Posts com a Tag ‘Fernwood Publishing (E)’
Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education: A Critical Reader – SEFA DEI; CALLISTE (CSS)
SEFA DEI, George J. ; CALLISTE, Agnes (Eds.), with the assistance of Margarida Aguiar. Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education: A Critical Reader. Fernwood Publishing, 2000. 188p. Resenha de: BECKETT, Gulbahar H. Canadian Social Studies, v.38, n.3, p., 2004.
Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education: A Critical Reader is a volume edited by George J. Sefa Dei and Agnes Calliste. As the title suggests, this book is indeed a critical, informative, and thought provoking reader on power, race, gender, and education. The book includes eight chapters plus an introduction and conclusion that address questions of racism and schooling practices in a variety of educational settings in Canada, a country that practices multiculturalism and is considered to value and promote diversity. Most Canadians believe that the country’s multicultural policy was established with good intentions and has served the country and its people well. As such, we rarely ask ourselves questions such as: Who is benefiting from the policy and who is not? Why and why not? What are the strengths and limitations of the multicultural policy in empowering people of all origins? What more can be done to ensure equality in education and the larger society? This very well written book asks and answers these and many other very important questions.
Specifically, Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education addresses critical issues such as multiculturalism, racism, equality, exclusion, and gender issues from theoretical as well as practical perspectives. It calls for a critical examination of and going beyond multiculturalism by challenging the status quo with critical anti-racist education. In Chapter 1, Dei contextualizes the book through his discussion of a critical anti-racist discursive theoretical framework that deals foremost with equity: the qualitative value of justice (p. 17). He is critical of multiculturalism arguing that it creates a public discourse of a colour-blind society and he calls for an acknowledgement of and confrontation with differences. According to Dei, confronting the dynamics and relational aspects of race, class, ethnic, and gender differences is essential to power sharing in colour-coded Euro-Canadian contexts.
In Chapter 2, Bedard continues the discussion of multiculturalism and anti-racist education through a deconstruction of Whiteness in relation to historical colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. He reminds readers of the complexity of the race issue as we still live with the legacy of colonialism. He asserts that through their ideological and intellectual ruling of Canada, as well as many other parts of the world (e.g., Africa and Asia), white people enjoy more privileges that are not afforded to people from other racial backgrounds. In Chapter 3, Ibrahim revisits tensions surrounding curriculum relevance and demonstrates how popular culture, especially Black popular culture (e.g., Hip Hop and Rap), can be utilized to carry out anti-racism education as it relates to students identity formation, cultural and linguistics practices, and sense of alienation from or relation to everyday classroom practice. In Chapter 4, James and Mannette address issues related to visible minority students’ access to publicly funded post-secondary education. Through rich personal accounts from students, they illustrate how these students mediate systemic barriers, gain entry, and experience post-secondary education in Canada.
In Chapter 5, Henry presents a brief reflection of black teachers’ positionality in Canadian universities and schools through three vignettes: her personal experience, two teacher candidates’ experiences, and a veteran teacher’s experience. Through these vignettes, Henry makes a case that black women in Canadian universities and schools were isolated and bore the responsibility of raising the awareness and consciousness of the White people in their work environment (p. 97). She calls on all of us to reflect on every day acts of power and subordination and to use them to develop theories and workable strategies to end inequality (p. 97). In Chapter 6, Tastsoglou discusses various types of borders and the challenges and rewards of cultural, political, and pedagogical border crossing. As a transnational person who crosses various borders daily, I found the discussion to be particularly interesting. Among others, I like the points Tastsoglou makes about otherness (i.e., how all of us can be othered sometime or another) and the detailed illustration of border pedagogy (Giroux, 1991) that can enable us to engage in socially and historically constructed multiple cultural experiences.
In Chapter 7, Wright addresses issues of exclusion and engages in an anti-racist critique of progressive academic discourse in general rather than Canadian multiculturalism per se, using post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonialist, feminist, and Afrocentricist discourses. What I found particularly informative in this chapter is Wright’s discussion of what Afrocentricism and feminism are and how they can contribute to our understanding of inclusion and exclusion. In Chapter 8, Calliste presents and discusses some research studies on racism in Canadian universities. This chapter shows racism does exist in Canadian universities overtly as well as through hidden curriculum. As such, it supports Dei’s argument that Canada is a colour-coded society where racism and inequality exist and need to be addressed.
