M. (2014).  Social justice art: A framework for activist art pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy.  Harvard Educational Review,  59(3), 297–325. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (2006). “The banking model of education.” In E. Provenzo (Ed.), Critical issues in education: An anthology of readings (pp. 106–119). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. (Original work published 1970) Gablik, S. (1995). Connective aesthetics: Art after individualism. In S. Lacy (Ed.), Mapping the terrain: New genre public art (pp. 74–87). Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Greene, M. (1977). The artistic-aesthetic and curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 6(4), 283–296. Ibáñez-Carrasco, F., & Meiners, E. (2012). Making knowledge in public: Olssen, M., & Peters, M. A. (2005). Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, 20(3), 313–345. Overturning an audience. In De Castell (Ed.),  Public Acts (pp. 14–22). New York, NY: Routledge. Leonardo, Z., & Zembylas, M. (2013). Whiteness as technology of affect: Implications for educational praxis.  Equity & Public Excellence in Education,  46(1), 150–165. MacFarlane, L. (2018, June 6). Disability pride is back! [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://larissamacfarlane.blogspot.com/2018/08/disability-pride-is-back-at -melbourne.html Májozo, E. C. (1995). To search for the good and make it matter. In S. Lacy (Ed.), Mapping the terrain: New genre public art (pp. 88–93). Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Pennington, J. L. (2007). Silence in the classroom/whispers in the halls: Autoethnography as pedagogy in White pre-service teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(1), 93–113. Potter, J. E. (2015). The whiteness of silence: A critical autoethnographic tale of a strategic rhetoric. The Qualitative Report, 20(9), 1434–1447. Springgay, S. (2011). The ethico-aesthetics of affect and a sensational pedagogy. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 9(1), 66–82.

212    S. L. RAYE Stauber, L. S. (2017). Turning in or tuning out? Listening to silences in education for critical political consciousness. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(6), 560–575. Zembylas, M. (2013). Critical pedagogy and emotion: Working through ‘troubled knowledge’ in posttraumatic contexts.  Critical Studies in Education,  54(2), 176–189. Zembylas, M. (2014). Theorizing “difficult knowledge” in the aftermath of the “affective turn”: Implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), 390–412. Zembylas, M., & Boler, M. (2003). Discomforting truths: The emotional terrain of understanding difference. In P. P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social change (pp. 115–138). New York, NY: Routledge. Zorrilla, A., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Art as critical public pedagogy: A qualitative study of Luis Camnitzer and his conceptual art.  Adult Education Quarterly,  66(3), 273–291.

CHAPTER 12

CHANGE IN THE BLINK OF A QUEER EYE Exploring Recent Shifts in LGBTQ+ Representation, Agency, and Intersectionality in Pop Culture Cole Reilly Towson University

ABSTRACT Foucault (1978/1990) asserts, “Where there is power, there is resistance” (pp. 95–96), but the reverse proves true as well.  Contextualized against the backdrop of progressive advances in social justice under threat, recent developments via pockets of queer resistance in pop culture seem particularly noteworthy and empowering. How LGBTQ+ matters are now being produced, consumed, mediated, and explored has become ripe for the curricular queering. In this chapter, I illuminate recent paradigms in pop culture that disrupt and broaden notions of position, place, and possibility. From books, blogs, and Broadway, to the silver screen or network television, from streaming services, cable, satellite, social media, and video-sharing platforms online, points of entry, escape, and expression have increased exponentially for clusters of

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 213–236 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

213

214    C. REILLY othered others’ progress to prevail. Queer Eye today is no longer [just] “for the Straight Guy” it’s fabulous to see LGBTQ+ agency, voice, visibility, and representation getting a meaningful makeover lately.

Make no mistake: These are troubling times—particularly for those among us with marginalized identities or who prize education, the free press, or matters of equity—and it is plain to see why. With a sitting POTUS1 who profits from marketing White supremacy, xenophobic sentiment, toxic masculinity, heterosexism (masquerading as “religious freedom”), and transphobia, there is legitimate reason for concern that recent advances in social justice threaten to backslide considerably under his fascist regime. Ever envious of his predecessor’s popularity and praiseworthiness the world over, the reigning administration seems determined to undo recent progress toward social equity and erase hope itself for those historically disenfranchised, re-rigging privileges and reinstating entitlements instead among those already advantaged. Add to all this the gross manipulation of media of late2—operationalized strategically as both a weapon and distraction—to advance underhanded initiatives of imperialism, exploitation, corruption, hate, and fear . . . and what we face seems bleak. As indicated above, I regard this as no less than a crisis: a Bizarro time (Binder & Papp, 1958) where moral bankruptcy is bulwarked and profiteering is prized, yet education, equity, and empathy are constructed as unworthy investments.3 In an effort to resist the paralysis of overwhelming devastation, I’ve found myself in search of perspective and renewal: a point of reference that might ground me to see even tragic circumstances as less disastrous or dire. Like numerous others, I draw parallels between the current political climate and the parable of Pandora’s box (Chon, 2019; Cillizza, 2018; Johnson, 2018; Postol, 2019; “Trump Opens,” 2016; “Trump’s Election,” 2016)—albeit a bit differently. Most any such reference drawn to the opening of Pandora’s box conjures up an emphasis on the tragic facet of the story—where the naïve self-interest of one party led them to disregard informed warnings and an ill-advised action unleashed the unimaginable of evils (i.e., ambition, competition, despair, disease, envy, greed, hatred, injustice, jealousy, pride, and treachery) upon us all. However, the part of the myth that lifts my spirits is what seemingly garners no attention: the ancient tale’s silver lining. Pandora’s box had been opened and monsters had come out. But there had been something hidden at the bottom of Pandora’s box. Something wonderful: Hope. —Lisa Marie Rice (2014), Breaking Danger

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     215 Hope . . . whispered from Pandora’s box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. —Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason (2004), The Rule of Four

Hope exists too, often in the shadows of catastrophe, to help us through . . . if we take notice. Especially when a people suffers significant setbacks to years of hardearned social progress, those among us determined to be resilient are wise to make a concerted effort to actively search for humble footholds wherever those might exist. How else might we find the necessary traction and fuel to begin a determined climb toward activist recovery? Foucault (1978/1990) asserts, “Where there is power, there is resistance” (p. 95–96), but the reverse proves true as well: Resistance can reconstruct power too.   Search among the ashes of a once-destructive blaze, for potential lies within enduring embers, defiantly refusing to be extinguished. Once discovered and mindfully nurtured, such hardy remains can prove mighty indeed, if operationalized to bring fire anew—hope reborn can rebound as evolution. Contextualized against a backdrop of willful ignorance promoted in my field (e.g., casting DeVos as Secretary of Education), this teacher-educator, turns to public pedagogy (Burdick, Sandlin, & O’Malley, 2013; Sandlin, O’Malley, & Burdick, 2011; Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010) for answers now more than ever—hungry to find and embrace renewed hope wherever it might exist. As such, I find a number of promising developments evolving via pockets of queer resistance and activism in popular culture, which collectively seem particularly noteworthy and (Dare I say?) empowering (Ellesworth, 1989). More specifically, how LGBTQ+ matters are now being produced, consumed, mediated, and explored has become ripe for the curricular queering as well as for queer pedagogical applications (Britzman, 1995; Pinar, 1998) and activism. In this chapter, I illuminate recent paradigms (and shifts) in pop culture that disrupt and broaden notions of position, place, and possibility. From every plausible platform of popular culture, points of entry, escape, and expression have increased exponentially for clusters of othered others’ progress to prevail. QUEER TO HELP It seems necessary to clarify certain foundational terms and conceptual understandings before proceeding. To be sure, I never employ the word “queer” as a pejorative. Historically, the term queer held a predominately negative connotation—in reference to strangeness or peculiarity—and by

216    C. REILLY

the late 1800s became associated with a myriad of surfacing orientations and identities that might find shelter beneath the broader LGBTQ+ umbrella today. Queer was essentially a dismissive insult moniker, initially critical of deviation from what might be customarily expected—punishably weird even, in the context of the cruel childhood game, smear the queer. By contrast, a reclaiming of the term began in the 1980s, acknowledging agency and (comm)unity, relative to counterculture identities and underdog mindsets interpreted as odd, unusual, and unconventional . . . and what of it?! What if to be queer could be(come) powerful—no longer a less than label others might place upon us, but a means of embracing our own otherness defiantly—a testament of human evolution in process? While queerness has presumably existed as long as humankind itself, it has only been a few decades since queer theory (Butler, 1993, 1999, 2004; de Lauretis, 1991; Duggan, 1992; Epstein, 1992) and activism (Feinberg, 1996; Wilchins, 2004) began a complicated process of reclaiming the term’s power.4 Even today, however, not all beneath the LGBTQ+ rainbow feel positively about the word . . . nor need they. It was years before even I came to embrace the term queer myself as potentially freeing and empowering: regarding pride, not shame—strength, not weakness. During my doctoral studies I grew increasingly fond of how queerness might afford me more fluid and flexible frames of understanding than I had previously imagined. My dissertation attests to this: I situate my scholarship and thinking as queer feminist in that I seek to queer—that is to trouble, disrupt, and/or destabilize—hegemonic notions of identity, language, power, and difference. Although my feminism and politics are informed by queer theory, I position my scholarship as a means to bring such themes into conversation with curricular and pedagogical work. (Reilly, 2009, p. 21)

Embracing the counterculture confidence of queerness helps upend the reductive ideologies of what “normal” even is/was, shedding light upon the puppet strings of social and cultural constructs. Matthew Thomas-Reid (2018) explains, Queer pedagogy, much like the queer theory that informs it, draws on the lived experience of the queer, wonky, or non-normative as a lens through which to consider educational phenomena. Queer pedagogy seeks to both uncover and disrupt hidden curricula . . . as well as to develop classroom landscapes and experiences that create safety. (paras. 2–3)

My relationship with queer pedagogy is both situated and unfolding as my interpretation of it is born of both my queer feminist identity and

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     217

ongoing career in education. Three spheres of pedagogical thought that I came to before recognizing their overlaps in queer pedagogy are (de) constructivism, collaboration, and inquiry. Queer pedagogy, as I employ it, is much-informed by this collective kaleidoscope of the very best of those pedagogical lenses. Moreover, in the context of mediating pop culture as an educational platform that occurs largely outside of formal K–16 schooling (but is nonetheless ever-present), I appreciate how public pedagogy provides direction for me as a scholar, pedagogue, and activist to consider how best to utilize hope where I find it to exist. STARTING QUEER, STARTING NOW . . .  It’s worth acknowledging how LGBTQ+ figures and matter(s) have been portrayed over time in popular culture, as visibility is foundational to any sound analysis of representationalism, for it pertains to representation at the most literal level. Having identifiably queer figures5 featured in pop culture projects does much to interrupt the established null curriculum (Flinders, Noddings, & Thornton, 1986) of cis- and heteronormativity that was grossly pervasive up until the 1970s and 1980s for most Western audiences. Others might just as well have presumed queer people and their concerns did not exist, particularly if they had persistently gone unseen/unheard for so long. Imagine the damage such silence and invisibility could do, in particular, to impressionable queer and questioning youth in the audience. Whether such characters might present as protagonists, antagonists, or even just peripheral figures, in pop culture’s earliest years, every little effort proved a significant, if imperfect beginning. Some examples of queer supporting characters from film and television during the last quarter of the 20th century include Jodie Dallas from Soap (Harris, Silver, Clair, McMahon, & Jacobson, 1977–1981), Hollywood Montrose from Mannequin (Gottlieb, Rugoff, & Levinson, 1987), Rosalind Shays from L.A. Law (Bochco & Fisher, 1989–1991), Clayton Hollingsworth from Golden Girls 6 (Harris, Witt, & Thomas, 1985–1992), Jame Gumb from Silence of the Lambs (Demme & Tally, 1991), Dil from the Crying Game (Jordan & Woolley, 1992), and Cleo Sims from Set it off (Gray, Bufford, & Lanier, 1996). Pop culture’s LGBTQ+ roles at the time typically landed on a continuum, somewhere between being mindfully situated—within “a very special episode” status for a television series determined to acknowledge and confront prejudice—and largely tokenistic, perhaps tossed in for comedic effect or presumed shock value. Some such early representations might just as likely perpetuate problematic stereotypes as would others challenge them, offering a richer sense of heart and dimension.

