Laboring for Liberation

I’ve dragged my feet on getting started here, in large part due to the daunting task of figuring out what exactly I want to write about at the moment. Given that I’ve been working on my research agenda and my epistemological positioning for school, I might as well begin with that.

As I was writing the piece below, I kept thinking of a quote from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescription for having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and recreate, in their power to transform the world.”

Becoming free and being able to liberate others is a continual struggle - it is active, it is political, it requires effort and sacrifice. We won’t get to equal outcomes for students by becoming more efficient or more understanding. We get there by doing some hard work on ourselves and our systems.

Much of the work you’ll find here will be in this vein, so I hope that this piece helps ground you in the theoretical foundations of what I’ll be thinking about, reading, and occasionally blogging about.

Shookie

Critical Grounding: Human in the Process of Achieving Freedom

I am studying the experiences of low-income, students of color in college access programs in order to explore how college readiness is or is not situated to address the specific structures of oppression these students encounter. Broadly, I hope to utilize a critical frame to understand where college readiness programs and initiatives fail to address the historically rooted systems that manufacture student failure. I position myself as critical scholar, in large part based on the central place that equality and the oppression of marginalized groups takes in my research. I believe that the critical conceptions of the nature of truth, social change processes, and understanding of difference provide the epistemological grounding best suited to produce equitable change for students.

Truth, and the metrics by which we legitimate truth, are deeply influenced by historical, cultural, and relational experiences. Like McLaren (2009), I position truth as relational rather than relative, meaning that truth claims are situated in particular history, influenced by cultural context, and dependent on power. This becomes particularly important when considering the metrics of analysis we utilize to find students, schools, or communities wanting. Unlike an objectivist scholar, I do not accept that the “common sense” metrics utilized to describe our social realities are either adequate or unbiased. Rather, I contend that the metrics by which we define most social realities, particularly student success, have been determined without questioning the power structures at work in our schools. In my research on postsecondary readiness, for instance, I hope to question what it means to be college ready. While an objectivist scholar might designate minority students as less prepared for college on the basis of their standardized test scores or “noncognitive” traits, I plan to interrogate what it means for marginalized students to be ready for spaces dominated by white supremacy.

I also situate myself in a critical epistemology due to the nature of my central questions, which center on a critique of narratives of worthiness in the postsecondary readiness space. Critical theory posits that the human beings interact in a world fundamentally shaped by power imbalance and that “school functions simultaneously as a means of empowering students… and a means of sustaining legitimizing, and reproducing dominant class interests” (McLaren 2009, p. 62). Much of my professional training prior to enrolling in a master’s program was objectivist in nature, focusing the aims and efforts of research and practice on efficiency. An underlying belief in many of these “justice” oriented educational spaces was that the system wanted the right thing for students and merely failed as a result of error. These spaces failed to recognize that the system would reproduce its current conditions as part of its design. In these spaces, I learned a great deal about the value of efficiency, particularly as it relates to preventing burn out in the hard work of social justice struggle. Still, efficiency is not the end which I hope to pursue. Arriving at unequal outcomes twice as fast simply oppresses students in half the time. I ultimately hope to see college readiness in K12 and higher education shift from systems that reproduce inequity and deficit views of students to ones that foster critical consciousness and resistance from testimonios and counterstory.

Connected to the centrality of oppression and power, I position myself within critical theory with the belief that the education system, and many of our social structures, need to be confronted, critiqued, and changed. Educators rooted in structural functionalist epistemologies work towards progress through regulation while still viewing “existing social order and its institutions as legitimate and desirable” (Capper 2019, p. 37). Interpretivism allows for increased understanding of alternative viewpoints, but not for the radical criticism necessary to create systemic and structural change (Crotty 1998, Capper 2019). I hope to utilize my research to call into question the measures by which we find students wanting, to encourage critical reflection in research, and identify how different actors participate in the creation of inequity.

My positioning as a critical scholar also lies in how I understand and interpret student and community differences. Objectivist and interpretivist epistemologies understand student differences as deficit or as misunderstanding (Capper 2019), which require viewing these differences through an ahistorical and acontextual lens (Ledesma and Calderon 2015). Literature on the history of expansion of educational access demonstrates the US commitment to preserve white, wealthy advantage (Labaree 1997, Labaree 2012), and theories of school and student failure demonstrate the manufactured rather than based on merit (McDermott 1997). Although I have been guilty of faulting students’ environments rather than the schooling environment early in my career, my central aim is not to worry about student failure but rather focus on the systems that were designed to fail them.

Finally, I find it important to recognize both in myself and in others the intersectional identities that arrange how we encounter and experience power and oppression. Although Capper aligns intersectionality with postmodernism, its roots in Crenshaw (1995) are still firmly grounded in the development of critical race theory. Due to my own positionality as a middle-class, mostly-monolingual, formerly evangelical, able-bodied scholar, I understand the limitations of my ability to harness the power of the margins in my research. However, my experiences navigating the world as a woman, a multi-ethnic person carrying the internalized oppression of cultural assimilation, and as someone educated outside the confines of the US classroom obligates me to work in solidarity with other critical scholars. Like Delgado Bernal (2002) and Teranishi (2002), my work is shaped by the understanding that both researchers and their subjects’ lived reality is shaped by the identities we have, and that there is “not just one race-gendered epistemology but many” (Bernal 2002, p. 107).

Like Ladson-Billings (2000), I recognize that my choice to root my work in a critical epistemology is fundamentally a decision rooted in my personal and political commitment to my students and to my ancestors. The interpretivist frame that I held prior to my master program in many ways was easier to hold, both on a personal and professional level. It allowed for difference without mal intent. It promised progress without requiring confrontation and political action.  My choice comes at a personal cost and exacerbates existing tensions with my family members and religious community. This process has and will continue to be difficult, requiring “active intellectual work on the part of the knower” to reject the conditioning of schools and society as a whole (Ladson-Billings 2000, p. 258). However, as Freire points out in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is also the choice to live wholly rather than be divided and to be engaged in the labor of being “human in the process of achieving freedom” (Freire 2018, p. 49).

References

Bernal, D. 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.

Capper, C. A. (2018). Introduction and Epistemologies of Educational Leadership and Organizations.

Crenshaw, K. (1990). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stan. L. Rev., 43, 1241.

Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research: Meaning and perspective in the research process. Sage.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA.

Labaree, D. F. (1997). How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education. Yale University Press.

Labaree, D. F. (2012). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Harvard University Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2000). Racialized discourses and ethnic epistemologies. Handbook of qualitative research, 2, 257-277

Ledesma, M., & Calderon, D. (2015). Critical Race Theory in Education: A Review of Past Literature and a Look to the Future. Qualitative Inquiry, 21, 206–222.

McDermott, R. (1997). Achieving school failure 1972-1997. Education and cultural process: Anthropological approaches, 3, 110-135.

McLaren, P. (2009). Critical pedagogy: A look at the major concepts.  In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R.D. Torres (Eds.) The Critical Pedagogy Reader (pp. 61-83). New York, NY: Routledge.

Teranishi, R. T. (2002). Asian Pacific Americans and critical race theory: An examination of school racial climate. Equity & Excellence in Education, 35(2), 144-154.