Political Neutrality as Ideal, Right-wing Pedagogy in Practice: Hegemony and Civic Learning Opportunities in Predominantly White Schools

ABSTRACT

While schools are necessary spaces for democratic education, more analyses are needed that unpack their limits. Drawing from ethnographic research in U.S. Government classrooms in two predominantly White schools in politically conservative communities in central Ohio, findings show that teachers and students idealize a politically neutral pedagogy, yet in practice, teachers engage in discursive and pedagogical moves that reify right-wing politics in implicit and explicit ways. Ideas that deviate from “neutrality”—those deemed “racial” or left-leaning—are viewed as “political” and avoided. Drawing on the concept of hegemonic power and situating this amidst conversations of the White normative trappings of civic and social studies education, this paper offers insights into the political ideologies and pedagogical choices that shape right-wing civic learning opportunities in politically and racially homogenous schools.

Schools have long been regarded as sites tasked with promoting a robust democracy by nurturing an informed citizenry (Civic Mission of Schools, 2011) and as central in “helping to shape citizens” (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004, p. 263). Perhaps because of this belief in schools’ role, the Right has long waged battle on schools through attempts at privatization, lobbying for Christianity in the curriculum, and demonizing multicultural education (Apple, 2006) putting forth an agenda that schools should shape citizens that epitomize rightist ideals. In September 2020, then-President Trump continued this movement signing an executive order banning racial sensitivity and diversity training for federal contractors and employees stating such trainings were “efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies” (Trump, 2020). The ensuing months saw an increase in legislation and mobilizations across the country against “woke” educational practices resulting in the banning of books that focus on LGBTQIA communities and issues (Diaz, 2022) and, as of the time of this writing, 563 anti-CRT measures (UCLA School of Law, 2023).

These contemporary movements frame schools as sites of indoctrination in order to demonize and criminalize critical and social justice centered education and their related ideals, values, and modes of engagement, yet the impact of right-wing ideologies on curriculum and pedagogy are less examined. Thus, while critical discourses and centering of marginalized voices in school are needed more than ever, explorations into the ways right-wing politics affect the schooling practices of racially and economically privileged students are equally as urgent. This article makes this shift exploring educational experiences in two predominantly White and politically conservative high schools in central Ohio—one in an affluent suburb, the other in a working-class small town—with an emphasis on what teachers and students think about political ideologies and their place in pedagogy, teachers’ attempts at neutrality in everyday classroom practice, and how these work in concert to (re)produce right-wing hegemony.

Civic learning opportunities and predominantly White schools

To help explain and attempt to mitigate the decades-long decline in youth civic knowledge and engagement, researchers turned their lens onto schools. Important work has shed light on the narrowing of civic content in schools in the aftermath of the A Nation At Risk report, policies like No Child Left Behind that push for focus on literacy and labor market skills (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008b), and increases in state mandated testing (Brezicha & Mitra, 2019; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). This narrowing of curriculum occurs, they argue, at the expense of “civic learning opportunities” (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008a) that include, but are not limited to the extent to which students study government and history and other related subjects, discuss current events, study issues they care about, and experience a classroom climate that is open to discussions of social and political topics (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008b).

Given the relationship between social inequality and educational disparities, researchers also explain how educational inequality affects civic learning opportunities and the negative implications this can have for the democratic participation of marginalized, and specifically racialized youth. The terms “civic opportunity gaps” (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008a) and “civic empowerment gap” (Levinson, 2012), for example, are used to illustrate the disparities between the schooling experiences of students in high-poverty communities and those in resource-rich schools. Less research exists that goes beyond the fact that students in predominantly White schools experience schooling and civics in ways that better prepare them for participation in the polity, but that interrogates the contours of their civic education. This paper adds to this literature by delving into details of what students in predominantly White schools learn about politics and whether and how political ideologies influence their civic learning opportunities.

As Woodson (2019) writes, citizenship functions as “a racial code word for a particular set of legal, socioeconomic, ethnic, linguistic, and gendered intersections that are predominantly inhabited by White people” (p. 28). These exclusionary qualities of citizenship inevitably shape the civic education of students of color as well as White students. Scholars highlight how curriculum in civics and social studies perpetuate White, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative politics (Brown & Urrieta, 2010; Calderon, 2014; Macintosh & Loutzenheiser, 2006; Rubin et al., 2009; Sabzalian & Shear, 2018; Sinclair et al., 2023; Wheeler Bell, 2014). More work is needed that explores education in predominantly White schools and how Whitestream curriculum and White-normed civics education is navigated in these spaces (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2021; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Sinclair et al., 2023; Swalwell, 2013; Tyson & Park, 2008; Urrieta, 2004; Urrieta & Riedel, 2008). This study builds on this scholarship and my own prior work on political education in what are categorically deemed “good” schools (Sánchez Loza, 2021) to focus on teachers’ idealizations of and attempts at politically neutral pedagogy and how this manifests in classrooms.