218    C. REILLY

Those wishing to experience well-developed LGBTQ+ characters in leading roles up through the mid-to-late 1990s typically needed to purchase pricey theater tickets at the time, to see The Boys in the Band (Crowley, 1968), In Trousers (Finn, 1979), Bent (Sherman, 1979), March of the Falsettos (Finn & Lapine, 1981), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Graczyk,1982), The Normal Heart (Kramer, 1985), Falsettoland (Finn & Lapine, 1990), Angels in America (Kushner, 1993), Jeffrey (Rudnick, 1993), Love! Valour! Compassion! (McNally, 1995), and/or Rent (Larson, 1996). Particularly for those who didn’t live near a major city where such shows might be playing with regularity, class and geography alone left much of this largely inaccessible to the masses. It’s no wonder that ABC’s trailblazing decision to air Ellen’s “The Puppy Episode” (Driscoll, Sava, Newman, Stark, DeGeneres, & Junger) on April 30, 1997, was regarded as such a game-changer:7 It meant queer protagonists could finally be invited into homes8 through mainstream media. After Ellen (Marlens, Black, Rosenthal, & DeGeneres, 1994–1998) came Will & Grace (Mutchnick, Kohan, & Burrows, 1998–2006)—where Will Truman, television’s first gay male lead was juxtaposed with his straight, female BFF sharing the titular spotlight. On the heels of the box office smash, My Best Friend’s Wedding (Hogan & Bass, 1997), this equation—that of a straight woman whose best friend is a gay man9—perhaps seemed less threatening than trusting another, singular LGBTQ+ character to carry the show alone as lead (as DeGeneres had . . . before her sitcom got canceled). Will & Grace (W&G) did challenge homophobia, but more modestly—not pushing against heteronormativity “too” aggressively, as the familiar balance of a male–female relationship would remain the show’s central driving force. Although Grace Adler routinely had male suitors and boyfriends, talk of that was as far as it went initially with Will. More than 35 episodes would air before the show had its first kiss between two gay men—and even that was not so much a romantic moment as a stunt, where to prove a point, Will kisses his more flamboyant friend Jack on the air of a The Today Show taping. Although the moment was historic on some fronts, it was also more of a punchline than a celebration of queer love. In successive seasons (and due in part to criticism of this), Will did get to date more regularly and have an active sex life too. Fortunately, much progress has come since Ellen and Will served as pioneers. A broader variety of increasingly developed LGBTQ+ characters have emerged—making way for several sophisticated and groundbreaking characters of color. For instance, Callie (Rhimes, seasons 2005–present), Chiron (Jenkins & McCraney, 2016), and Sophia (Kohan, Kerman, Friedman, Hess, & Herrmann, 2013–2019) have each provided rather nuanced, layered, and acclaimed performances of intersectionality.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     219

Moving beyond the mere presence of LGBTQ+ figures, consider what other factors might make a pop-culture project queer. As I tried to wrap my head around this idea, I found it helpful to consider the most prominent, recurring narrative themes historically evident in queer pop culture: (a) self-actualization, (b) resistance and acceptance, (c) fear, bullying, and danger, (d) redefining camily, (e) queer relationships, (f) healthcare, HIV/ AIDS+,10 (g) social justice activism, and (h) performativity as drag (see Table 12.1). In Table 12.1, I provide illustrative samples of each distinguishable theme. TABLE 12.1  Eight Prominent Themes in Queer Pop Culture 1

Self-Actualization: Taking Stock, Coming Out & Coming to Terms with One’s Identity

Boys in the Band (1968), In Trousers (1979), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, (1982), Ellen (1994–1998), Ma Vie en Rose (1997), Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), TransGeneration (2005), Love, Simon (2015), Hannah Gadsby: “Nannette” (2018)a

2

Resistance & Acceptance: Faith/Familial/Cultural Rejection (e.g., “Conversion Therapy”) vs. Pride

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), Billy Elliott (2000), Saved (2004), Glee (2009-2015), Book of Mormon (2011), the “Grandpa Jack” episode Will & Grace (2017), Boy Erased (2018)b

3

Fear, Bullying, & Danger: Homophobia, Transphobia, Hate Crimes, Holocaust, & Prison Culture

Bent (1979), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Oz (1997–2003), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), The Laramie Project (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Orange is the New Black (2013–2019), Moonlight (2016)c

4

Redefining Family: “Finding Your Tribe,” Community Support, + Raising a Family?

March of the Falsettos (1981), The Bird Cage (1996), Queer as Folk (1999–2000; 2000–2005), Grey’s Anatomy (2005– 2019), Modern Family (2009–2019), Pose (2018–2019), Fun Home (2015), Grace & Frankie (2015–2019)d

5

Queer Relationships: Deconstructing Desire, Dealing with Love, Dating/ Marriage/Polyamory?

The Object of My Affection (1998), Will & Grace (1998– 2006), The L Word (2004–2009), Imagine Me & You (2005) True Blood (2008–2014), Carol (2015), Looking (2014–2015), Call Me by Your Name (2017), Sense8 (2015–2018)e

6

Healthcare, HIV/AIDS+: Disease, Death, + Dignity (Hospitals, Funerals, Final Wishes)

The Normal Heart (1985), Falsettoland (1990), Angels in America (1993), Philadelphia (1993), Jeffrey (1993), RENT (1996), If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), Tig Notaro:“Live” (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013)f

7

Social Justice Activism: Equal Rights, Finding Strength/Voice

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), Before Stonewall (1985), Milk (2008), Pride (2014), Will & Grace [Reboot] (2017– 2019), Queer Eye [Reboot] (2018–2019)g

8

Performativity As Drag Deconstructing Beauty + Celebrating Creativity, from

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Victor/Victoria (1982), Paris is Burning (1990), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks (continued)

220    C. REILLY TABLE 12.1  Eight Prominent Themes in Queer Pop Culture (cont.) Camp to Couture

for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007), Connie and Carla (2004), Dragula (2016–2017), RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–2019)h

a.

Berlanti, Berger, & Aptaker, 2015; Berliner & Stappen, 1997; Crowley, 1968; Finn, 1979; Gadsby, 2018; Graczyk, 1982; Herman-Wurmfeld, Juergensen, & Westfeldt, 2001; Marlens et al., 1994–1998; Mitchell, 2001; Simmons, 2005

b.

Babbit & Peterson, 1999; Burrows & Herschlag, 2017; Daldry & Hall, 2000; Danelly & Urban, 2004; Edgerton, 2018; Lopez, Parker, & Stone, 2011, Murphy, Falchuk, & Brennan, 2009–2015

c.

Fontana, Winter, & Nayar, 1997–2003; Jenkins & McCraney, 2016; Kaufman & Tectonic Theatre Project, 2000; Kohan et al., 2013–2019; Lee, Ossana, & McMurty, 2005; Peirce & Bienen, 1999; Schrader, 1985; Sherman, 1979

d.

Bredeweg & Paige, 2013–2015; Cowen & Lipman, 2000–2005; Davies, 1999–2000; Finn & Lapine, 1981; Kauffman & Morris, 2015–2019; Kron & Tesori, 2015; Levitan & Lloyd, 2009– 2019; Murphy, Falchuk, & Canals, 2018–2019; Nichols & May, 1996; Rhimes, 2005–2019

e.

Ball, 2008–2014; Chaiken, Abbott, & Greenberg, 2004–2009; Guadagnino & Ivoery, 2017; Haynes & Nagy, 2015; Hytner & Wasserstein, 1998; Lannan, 2014–2015; Mutchnick et a,l. 1998–2006; Parker, 2005; Polk, Blair, & Gordon, 2005–2006; Wachowski, Wachowski, & McTergue, 2015–2018

f.

Anderson, Sichel, Sichel, & Heche, 2000; Demme & Nyswaner, 1993; Finn & Lapine, 1990; Kramer, 1985; Kushner, 1993; Larson, 1996; McNally, 1995; Notara, 2012; Rudnick, 1993; Vallée, Borten, & Wallak, 2013

g.

Collins, Brodsky, & Ortiz, 2018–2019; Epstein & Schmiechen, 1984; Mutchnick, Kohan, & Burrows, 2017–2019; Schiller & Rosenberg, 1985; Van Sant & Black, 2008; Warchus & Beresford, 2014

h.

Charles, Polly, & Visage, 2009–2016; 2017–2019; Collins & Cabano, 2003–2007; Edwards, Macini, & Bricusse, 1982; Elliott, 1994; Kidron & Beane, 1995; Livingston, 1990; Noyes, Boulet, & Boulet 2016–2017; Sharman, 1975; Vardalos & Lembeck, 2004

This is not to suggest all queer projects necessarily fit neatly (or even singularly) into one of these boxes. After all, queerness rejects limitation and many of these works arguably straddle multiple categories. I merely placed them where they seemed most obvious to me. Approaching these narrative archetypes however as scaffolding, not constraints, I brainstormed a trio sampling11 of additional examples for each category (see Table 12.2), where pop culture productions have undeniably queer sensibilities, regardless of whether or not any of their protagonists explicitly identify as LGBTQ+. Much of what I identify as a “queer sensibility” in these narratives with or without explicitly-LGBTQ+ characters, is the central spirit of outsider and/or underdog status. Rather than abandon one’s otherness and assimilate to what is mainstream, I appreciate how many of these efforts dismiss that as impossible and/or undesirable. Instead, their protagonists embrace varying levels of resilience (both individually and often as part of counterculture community) re-establishing how they wish to see and move through the world on their

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     221 TABLE 12.2  Examples of Pop Culture Efforts with Queer Sensibilities (Not LGBTQ+ Protagonists) 1

Self-Actualization

Dexter (2006–2013), Equus (1973), Mom (2013–2019)a

2

Resistance & Acceptance

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Doubt (2005)b

3

Fear, Bullying, & Danger

Bang Bang You’re Dead (2002), The Help (2009), Whiplash (2014)c

4

Redefining Family

Tarzan (1999), The X-men Series (2000-2019), The Haunting of Hill House (2018)d

5

Queer Relationships

Bat Boy (2001), Big Love (2006–2011), The Shape of Water (2017)e

6

Healthcare, HIV/AIDS+

Nurse Jackie (2009–2015), The Big C (2010–2013), Crazy ExGirlfriend (2015–2019)f

7

Social Justice Activism

Hamilton (2015); Scandal (2012–2018), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–2019)g

8

Performativity as Drag

America’s Next Top Model (2003–2019), Drop Dead Diva (2009–2014), Dumplin’ (2018)h

a.

b. c. d. e. f.

g. h.

Lore, Gorodetsky, & Baker, 2013–2019; Manos Jr. & Lindsay, 2006–2013; Shaffer & Dexter, 1973 Chadha, Berges, & Bindra, 2002; Shanley, 2005; Vardalos & Zwick, 2002 Chazell, 2014; Mastrosimone & Ferland, 2002; Stockett, 2009 Donner, 2000–2019; Flanagan, 2018; Murphy, Tzudiker, White, Lima, & Buck, 1999 del Toro & Taylor, 2017; O’Keefe, Farley, & Fleming, 2001; Olsen & Scheffer, 2006–2011 Bloom & McKenna, 2015–2019; Brixius, Dunsky, & Wallem, 2009–2015; Hunt & Hicks, 2010–2013 Miranda, 2015; Rhimes, 2012–2018; Sherman-Palladino & Fodor, 2017–2019 Banks, Mok, & Dominici, 2003–2019; Berman, 2009–2014; Fletcher & Hahn, 2018

own terms—convention be damned. I celebrate this sense of rebellion, posing resistance to dogmatic ideologies of thought and deriving both strength and agency to reason and behave accordingly. I am not suggesting this alone is entirely new. There have long-existed clusters of queer sensibility speckled throughout popular culture, from The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, Langley, Ryerson, & Woolf, 1939) to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Muller & Roemer, 1964) and The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985), from Fight Club (Fincher & Uhls, 1999) to Showgirls (Verhoeven & Eszterhas, 1995), and The Little Mermaid (Clements, Musker, & Menken, 1989) to the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 1997–2007); however, in recent years, the presence of queer influences in pop culture seem to have grown exponentially . . . and that’s exciting! CRAFTING NEW VOICES AND VISIONS IN THE QUEER AND NOW One might just as readily recognize whether queer individuals are not just featured in the stories, but creating them (behind the pen, page, keyboard,

