The limits of critical pedagogy: teaching about structural obstacles to students who overcame them

Abstract

This article focuses on efforts to critically analyze the social reproductive functions of schooling with a group of pre-service teachers in the US–Mexico border region, and on students’ reactions to these efforts. The students – all female, predominantly Mexican-American – had experienced both educational discrimination and academic success, and heavily invested in the dominant view of schooling as a meritocracy where individual talent and motivation regularly overcome structural obstacles. We argue that the students’ ideologies and experiences of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and language predisposed them to resist analysis of systemic inequalities in schools; we also examine the implications of this resistance for their future success as teachers. We conclude with recommendations for balancing structural pessimism and strategic optimism in the classroom, and for bringing students’ personal and social histories to bear on the contradictions between schooling’s promise of social mobility and its tendency to reproduce social inequality.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• critical pedagogy
• Latino education

Notes

1. Also, writing courses offer more flexibility in subject matter than do content-driven courses, as Shor recognizes (1992, pp. 73–79). While questions of how to approach or include content do present opportunities for teacher–student collaboration, it is also our view that teachers should retain authority to make sure that certain topics and ideas are covered. This is relevant, insofar as students may initially skirt disturbing topics, as discussed in the text.

2. Of course, this process is not unique to college students. Foundational work such as Sennet and Cobb (1972), as well as more recent research such as Hoschild (1995) and Johnson (2006), reveal the persistence of working-class and ethnic minority families’ adherence to ideologies of meritocracy and the “American Dream,” even as structural barriers to social mobility intensify.

3. Official statistics on state graduation rates are notoriously unreliable; the use of misleading indicators and outright fraud have led to at least one lawsuit (Leung, 2004). The Texas Education Association website states that the grade 9–12 longitudinal dropout rate went from 11.4% in 2007 to 10.5% for the Class of 2008 (TEA, 2009a, 2009b). However, this is substantially lower (in fact, less than half) than what their own enrollment data would suggest. McNeil’s (2005) calculations of Texas graduation and dropout rates, based on her own analysis of TEA data, are drastically different than those given by TEA for the same period. McNeil claims manipulation of student data at both the state and district levels (see also Shapleigh, 2010). The articles in Valenzuela (1999) examine the disproportionate impact of Texas’s test-based “accountability” system on Hispanic students in greater detail.

4. In this narrative, the pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” refer to Luykx, who taught the course. “We/us/our” refer either to the authors’ joint analysis, or to Luykx and her students, which is made clear by context.

5. Although they were not familiar with the specific readings chosen for the course, the titles – “Social Reproduction in Theoretical Perspective” (Chapter 2 of MacLeod, 1995), “Conceptualizing the Notion of Deficit Thinking” (Chapter 1 in Valencia, 1997), “Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning” (Ogbu, 1992), etc. – were enough for them to discern (and reject) the direction in which I planned to take the class.

6. For a historical analysis of this perspective, see Valencia (1997).

7. See Urrieta (2009) for a nuanced discussion of the challenges of critiquing educational institutions from the inside.

8. Though the supra-category of “Mexican” is often used to refer to all those (Mexican-born and US-born) who are descended from citizens of Mexico, differences in skin color are a salient (though imprecise) marker of social class. Also, the region is home to at least one indigenous group of significant size; while members of this indigenous group are most conspicuous as beggars or street vendors in the (Mexican) regional capital, a number of UTEP students also acknowledge at least partial indigenous ethnicity, often through a grandparent.

9. See Apple and Beane (2007), Ladson-Billings (1994), Perry, Steele, and Hilliard (2003), Shirley (1997, 2002); the student case studies in Nieto and Bode (2007); as well as the consistently inspiring work of teacher collectives like Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

10. On occasion, I (Luykx) have kept an empty chair at the front of the classroom, as a visual reminder for students of those peers who did not make it to college, in spite of their strivings.

11. This point was recently brought home to me once again, while preparing a PowerPoint presentation on the school-to-prison pipeline. The data were so grim that I myself was depressed before I finished it. However, my discouragement lifted when I realized (luckily, before I showed it in class) that I had neglected to include the crucial final slide: “What we can do about it.”