The impact of teachers and neutrality on civic learning

The role of teachers on students’ civic learning is an important focus in research. Teachers hold a pivotal role in creating civic learning opportunities; namely, through their facilitation of a classroom climate where students feel safe to explore their and their peers’ opinions which lead to an increase in students’ electoral participation and helps to nurture tolerance of others’ ideas (Hahn, 1998; Torney-Purta et al., 2001). This dynamic between teachers and students also influences how youth come to develop and enact citizenship. As Flanagan et al. (2007) note, the teacher–student relationship has a profound effect on how students enter the polity since it shapes more than just academic achievement: the interactions between students and teachers helps students construct their concept of democratic citizenship via the climate in which they learn. Students’ trust in their teacher as a fair and respectful figure is crucial and translates to a heightened belief in the larger national civic project (Flanagan et al., 2007) while a lack of trust in school’s ability to mete out justice and fairness does the opposite (Graham, 2020). While these findings are imperative in understanding teacher-focused variables shaping aspects of student’s civic learning, more study is needed about how our current political moment—with its continuance and escalation of White supremacist and White nationalist legacies—influences teachers’ decisions day-to-day.

In the wake of the Trump election in 2016, a comprehensive study by Rogers (2017) of teachers and school climate found an increase in hostility against immigrants, girls, non-White students, and LGBTQ youth with teachers perplexed at how to navigate these tensions in their schools. In their survey-based study, Dunn et al. (2019) found that teachers weighed their perceptions of parents’ political affiliations, administrators’ varied stances on politics, and colleague support or lack thereof, against their own political beliefs and values to then determine their pedagogical decisions in the classroom. Gibbs (2019) case study of an educator teaching in in a military-community points to the perceived and imagined power a community wields to shape pedagogical choices and the ultimate choice to “teach defensively” and avoid critical teaching about war (p. 110). While these studies offer important insights into the various contextual factors that teachers across the country navigate, questions arise as to how political neutrality played out in everyday classroom life. Because neutrality is quite difficult to carry out in educational spaces—with critical scholars of education arguing its impossibility—an in-depth look into school life via ethnographic methodologies allows for sustained observation as to its nuances. This article adds to this literature with a focus on how teachers in predominately White and politically conservative spaces shape civic learning in their schools.

The specific questions I explore here are: what do teachers and students think about teachers’ political ideologies and their place in pedagogy? How do teachers’ attempts at neutrality translate in everyday classroom practice? In answering these questions, this article explores the ways political ideologies are enacted in and through predominantly White and politically conservative schools in central Ohio and how right-wing ideologies are (re)negotiated in and through classroom life.

Schools as conduits of hegemonic power

Operating under the understanding that education is always already political and that public schools are inevitably imbricated in the reproduction of social and political structures and norms (Anyon, 1997; Apple, 2018; Freire, 2000; Giroux, 1983), I draw on the notion of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) as theoretical frame to describe the relationship between schooling and political reproduction. This framing allows for an understanding of the mechanics—the what and how—of this reproduction and helps explain how the purported politically “neutral” pedagogy of the teachers in this study is not neutral and, in fact, serves to reify right-wing politics. I draw from these ideas, scholarship in right-wing studies, and the previously mentioned critical scholars of race in civic education and to help trace the sociopolitical landscape in which and for which this hegemony operates to expand our understanding of the power of politics to shape civic learning opportunities occurring in predominantly White schools.

To understand the school’s role in the social and political reproduction of society, Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemonic power proves useful. Institutions of civil society—of which schools form part—are largely responsible for producing and disseminating this hegemonic power by helping an individual or social class to willingly participate in an exploitative system and (re)creating these exploitative ideologies and relationships as the “common sense” (Gramsci, 1971). Understanding schools as vehicles of hegemonic power allows for an analysis of the ideas that circulate as “common sense” and how differently situated groups—for example White teachers and students in politically conservative communities in Ohio—may ascribe to and perpetuate these dominant ideologies.

Moreover, this theoretical frame points to the impossibility of education spaces as neutral. As Richard Shaull writes in the foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), “[t]here is no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom” (emphasis in original, Shaull in Freire, 2001, p. x). The question then is not if pedagogies that teachers employ are neutral—they are not—but, in what ways are they not neutral? That is, what sorts of ideas circulate, what social values and norms, what “common sense”? As Gramsci further explains, prevailing views of the world are “inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed” leading to a society entrenched in “a moral and political passivity” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 333; Stoddart, 2007, p. 201). One can draw parallels, I argue, between the politically passivity Gramsci discusses and current desires for and conceptualizations of “political neutrality.”

For this article, I focus on right-wing politics in the U.S. as these spatially and temporally impact current “citizenship formations” (Mitchell, 2016) and demarcate the field of common sense-making, especially in the communities where these schools under study were situated. While defining “conservativism” and “right-wing” can prove difficult, Blee and Creasap (2010), understand conservativism to signal movements that “support patriotism, free enterprise capitalism, and/or a traditional moral order” and right-wing as describing movements that “focus specifically on race/ethnicity and/or that promote violence as a primary tactic or goal” (pp. 270–271). However, I utilize the term “right-wing” as an umbrella term for politics that traverse this spectrum given that clear lines between both have never been clear. Both schools under study were located within staunchly Republican districts and, more generally, exist within Ohio—a state once viewed as a “swing state,” but has in recent years increasingly cemented its place as a “red state.” That said, Ohio is no aberration, but serves to highlight the increase and expansion of right-wing populist politics worldwide (Jones, 2018).