222    C. REILLY

microphone, or camera, etc.) as writer, directors, and producers, and so forth. Although I’ve focused primarily on film, television, theater, comedy, and some pop literature thus far, it would be shortsighted to ignore the likes of LGBTQ+ composers and lyricists, as their songwriting influence too has been substantial. Cole Porter, Billie Holiday, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Little Richard, Janis Joplin, Freddie Mercury (of Queen), David Bowie, Stephen Sondheim, Boy George (of Culture Club and solo fame), Barry Manilow, Elton John, Rob Halford (of Judas Priest), Morrissey (of The Smiths and solo fame), George Michael (of Wham and solo fame), Tracy Chapman, k.d. lang, Fred Schneider (of The B-52s), Michael Stipe (of REM), Sinead O’Connor, Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, Sophie B. Hawkins, Billy Joe Armstrong (of Green Day), Amy Ray + Emily Saliers (of The Indigo Girls), Sandra Bernhardt, Meshell Ndegeocello, Rufus Wainwright, Darren Hayes (of Savage Garden), Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, P!nk, Vanessa Carlton, Lady Gaga, Sia, Janell Monae, Jessie J, Jake Shears (of The Scissor Sisters), Mika, Sam Smith, Tegan + Sara, Frank Ocean, Adore Delano, Halsey, and Troye Sivan have continually shaped and influenced the ever evolving voice of pop culture. So much high-quality, queer work is being produced, consumed, mediated, and explored at present, and across so many platforms of popular culture. Allison Bechdel, Piper Kerman, Dustin Lance Black, Steven Fry, John Waters, Ryan Murphy, Lee Daniels, Tom Ford, Jordan Peele, Linda Perry, Todrick Hall, Michael Buckley, Shane Dawson, Tyler Oakley, Hannah Hart, and Ingrid Nilsen are some such examples who come to mind. Sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski are a particularly noteworthy team of innovative co-writers/-directors/-producers. This creative pair of trans women saw the entire Matrix series (1999–2003) and V is for Vendetta (2005) through to fruition, each groundbreaking, dystopian projects with queer sensibilities, particularly relevant to today’s corrupt political climate. To my mind, the Wachowskis’ latest project, Sense8 (Wachowski, Wachowski, & McTeigue, 2015–2018) introduces perhaps the queerest show yet. Not only do a pair of complex and intersectional queer characters make up 25% of the show’s core protagonists, but it is significant too that these LGBTQ+ figures are established in particularly stable, loving, and healthy relationships: 1. Nomi, a political blogger and badass hacktivist, this San Franciscan trans lesbian’s interracial relationship to fiancé-cum-wife, Amanita, helps see her through everything from harsh TERF criticism, to escaping a non-consensual lobotomy attempt (orchestrated at the request of her estranged and disapproving parents), to E-Death; and 2. Lito, a budding telenovela lead, presumably on the brink of crossing over from Mexican cinema to helm major Hollywood block-

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     223

busters as a bona fide action star—provided he remain closeted as a gay man. As such, a female costar acts as his beard and his professor boyfriend pretends to be their bodyguard, so as to avoid the paparazzi’s scrutiny. Together with their six sensate siblings scattered about the globe, the multiethnic octet make up a powerful cluster, with each of the core characters sharing a powerful emotional link and psychic connection to the others, queering hegemonic limitations of place, culture, language, ability, and knowledges. A poststructural narrative allows its protagonists to blur and redefine notions of kinship, community, reality, sex, and love—even resolving a Hindu woman’s complicated relationship to her two male suitors, with a surprisingly empowering and polyamorous solution. Only as a throuple can all three be sated; what’s particularly revolutionary in terms of representation is the triad’s MFM gender ratio. PEERING BEHIND THE CURTAIN RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR, Charles et al., 2009–2016; 2017–2019) is particularly noteworthy in terms of how the break-out show, first on Logo then VH1, has played a hand in advancing a great deal of necessary queer dialogue—not just a spectator sport, but also in response to it. The show itself, a reality show12 drag competition continues to yield impressive ratings that would rival most any successful show on a major network channel. While certainly a huge commercial success and proving influential on mainstream culture (in terms of advancing fashion, humor, and discourse, etc.), drag itself will never be entirely “mainstream” (not to say it cannot be popular or embraced by the masses), as the medium itself is inherently subversive, intending to perpetually queer notions of sex and gender, push at the edges in deconstruct and reimagine. Part of the hit show’s appeal is likely how it pulls back the mysterious curtain on an age-old queer art form—not just in terms of allowing the audience to see each queen’s dramatic transformation, but also for how it affords viewers access to “know” these queens and interact with them peri- and post-production, via social media, at gigs, and/ or at meet-and-greets events like Dragcon. Some say the show has forever changed the artform, although whether that’s to drag’s detriment or not is up for debate. Former contestants who have been on Drag Race, and who are able to market themselves reasonably well afterword as Ru Girl celebrities, stand to more than triple their previous booking fees. This, of course, is good news for them, as many are then able to quit their other jobs and pursue their passion: a full-time drag career.13 However, money to pay Ru Girls so much more also has to come

224    C. REILLY

from somewhere, so many of the local queens are in turn losing gigs they may have previously struggled for years to book/maintain, as club and bar owners know they can expect to pull in a much larger audience (and thus see their investments returned in cover-charges and drink orders) if they book a Ru Girl and not drag queens who lack that celebrity impact. As such, the show presents a major divide in the community: Up and coming queens often want to be cast on the show to make their careers happen, but trans14 and veteran performers not cast may resent it. What I find most fascinating about RPDR, has been the evolution of what I consider a meta-drag effect. By this I mean the reality show has become increasingly aware of itself and so the community has come to drag its drag. In response to critiques of RPDR drag becoming too conventional or mainstream, some of the more avant-garde interpretations of typical drag pageantry have found an audience to further celebrate weirdness. Not only do Sharon Needles, Milk, Nina Bo’nina Brown, Sasha Velour, and Yvie Oddly come to mind as aesthetically experimental contestants on RPDR—three of them winning their respective seasons—but spinoff shows like Dragula (Noyes, Boulet, & Boulet, 2016–2017), and Camp Wannakiki (Wright & Wright, 2018) have successfully prized oddity above glamour, celebrating filth, horror, and camp creativity.15 Another aspect of meta-drag with RPDR show culture has come in an evolving hyperawareness, not only with former contestants critiquing the show’s host as problematic at time, but also acknowledging a fanatical fandom whose obsessive interest can turn ugly—at times aggressive, bullying, and shamefully racist. On season ten, an African American contestant named “The Vixen” broke the fourth wall in a forthright attempt to deconstruct how race would likely be constructed during filming. She refused to passively accept predictable editing patterns that promised to construct her as just another angry Black “bitch” for the predominantly White viewing audience to interpret as a troublemaker. Given the track record of the fandom’s hypercritical devaluing of contestants like her (consistently ranking even those Black folk who won their season as among the least deserving) her critique was not unfounded. As such, while the show continued to construct her as the season’s villain, her point landed with many and the Ru Girls sisterhood have begun to stand up against some of the racism and cyberbullying that had been running rampant for years. QUEER EYES COME INTO FOCUS By contrast with Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye (Collins et al., 2018; 2019)— no longer “. . . for the Straight Guy”16 (Collins & Cabana, 2003–2007)—exemplifies an undeniable shift—or make-over, if you will—to finally begin

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     225

queering the design, execution, and responsibility of popular culture as curricula with regard to LGBTQ+ representation and agency. Antoni, Bobby, Jonathan, Karamo, and Tan offer a comparatively woke and empowering revision of their rather homogenous and superficial predecessors (i.e., Carson, Jai, Kyan, Ted, & Thom), for how queering pop culture might work moving forward. The new cast, ever (inter)active with fans on social media, is undeniably more intersectional: • Among the group, the “Fab Five 2.0” features two men of color and three of the men are in long term, interracial marriages or engagements. • One cast member is a Polish-Canadian introvert, another is a Pakastani Brit Muslim married to a Mormon cowboy, and still another, a former Mormon who left home at 15 because his family and faith would not accept him. • There’s one Gen-exer who is a father of two teenagers, juxtaposed with four millennials in the case, one among them actively looking to adopt soon. • While the range of fashion varies among the group, one former cheerleader in the cast routinely sports stilettos and recently came out as non-binary. Fortunately, they each lean comfortably into those differences with an awareness of them as opportunities to embrace, engage with, and celebrate how their own positionality and that of the “heroes” of each episode might prove teachable moments for all involved, whether for themselves, the episodes’ guest protagonist, or for the viewing audience. Pairing all this with the very nature of a streaming service platform like Netflix, where the audience can binge-watch less commercially crafted shows at their leisure, puts the audience in control. This frees a cast and crew up from having to initially cater to only conservative studio heads fearing Middle America’s response in order to have a show the next week. Fortunately, the less filtered project has been warmly received, earning critical acclaim. WHAT NOW? WHAT NEXT? In spite of what certainly presents recently as unsettling and corrupt times politically, it’s important to remember that even Pandora held on to hope . . . and we must too. Keeping the present in perspective, ever cognizant of the breadcrumb path laid for us by countless others and their projects, helps contextualize the whole and spur us onward to what might befall next. So, whether we draw inspiration from Laverne Cox’s tipping point

226    C. REILLY

cover of Time Magazine or Killing Eve’s (Morris, Waller-Bridge, Woodward Gentle, & Jennings, 2018–2019) edgy reawakening of Cold War concerns, from Queer Eye’s “Fab Five” crushing it on social media (with endless wit, heart, charm, and Instagram thirst traps) or the Wachowski’s mysteriously crafting still more prolific projects ahead, from Nike’s campaign supporting Colin Kaepernick’s redemptive redefinition of mindful masculinity and martyrdom, to taking stock of June 2019 as both 50 years since Stonewall— yet only 3 years since the Pulse shootings—the pop culture record keeps spinning and we’re wise to stay tuned, listen, and learn. However, it must not end with us remaining only in the position of passive spectators. We too must find our means of scratching the record to remix the story more to our liking. So much stands to effectively push the queer needle in fascinatingly progressive and unprecedented ways, so even when the track skips and marginalized communities suffer devastating setbacks, that mustn’t hijack our narrative of progress. Amid the current climate of struggles, setback, and unrest, the public space of popular culture offers a means beyond formal schooling (Sandlin et al., 2011), for rich sense-making opportunities (if not rigid teaching and learning) to occur. Whether we position ourselves initially as consumers (members of the audience), producers (artists in the story telling), or eventually shift to a creative hybrid of the two (lending to increased possibilities for engagement and empowerment), consumer culture is the primary mechanism through which we most often express personal agency and identity (Giroux, 2015). As such, we are wise to engage with and explore its decolonizing zones of contact (Pratt, 1997) as inherently political, considering our own notions and enactments of identity, representation, agency, voice, and context. We stand to draw information, insight, and inspiration from how we creatively engage in each next step forward. At a curricular level, popular culture offers as much to consume as to also be consumed by when we too consider how these narratives and characters might reshape our world, politics, and sense of (comm)unity. It provides us a marauders map (Rowling, 1997–2007) of possibility, that is ours to employ—for making sense, mischief, or something more of our world. NOTES 1. Although my frame of reference is shaped by my identity as a first-generation U.S. citizen, it’s worth recognizing how transnational developments and relations too relate to many of the concerns explored herein. Whether on the campaign trail or the greens of Mar-a-Lago, from behind the desk of the Oval Office or his unreal twitter handle, Covfefe’s coiner has not only taken problematic stances domestically, but with international diplomacy as well.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     227 2. “The 45th” has sought to colonize the narratives of any/all news media coverage relating to him, employing “alternative facts” and fictional figures to proclaim a sense of adoration and approval that neither the popular vote nor attendance at his inauguration can substantiate. In addition to trying to bar journalists who pose critical questions to hold his administration accountable, he has made countless efforts to hamper the legitimacy of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Times Up/#MeToo. He presumes to minimalize the impact of still other civil rights activism (e.g., the Women’s March, the March for Science, and the March for Our Lives) by impassioned groups worldwide who take issue with his neoliberal agenda, citing its correlation to rising incidences of violence and environmental devastation. 3. Admittedly, still others who benefit personally (or perceive themselves to) may feel something else entirely about how things stand today—grateful for a political tide that has shifted [back] in their favor. 4. Queer theory’s specific roots are difficult to discern definitively—what else might we expect but difficulty in tracing the very rejection of labels?—but connections seem to derive from a multitude of relevant efforts—from feminism, poststructuralist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism to 1980s HIV/ AIDS activism and the punk scene. 5. To clarify, though some may consider Jamie Farr’s performance on M*A*S*H (Gelbart, Dublin, & Alda, 1972–1983) iconic, the Klinger character is patently not queer; his character is a cisgender straight man who crossdresses with ironic strategy, as it’s part of his ongoing effort to secure a Section 8 psychiatric discharge as “mentally unfit for service” etc. Neither the character nor the show itself ever once critiqued Section 8 as problematic. It was a punchline. 6. Not only had Blanche’s gay brother made appearances in season four and six of the series, but the show’s pilot featured Coco, a gay live-in cook for the ladies, and season two featured Jean, a lesbian friend of Dorothy’s. 7. The fourth season episode smashed records, drawing some 42 million viewers to earn the show’s highest Neilson ratings ever [#1]. It also earned a Peabody Award as well as the show’s first two Emmys [for writing and for DeGeneres’ acting.] Many may forget how ABC issued a parental advisory message just before the episode’s airing, but nonetheless the critical backlash ABC and DeGeneres faced (as well as guest-stars Dern and Winfrey, etc.) was equally unprecedented, and Ellen was canceled within months of the episode’s airing. 8. That same year, The RuPaul Show was given the green light at VH1 (Charles, Bailey, & Barbato, 1997–1998) so famous guests came on the evening talk show to be interviewed by the world’s most famous drag queen. [This stood in stark contrast to the countless tabloid-style representations of hypersexualized and un-poised queer people featured on talk shows at the time.] Fast forward a half-dozen years and Ellen (DeGeneres & Ernst, 2003–2019) would debut and soon become a ratings force for daytime talk. As fate often brings coincidence full circle, RuPaul recently began hosting a daytime talk show (van Lokeren, 2019) on network TV—Fox, no less. 9. The Object of My Affection (Hytner & Wasserstein, 1998) proved commercially successful too with this formula.

