Race, pre-college philosophy, and the pursuit of a critical race pedagogy for higher education

Abstract

This article seeks to explore ways in which pre-college pedagogical resources – particularly Critical Race Pedagogy (CPR) developed for high school students, as well as Philosophy for Children (P4C) – can be helpfully employed by college level instructors who wish to dialogue with students about the nature of race and racial oppression. More specifically, we wish to explore (a) how P4C can both learn from, and be put to the service of, CRP, and (b) how this provides a useful framework for philosophical conversations about race at the college and pre-college levels. Our arguments are interwoven with narratives of our personal experiences utilising these pre-college pedagogical resources in conversations about race, so as to illustrate and provide context for our claims. We ultimately contend that these resources can help pedagogues in both higher and lower education work toward unmuting the voices of undervalued and underserved students in the United States.

Keywords:

• Philosophy for children
• critical race pedagogy
• liberation pedagogy
• dialogue-based education
• student-centred learning
• co-construction of knowledge

Notes

1. The syllabus can be accessed here [https://www.academia.edu/20317528/Syllabus_Philosophies_of_Race_and_Racism_Spring_2016] The syllabus and corresponding course materials included course readings on the history of the concept of race, competing approaches to defining and understanding race, ethnicity and racism, intersectionality, the philosophical ‘problems’ of mixed-race identity, particularities of anti-Black racisms and anti-Latinxs racisms, and how the ‘black-white binary’ serves to render invisible the experiences of other racialised minority groups.

2. This is not to say, of course, that white supremacy is not a (the?) root cause of such inter-racial tensions; rather, it is to say that white supremacy was not always the most intuitive philosophical starting point for many students in the class.

3. The ‘1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools’ refers to a group of alternative schools that were created in Mississippi during the ‘Freedom Summer’ (a key moment during the civil rights movement in the United States) in response to the miseducation of the black youth in the Mississippi Delta. Volunteers from various institutions in the United States came to Mississippi to provide black students with an intellectually stimulating and politically/culturally relevant education that the public schools simply would not provide. For an excellent overview of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, the unique pedagogies they employed, and the challenges they faced, see Perlstein (1990).

4. These statistics/overview of the situation in Eudora were provided during the pre-teaching training that the Freedom Summer Collegiates received just before heading off to teach at their respective sites in the Mississippi Delta.

5. ‘Whiteness’ here refers to the disproportionate amount of ‘white’ voices in the Western philosophical canon.

6. It is worth noting that this assumption that ‘all teaching and learning are political’, as well as the concomitant commitment to the co-construction of knowledge in the classroom, are key dimensions of CRP that CRP shares with the tradition of Critical Pedagogy associated with Paolo Freire.

7. It is here that Katz provides an illuminating account of the separation in (contemporary) philosophy of reading the text and reading ourselves.

8. Katz’s Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism (2012) does a beautiful job analysing this problematic, and, in reference to Emmanuel Levinas’s work on subjectivity and Jewish education, she provides a variety of ways in which we might be able to effectively move past this ‘crisis’, and re-imagine the way we educate our youth – focusing instead on inflaming their minds, and nourishing a sense of co-responsibility in the classroom, and (even beyond the classroom) responsibility for the other.

9. See the final chapter of Katz (2012) for a pertinent analysis of this issue and potential remedies.

10. Here we have in mind Freire’s (1970).

11. For further discussion, see Lipman (1980), particularly Chapter 7, ‘Guiding a Philosophical Conversation’.

12. Of course, voting may lead to a reduced amount of attention given to minority interests in the classroom (a ‘tyranny of the majority’ situation) – particularly in contrast to a course in which a social justice educator selects topics that engage issues of race and racism. We return to these concerns later in the paper. For further information about ways in which Philosophy for Children founder Matthew Lipman was influenced by Dewey’s writing on democracy, see Lipman (2003).

13. Examples of activities other than CoI that can be used in pre-college philosophy classes can be found in texts such as Shapiro (2008) and Lone and Burroughs (2016).

14. Students in the class referred to themselves as ‘black’, rather than ‘African-American’, so we follow their preferred term in this paper.

15. We will address some of the potential problems with this democratic process below.

16. That is, ‘Socratic dialogue’ as practiced by Plato’s Socrates in the Platonic dialogues.

17. ‘Hosting’ in the Levinasian sense of the term. For Levinas, to host ‘the stranger’ is to welcome, in radical humility and hospitality, that which is otherwise than oneself (the Other). This involves striving to preserve/respect/appreciate difference, and seeking to listen, rather than dictate.

18. Katz (2003 and elsewhere) Katz underscores the centrality of the Delphic order to know thyself in the project of philosophy – philosophy’s ‘original, powerful aim’ (531) – and describe the way in which the discipline has suffered in the de-centering of that order, including its loss of interest in education.

19. On this, see Mills (2007).