This article builds on this scholarship to center predominately White schools and the teaching and learning of politics therein. Drawing on the concept of hegemonic power and situating this amid conversations of the White normative trappings of civic and social studies education, this article offers new approaches to the study of civic education and how right-wing common sense is shaped in and through schooling. Accounting for the hegemonic function of schooling and operationalizing this through right-wing politics and common sense-making, this article explores the day-to-day pedagogical choices made by teachers across the two sites in this study—two predominantly White schools in politically conservative counties in Ohio—in order to investigate the role of pedagogy in political (re)production. I examine the mechanics of this common-sense making through schooling and specifically, via teachers’ pedagogical choices in the classroom.

Methodology: A political ethnography of schooling

The empirical evidence I draw from stems from a larger ethnographic study focused on understanding how race and class interact with schooling experiences and how this, in turn, impacts how youth in predominantly White schools come to understand and engage with politics. I approached this work as a critical political ethnography; that is, an ethnography that looks at “the foundation of political institutions and their attendant sets of practices” along with identifying how and why political actors act as they do (Joseph et al., 2007) and which draws attention to oppressive power structures and, in so doing, attempts to disrupt social inequality (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022). I drew on ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis to examine schools as such institutions and both students and teachers as political actors. I drew upon participant observations of three Social Studies teachers’ nine class periods across two school sites (suburb = 3; small-town = 3–6). For the purposes of this analysis, I focus on two teachers, Mr. Lenard (all names are pseudonyms) who taught in a small town and Ms. Greene, who taught in an affluent suburb. Both teachers identified themselves as politically conservative and as registered Republicans.

Positionality

As Shehata (2006) writes, “the ethnographer’s self becomes a conduit of research and a primary vehicle of knowledge production” (p. 246). As a non-Black Xicana, I acknowledge my existence in the U.S. as complicit in the occupation of Indigenous land and the ways my community may be leveraged to further anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Operating with and from Paperson’s (2017) conceptualization and acknowledging my existence as a “North American settler ‘of color’” navigating the “dilemma of being displaced by colonialism, only to arrive at a place as another participant in colonization” (p. xxiii), I am nevertheless a daughter of Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student, and positioned as racial “Other” at both of these sites. My skin-tone and facial features are often read/misread depending on where I am and who I am with, but in both of these sites, I was seen as not-White and an outsider and my “different” name and out-of-state affiliation only further marked me in ways (all the ways, I cannot know for sure), that drew suspicion from students and teachers about me and my project. Conversely, my affiliation with UC Berkeley, indexing for some a left-leaning positionality and a status-marker perhaps also served to inspire some participants to agree to participate in this research. For example, for those students that identified as queer, Democrat, or a person of color, my “Otherness” may have factored into their agreement to be interviewed. While I cannot know for sure how my “self” allowed access or opportunities, and which ways these were denied, I acknowledge that there will undoubtedly be limitations and shortcomings but hold a commitment to interrogating these tensions.

Data collection

Data collection consisted of participant observation with fieldnotes, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students, and artifact collection for the duration of the 2017–2018 academic school year. To make sense of the political life occurring in these schools, I primarily observed Mr. Lenard and Ms. Greene’s classrooms at each high school for a minimum of three class periods per day, including U.S. Government and AP Government classes. I completed over 500 hours of participant observation, which allowed for me to document how students and teachers made sense of curriculum and political events as they occurred in real-time. Field notes were composed from jottings (n = 320) (Emerson et al., 2011) and taken during each class session and followed by periodic reflections to capture emerging themes (Saldaña & Omasta, 2018). In addition to observations, I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 42 students focused on their experiences living and learning in their communities and their perspectives on social and political issues. With teachers, I engaged in countless conversations throughout the year with one main initial and concluding interview that attended to curricular and pedagogical questions, experiences living and teaching in these communities, political beliefs in relation to those of their students, and what they saw as the purpose of teaching U.S. Government. I supplemented interview and observational data with classroom and school artifacts (n = 350) including lesson plans, lecture slides, discussion videos, student essays, reflective writing, etc.

Data analysis

To analyze data, I employed a three-step process (Luttrell, 2010). During the primary reading, I took note of “recurring images, words, phrases, and metaphors” that arose (p. 262); for example, regarding neutrality, I made note of teachers’ explicit efforts to be neutral and moments, scripted or extemporaneous, where teachers took a political stance. Reviewing a second time, I searched for “coherence among stories”—across participant interviews and across sites and observations. Throughout the third reading, I engaged in explicit coding utilizing concepts from my theoretical framework.

Findings

In the following sections, I analyze excerpts from interviews and moments from classroom observations across both school sites. In both schools, I found: (1) political neutrality as an idealized goal both by teachers and students, and (2) pedagogical choices on the part of teachers that predominantly reified right-leaning political views. Since these findings were similar across both school sites, I focus here on the similarities and resultant nuances around these ideals and pedagogical choices.

Political neutrality as pedagogical ideal

Teachers in this study discussed feeling strongly that they should remain politically neutral in their teaching of U.S. Government courses. Students also overwhelmingly made clear they wanted teachers that “didn’t take sides.”