228    C. REILLY 10. Although HIV/AIDS plays a significant role in many queer projects (as has it in queer history), the “+” here is meant to also acknowledge still other health factors and conditions, for example, cancer, mental illness, hormone supplements, and addiction, plus relationship recognition regarding hospital visitation, medical decisions, and handling inheritances. 11. Countless more exist, but I stopped at three of each just to convey the idea here. 12. RPDR borrows unabashedly from Project Runway (Cutler, Gruber, Schneeweis, & Klum, 2014–2019), and America’s Next Top Model (Banks, Mok, & Dominici, 2003–2019) in terms of the show’s structural design. 13. Prior to RPDR very few queens could realistically do that, as drag can be expensive and the pay rarely covered costs. 14. RuPaul eventually retracted a series of insensitive public statements (Kaplan, 2018), after suggesting that transgender women who had begun the process of transitioning (e.g., taking hormones or having surgeries) ought to be banned from Drag Race casting, equating their efforts to transition as akin to cheating, like an Olympic athlete taking performance enhancing drugs. This ignorance only revealed just how out of touch Ru had been with actual drag culture anymore, given the role of trans and non-binary individuals who have been foundational to the drag scene since its very onset. 15. Contestants Vander Van Odd, Biqtch Puddin’ (Noyes et al., 2016–2017), Alexis Bevels, Pagan, Holladay, and Vajay J. Snappinturtle (Wright & Wright, 2018) are among these offshoot’s winners and celebrated standouts. 16. While the show’s predecessor focused only helping heterosexual men satisfy their frustrated wives and girlfriends, this reboot’s focus runs the gamut in terms of helping individuals of varying sexualities, gender identities, ages, races, and numbers (even helping out with church communities and local fire stations).

REFERENCES Anderson, J., Sichel, S., Sichel, A, & Heche, A. (Co-Creators/Co-Writer). (2000). If these walls could talk 2 [Motion picture]. New York, NY: HBO Films. Babbit, J. (Director/Co-Writer), & Peterson, B. W. (Co-Writer). (1999). But I’m a cheerleader [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, CA: Ignite Entertainment. Ball, A. (Creator/Writer). (2008–2014). True blood [Television series—seasons 1–7]. Los Angeles, CA: HBO & Your Face Goes Here Entertainment. Banks, T., Mok, K. (Co-Creators/Co-Producers), & Dominici, A. (Co-Producer). (2003–2019). America’s next top model [Television series – seasons 1-24]. Los Angeles, CA: 10 by 10 Entertainment & Bankable Productions. Berlanti, G. (Director), Berger, E., & Aptaker, I. (Co-Writers), (2018). Love, Simon. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox. Berliner, A. (Co-Writer/Director), & Stappen, C. V. (Co-Writer), (1997). Ma vie en rose/My life in pink [Motion picture]. Paris, France: Haut Et Court/Sony Pictures.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     229 Berman, J. (Creator/Writer). (2009–2014). Drop dead diva [Television series—seasons 1–6]. Los Angeles, CA: Sony Pictures Television. Binder, O., & Papp, G. (1958). Superboy #68. Burbank, CA: DC Comics, Inc. Bloom, R., & McKenna, A. B. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2015–2019). Crazy ex-girlfriend [Television series—seasons 1–4]. Los Angeles, CA: Black Lamb & CBS Television Studios. Bochco, S., & Fisher, T. F. (Co-Creators). (1989–1991). L.A. Law [Television series— seasons 3–5]. Los Angeles, CA: CBS & 20th Century Fox. Bredeweg, B., & Paige, P. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2013–2015). Crazy ex-girlfriend [Television series—seasons 1–5]. Encino, CA: Blazing Elm Entertainment & ABC Domestic Television. Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight! Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165. Brixius, L., Dunsky, E., & Wallem, L. (Co-Creators/Co-Writer). (2009–2015). Nurse Jackie [Television series—seasons 1–7]. New York, NY: Showtime & Lionsgate Television. Burdick, J., Sandlin, J. A., & O’Malley, M. P. (2013). Problematizing public pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Burrows, J. (Director), & Herschlag, A. (Writer). ( 2017, October 19). Grandpa Jack [Television series—seasons 9, episode 4]. In Will & Grace. Los Angeles, CA: Komut Entertainment & NBC. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York, NY: Routledge. Caldwell, I., & Thomason, D. (2004). The rule of four. New York, NY: The Dial Press. Chadha, G. (Co-Writer/Director), Berges, P. M., & Bindra, G. (2002). Bend it like Beckham [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox & Future Films. Chaiken, I., Abbott, M., & Greenberg, K. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2004–2009). The L word [Television series—seasons 1–6]. Toronto, Canada: Showtime & Cowlip Productions. Charles, R. (Creator/Producer), Bailey, F., & Barbato, R. (Producer). (1997–1998). The RuPaul show [Television series—seasons 1–2]. Los Angeles, CA: World of Wonder Productions & Viacom. Charles, R. (Creator/Producer), Polly, J., & Visage, M. (Producers). (2009–2016). RuPaul’s drag race [Television series—seasons 1–8]. Los Angeles, CA: Logo & World of Wonder Productions. Charles, R. (Creator/Producer), Polly, J., & Visage, M. (Producers). (2017–2019). RuPaul’s drag race [Television series—seasons 9–11]. Los Angeles, CA: VH1 & World of Wonder Productions. Chazell, D. (Writer/Director). (2014). Whiplash [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, CA: Sony Pictures & Right of Way Films. Chon, G. (2019, January 9). Trump’s crisis powers are a Pandora’s box. Reuters Breakingviews. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown-breakingviews/ breakingviews-trumps-crisis-powers-are-a-pandoras-box-idUSKCN1P32IG

230    C. REILLY Cillizza, C. (2018, October 30). The dangerous consequences of Trump’s allout assault on political correctness. CNN: The Point, https://www.cnn .com/2018/10/30/politics/donald-trump-hate-speech-anti-semitism-steve -king-kevin-mccarthy/index.html Clements, R., Musker, J. (Co-Director/Co-Writer), & Menken, A. (Composer) (1989). The little mermaid [Motion picture]. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Pictures. Collins, D. (Creator), Brodsky, J., & Ortiz, E. (Producers). (2018). Queer eye [Television series seasons 1 & 2]. Atlanta, GA: Netflix & Scout Productions. Collins, D. (Creator), Brodsky, J., & Ortiz, E. (Producers). (2019). Queer eye [Television series—season 3]. Kansas City, MO: Netflix & KC Film Office. Collins, D. (Creator), & Cabano, S. (Producer). (2003–2007). Queer eye for the straight guy [Television series—seasons 1–5]. New York, NY: Bravo Original Productions. Cowen, R., & Lipman, D. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2000–2005). Queer as Folk [U.S. Television series—seasons 1–2]. Toronto, Canada: Showtime & Cowlip Productions. Crowley, M. (Playwright/Producer). (1968). The boys in the band [Play]. New York, NY: Theatre Four. Cutler, J. C., Gruber, D., Schneeweiss, B., & Klum, H. (Co-Producers). (2004–2019). Project Runway [Television series—seasons 1–17]. Los Angeles, CA: BunimMurray Productions. Daldry, S. (Director), & Hall, L. (Writer). (2000). Billy Elliot [Motion picture]. London, England: BBC Films. Danelly, B. (Director/Co-Writer), & Urban, M. (Co-Writer). (2004). Saved! [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, CA: MGM & United Artists. Davies, R. T. (Co-Creator/Co-Writer). (1999–2000). Queer as Folk [U.K. Television series—seasons 1–2]. London, England: BBC Studios. DeGeneres, E. (Creator/Co-Producer), & Ernst, V. A. (Co-Producer). (2003–2019). Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show [U.S. Television series—seasons 1–16]. Los Angeles, CA: Time TelePictures Television. de Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer theory: Lesbian and gay sexualities. Differences, 3(2), iii–xviii. del Toro, G. (Director/Co-writer), & Taylor, V. (Co-writer). (2017). The shape of water [Motion picture]. Toronto, Canada: TSG Entertainment & Fox Searchlight Pictures. Demme, J. (Director), & Tally, T. (Writer). (1991). Silence of the lambs [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, CA: Strong Heart Productions & Orion Pictures. Demme, J. (Director), & Nyswaner, R. (Writer) (1993). Philadelphia [Motion picture]. Philadelphia, PA: TriStar Pictures. Donner, L. S. (Producer). (2000–2019). X-Men [Motion picture series]. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox & Marvel Entertainment. Driscoll, M., Sava, D., Newman, T., Stark, J., DeGeneres, E. (Co-Writers), & Junger, G. (Director). (1997, April 30). The Puppy Episode [Television series—season 4, episode 22]. In Ellen. Los Angeles, CA: American Broadcasting Company. Duggan, L. (1992). Making it perfectly queer. Socialist Review, 22, 11–31. Edgerton, J. (Writer/Director). (2018). Boy erased [Motion picture]. Atlanta, GA: Perfect World Pictures.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     231 Edwards, B. (Creator/Writer), Macini, H. (Composer), & Bricusse, L. (Lyracist). (1982). Victor/Victoria [Motion picture]. United States: MGM Studios. Ellesworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3) 297–324. Elliott, S. (Writer/Director). (1994). The adventures of Priscilla, queen of the desert [Motion picture]. United States: PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. Epstein, R. (Director/Co-Producer), & Schmiechen, R. (Co-Producer) (1984). The times of Harvey milk [Documentary Film]. San Francisco, CA: Black Sands Productions. Epstein, S. (1992). Gay politics, ethnic identity: The limits of social constructionism. In E. Stein (Ed.), Forms of desire: Sexual orientation and the social constructionist controversy (pp. 239–293). New York, NY: Routledge. Feinberg, L. (1996). Trans-Gender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fincher, D. (Director), & Uhls, J. (Writer) (1999). Fight club [Motion picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox & Regency Enterprises. Finn, W. (Composer/Lyricist/Playwright/Director). (1979). In trousers [Musical]. New York, NY: Playwright’s Horizons. Finn, W. (Composer/Lyricist/Playwright), & Lapine, J. (Director). (1981). March of the Falsettos [Musical]. New York, NY: Westside Theatre. Finn, W. (Composer/Lyricist/Co-Playwright), & Lapine, J. (Director/Co-Playwright). (1990). Falsettoland [Musical]. New York, NY: Lucille Lortel Theatre. Flanagan, M. (Creator/Writer/Director). (2018) The haunting of Hill House [Television series—season 1]. Los Angeles, CA: Netflix & Paramoun Television. Fleming, V. (Director), Langley, N., Ryerson, F., & Woolf, E. A. (Co-Writers). (1939). The Wizard of Oz [Motion Picture]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Fletcher A. (Director), & Hahn, K. (Writer). (2018). Dumplin’ [Motion Picture]. Atlanta, GA: Netflix & Echo Films. Flinders, N. J., Noddings, N., & Thornton, S. J. (1986, Spring). The null curriculum: Its theoretical basis and practical implications, Curriculum Inquiry, 16(1), 33–42. Fontana, T. (Creator/Writer/Co-Producer), Winter, B., & Nayar, S. (Co-Writers) (1997–2003). 0z [Television series—seasons 1–6]. Los Angeles, CA: HBO & Rysher Entertainment/Viacom Productions. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge. London, England: Penguin. (Originally published in 1978) Gadsby, H. (Writer/Producer). (2018). Hannah Gadsby: Nannette [Comedy performance]. Sydney, Australia: Netflix & Guesswork Television. Gelbart, L. (Creator/Director), Dublin, C. S., & Alda, A. (Producer/Directors). (1972–1983). M*A*S*H [Television series—seasons 1–11]. Los Angeles, CA: CBS & 20th Century Fox. Giroux, H. A. (2015, July). Public pedagogy and manufactured identity in the age of the selfie culture. Media and Communication Policy, 19(2), 155–164. Gottlieb, M. (Co-Writer/Director), Rugoff, E. (Co-writer/Co-producer), & Levinson, A. (Co-Producer). (1987). Mannequin [Motion picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox.