In summary, Power, Knowledge and Anti-Racism Education: A Critical Reader is a book that challenges us to be critical of the multiculturalism that has become part of Canadian social and public discourse. It reminds us that multiculturalism works with the notion of a basic humanness. As such, it downplays inequalities and differences by accentuating shared commonalities among peoples of various backgrounds. It advocates empathy for minorities on the basis of a common humanity, envisions a future assured by goodwill, tolerance, and understanding among all, but it also breeds complacency, creating the illusion that we live in a raceless, classless, and genderless society. For example, Dei points out that, while a raceless, classless, and genderless society is an ideal that we all aspire to and work towards, we must remember that, at present, such a society is a luxury that is only possible for people from a certain racial background, namely white people. He, therefore, urges us to acknowledge that while multiculturalism is an important first step in building an ideal nation, it is anti-racist education that seeks to challenge the status quo and aspires to excellence. According to Dei and Calliste, anti-racism education practice must lead to an understanding that excellence is equity and equity is excellence (p.164). I would recommend this book as a required text for undergraduate and graduate level sociology and educational foundations related courses.
References
Giroux, H. (1991). Post-modernism as border pedagogy: Redefining the boundaries of
race and ethnicity. In H. Giroux (Ed.). Postmodernism, feminism, and cultural
politics: Redrawing educational boundaries (pp. 217-56). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gulbahar H. Beckett – College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
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Teaching Controversy – VISANO; JAKUBOWSKI (CSS)
VISANO, Livy Visano; JAKUBOWSKI, Lisa. Teaching Controversy. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2002. 175p. Resenha de: KEE, Kevin. Canadian Social Studies, v.39, n.1, p., 2004.
What is the goal of post-secondary education? While politicians and business leaders echo the familiar cant of marketable skills appropriate to the globalized economy, Livy Visano and Lisa Jakubowski offer a different response. In Teaching Controversy, a book that could have carried the subtitle: University Instructors of the World Unite!, Visano and Jakubowski call on educators to teach controversial issues that will motivate students to work towards social justice. The title’s double entendre is deliberate. This is not a standard defence of university education, and it is bound to create controversy. The authors would welcome a lively debate on the subject. Visano, an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies at York University, and Jakubowski, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brescia University College, affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, are troubled by what they view to be the increasing commercialization of post-secondary education. Continuing in this direction, the authors insist, will change the role of the university from a public to a more private ‘for hire’ enterprise with a more limited and highly compromised quest for knowledge (p. 139). Using the ideas of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci as their compass, and of Henry Giroux and Paolo Freire as their guide, Visano and Jakubowski map out a different course for Canada’s universities.
Many of Marx’s theories are as relevant to twenty-first-century higher education as they were to nineteenth-century industry, the authors imply. Leaving aside Marx’s rough outline of violent confrontation between capitalists and workers, Visano and Jakubowski gravitate towards Gramsci’s more nuanced portrait of class struggle. Gramsci developed the notion of hegemony to describe the manner by which the dominant class in a capitalist society perpetuates its power through persuasion, and the subordinate class perpetuates its subjugation by offering its consent. According to Visano and Jakubowski, hegemony dominates all aspects of twenty-first-century Canadian society, including higher education.
Applying Marxist models to classroom life, they draw on educational theorist Paolo Freire’s notion of banking an act of depositing in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor to describe what is wrong with contemporary university teaching (p. 31). By indoctrinating students, rather than communicating with them, the dominant class has used schools to elicit the subordinate class’s consent. In this way, as Henry Giroux has pointed out, the principles of marketplace capitalism have been passed on from one generation to the next.
Visano and Jakubowski insist the cycle can be broken; what is required are educators willing to take risks in what they teach and how they teach it. Educators must reach in (acknowledge their own biases) and reach out (recognize their similarities and differences with their students). Rather than standing above and apart from students, an educator should create collaborative partnerships, becoming, in the words of Visano, a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage (p. 115). An educator can also challenge the dominant hegemony by teaching controversy and here the reader arrives at the authors’ primary thesis sensitizing students to inequities, and providing them with opportunities to act on their new-found knowledge by working towards social justice.
What does this kind of teaching look like? Visano and Jakubowski devote their longest chapter to one example: teaching students about the subjugation of Canada’s First Nations peoples. In the spirit of a Native sharing circle, in which each speaker tells her story while others listen, John Elijah of the Oneida Nation, Ursula Elijah of the Cree Nation, and Julie George, an Ojibway Indian from the Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation, testify to the oppression of aboriginal peoples in the past and present. Visano and Jakubowski add their own voices, providing examples of classroom projects that move students beyond listening and towards action that will bring about justice for First Nations peoples.