Teacher idealization of political neutrality

Throughout the year, the teachers in this study discussed not wanting to impart a particular way of thinking onto students. Mr. Lenard, the U.S. Government teacher in the small-town school, made it a running joke in his class that he would not share any of his political views. Whenever students asked him if he was a Republican or Democrat or if they asked how he voted on a particular issue, he would respond, “I’m not telling you that!” or, “I’ll tell you in … ” and he’d calculate the year they’d graduate college as the date when he’d finally share with them. When I asked why he felt strongly about this, he said he did not think it was fair to share his viewpoint as he took seriously the idea that perhaps his role as teacher would carry a lot of weight and did not want to influence students’ political development. He relayed that throughout the year he “really tried hard to teach both sides.” Mr. Lenard's idealization of political neutrality points to a “common sense” around pedagogy: for one, that it can be neutral if one refrains from explicitly sharing political views and that one must refrain from “influencing” students. The following example shows, however, the tensions existing for teachers and how this may not only motivate teachers to be politically “neutral,” but how neutrality may be political determined.

When I asked Mr. Lenard about the political climate in which he taught and if he felt that there was a pressure to avoid particularly contentious topics, he told me that there was some concern and relayed a story about a teacher who had been fired from the district not too long before and that the narrative that circulated regarding the incident was that the teacher was let go for “being too liberal.” Although he added there might have been “more to the story,” he implied that this was definitely something that crossed his mind. While he felt as though he was safe as he was not one to really push political boundaries by nature, he nonetheless felt some pressure to stay neutral. This conversation illuminated a conscious understanding of the conservative politics that existed in the school in which he taught, and which functioned as the norm dictating when and how one might steer too far and push the boundaries and his conscious decision to refrain from doing so. In this way, his consent to remaining within the normative bounds of sanctioned politics in the school space demonstrates hegemonic power. It also corroborates Dunn et al. (2019) findings regarding external administrative pressures as to why teachers may avoid curricular and pedagogical choices that might be deemed political.

Ms. Greene, a teacher at the suburban high school, took a similar approach to her teaching of U.S. government. She relayed that her primary goal was to teach students how the government worked and said, “I don’t want to teach them what to think necessarily. I don’t know. I don’t believe that’s my role.” However, during a lecture in which Ms. Greene prepared a PowerPoint presentation to discuss presidential powers, I noted that it had not been updated and still showed pictures of Barack Obama as president although we were well into the Trump administration. After class, I asked why this was the case.

dsl: Have you just not gotten around to updating the [Powerpoint] slides with new pictures?

Ms. Greene: No, actually. I have a hard time finding a picture where he’s not making a face, or looking … unpresidential … so I figured it best to not put a picture that might make it as though I’m portraying him in an unfavorable light.

(Fieldnote, September 2018)

In the above instance, Ms. Greene makes the conscious choice to keep President Obama’s pictures on her lecture slide even though he is no longer president and does so to avoid being perceived as purposefully showing President Trump in an “unfavorable light.” She explains her decision as not only a personal desire to be politically neutral, but also to avoid being viewed as imparting a particular political ideology by students, their parents, or administrators. This moment proved salient especially when juxtaposed with other moments throughout the year such as when she discussed President Bill Clinton and his affair with Monica Lewinsky. This event she discussed at length and shared her opinion in class that Lewinsky was “not very smart” and yet, the mere thought that a picture of Trump making a face could position her as anti-Trump was enough for her to leave President Obama’s picture on the PowerPoint slide instead. Her attempts at neutrality, or lack thereof, illustrate the types of pedagogical microdecisions made on a daily basis across both sites and how these decisions are informed by a “neutrality” calibrated on the right-wing hegemony permeating in and through these school communities.

Teachers at both sites created ample opportunities for students to have conversations about political topics (an important component of the civic learning discussed above), however, the avoidance that both Ms. Greene and Mr. Lenard share inspire questions as to the ways right-wing hegemony dictated the civic learning opportunities created for students. That is, their goal of neutrality—in effect steering clear from left-leaning topics—created a climate that is open to discussions of social and political topics (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008a) as long as this climate aligns with conservative ideals.

Further, teachers discussed not wanting to make students feel as though they had to “out” themselves politically and feel pressured to express their political views openly in the classroom. Teachers never required anyone to openly declare their views. Yet, students shared their political views all the time in class. These views were most often right-wing yet framed as neutral statements and never identified as affiliated with any political party. While on the surface, a code to not “out” students seems like an appropriate and necessary pedagogical move, in practice, this created a culture of normativity at both sites where left-leaning students avoided sharing ideas publicly. Throughout one-on-one interviews, left-leaning students expressed that they did not feel welcome to share viewpoints that fell out of the norm—that is, that were not conservative or right-leaning. Sharing their ideas could easily serve to mark and “out” them in a community where a liberal viewpoint was looked down upon and could pose social consequences. Further, this political avoidance on behalf of the teachers arguably had the opposite intended effect: instead of protecting students’ right to privacy, it made the weight of the labels (right/left; conservative/liberal) heavier as it made some students further retreat into silence and secrecy around their beliefs and amplified the right-wing ideas that were shared publicly and increase its hegemonic power, even if often unnamed.

Student desires for teacher neutrality

Students across both sites overwhelmingly expressed a preference for a teacher to be politically neutral. In fact, not one student expressed in their interview that they would be okay with a teacher expressing personal political views. During her interview, Julia, a White female student at the suburban high school who identified as conservative, stated that she appreciated Ms. Greene because she “does a good job at being neutral.”

Julia: Like if I were to ask her something just in general, nothing super specific, like today I asked her about like gerrymandering, that wasn’t even a very political or controversial thing, but she told me the answer I needed. […] It’s nice to have her be able to censor her beliefs to give me an informational response that I want. So, if I were to ask her about like something else, something like taxes or something, she wouldn’t be like, “Oh, like taxes are [scoffing] oh my gosh.” She would literally tell me exactly what I needed to hear to be able to understand it and form my own opinion about it, which I really appreciate.