232    C. REILLY Graczyk, E. (1982). Come back to the five and dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean [Play]. New York, NY: Martin Beck Theatre. Gray, F. G. (Director), Bufford, T., & Lanier, K. (Co-Writers). (1996). Set it off [Motion picture]. United States: New Line Cinema. Guadagnino, L. (Director), & Ivory, J. (Writer). (2017). Call me by your name [Motion picture]. Italy: Sony Pictures & Water’s End Productions. Harris, S. (Creator), Silver, S., Clair, D., McMahon, J., & Jacobson, D. (Writers). (1977–1981). Soap [Television series—seasons 1–4]. Los Angeles, CA: ABC & Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions. Harris, S. (Creator/Producer), Witt, P. J., & Thomas, T. (Producers). (1985–1992). Golden girls [Television series—seasons 1–7]. Los Angeles, CA: NBC-ABC & Buena Vista Pictures. Haynes, T. (Director), & Nagy, P. (Writer). (2015). Carol [Motion picture]. United States: Film4 & TWC. Herman-Wurmfeld, C. (Director), Juergensen, H., & Westfeldt, J. (Co-Writers). (2001). Kissing Jessica Stein [Motion picture]. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Hogan, P. J. (Director), & Bass, R. (Writer). (1997). My best friend’s wedding [Motion picture]. United States: TriStar Pictures & Zucker Brothers Productions. Hughes, J. (Writer/Director). (1985). The Breakfast Club [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures and A&M Films. Hunt, D. (Creators/Co-Writer), & Hicks, H. Jr. (Co-Writer). (2010–2013). The big c [Television series—seasons 1–4]. Stamford, CT: Showtime & Sony Pictures Television. Hytner, N. (Director), & Wasserstein, W. (Writer). (1998). The object of my affection [Motion picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox. Jenkins, B. (Director/Writer), & McCraney, T. A. (Original Book Author). (2016). Moonlight [Motion picture]. United States: A24 Plan B Entertainment & Pastel Productions. Johnson, K. (2018, March 14). Trump opened “Pandora’s box” with Tarriffs. Foreign Policy. Retrieved from https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/14/trump -opened-pandoras-box-with-tariffs-232-steel-article-21-wto/ Jordan, N. (Writer/Director), & Woolley, S. (Producer). (1992). The crying game [Motion picture]. London, England: Palace Pictures & Channel Four Films. Kaplan, I. (2018, March 6). RuPaul: Drag Race host apologizes for controversial remarks about transgender contestants. Independent Minds. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/rupaul-drag -race-host-apology-transgender-comments-lgbt-trans-contestants-a8242381 .html Kaufman, M. (Creator, Co-Playwright) & Members of the Tectonic Theatre Project (Co-Playwright). (2000). The Laramie project [Play]. Denver, CO: Ricketson Theatre. Kauffman, M., & Morris, H. J. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2015–2019). Grace and Frankie [Television series—seasons 1–5]. Los Angeles, CA: Netflix and Skydance Media.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     233 Kidron, B. (Director), & Beane, D. (Writer). (1995). To Wong Foo, Thanks for everything! Julie Newmar [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures & Amblin Entertainment. Kohan, J., & Kerman, P. (Co-Creator/Co-Writer), Friedman, L., Hess, S., & Herrmann, T. (Co-Writers), (Original Book Author). (2013–2019). Orange is the new black [Television series—seasons 1–7]. New York, NY: Astoria Studios. Kramer, L. (Playwright). (1985). The normal heart [Play]. New York, NY: The Public Theatre. Kron, L. (Playwright/Lyricist), & Tesori, J. (Composer). (2015). Fun home [Musical]. New York, NY: Circle in the Square Theatre. Kushner, T. (Playwright). (1993). Angels in America [Play]. New York, NY: The Walter Kerr Theatre. Lannan, M. (Creator/Writer). (2014–2015). Looking [Television series—seasons 1–2]. San Francisco, CA: HBO Films. Larson, J. (Playwright/Composer/Lyricist). (1996). RENT [Musical]. New York, NY: Nederlander Theatre. Lee, A. (Director), Ossana, D., & McMurty, L. (Co-Writers). (2005). Brokeback Mountain [Motion picture]. United States: River Road Entertainment & Focus Features. Levitan, S., & Lloyd, C. (Co-Creator/Co-Writers). (2009–2019). Modern Family [Television series—seasons 1–11]. Los Angeles, CA: Lloyd-Levitan Productions & 20th Century Fox Television. Livingston, J. (Director/Co-Producer). (1990). Paris is burning [Documentary Film]. New York, NY: Academy Entertainment Off White Productions. Lopez, R., Parker, T., & Stone, M. (Co-Composers/Co-Lyricists/Co-Writers). (2011). The Book of Mormon. New York, NY: Eugene O’Neill Theatre. Lore, C., Gorodetsky, & Baker, G. (Co-Creator/Co-Writers). (2013–2019). Mom [Television series—seasons 1–8]. Los Angeles, CA: Warner Brother Television & CBS. Manos, J., Jr., (Creator, Co-Writer), & Lindsay, J. (Co-Writer). (2006–2013). Dexter [Television series—seasons 1–8]. Florida: Showtime & John Goldwyn Productions. Marlens, N., Black, C., Rosenthal, D. S., & DeGeneres, E. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (1994–1998). Ellen [Television series—seasons 1–5]. Los Angeles: American Broadcasting Company. Mastrosimone, W. (Writer), & Ferland, G. (Director). (2002) Bang bang you’re dead [Motion picture]. Canada: Showtime & Legacy Filmworks. McNally, T. (Playwright). (1995). Love! Valour! Compassion! [Play]. New York, NY: Walter Kerr Theatre. Miranda, L.-M. (Composer/Lyricist/Playwright). (2015). Hamilton: An American musical [Musical]. New York, NY: Richard Rogers Theatre. Mitchell, J. C. (Writer/Director). (2001). Hedwig and the angry inch [Motion picture]. United States: New Line Cinema. Morris, L., Waller-Bridge, P., Woodward Gentle, S. (Co-Producers), & Jennings, L. (Writer) (2018–2019). Killing Eve [Television series—seasons 1–2]. London, England: BBC One/America & Sid Gentle Films Ltd.

234    C. REILLY Muller, R. (Writer), & Roemer, L. (Director). (1964). Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer [Television special]. New York, NY: NBC & Videocraft International. Murphy, R., Falchuk, B., & Brennan, I. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2009–2015). Glee [Television series—seasons 1–6]. Los Angeles, CA: The Princesses and a P & Universal Television: 20th Century Fox Television. Murphy, R., Falchuk, B., & Canals, S. (Co-Creators, Co-Producers). (2018–2019). Pose. [Television Series—Seasons 1–2]. New York, NY: Color-Force & FX Network. Murphy, T., Tzudiker, B., White, N. (Co-Writers), Lima, K., & Buck, C. (Co-Directors). (1999). Tarzan [Motion picture]. United States: Walt Disney Pictures. Mutchnick, M., Kohan, D. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers/Co-Producers), & Burrows, J. (Director). (1998–2006). Will & Grace [Television series—seasons 1–8]. Los Angeles, CA: NBC Studios & Universal Television. Mutchnick, M., Kohan, D. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers/Co-Producers), & Burrows, J. (Director). (2017–2019). Will & Grace [Television series—seasons 9–10]. Los Angeles, CA: The Princesses and a P/Universal Television: NBC Universal Television. Nichols, J. (Director), & May, E. (Writer). (1996). The birdcage [Motion picture]. United States: Nichols Film Company & United Artists. Notaro, T. (Writer/Director). (2012). Tig Notaro: Live [Comedy performance]. Los Angeles, CA: Largo at the Coronet Theater & Secretly Canadian. Noyes, N. (Director), Boulet, D., & Boulet S. (Co-Creators). (2016–-2017). The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula: Search for the world’s first/next drag supermonster [Web series—seasons 1–2]. Los Angeles, CA: Ash & Bone Cinema & Hey Qween TV. O’Keefe, L. (Composer/Lyracist), Farley, K., & Flemming, B. (Co-Playwrights). (2001). Bat Boy [Musical]. New York, NY: Union Square Theatre. Olsen, M. V., & Scheffer, W. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2006–2011). Big love [Television series—seasons 1–5]. Los Angeles, CA: Anima Sola Productions & HBO. Parker, O. (Director/Writer). (2005). Imagine me & you [Motion picture]. England: BBC Films. Peirce, K. (Director/Co-Writer), & Bienen, A. (Co-Writer). (1999). Boys don’t cry [Motion picture]. England: Hart-Sharp Entertainment & IFC Films. Pinar, W. F. (1998). Queer theory in education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Retrieved from ERIC database. (ED424511) Polk, P.-I., Blair, R. B., & Gordon, J. E. (Co-Creators/Co-Writers). (2005–2006). Noah’s Arc [Television series—seasons 1–2]. Los Angeles, CA: Logo and Open Door Productions. Postol, T. (2019, February 19). Are Trump and Putin opening Pandora’s box. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/inf-treaty-missile-defense.html Pratt, M. L. (1997). Arts of the contact zone. In P. Gibian (Ed.), Mass culture & dveryday life, (pp. 61–72). Longdon, England: Routledge. Reilly, C. (2009). Re-reading read-alouds: Reading into gendered discourses through pedagogy in action (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://etda.libraries. psu.edu/files/final_submissions/1291 Rhimes, S. (Creator/Writer). (2005–2019). Grey’s Anatomy [Television series—seasons 1–16]. Los Angeles, CA: Shondaland & ABC Studios.

Change in the Blink of a Queer Eye     235 Rhimes, S. (Creator/Writer). (2012–2018). Scandal [Television series—seasons 1–7]. Los Angeles, CA: Shondaland & ABC Studios. Rice, L. M. (2014). Breaking danger. New York, NY: HarperCollins Books. Rowling, J. K., (1997–2007). Harry Potter [Book series]. London, England: Bloomsbury. Rudnick, P. (Creator/Playwright). (1993). Jeffrey [Play]. New York, NY: Players Art Foundation, Inc. Sandlin J. A., O’Malley, M. P., & Burdick, J. (2011). Mapping the complexity of public pedagogy scholarship: 1894–2010. Review of Educational Research. 81(3), 338–375. Sandlin J. A., Schultz B. D., & Burdick, J. (2010). Handbook of public pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Schiller, G., & Rosenberg, R. (Co-Directors). (1985). Before Stonewall [Documentary]. New York, NY: Alternative Media Information Center. Schrader, L. (Writer). (1985). Kiss of the spider woman [Motion picture]. Brazil: Embrafilme. Shaffer, P. (Playwright), & Dexter, J. (Director). (1973). Equus [Play]. London, England: National Theatre. Shanley, J. P., (2005). Doubt [Play]. New York, NY: Walter Kerr Theatre. Sharman, J. (Director/Writer). (1975). The Rocky horror picture show [Motion picture]. United States: 20th Century Fox. Sherman, M. (Playwright). (1979). Bent [Play]. London, England: The Royal Court Theatre. Sherman-Palladino, A. (Creator/Co-Writer), & Fodor, K. (Co-Writer). (2017–2019). The marvelous Mrs. Maisel [Television series—seasons 1–3]. New York, NY: Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions & Amazon Studios. Simmons, J. (Director/Producer). (2005). TransGeneration [Television series]. Los Angeles, CA: SundanceTV & World of Wonders Production. Stockett, K. (2009). The help. New York, NY: Berkley Books. Thomas-Reid, M. (2018, September). Queer pedagogy. Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Retrieved from http://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-405 Trump Opens Pandora’s Box in U.S. (2016, March 14). Global Times [China]. Retrieved from http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/973564.shtml Trump’s Election Opened ‘Pandora’s Box of Hate. (2016, February 20). The Herald [Scotland]. Retrieved from https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15105395 .trumps-election-opened-pandoras-box-of-hate/ Vallée, J.-M. (Director), Borten, C., & Wallak, M. (Co-Writers). (2013). Dallas buyers club [Motion picture]. United States: Truth Entertainment & Voltage Pictures. van Lokeren, J. (Producer). (2019, Summer). RuPaul. [U.S. Television series— three-week test run for a possible Fall launch]. Los Angeles, CA: TelePictures/ Warner Brother & Fox Television. Van Sant, G. (Director), & Black, D. L. (Writer). (2008). Milk [Motion Picture]. United States: Groundswell Productions. Vardalos, N. (Writer), & Lembeck, M. (2004). Connie and Carla [Motion Picture]. United States: Spyglass Entertainment.

236    C. REILLY Vardalos, N. (Writer), & Zwick, J. (2002). My big fat Greek wedding [Motion Picture]. United States: HBO Films. Verhoeven, P. (Director), & Eszterhas, J. (Writer). (1995). Showgirls [Motion Picture]. United States: MGM & United Artists. Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (Co-Creators/Co-Directors/Co-Writers). (1999– 2003). The Matrix Series [Motion Pictures series]. United States: Warner Brothers Pictures. Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (Co-Creators/Co-Directors/Co-Writers). (2005). V is for vendetta [Motion Pictures series]. England: Warner Brothers Pictures. Wachowski, L., Wachowski, L. (Co-Creators/Co-Directors/Co-Writers), & McTeigue, J. M. (Director) (2015–2018). Sense8 [Motion picture]. Sense8 [Television series—seasons 1 & 2]. London, England/Berlin, Germany/Reykjavik, Iceland/ Mumbai, India/Nairobi, Kenya/México City, Mexico/Seoul, South Korea/ San Francisco, CA (USA)/Chicago, IL (USA): Netflix & Javelin Productions. Warchus, M. (Director), & Beresford, S. (Writer). (2014). Pride [Motion picture], England: BBC Films. Wilchins, R. (2004). Queer theory, gender theory: An instant primer. Los Angeles, CA: Alyson. Wright, A., & Wright, B. (2018). Camp Wannakiki [Web series—season 1] Chicago, IL: Sugarbaker Productions.