In this, and many other ways, the authors weave together theory and practice in their defence of teaching controversy. They demonstrate how dialogue can lead to insight by including conversations with each other on difficult issues. References to classroom projects and field trips dot each chapter, even when these events do not turn out as the authors had expected. These examples from the authors’ own experience form one of the strengths of the book, and at the same time one of the weaknesses. Visano and Jakubowski have drawn on their research and teaching about the plight of some of our society’s most oppressed people to develop a thought-provoking thesis about the goals of post-secondary education. However, teachers of other disciplines may not be able to link content with action in as straightforward a manner.
The issue comes down not to whether their model is valid and admirable but to whether everyone should be expected to follow their example. Certainly there are powerful pragmatic disincentives for those who, unlike the authors, do not have tenure. Allowing course content to evolve according to the expressed needs of students conflicts with almost universal institutional expectations that a defined curriculum be given to students near the start of a course. Furthermore, the guide on the side needs to submit grades for each student at the end of the term. And in many cases students arrive to courses hoping to be captivated by a sage on the stage. In short, following the authors’ lead may be a recipe for professional martyrdom: undoubtedly admirable, but understandably unpopular.
The authors, to their credit, recognize this difficulty, yet they insist on the need to resist. Their students, I am sure, would not want it any other way. Visano and Jakubowski appear to thoroughly enjoy creating a debate, and welcome responses of all varieties. One hopes that this is the beginning of a sustained dialogue about the goal of post-secondary education, and that they will provide readers with further insights into how their colleagues can bring controversy into the classroom.
Kevin Kee – Faculty of Education. McGill University.
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Under the Gaze: Learning to be Black in White Society – KELLY (CSS)
KELLY, Jennifer. Under the Gaze: Learning to be Black in White Society. Fernwood Publishing, 1998. 144p. Resenha de: BROWN, Yvonne. Canadian Social Studies, v.36, n.2, 2002.
Jennifer Kelly has produced another fine ethnography of African-Canadian high school students. She defines herself to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. She shares a Black identity born out of a common history of enslavement and colonization but recognizes that the location of her birth and family background makes her an outsider. Another relevant aspect of her identity is that she is a teacher and mother. Employing a male interviewer enabled her to obtain richly textured data about the Black male identity constructs. There were twenty-six females and twenty-three males as well as thirteen teachers in her sample.
The purpose of the study was to investigate how a sample of Black students constructed their identities within a White-dominated society. The location is the City of Edmonton, Alberta. Kelly investigated six topics as follows: how Black students view and perceive themselves; how they relate to their peers; the significance they attach to being Black in a White-dominated environment; how they receive and perceive predominantly Western popular cultural forms; and how they relate to teachers and schools.
Her methodology employed multiple methods for obtaining data. There was
historical data from both primary and secondary sources. These data established the background for the conceptual framework, which she used to frame and interpret the other data collected. Out of this framework she defined the main terms Black, White, racialization and identity. Focus groups with boys only, girls only, and boys and girls together, were carried out. Individual interviews were done with the students and teachers. She drew on her research journal as well.
Discussion and data interpretation revolve around the trope of the racialized gaze, as explicated by Frantz Fanon (1967), in his very influential book Black Skins White Masks. It is from this work that the title of the book comes. The gaze is defined in many ways: 1) dominant as in the white gaze; 2) oppositional as in the black child returning the gaze; 3) perceptual as in signifying ascribed identities. One quotation will illustrate the complex meanings attached to the gaze:
The importance of the gaze is that it allows a dominant group to control the social spaces and social interaction of all groups. Blacks are made visible and invisible at the same time under the gaze. For example, when Black youth are seen it is often with a specific gaze that sees the troublemaker the school skipper or the criminal. Thus they are seen and constrained by a gaze that is intended to control physical and social movements. The purpose of the gaze is that it should subdue those who receive it and make them wish to be invisible (p.19).
In six short chapters, I believe that Kelly has fulfilled the five goals of her research. There are a few weaknesses. The reader would benefit from seeing the research protocols as well as an index. The prose is choppy; this is no doubt a function of including so many quotations. This said I would like to tell the reader about a few of the admirable qualities. The historical overview accompanied by the photographs of Black settlers in Alberta was a reminder that though they were deemed unsuitable they came and they made their contribution. Social Studies teachers could benefit from reading this short ethnography. The chapter on gender relations explains racialized patriarchy well. The pedagogical insights from this study could help teachers understand the construction of racialized identities.
Yvonne Brown – The University of British Columbia.
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