(Interview, 2017)

Julia makes clear that Ms. Greene is good at her job because she possesses the ability to censor her own beliefs and provide her with “exactly what [she] needed to hear to be able to understand it and form [her] own opinion.” I was not sure exactly what Ms. Greene told Julia about gerrymandering, but I can imagine Ms. Greene giving Julia a short and purely definitional response. However, one can also imagine that she might have given a response that was “political” but not read as such by an 11th-grader. During one of my observations, Ms. Greene discussed gerrymandering as something that was par for the course in politics, in a way absolving the state’s Republican party from any wrongdoing (“both parties do it when they are in power”). Yet, gerrymandering was then, and continues at writing, to be an important state issue as Republican-drawn maps have been repeatedly deemed unconstitutional by the state supreme court. However, Julia’s response illustrates an additional problem with fetishizing that teachers be neutral—students come to believe, uncritically perhaps, that teachers are unbiased and neutral when this might not be the case.

In his interview, Trevor, a White male conservative student at the small-town high school and a Trump supporter, revealed that he had once experienced a teacher who was not “neutral” and in fact, was very much “liberal” and that he did not think this was “correct.” When asked what made him think that the teacher was liberal, he relayed a time when a Spanish teacher discussed the impact of deportation on Latinx families.

Trevor: She was playing these videos where people were crying about how sad they were that family members were being deported. And, yes, it was sad, but they chose to come here illegally.

dsl: So, what made you think this was her being liberal?

Trevor: Well, because I think she was showing us that to try to make us feel for them. See it from their eyes.

(Interview, small-town high school, May 2018)

His response, that her attempt “to try to make us feel for them” and “see it from their eyes,” is powerful in that it also raises the question around pedagogical and curricular choices that teachers employ for the sake of perspective-taking, for increasing ability to understand others’ point-of-view, for increasing empathy and understanding how others’ may experience life differently. These are strategies viewed as best-practices in civics and democratic education—yet, for students with an opposing political ideology, a teacher creating space to “see it from their eyes” can then be seen as imparting a political ideology. That is, if the activity is poignant and salient enough and “works” to elicit empathy, then perhaps it veers into non-neutrality.

Paisley, a White female student at the same small-town school as Trevor and whose politics were liberal-leaning also brought this teacher up in her interview but had a different take. She appreciated that the teacher routinely shared information about Mexico and other Latin American countries to learn more about the context and cultures in which Spanish was spoken. Paisley agreed with this pedagogical choice because she felt it helped students understand a viewpoint from someone they may not otherwise interact with in a community as homogenous as the one in this small town. Paisley, however, did not think this pedagogy was indoctrinating or espousing a particular liberal point of view. She saw it as the teacher relaying actual current events and their impact on those affected.

That teacher no longer taught at the school during the time of data collection, and so it was not possible to speak with her and ask about her experiences teaching in a predominantly conservative school or to determine her reason for this pedagogical choice. Yet, this example and the two students’ vastly different opinions of that experience illuminate a tension: particular pedagogical choices may only be a problem for students if the content discussed challenges their political views. And, perhaps they are only a problem if it challenges predetermined conservative views as left-leaning students did not complain about conservative teachers, although they discussed it as par for the course living in their communities.

At the suburban school, Julia also brought up instances where she perceived her teachers as not neutral and described the liberal lean of the English department,

It’s very nice to be able to go to [Ms. Greene] because a lot of the times [her as a] Gov teacher is what shows through not her personal beliefs, which I think is important, especially at like being an educator and being somebody who influences other people because … our English department is very left leaning, like very left leaning and now, last year my English teacher rolled in with an Obama shirt on! And, she showed us videos of like Donald Trump, like failing! And I was like, this is so uncomfortable. But they’re all very, they’re all very Democrat, which I can respect because I’m not, I don’t like being dirty … And they’re [left-leaning teachers] like that and it shows. And with [Ms. Greene] it’s nice.

(Interview, 2017)

Julia makes clear that she disapproved of English teachers sharing their political views and relays that she felt uncomfortable with their use of videos of Donald Trump “failing.” Her comments bring to light again how perceptions of “left-leaning” choices are seen as not neutral and also draw attention to the tensions educators face when deciding what to share in the classroom. Sharing current political topics and real-world issues with global and local impact (such as deportations) or videos that may include the real quirks and problematic rhetoric of politicians (videos of Donald Trump “failing”) are categorized by students with right-wing politics as taking a particular stand. This offers credence to the concern Ms. Greene shared earlier as to her decision to leave out any images of Donald Trump for fear of just this perception.

As discussed, the focal teachers at both the small-town and suburban high school declared a desire to teach in a matter that was politically neutral and students overwhelmingly expressed the desire for teachers to be neutral as well, yet only perceiving left-leaning politics as transgressions. However, as the next section shows, I observed many instances throughout the academic year where pedagogical choices implicitly and explicitly endorsed right-wing views.

Right-wing (re)production in practice: Implicit and explicit pedagogical moves

Both Ms. Greene and Mr. Lenard’s pedagogy reflected and took up right-leaning political views through their framing of particular events, through their lack of challenge to students, and by ultimately, not challenging the right-wing hegemony in which their classrooms operated.