CHAPTER 13

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES OF CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY Story Circles, Dialogue, and Complicated Conversations Krystal A. Yañez Medrano University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Laura Jewett University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

By incorporating a counter-storytelling method based on the narratives, testimonies, or life histories of people of color, a story can be told from a non-majoritarian perspective . . . At the same time, counterstorytelling can also serve as a pedagogical tool that allows one to better understand and appreciate the unique experiences and responses of students of color. —Delgado, 2002, p. 116

Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 237–248 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

237

238    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT

As the above quote argues, counterstorytelling based on the lived experiences and embodied epistemologies of people of color can serve as a powerful pedagogical tool. In this chapter we argue that such storytelling might also be considered as a fruitful and contested curricular practice. More specifically, this chapter examines the story circle pedagogy as developed by John O’Neal, a New Orleans-based activist, as a critical form of curricular practice that engages in complicated conversations aimed at exploring and transforming shared experiences of oppression, injustice, strength, imagination, and hope. Drawing from ethnographic and auto-ethnographic data from a larger study exploring the pedagogical and curricular uses of the story circle in undergraduate and graduate courses at two Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) on the Texas-Mexico border, this chapter examines the story circle as a complicated curricular conversation with the potential to engage students in building collective actionable theory—grounded in complicated interstices among identity, culture, and higher education curriculum—and galvanize students “who wish to take action in the face of contemporary social injustice” (O’Neal, O’Neal, Hoffman, & Rao, 2006, p. 2). Although this chapter focuses on curricular potential, we also suggest that such conversation often simultaneously works to reify systems of power and privilege. In other words, it’s complicated. We begin by discussing the context of our larger study, which took place within story circles composed of students and professors in two separate undergraduate and graduate classrooms representing two HSIs located on the Texas–Mexico border. Yet, story circles and the counterstorytelling they can give rise to also represent ideological, cultural, linguistic, and epistemological borders situated within the fertile, yet contested, interstices betwixt and between curriculum studies and critical pedagogy. Along with Moreira (2016), we argue that in addition to being considered in light of critical pedagogy, story circles as a form of counterstorytelling might also be considered a curricular practice aimed at naming and reframing, which operates “counterclockwise to neopositivist epistemologies” (p. 666). Toward these ends, we present auto-ethnographic composites composed of compressed curricular moments drawn from our own experiences in order to explore the swirling possibilities and challenges of the story circle as, among other things, a curricular practice of counterstorytelling. INTERPENETRATING SPHERES OF INQUIRY This study is a “layered account” (Goodall, 2003, p. 57) that draws from multiple interpenetrating modes of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic data including participant observation, document analysis gathered over a 2-year period, and multiple and ongoing iterations of written auto-ethnographic

Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy    239

reflections and joint dialogue among the two researchers as well as among the researchers and participants (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016). This chapter does not represent a linear retelling or synopsis of our research critically exploring story circle pedagogy. Rather, it represents a narrative mode of “bootleg” inquiry that gathers up patterns as they emerged during the larger study and distills them into two auto-ethnographic composites that we hope serve as provocations toward further conversations. (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 199). As such, the composites in this chapter serve as curricular spaces where questions about whose story belongs to who is in perpetual negotiation, and where narrative borders are crossed and re-crosssed with the regularity of the literal crossings that take place on the Mexico-Texas border that shapes and is shaped by these stories (Campos, 2011). The border, writes Anzaldua (1987), is complicated terrain: “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional of an unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition” (p. 3). In many ways, the institutional settings within which our study took place are emblematic of the unnatural boundaries and perpetual transition Anzaldua (1987) attributes to borderlands. Located in one of the poorest counties in the United States and less than a stone’s throw from a bridge to Mexico, the institutions in this study represent two distinct territories whose campuses sit on separate shores of the same resaca (former distributary of the Rio Grande). One is a community college and the other a doctoral-granting institution. A subtropically picturesque walking bridge, where bird watchers often travel from afar to check rare, exotic species off their list, joins the two campuses, but so do other things. Both are designated HSIs in which well over 90% of students identify as LatinX, Mexican American, or Hispanic. Both serve primarily first-generation college students who live their lives in Spanish and in English. And both are linked by historical and contemporary systemic inequities that disproportionally disadvantage the institutions and the students they serve. In this chapter we draw from story circle data gathered in classrooms from both institutional shores. Both authors use (although to different extents) the story circle as a critical pedagogical, problem-posing protocol in which student-generated questions serve as the subject of study. In this protocol, the problem poser voices their question and imposes a time limit for each student (and their teacher) to in turn address the question. The discussion proceeds in this way with each participant addressing the question in strictly timed turns without interruption or vocalized response from other participants. The composites we present in this chapter are composed from participant observation recorded in on-the-spot field notes across multiple story circles and across different semesterly times and institutional spaces linked by the same pedagogical protocol and research process. As professors and researchers engaging in dialogic inquiry with students and each

240    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT

other, we found ourselves sometimes at the center and other times on the periphery of the circles we write about, and this auto-ethnographic reflexivity was itself complicated (Goodall, 2000, Jewett, 2008). In this chapter, we intentionally recombined participant-observation data from multiple circles with the intention of narratively representing both distinct and shared moments of possibility on the border of curriculum and pedagogy. We also want to acknowledge that no two story circles shared the same contours or moments, as each classroom or communidad (community) was allowed to define and dictate their struggle. The process of recombining, distilling, and recasting these moments into composites entails a process of naming and reframing. In this way, the auto-ethnographic form of this study as well as its content represents a complicated, and not unproblematic, conversation (Holman Jones, 2016). BRIDGING CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY According to Giroux (2011), critical pedagogy is more than just a radical form of learning, it is “about encouraging students to take risks, act on their sense of social responsibility, and engage the world” (p. 14). In classroom settings where the story circle is used, teachers are not facilitators but rather co-producers of whatever new knowledge is birthed in the moment, the antithesis of hegemonic aims to silence and control. While the general principles of the story circle have roots in the critical pedagogical practices of Paulo Freire as well as indigenous African American and Latino activists and their Anglo allies (Curthoys, Cuthbertson, & Clark, 2012; Lau & Seedat, 2015, Rodriguez, 2015), we take guidance from the story circle’s specific routes as developed and implemented by John O’Neal, a New Orleans based civil rights activist and founding member of the Free Southern Theater (FST) which was founded in the 1960s as a cultural arm of the civil rights movement in the black belt south (O’Neal et al., 2006; Randels, 2005). According to Randels (2005), the story circle protocol developed out of the FST’s desire for a more democratic process of discourse that included all voices. Randels (2005) continues: “They also wanted to emphasize story rather than argument, understanding that stories tend “to bring people together, to help them find common ground or at least to understand each other” (p. 1). The immediate pedagogical goal of the story circle, according to O’Neal et al. (2006), is to “create connections by establishing common ground, along with the chance to share experiences of love, injustice, hope, fear, and other powerful emotions and moments that all participants share” (p. 4). If we look at curriculum as the “transformation of consciousness that takes place at the intersection of at least three agencies (often constructed in education as the teacher, the learner,

Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy    241

and the knowledge they produce together),” then the story circle is working to transform knowledge as well as knowers through dialogue (Jewett, 2008, p. 67). In this way, we see these story circles in relation to curricular as well as pedagogical transformation. Our inquiry into the possibilities and challenges of the story circle is certainly contoured by notions of dialogue taken up by critical pedagogy (Freire, 2018a; Giroux, 2011; hooks, 1994; Kincheloe, 2007). However, it is also shaped by our own lived experience of engaging these story circles and their counterstories as complicated conversations in which interlocutors are speaking not only among themselves but to those not present, not only to historical figures and unnamed peoples and places they may be studying, but to politicians and parents dead and alive, not to mention to the selves they have been, are in the process of becoming, and someday may become. (Pinar, 2011, p. 43)

In this way, we hope the story circle composites that follow might also be heard as complicated curricular conversations in which “an expressive complex of quasi-colonialism in the American Southwest, especially Texas . . . often enforced through the power of the state” (Limón, 1998, pp. 110–111) abuts the startling particularities of local knowledges embodied by the lived contradictions of localized curricular practices of naming and reframing and ultimately of becoming. NAMING AND REFRAMING Human existence cannot be silent . . . To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. [. . .] But while to say the true word— which is work, which is praxis—is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. —Freire, 2018b, p. 88

Institutionalized racism reverberates within and across the different, but systematically connected, inequities and injustices that shape our experience in the academic institution in which we teach, learn, and love. Likewise, you can hear it in the story circles we explore here. While dialogue can be seen as a pedagogical practice of resistance, it also represents a complicated conversation. Critical scholars and educators have been attempting to resist institutionalized racism for decades through curricular and pedagogical practices aimed at unmasking systems of power and privilege as they circulate through educational entities who shape and are shaped by policies and practices which seem to facilitate among the neoliberalism’s persistent drone, the cheerful chirps of neutralized multiculturalisms, and

242    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT

the sometimes silent, yet no less willful, ignorance regarding our own complicity in perpetuating institutionalized racism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Giroux, 2013; Giroux, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2009; Picower & Kohli, 2017). The story circles we explore in this chapter certainly echo such racisms. But in their dialogic work aimed at naming— defining, detailing, and deliberating—individual and collective struggles with institutionalized racism, resistance more than murmurs. Acknowledging institutionalized racism is akin to engaging in a nameless concept your whole life and then suddenly knowing the name of it. Classrooms have often been sites of overwhelming shame, outrage, confusion, and disheartenment, as we put names for the first time to our oppressions, our struggles. Though each class began with the same set of disheartening topics of discussion (institutionalized racism), the story circle created a discursive space large enough to travel among new revelations, and journey toward different possibilities within the confines of the too-familiar terrain of institutional racism to which our classroom remains related. Naming These particular curricular moments in this composite occurred in public speaking courses. The courses met twice a week and consisted of about 25 students each. This first circle of counterstorytelling was generated by an assertive group of Latinx students. Most identified as women, and all except two students were under the age of 28. Three students were veterans whose experiences of strength—but also trauma—were still very much with them. To prepare students for their first story circle, all classes were given the same topic and same framing. The topic was introduced lecture style with alarming statistics on college completion rates for Latinx students, which at the time reported only 15% of Hispanics had a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 22% of Blacks, 41% of Whites, and 63% of Asians (pewresearch.org), and current data sets show little to no difference (Gurantz, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2017). Additionally, in that lecture the instructor summarized and read several quotes from a Ladson-Billings (2006) article on achievement debt in which she asserts that our national focus and efforts to problematize the achievement gap are misplaced and further damaging, while our real concern should be our national education debt. After I lecture and before we all leave, I remind them of who I am and what I care about as their instructor and what education means to me. There is power that comes with initiating these story circles and selecting what I share. I acknowledge that. My students and myself wrestle with the information for a few days before returning to class to engage in our story circle. The students believe this time is set aside for them to collect their thoughts, reflect, and build questions,

Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy    243

but they’re not the only ones coming up with questions. I wonder if my summary of education debt and my explanation of the statistics is compromised by my crusade against all things oppressive and my affection towards all things subversive. Does this influence the story circle? Of course it does. Today’s circle was launched by a question about ignorance. Specifically, the question centered on an implicit and highly contestable argument that institutionalized racism and, concomitantly, all racism (in this circle today at least) is the byproduct of ignorance. Students seemed to dig in here, and we didn’t get much farther than that. “Why don’t they tell us in high school,” a student asked as we opened up the story circle after tossing around the question “What has education failed at?” I don’t know. “Why don’t they teach us (. . .) like how we learn about economics and budgeting but about how to manage our own learning,” another student asked. I now am thinking of the AVID classes (classes at early college high schools aimed at preparing dual enrollment students for college) that my current dual enrollment students are taking and, to my dismay, are justifiably complaining about. I don’t know why they’re not teaching you all to manage your own learning.

