Working Difference in Education

ABSTRACT

We are two educators who teach in graduate schools of education and who work issues of difference as they intersect with our teaching, writing, and daily lives. In this article we offer a reading of Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. This reading uses Williams's text for the purpose of exploring the meanings of “working difference” and “multiple and fluid identities” for educators. Specifically, we understand difference to be fluid and therefore able to be worked strategically against, for example, racist and sexist uses. We argue that Williams provides a much needed, detailed account of how she works the meanings and uses of her “oxymoronic” positionings as black woman, professor, Harvard-educated scholar/lawyer. With her account, Williams shows the work that it takes to resignify racist and sexist uses of such positionings in particular contexts. We suggest that by showing the work of working difference, Williams draws important implications for how teachers and students might enact multicultural curriculums in classrooms. We suggest that textured accounts of working difference may both ground and call into question more abstract educational discourses that currently address difference. We argue that situated accounts of working difference may constitute a form of pedagogical address—one that is missing in current multiculturalisme. It is an address that may productively shift some of the tensions that teachers often report when they try to teach about difference.