Explicit endorsements of right-wing views: The Vietnam war

One example of explicit right-wing pedagogy occurred during a lecture Mr. Lenard gave to his AP Government students in the small-town high school about U.S. Foreign Policy. He asked the students, “Why did we go to Vietnam? To combat the evil Commies.” Students laughed. He continued, “Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way” and then changed gears to talk about his time in the military.

When I was in the military 101st, we had a chant before we did anything, “And kill godless commies with a high-power weapon in the face.” Literally … Who doesn’t want to take down godless commies? No real American. (Students laugh.)

(Fieldnote, April 24, 2018)

Mr. Lenard gave confident, engaging lectures that were often humorous and sprinkled with sarcasm, yet it was hard for me to tell when he was joking and when he was sincere, and I can only assume that it might have been difficult for students to decipher this as well. He continued,

Much of our foreign policy was defeat the Nazis, the evil Japanese, Saddam Hussein, was he a friendly neighborhood dictator? No, he was a brutal dictator, Viet Cong, they were ruthless. Alright … This is my favorite foreign policy moment in history. Monroe Doctrine […] So 1823, we were puppies. But, basically, we were half of this continent. In 1823, Spain, Great Britain were still powerful empires. Russia, had a lot of influence here and obviously here [pointing at map], but 1823, this little puppy country, this little puppy country, guess what? We’re just a little puppy now, but if this is all ours, North and South America, we own it. If you venture into U.S. we will stop anybody coming in. If you venture into the western hemisphere, we will oppose all attempts, we will stop anybody coming in.

He then stopped abruptly to tell a seemingly tangential story about how his wife’s small dog barked at bigger dogs like he was going to tear them apart. And then he continued his lecture,

That was the U.S. in 1823, puppy marks his territory, lifts his leg, we essentially marked North and South America and said “get away.”

(Fieldnote, April 24, 2018)

In this particular instance, Mr. Lenard’s non-neutrality is evident and can be safely categorized as right-wing as he flippantly used terms like “godless Commies.” There was also no ambiguity with his expression that the Monroe Doctrine was his “favorite” and thus, no neutrality in his framing. In actuality, the lecture normalized imperialist and settler colonial politics as he made no space for students to pose questions about this policy nor was an analysis or critique offered by Mr. Lenard discussing U.S. critics of this policy, let alone from the point of view of the countries, including the Native peoples, of North and South America. Students were exposed to the civic learning opportunity of studying government and history, but solely through a right-wing framework.

Similarly, at the suburban school, explicit instances of right-wing/conservative framing on the part of Ms. Greene occurred. For example, one such moment occurred after the Parkland shooting, the incident that occurred on February 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where a gunman murdered 17 people. After the shooting, students across the country organized under the hashtag #MarchforOurLives to engage in “walkouts” from their schools to honor the victims and bring attention to the need for gun reform. The administration at the suburban high school decided to preemptively allow the students to walk out and providing a space for them to convene outside of the school and asking teachers not to mark students absent or otherwise impart punishment for participation. The students in Ms. Greene’s class walked into class and brought this policy up. She responded that she disagreed with the walkout, stating that there really was no point to it and argued that the administration should not be getting involved. She also commented that students organizing it on 4/20, “a day known for getting high,” did not help their cause: mobilizing for gun control legislation. Seemingly unbeknown to Ms. Greene, the national organizers selected April 20 because it was the anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Yet her critique illustrates another instance of nonneutrality and is similar to the rhetoric deployed by right-wing politicians and pundits about #MarchforOurLives at the time. My observations included numerous impromptu moments like these throughout the year, many as students walked in before the start of class. These nonofficial moments often involved political topics, illustrating the civic learning occurring at all times in scripted and unscripted ways.

Implicit endorsements of right-wing views: Affirmative action

At the affluent suburban high school, moments of right-wing pedagogy were often more implicit than those occurring at the small-town high school, the higher poverty school in a more Republican county. Toward the end of the academic year, Ms. Greene taught about civil rights cases because these would be tested on the AP Government exam that most of her students were taking at the end of the year. On this particular day, students discussed affirmative action via the University of California v. Bakke case. Ms. Greene asked students what they thought of the intentions behind affirmative action policies,

Ms. Greene: How did this become a thing? Why did people want this?

Emily: I think it was LBJ, right? It came around LBJ’s time, it was an attempt to help races who were oppressed in the past because of their race … be equal with …

Ms. Greene: Yeah, trying to correct an injustice of the past. Ok … Yeah. Good. Um, Iknow, I hear a lot of things from students about this today, especially with going to college, right? (Students murmur.) What do you think about affirmative action in the present context? (Comments include “reverse racism,” “inherently racist,” “definitely bad.”) Raise your hand, raise your hand, so I hear one of you at a time. Meghan?

Meghan: I believe that the original intent of affirmative Action was with a good purpose but, today it won’t ever be a way to help those whose relatives had been treated poorly in the past, so, it won’t help them, so now it’s just like reverse racism, discriminating against other people.

Ms. Greene: Um. Today we are going to look at this issue of de facto and de jure discrimination … so get out those papers you picked up. (Student murmurs.) Oh yes, pass forward your Bell Ringers. (She cues the film.)