While arguably the difficult, critical knowledge that is of the most use is ultimately unmanageable, we often wonder ourselves if we are being cynical in thinking that we as teachers and the curriculums we live are purposely creating and managing the “achievement debt,” or if it’s naïve to think that none of us do (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 3). It’s at this point that our dialogue becomes a quarrel, not with one another but between the curriculum maker and critic within. Even my students, as curriculum makers within our classroom and in their own lives, struggle to reconcile the “normalization of race and racism” (Berry, 2010, p. 151) with the hope of unmasking and obliterating the “forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay” and academic division (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2009, p. 49). Are our dual roles as both critic and creator of this curricular debt locked in a circle, and our perspectives cycling from that of double agents patrolling curricular borders and pedagogies of full-on false consciousness? Our story circles sometimes provoke similar tension among students. In these circles all students identify as Hispanic or LatinX or Mexican American, and most identify as first-generation college students. Some, despite the contemporary danger of such identification, identify as immigrants. Some students seem to bring social class privilege to bear on our dialogue, privileged in ways that complicate our discussions of racism. They might agree that institutionalized racism is felt by some, by “the less fortunate.” Yet, they discursively approach their own educational experience with a detachment that they often conflate with objectivity or a vague sense of impartial professionalism. They have their eyes set on the prize. If this discourse goes unchallenged for long, the truth of the story circle dissolves

244    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT

or gets traded in for a superficial discussion that only serves to pacify the external ego of the group, thereby reifying the current systems of power and privilege. Along a related line, another discursive thread in the same circle insists (in different terms) that oppression, whitewashing, and academic disparities do not exist or, if they do, can be outmaneuvered by strong will or motivation. Perhaps disillusioned from politically inert versions of multiculturalism, these students propose resiliency, not resistance, and posit psychological grit in place of justice. For example, one young man, a 19-year old entrepreneur who arrived late to the story circle and thereby missed the previous discursive destinations to which the group had traveled, including disappointment and anger, responded earnestly to a story circle question about racism, saying, “I think education still is the great equalizer.” Although the circle considered his response and responded to it as either indifference or ignorance, his contributions were often discursively dismissed as peripheral to the circle. In these circles, adherence to dominant discursivity became a marginalizing discourse. Although students initially struggled to name their experiences of institutionalized racism, the shared dialogic journey of this collective discursive struggle provided a sort of pedagogical coherence that united us and propelled our thinking. “Nobody has full authority when it comes to knowledge,” I told a class once as we argued about how much we should argue in class. No one sees all. The problem isn’t just everyone else. It is us too. Reframing When we think “resistance,” we are sometimes flooded with images of underground societies where oppressed peoples have across time and place, developed sophisticated practices to subvert systems of power and privilege, and overthrow oppressors. Places where secret codes and gathering locations are established beyond the gaze of our oppressors and in the nooks and crannies of the “master’s house” (Lorde, 2018). These are the places where revolutions are hatched. The story circles of resistance in this chapter are perhaps not as historic or as cinematic, yet they can serve as sites of nested subversivities that build solidarities across the curricular landscape as well as within the curricular confines of one course. In this sense, story circles can be seen as a concentric strategy to reframe the curricularly discursive horizons of critical dialogue and expand its pedagogical reach beyond a singular circle. For example: Another separate class started their story circle with the same topic of institutionalized racism. Together, we generated the question, “How can we ensure

Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy    245 we all graduate?” Taking the disheartening college completion statistics personally and banding together under the banner of “we must finish,” this particular story circle flowed with love and empathy, although at times it seemed to rotate into naïve optimism as opposed to critical hope. But, I embraced it as the students shared their ideas on how to ensure graduation, ranging from exchanging cell numbers with one another to keeping each other accountable, to vowing to take courses together, to sharing insider information about which professors were lazy or least likely to help them succeed. “Mr. Garcia sucks. He just reads from the book and his tests are the hardest. Take it with Gomez. She explains everything better,” one student’s voice rose above the rest, and some scribbled down “Gomez” on their notebooks before leaving class that day. They weren’t the only ones bitten by the resistance bug. I also divulged some secrets about the system, about the behind-the-scenes, about the processes that are in play that might increase their academic capital. I spilled it all that day and continue to do so. In fact, I’ve been known to spend entire weeks explaining in detail what I’m sure academic advisors are hired to do. That story circle was a desperate, revelation/revolution in which we shared whatever we thought might help each other get our footing. A lot of times this included a glimpse into the structural realities of the “master’s house” or breaking the vernacular code at the heart of the very institutions we were simultaneously helping each other gain access-to and revolt against. Our circle was clear. It did not want to mimic White-stream ways of knowing, dominant habits of mind or hegemonic practices, or force their discourse on each other or our students. We also realized “that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resistance . . . that intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would make recovery . . . possible” (hooks, 1994, pp. 169–170). Sometimes the strategic crosspurposes of our story circles became interpenetrated and tangled through dialogue. This story circle, centered around strategic revolt and resistance, created such a tight-knit group of students that anybody that missed that day didn’t exchange numbers. They didn’t exchange vows. The circle was configured. I remember setting up my lecture slides only a week later as that day’s class got situated. I saw a young man whom had missed the story circle come in, and a pair of girls looked over at him. One of them whispered to the other, “He hasn’t even been here in weeks.” The other girl looked up at me and proudly chuckled, “I don’t know about him, but we’re going to graduate.”

By actively engaging in the collective acknowledgement and resistance of our oppression, we “name the world, to change it” as nobody “can say a true word alone” (Freire, 2018b, p. 147). Story circle moments, powerful and problematic forms of critical dialogue, provide a space to name our experiences of racism and oppression and the intersections among them. Critical classroom dialogue, particularly that which is pedagogically structured by generative constraints designed to diminish polarized discursive practices, can also help us reframe our reality, recontour our worlds (Campbell, West, & Littles, 2016). As curriculum makers and critics, we

246    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT

move feverishly through concentric curricular circles that entail acknowledging, grappling, and resisting the interpenetrating realities of teaching, learning, and researching within and against the snug circles that too often characterize academic institutions and the institutionalized racism that is characteristic of them/us. As the story circle reflections in this chapter suggest, the contested spaces of critical dialogue might stop short of revolution. However, such discursive spaces can help foster solidarities and alliances that sustain resistance—even within pedagogical spheres constrained by entrenched systems of power and privilege. I stared lovingly at Madeline, my 16-year-old dual enrollment student as her tears rolled down her cheeks and fell to the ground. It was her turn to speak. She spoke assertively in a low volume: “I just feel this enormous amount of pressure, from even my parents, to rush through something [her education] and make all these long-term career choices.” She looked at Sonja and Kayla, her closest friends in the story circle, for support before adding, “learning used to be exciting and fun. Now I’m just worried all the time.” PROSPECTIVE CIRCLES As a process of “naming” and reframing “one’s reality” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2009), the story circle protocol serves not only to subvert systems of power and privilege but also to transform them, by transforming ourselves, teachers, and students, together in dialogue. This is important in light of the asymmetries of power all students, via their status as students, encounter in academic communities and through conventional pedagogies often favored in college classrooms. This is particularly important for the LatinX students for whom this asymmetry is often experienced as just one part of a cascading set of systemic, epistemic hegemonies related to power and knowledge. As Ladson-Billings and Tate (2009) note, “A growing number of education scholars of color are raising critical questions about the way research is being conducted in communities of color” (p. 176). The story circle, as a source of collective critical inquiry aimed at generating vernacular (by and for real people) theory about shared realities of power and knowledge, can serve as powerful grounding for research and action. While this chapter focuses on students who all identified as LatinX and/or Hispanic, findings can provide more general insights regarding the capacity of story circles and critical dialogue more broadly, to serve as complicated curricular conversations that acknowledge institutionalized racism. For teachers, students, and researchers “who are invested and produced in the process of education,” the story circle can serve as a curricular place of possibility and a place of resistance shaped by the reciprocal tensions of critical, discursive practices that represent powerfully vested epistemological interests,

Concentric Circles of Curriculum and Pedagogy    247

themselves nested in larger dynamics of power and privilege. As our chapter suggests, inclusion and exclusion can sometimes be seen to work together in the joint action of reciprocal tension to form a bond, forged by exclusion, that is so tight that it can inadvertently force perceived Others (in the story circles here, discursive practices perceived as those representing dominant ideologies and other ideologies or theoretical perspectives that are not corroborated by participants’ experiences) to the periphery or even fully outside the circle. In this way, the story circle does not stand apart as an oasis of Freirean conscientization. Rather, story-circle pedagogy might be seen as one circle in a set of concentric circles of participatory, sometimes contradictory, and always partial, practices at the threshold of curriculum and pedagogy from which students, particularly students often marginalized in higher education, might foster subversivities, create solidarities and generate ripples of resistance and imagination. REFERENCES Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Berry, T. R. (2010). Critical race feminism. In K. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of curriculum studies (Vol. 1, pp. 151–152). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Boylorn, R. M., & Orbe, M. P. (Eds.). (2016). Critical autoethnography: Intersecting cultural identities in everyday life. New York, NY: Routledge. Campbell, C. J. S., West, J., & Littles, S. (2016). Transformative education and Freire’s pedagogy of love: A PhD graduate’s experience. Journal of Transformative Learning. Campos, D. (2011). Understanding immigration as lived personal experience. In F. Pappas (Ed), Pragmatism in the Americas (pp. 245–261). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Curthoys, L., Cuthbertson, B., & Clark, J. (2012). Community story circles: An opportunity to rethink the epistemological approach to heritage interpretive planning. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 17, 173–187. Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press. Delgado Bernal, D. (2002). Critical race theory, Latino critical theory, and critical raced-gendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126. Freire, P. (2018a). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (2018b). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: NY: Bloomsbury. Giroux, H. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: The Continuum International. Giroux, H.A. (2013). America’s education deficit and the war on youth. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

248    K. A. YAÑEZ MEDRANO and L. JEWETT Goodall, H. L., Jr. (2000). Writing the new ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Goodall, H. L., Jr. (2003) What is interpretive ethnography? An eclectic’s tale. In R. P. Clair (Ed.), Expressions of ethnography: Novel approaches to qualitative methods (pp. 55–63). Albany: State University of New York Press. Gurantz, O., Hurwitz, M., & Smith, J. (2017). Boosting: Hispanic college completion: Does high school recruiting help more students graduate? Education Next, 17(3), 60. Holman Jones, S. (2016). Living bodies of thought: The “critical” in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(4), 228–237. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Jewett, L. M. (2008). A delicate dance: Autoethnography, curriculum, and the semblance of intimacy. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical pedagogy: Where are we now? New York, NY: Peter Lang. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in US schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (2009). Toward a critical race theory of education.  In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, &  R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 167–183). New York, NY: Routledge. Lau, U., & Seedat, M. (2015). The community story, relationality and process: Bridging tools for researching local knowledge in a peri-urban township. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 25(5), 369–383. Limón, J. E. (1998). American encounters: Greater Mexico and the erotics of culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lorde, A. (2018). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. New York, NY: Penguin. Moreira, M. A. (2016). Counteracting the power of the single story in teacher education: Teacher narratives as Lion’s voices. In J. Paraskeva & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Curriculum: Decanonizing the field (pp. 663–684). New York, NY: Peter Lang. O’Neal, B., O’Neal, J., Hofman, A., & Rao, S. (2006). Storytelling in the name of justice. Retrieved from http://wagner.nyu.edu/files/leadership/JuneBug.pdf Picower, B., & Kohli, R. (Eds.). (2017). Confronting racism in teacher education: Counternarratives of critical practice. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Pinar, W. F. (2011). What is curriculum theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Randels, J. (2005, October 28). The story circle: After the storm Education Week Teacher Blog. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/randels/archives/2005/10/ the_story_circl_1.html Rodriguez, C. M. (2015). The Journey of a digital story: A healing performance of minobimaadiziwin: The good life (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://aura .antioch.edu/etds/219

ON ACTIVISM Camea Davis Georgia State University

This poem is a research poem (Faulkner, 2009; Leavy, 2015; Prendergast, 2015) from a 2016–2018 poetic inquiry research study on minoritized youth poet’s civic actions. The lines of this poem presents themes from the interview transcripts of interviews with 15 youth poets and activists. It also demonstrates the qualitative researcher as tool, to show the duality and tensions of activist identities shared by participants and the poet as researcher. This poem is about the tensions and contradictions in activist work that requires both deep self reflection and collective action. “ON ACTIVISM” I am dirty fingernails clawed at forgotten lawns Like tectonic plates at hardwood dinner table Shifting contexts Knowing if I shift so does every other hinged door on this block Activism is my right and blessing, to know my neighbor by name Searching the tool shed and finding a mirror on the door Ideating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 249–250 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

249

250    On Activism

Me peering through these eyes into a cacophony of love, masked as anger I search looking for tools that weaponize my protest of waking up as me today Activism is scratching the rust from the saw and noticing how sturdy it still is Although the blade is jagged Activism is knowing what my war is and the necessity to sound an alarm Activism is painting glue on the ceiling and putting a trampoline in the basket then inviting neighbors for a jump Taking the corpses from my closet (dusty brown, decaying bodies, twisted mouths with deadbolts for lips) and sitting them on the side walk like jack-o-lanterns Inviting neighbors for tea, cool-aid, and word play Deep frying my issues and carving them open with a slender knife Becoming fuller of self-certainty with each bite Making rubber gloves from old poems and going to recycle all that trash on the lawn.

