Turning in or tuning out? Listening to silences in education for critical political consciousness

Abstract

What happens when a team of university education researchers initiates a social justice learning project in a local high school, and – despite the overall project’s considerable successes in cultivating students’ critical political ‘voice’ – is confounded by the periodic, apparent ‘silences’ of some of its young female students? Drawing on eight years of fieldwork in a groundbreaking high school social justice education classroom, this article examines the presumptions inherent in certain forms of social justice pedagogy, and the ways in which ensuing classroom disjunctures may, in fact, lead to deeper insights about education for youth critical social consciousness. The article focuses on two, interrelated issues: the unsettling and sometimes confounding ‘silences’ of female students and the correlation between such silences and social justice educators’ attenuated ability to recognize and support the myriad ways in which minority female students may encounter, negotiate, and articulate their own particular forms of Freirian conscientización.

Keywords:

• Social justice
• gender
• Freirian pedagogy
• YPAR
• high schools

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Dr. Adela C. Licona, University of Arizona, for her careful and illuminating read of an earlier version of this manuscript. I am also indebted to the extremely thoughtful critiques offered by this manuscript’s peer reviewers. And, as always, my deepest gratitude goes to the many young people who have inspired and shaped this study and the broader one from which it derives.

Notes

1. The Urban Education Justice Project that I describe in this article drew heavily on Freire’s (1970) notion of conscientização; I employ throughout this article the Spanish translation, conscientización, of the Portuguese term.

2. While the city of Tucson, its Tucson Unified School District and the University of Arizona retain their names in this article, this project’s name and all other institutional and individual names are pseudonyms.

3. Tucson Unified School District, https://tusdstats.tusd1.org/planning/profiles/curr_enr/anydate/anyenr_front.asp.

4. US Census Bureau: State & County Quick Facts: Arizona/Tucson 2008-2012. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/04000.html

5. Arizona Department of Education: Health & Nutrition Services: Percentage of children approved for free or reduced-price lunches. http://www.azed.gov/health-nutrition/frpercentages/.

6. While description of these moments of critical consciousness, including the processes by which they unfolded and the ways in which the project team determined them ‘critically conscious,’ is beyond the scope of this article, cf. Cammarota, 2007; Cannella, 2009; Stauber, 2016.

7. Here and in the following paragraph, words in quotation marks are Elia’s phrasing, while the rest is my paraphrasing and summary.

8. While I use the terms, ‘female,’ ‘young woman/women’ and ‘girl(s)’ interchangeably throughout this article, I am particularly purposeful about my use of the term ‘girl’: rightfully considered diminishing when used in conjunction with adult or young adult women and/or when used opposite ‘men’ or ‘young men,’ girlhood as a social-temporal category of youth before legal adulthood retains specific social significances. Taft (2006, pp, 333–334) makes a particularly compelling argument for recognition of the social category of girlhood as one with specific structural constraints and political exigencies as well as potential for specific – while still diverse and complex – political dispositions and praxes.

9. Mari Matsuda writes, in Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition (1991), ‘The way I try to understand the intersection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call ‘ask the other question.’ When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ (p. 43)