Here, Emily, a White female student, framed affirmative action as a policy aimed at correcting racial oppression “in the past.” By replying with “Yeah […] Ok. Yeah, Good” and moving on to another point, Ms. Greene endorsed this framing of the policy especially as she then pivoted to asking students what their thoughts were on the policy in the present day and juxtaposed it with an example of college admissions. Since most of the students in this class were seniors, this example seemed to resonate given the multitude of murmurs and hands that were raised to share comments. Further, Meghan engaged in discourse that invisibilized racialization in describing those she deems as negatively impacted by “reverse racism” by using the euphemism “other people,” which I understood to mean White people. Ms. Greene let this comment stand on its own without requiring students to engage in a deeper conversation of privilege and power—of whether “reverse racism” could exist given the continuance of racial oppression. She continued and attempted to connect the policy to present day,

Ms. Greene: So, this is a pretty interesting topic in today’s society right because by law, right, we don’t have segregation, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, set up to end that segregation by law, with that being said, it doesn’t mean that we see all of these communities that are completely diverse and we have this mixing of religions and mixing of cultures that doesn’t just happen. There is push in today’s societies to do that and part of that is a lot about opportunities because living in one area, living in one area […] So, this is not technically achieved and there are a lot of questions of what this is supposed to look like. What we are going to do is look at some segments of the Eyes on the Prize and look at de jure and de facto segregation, try to identify the two and think about the present day. Any questions before we get started? (No students post questions.). Alright.

(Fieldnote, April 13, 2018)

The film, Eyes on the Prize, showed the case of Emmett Till as well as various people sharing testimony about the brutality of Jim Crow and segregation. The film discussed historical events and without any guidance for connecting these to the present day, reinforced student comments that affirmative action was not a useful tool in the present either to address past racism or acknowledge its continual present-day manifestations. Throughout the film, students were pretty quiet. Some looked down and seemed to be doing other work, a boy and girl flirted with each other, other students who usually were quite talkative and proud conservatives, looked down and away from the screen at many moments. The bell rang and the students were dismissed without any additional discussion. Although Ms. Greene promised to touch back on this topic the next class session, she did not. Instead, students were given the class session to study on their own for the upcoming AP test.

Ms. Greene and students provided a narrative of affirmative action policies as set out to correct injustices “of the past.” While Ms. Greene alluded to present day conditions, these were not made explicit and no serious engagement was undertaken with regard to reasons that affirmative action policies might still be needed. No positive viewpoints or arguments for affirmative action were shared, and students who spoke argued that this policy may have been with “a good purpose,” but resulted in “reverse racism.” All of the student comments I overheard fell along this vein, and all of this stood uncontested.

This type of implicit endorsement also occurred at the small-town high school. In the fall, Mr. Lenard’s U.S. Government class prepared for Lincoln–Douglas style debates. Mr. Lenard drafted a list of topics and while students could pick their topic, they were randomly assigned as to which side they would argue. Therefore, I found it difficult to gauge if students truly believed what they were saying. However, the points students chose to make during their debates offer insights as to the universe of arguments to which they had access, including those provided by their teachers as he coached them through preparation. For example, one set of White students debated affirmative action. A White male student charged with arguing against the policy stated in his remarks that admitting Black students into colleges because of their race, increased “mismatching,” which he defined as the belief that one is “placed in the wrong college because the college is trying to promote diversity so they give extra benefits to minorities instead of grading them completely on their academic achievement and success.” He added,

Some opposers of Proposition 209 would say it drops minority enrollment, but if you look at the numbers, graduation increased for the minorities who were rightfully accepted based on their academic achievement. They were passing classes as they should and not being mismatched and dropping out. (Fieldnote, November 15, 2017)

His challenger, also a White male, argued for the merits of affirmative action, but was not, in my observation and Mr. Lenard’s, as strong a public speaker nor as prepared. Thus, he did not provide the same quantity of information nor relayed it in a way that was clear (or always audible) to the audience. Some points made to counter related to gender—women can do any job a man can do and therefore deserve a chance—to which the anti-affirmative action side declared that women have equal chances and are underrepresented in STEM fields simply because they “choose different career paths.”

When students were done, Mr. Lenard offered his comments:

Alright. (Students clap.) What I heard almost none in this debate is statistics. I heard “raised SAT scores,” but you didn’t tell me by how much. You can’t just say it’s true, because it’s true. There are some good things, Daniel, you are a very good public speaker. Peter, you gotta stand up, you have to project, you gotta know your stuff better. You’re not organized and it showed. But you know what? You are alive, and you’re done. (Students clap.) That’s a tough one. You guys are in a tough spot, you’re White people … arguing against affirmative action. (Fieldnote, November 15, 2017)

While the use of debate can be a great tool to learn about political topics through development of research skills and public-speaking via political discourse, there was little to no engagement with students in the audience—that is, classmates were not part of the conversation and merely spectators. Further, Mr. Lenard did not aid in challenging any of the points made and by focusing on their public speaking aspect, he let many right-wing ideologies go unchallenged. In this way, he implicitly endorsed many of these ideas. His last comment, that affirmative action is a difficult topic for White people to argue against, is not “neutral.” Instead, it deploys rhetoric that White people are constrained in these instances since stances against policies benefitting people of color will only ever be perceived as racist. It corroborates similar talking points in right-leaning media at the time—such as those made by Ben Shapiro—that denounce “political correctness” as having a stranglehold on politics and impeding free speech (ABC News, 2017). Mr. Lenard offered no additional context for students to engage with this comment or explanations as to why he feels it is harder for White people to argue against affirmative action. No conversation occurred around the irony that Daniel, a White person, argued against affirmative action and won the debate albeit being in that “tough spot.” This moment and those previously mentioned in Ms. Greene’s class, demonstrate the implicit and explicit ways teachers reproduce right-wing hegemony across both sites and how, as previously stated, pedagogical choices perpetuate a White-normed civic education (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2021; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Tyson & Park, 2008; Urrieta, 2004; Urrieta & Riedel, 2008).