REFERENCES Faulkner, S. (2009). Poetry as method. New York, NY: Routledge. Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. New York, NY: The Guilford Press. Prendergast, M. (2015). Poetic inquiry, 2007–2012: A surrender and catch found poem. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(8), 678–685.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Pauli Badenhorst earned his dual PhD in curriculum and instruction and comparative and international education from The Pennsylvania State University. A teacher educator and educational anthropologist, he specializes in integrated research surrounding politically sustainable and culturally relevant educational approaches and practices generative of psycho-emotional, embodied well-being and equity. Consequently, his research is deeply rooted in psychoanalytic and new materialist thought. He is also particularly focused on the design of holistic epistemological and pedagogical frames to inform anti-racism and intersectional teaching, learning, and curriculum. Pauli is assistant professor of teacher education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. With degrees in creative writing, Spanish, and education, Deborah J. Bennett has been teaching language and literature at Berklee College of Music since 2001. Her poems and translations have appeared in Salamander, Connotations Press Online, La GuaGua, and elsewhere. Her prose has appeared on Only a Game, Cognoscenti, and Edify, among others. In addition, she is working on a collection of original poetry inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Recently, she and Dr. Simone Pilon were awarded an Inclusive Pedagogy Grant to examine and develop pedagogy and curriculum to address gender inclusion in Romance language instruction. Jake Burdick  is an assistant professor of curriculum studies at Purdue University. Jake is the co-editor of the  Handbook of Public Pedagogy  (RoutIdeating Pedagogy in Troubled Times, pages 251–258 Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

251

252   About the Contributors

ledge), Complicated Conversations and Confirmed Commitments: Revitalizing Education for Democracy (Educators International Press), Problematizing Public Pedagogy (Routledge), and The New Henry Giroux Reader (Myers Education Press). He has published work in Qualitative Inquiry, Curriculum Inquiry, Review of Research in Education, and Review of Educational Research. His research interests include public and popular sites of education, activist studies, and community knowledge and perceptions of education. Zachary A. Casey (PhD, University of Minnesota) is an assistant professor and associate chair of educational studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. Dr. Casey’s research focuses on the ways racial identity and systemic racism intersect in classrooms, schools, and in the lives of teachers and students. His work centers building critical racial literacy and antiracist pedagogies with practicing and future teachers, as well as the social, cultural, and philosophical contexts of education. His first book, A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the Society of Professors of Education. Kevin W. Clinard is an independent scholar, researcher, and educator based in Austin, Texas. His research focuses on critical aspects of educational inquiry, including curriculum studies, critical pedagogy, cultural studies in education, and the social and philosophical foundations of education. Specifically, he is interested in examining curriculum as a site of liberation, the out-of-school curriculum, and the role that the arts play in the generation of critical and emancipatory praxis. Dr. Michael Clough is a professor of science education at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. His scholarship focuses on the history and nature of science and its implications for effectively teaching and learning science, and promoting effective teaching and robust learning in the school science laboratory. He is past president of the International History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching (IHPST) organization, and currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Research in Science Teaching and as a science & education editorial board member. He is the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation supported project at http:// www.storybehindthescience.org Sarah Taylor Cook’s research and writings attempt to uplift and magnify marginalized voices through a critical pedagogy focus. As an educational practitioner for more than two decades, Sarah’s experience spans K–12 through higher education environments in both the United States and Mexico. Currently, Sarah is a middle-years, public school Spanish instructor and a Spanish-language interpreter for Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Previously, she worked with incarcerated young men in Mexico City

About the Contributors    253

as they envisioned alternative pathways to survival once released to avoid recidivism and further physical and emotional harm. Sarah holds a PhD in educational leadership from Keiser University and a master’s degree in Spanish language and literature, cum laude, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Camea Davis, PhD, is a poet-researcher and teacher educator with a doctorate in critical educational policy studies. Her research interests and community work explore culturally relevant teaching, minoritized youth civic action, and youth spoken word as tools to advance an equitable democracy. She has published in Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal and The Journal of School and Society. Davis has authored conference papers for the American Educational Research Association, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, The International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry, and the National Association of Multicultural Educators, and presented a TEDx Talk on language diversity in schools. Brian C. Gibbs earned his PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a focus on social studies teaching and critical theory and a minor in education policy studies. Dr. Gibbs’ work is rooted in the task of teaching, learning, and the potential of schools as sites of individual and collective transformation. His research interests include the possibilities and limits of critical, democratic and justice-oriented pedagogy, as well as the intersection of teacher ideology, choice, and decisionmaking in the implementation of pedagogy and curriculum within complicated sociopolitical contexts. Sarrah Grubb serves as an assistant professor of education at Indiana University, Kokomo. She earned her PhD in educational administration from the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has varied experience in education, including teaching at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels, and coordinating curriculum, instruction, and professional development across all levels of schooling. She rediscovered teaching as soul work through an appointment at a rural work college in the hills of eastern Kentucky, where she became dedicated to collaborating and co-creating curriculum with preservice teachers as they develop their teacher hearts. Laura Jewett is an associate professor of curriculum theory and coordinator of the curriculum and instruction doctoral program coordinator at UTRGV. Research interests include interpenetrating spheres of epistemology, culture, curriculum, and qualitative research along with chaos and complexity influenced models of emergent change. She is lead editor of Critical Intersections in Contemporary Curriculum and Pedagogy (IAP) and author of

254   About the Contributors

one book: A Delicate Dance: Autoethnography, Curriculum, and the Semblance of Intimacy (Peter Lang). Michelle L. Knaier researches, develops, and advocates for queer multicultural social justice teacher education and K–12 curriculum. She is a doctoral candidate at Purdue University, enrolled in the Curriculum and Instruction Department’s curriculum studies program. Her research focuses on queer multicultural education. Michelle also is a graduate of SUNY Cortland, holding a Master of Education in childhood education, with an emphasis in educational technology; and a Bachelor of Science in education in elementary and early secondary education, with an emphasis in biology. She often reflects on her experience as a former middle and high school science teacher while incorporating critical theories into her research on queer(ing) curriculum. Dr. Ann Mogush Mason serves as program director of elementary teacher education at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. She works with educators to recognize teaching as cultural work that can maintain or disrupt oppressive forces. Mason has faith that classrooms can be transformative spaces, and that people can claim the power to shape their experiences. She publishes in a range of scholarly venues, including International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Educational Studies, Teaching Education, Teachers College Record, and Multicultural Perspectives. Michael Takafor Ndemanu is associate professor of multicultural education, social foundations in education, and curriculum theory in the Department of Educational Studies at Ball State University. His research focuses on transformative education, multicultural education, international education, translingual literacy, peace education, and cross-cultural issues. He has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in his areas of scholarship since 2009. He earned his PhD in curriculum and instruction from Indiana University at Bloomington in 2012. Prior to that, he taught French and English in Cameroon public schools for over eight years before immigrating to the United States in 2006. Tiffany Karalis Noel is a clinical assistant professor and director of doctoral studies in the Department of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo. Her research and teaching interests examine how pedagogical preparation influences beginning teachers’ self-efficacy, as well as how interdisciplinary literacy practices facilitate learning among content-area preservice teachers. Stephanie Masta is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians. She is also an assistant professor in curriculum studies at Purdue

About the Contributors    255

University. Stephanie has published work in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, International Journal for Qualitative Studies in Education, Intersections: Critical Issues in Education, Multicultural Perspectives, The Social Studies, and The Qualitative Report. Much of her research focuses on the experiences of indigenous students in educational environments. Stephanie is particularly interested in the intersections of race and colonialism in the academy, and how underrepresented students make meaning of their sense of place within academic spaces. Her research is narrative-based and she uses both indigenous methodologies and critical race/decolonial theories in her work. Simone Pilon serves as chair of the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music. Prior to her position at Berklee, she was professor of French and director of international studies at Franklin College. She has been a Fulbright-Hays scholar to Morocco and Tunisia and has published and presented nationally and internationally on French pedagogy, Francophone literature, and international education. She has served as technical reviewer for Cliffs, Dummies, and Everything books, and has published a student edition of Louis Hémon’s canonical novel Maria Chapdelaine (Molière and Company). Simone holds a PhD in Québécois literature from Université Laval and an MA in French literature from McGill University. Shalin Lena Raye is a doctoral student in the curriculum studies program at Purdue University, where her current research focuses on the role of affect and emotional forms of knowledge as it relates to social justice education. She earned her master’s degree in English from Radford University in 2003. Her professional educational experiences span 18 years within higher education, teaching and designing courses in literature, composition, gender sexuality, and popular culture, and multicultural education. Currently, Shalin’s work is in arts-based research that centers student-created art that becomes a medium through which affective knowledge can be shared with the larger community in ways that move beyond traditional discourse and cognitive reasoning. She is interested in public pedagogies that engage the community in complicated conversations about difference and social change, and the role of the university to provoke and facilitate these conversations via aesthetic and affective research approaches. Cole Reilly is an associate professor of education at Towson University who teaches social studies methods and a variety of courses focused on social justice, diversity/multiculturalism, and/or urban education. He and his students investigate how practice stands to inform theory (and vice versa) in terms of exploring progressive pedagogies, critical feminist methodologies, and the development of more socially just and empowering curricula. Cole’s research interests typically focus upon matters of social constructivist meaning making around notions of gender(ing), sexuality, race, and

256   About the Contributors

class, as well as other matters of identity, equity, perspective, and socially just praxis in schools, life, and pop-culture. Peter A. Scaramuzzo is a doctoral student at Texas A&M University at College Station. His area of focus is curriculum studies, with particular emphasis in curriculum and ecological sustainability, queer studies, and multicultural studies. Scaramuzzo leads several research teams and is currently involved in several studies intended for publication. Scaramuzzo has served as the instructor of record for several undergraduate and postgraduate classes. He has completed his NYS administrative licensure program. Scaramuzzo is published in the International Journal of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth (2018), with forthcoming publications in press in several other journals. Dr. Amy Shema seeks opportunities to align classroom content with authentic discourse surrounding equity, diversity, and inclusivity. As a professor at the College at Brockport, she works to establish meaningful collaborations with school and community partners in order to engage teacher candidates in applied learning experiences. In addition to her work with out of school time and summer learning, Dr. Shema researches the significance of games and play in children’s development, classroom applications, and socio-emotional learning. Dr. Patrick Slattery is professor and associate department head for graduate studies in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University. His books include: Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era (Routledge) and the co-authored text with William Pinar Understanding Curriculum (Peter Lang). Dr. Slattery has published research articles in Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Educational Theory, and he is a past-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies. The central theme of his work is the promotion of a just, compassionate, and ecologically sustainable global culture through holistic and reconceptualized approaches to curriculum and process philosophical visions of creativity and change. In 2019, Dr. Slattery received the Lifetime Achievement Award from AERA Division B. Sam Tanner is an assistant professor of literacy education in The Pennsylvania State University System. His research concerns issues of Whiteness, arts-based educational research, and democratic education. Sam’s most recent book, Whiteness, Pedagogy, and Youth in America (Routledge) is about Whiteness pedagogy in K–12 contexts. Sam is a co-editor of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.

About the Contributors    257

Laura A. Taylor is an assistant professor of educational studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where she teaches courses on literacy teaching and learning in urban schools. Prior to earning her doctorate, she was a teacher at a public elementary school in Houston, Texas. In both research and teaching, she centers the role of talk in learning, considering how teachers and students construct knowledges, discourses, and identities through interaction. Her current research interests include the enactment of humanizing pedagogies within accountability-constrained schools, the pedagogical possibilities of narrative, and the intersections of language ideologies and identities. P. L. Thomas, professor of education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He recently co-edited Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/). Dr. Wandix-White has been an educator for over 20 years. She has taught various levels and aspects of English/language arts at the middle and high school, junior college, and university levels and has also served in administration. She earned a BA in communication studies from Washburn University, a MEd in reading education at Prairie View A&M, and she recently completed her PhD in curriculum and instruction at Texas A&M University, where she researched urban education and the culture of care in K–12 public schools. Dr. Wandix-White is currently furthering her research as a postdoctoral fellow at Texas A&M University. Timothy C. Wells (MA, Arizona State University) is a doctoral student in the Learning, Literacy, and Technology program at Arizona State University. His work resides in the fields of curriculum studies, qualitative methodology, and philosophy of education, bringing a critical interdisciplinary framework to the study of social and affective experiences in schooling. Currently, his research considers the concept of the acting-out child and its relationship to school curriculum. He has published in Teachers College Press, Qualitative Inquiry, and Discourse: A Journal of Culture and Education. Sijin Yan is a doctoral student in philosophy of education at Texas A&M University. Her scholarship is in the area of moral and ethical dimensions of education, contemporary continental philosophy, gender theory, and phi-

258   About the Contributors

losophy for children. Specifically, she focuses on the promotion of building connections and alleviating human suffering in the era of social alienation, political polarization, and environmental degradation. Her practical work includes teaching and facilitating in the philosophy for children program at Texas A&M University where middle and high schoolers engage in philosophical discussions together to deepen understandings of everyday life in and outside schools. Krystal A. Yañez-Medrano received her MA and BA in cCommunication studies and has been teaching applied undergraduate communication courses including Public Speaking and Interpersonal Communication in the lower Rio Grande Valley, TX since 2015. Growing up Latina, Medrano gravitates towards liberating pedagogy and decolonial studies. Her research interests include critical communication pedagogy, story circle protocol, critical dialogue, and other forms of transformative classroom practices, all in higher education. In 2017, Medrano co-authored a book alongside Dr. Kathy Bussert-Webb and Dr. Maria Diaz titled, Justice and Space Matter in a Strong, Unified Latino Community (Peter Lang).