Conclusion: “Neutral” pedagogy as right-wing civic learning opportunities

As these examples show, teaching and learning in these predominantly White schools occurred within a field of right-wing hegemony. While both students and teachers expressed a desire for politically neutral pedagogy, teachers’ pedagogical and curricular choices either passively endorsed right wing politics or actively put forth conservative views. This politically “neutral” pedagogy served to demarcate a field of political normativity in the classroom that silenced any opposition making it a space for only right-wing civic learning opportunities. While the examples shared may seem mundane to some readers, it is precisely this right-wing banality that illuminates the hegemony of right-wing common sense in these school sites and makes evident the insidiousness of a pedagogy of neutrality as it allows right-wing hegemonic thinking to go unnoticed and persist unchallenged.

As discussed by nondominant students in one-on-one interviews—students of color, LGBTQIA identifying students, left-leaning girls—and corroborated through observations, what becomes clear is not that neutrality is somehow a pedagogy devoid of politics. Instead, neutrality is determined by whether it affirms or challenges conservative political worldviews. Said another way: if the idea is right-leaning, it is “neutral”; if it is left-leaning, it is seen as “political.” This aligns with Gramsci’s (1971) notion of how hegemonic power creates and recreates the common sense.

In one-on-one interviews, right-leaning students detailed even more conservative and, at times, explicitly racist views while left-leaning students privately shared that they did not feel safe to share their ideas in class. “Neutrality” created a hostile political climate and further demonstrates the power teachers have to dictate the field of political possibility. Furthermore, in remaining silent—for example, offering no counters to the colonizing force of the Monroe Doctrine or countering the idea of affirmative action as reverse racism—teachers allow for these political ideologies to take root as normative and as not needing debate. As the examples show, the ideas shared either for or against a policy or topic endured hardly, if any, real substantive pushback. There existed an extreme aversion to discussing anything “controversial” and this only served to fetishize neutrality and reproduce right-wing hegemony. While Dabach et al. (2018) make an important point against the use of immigration issues as controversial topics in the classroom since this frames immigrants and migration as “not normal,” in the sites under study, “not normal” might be a crucial first step in disrupting right-wing hegemony.

Further, as Woodson (2019) explains, the concept of citizenship, with its exclusionary and racist legacies, serves as a “racial code word.” I argue that neutrality in these schools functions much in the same way. While on the surface the push for politically neutral pedagogy is expressed as ethical, in practice, neutrality is a stand-in for not being left-leaning: not sympathizing, advocating, or at times even acknowledging racial and social justice issues. Thus, “neutrality” functions to reproduce not only right-wing politics, but also Whiteness and settler colonialism given their coconstitutive nature (Sánchez Loza, in press). Taking into consideration how the above examples extol racist (and settler colonial) ideologies, pedagogical moves work to elicit consent to a normative view of oppressive power structures that draw attention to and argue the need for further research into the political power of pedagogy.

As I observed throughout the academic year at both sites, left-leaning students in both communities (the majority of whom in this study were White female students, LGBTQIA students, and students of color) were silenced. Either a self-imposed silence out of desiring a sense of safety, or a real, externally imposed silence as a result of a classroom and school climate calibrated toward right-wing politics, their silencing makes clear that for marginalized communities, there are real and grave consequences that result from idealizing political neutrality. Given the continued assault on education and the increased violence animated by right-wing ideologies globally, the consequences of “neutrality” are grave for everyone.

Threats to democratic education in this political moment are evident, yet the converse is also true: a great promise exists as to the power of curriculum, pedagogy, and the larger project of education to challenge students, teachers, parents, and administrators to better think and engage in democratic thought and action. It is why critical work is targeted. If we believe in schools’ role in helping to “shape citizens,” and if we sincerely believe in human rights and social justice, explicit stances supporting critical social justice education must be taken by scholars, policy makers, educators, and teacher unions along with real material support offered to practitioners. This must happen alongside the theorizing, researching, and facilitation of civic learning opportunities that are not politically neutral—these are not achievable nor desirable—but that are normed toward social and racial justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this research came from the Ford Foundation and the Center for Right Wing Studies and the Institute for the Study of Social Issues at University of California, Berkeley.

Notes on contributors

Dinorah Sánchez Loza

Dinorah Sánchez Loza is a critical scholar of education focused on the relationships between education and power, schooling and social (re)production, and democratic (mis)education. Her research agenda centers on the relationship between school and how youth come to think and act politically while focusing on critical social theories such as settler colonialism and its resultant structuring of race, gender, and political economic relations and the impact these have on the teaching and learning of politics and civic engagement. She is an assistant professor at The Ohio State University where she teaches classes on critical social theories in education, critical ethnography, and the teaching and research of social justice education.