Internalised deficit perspectives: positionality in culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks

ABSTRACT

By showing that deficit thinking can manifest in an internalised sense among historically minoritised students, this paper examines the significance of ‘positionality’ in (re)conceptualising culturally responsive pedagogies (CRPs). Drawing from a study that explored the lived experiences of students participating in a culturally and linguistically diverse context, I demonstrate that whilst some students’ dispositions towards their home cultures and languages align with the anti-deficit and anti-racist agendas of CRPs, some dispositions present a counter-narrative and can be supportive of the status quo. I refer to these dispositions as ‘internalised deficit thinking or perspectives’. To capture this concept and, in a more general sense, the diverse subjectivities students used to navigate Westernised schooling arrangements, this paper advances the notion of positionality. Bringing ‘positionality’ into conversation with CRPs means confronting the relations of power, embodied by students of diverse backgrounds, in fostering socially just educational experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Positionality
• internalised deficit perspectives
• culturally responsive pedagogies
• embodied relations of power
• strengths-based approaches
• internalised racism

Introduction

Across the globe, many students enter the school gates with the implicit understanding that they will need to divest parts of themselves to successfully participate in schooling (Gay 2002, 2018; Nieto 1999). This is often the case with students who are historically minoritised due to class, race or ethnicity, gender, and often the intersections of all these identity markers. Current schooling arrangements bear entrenched mechanisms that can subtly, sometimes openly, position students’ cultural resources and identities as deficit and having shortcomings that negatively impact their educational outcomes and trajectories (Hickey-Moody and Horn 2022; Rudolph 2013; Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard 2022). As such, for some students, asserting their identities requires active resistance to the status quo. Schools, however, do not operate in isolation, and such deficit positionings of minoritised students (and their families) is reflective of broader societal issues related to racism, classism, and homophobia, among others (Menchaca 1997). It is therefore unsurprising that, as in the case of Australia, whilst research continues to document students’ experiences of racism (Baak 2019; Mansouri and Trembath 2005), reports of overt displays of racism in broader society persist (e.g., Grant 2023; Yu and Hosier 2023; see also Hage 2000). Furthermore, a general lack of diversity in the Australian teaching cohort means that in many educational contexts, teachers predominantly come from White middle-class backgrounds and often feel unprepared and not confident to teach in culturally diverse spaces, including Indigenous communities (Stacey 2022). Thus, it is insufficient to attend to the issues of schooling without fully understanding how deficit thinking presents itself and how it operates to disadvantage minoritised students.

Whilst it is important for educators to examine practices reflective of their deficit thinking, I would argue that it is equally important for educators and researchers to attune to the ways that deficit thinking can be internalised by minoritised students and to engage with these internalisations to inform their practices. Recently, in response to outcome disparities between students of relatively privileged backgrounds and those from disadvantaged circumstances, a growing number of scholarly works have lauded the success of culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks (Morrison et al. 2019). Culturally responsive pedagogies (CRPs), with origins in Northern America, have achieved global impact with applications in various geographical settings including Africa (e.g., Anlimachie et al. 2023), Australia (e.g., Morrison et al. 2019; Rigney and Kelly 2023), Canada (e.g., Yasin 2021), and the United Arab Emirates (e.g., Garces-Bacsal et al. 2021), to name a few (see also Pirbhai-Illich and Martin 2017). Despite its global uptake, CRP maintains a marginalised position vis-à-vis mainstream educational approaches (Rigney 2020; Sleeter 2012), although scholars continue to advocate its importance for decolonising and anti-racist educational agendas (Gay 2018; Pirbhai-Illich and Martin 2017). Furthermore, whilst research illuminates the challenges educators experience – be it systematic or dispositional, in nature – in implementing CRPs (Mellom et al. 2018; Valtierra and Whitaker 2021), considering the diverse ways that CRPs are applied and mobilised, there remains a lack of robust and sustained theorisations of CRPs (Morrison et al. 2019). As I will demonstrate in this paper, CRPs can potentially benefit from an engagement with the concept of ‘positionality’. Doing so means (re)affirming that power relations are central to designing educational initiatives that seek to engage with students of diverse cultural backgrounds.

Engaging with the current discourse on CRPs, I build from the notion of ‘internalised deficit perspectives’ to promote student positionality as a critical aspect of deliberating enactments of CRPs. I start by examining the perils of ‘deficit thinking’ that dominate how policy and practices represent and understand the problem of schooling. I then explore current conceptualisations of CRPs and how positionality might inform such approach. Following this, I make a case for ‘positionality’ to capture the internalisation of worldviews and as having the potential to significantly inform the practice of cultural responsiveness in classrooms. To illustrate this, I draw from empirical research that sought to examine the lived experiences of students as they participated in a culturally diverse educational context.

‘Deficit thinking’ in educational contexts: engaging with ‘positionality’

In a seminal work illuminating the concept of deficit thinking, Valencia (1997) offers a counter-narrative to, then existing and still persistent, negative and harmful narratives that establish historically minoritised students as uneducable and problematic. For Valencia (1997), a deficit perspective:

at its core, is an endogenous theory – positing that the student who fails in school does so because of internal deficits or deficiencies. Such deficits manifest, it is alleged, in limited intellectual abilities, linguistic shortcomings, lack of motivation to learn and immoral behavior. (Valencia 1997, 2)

Scholars contributing to ongoing work on deficit thinking evince that it is the combined minoritisation due to race or ethnicity and socio-economic disadvantage that can unfairly label these students as uneducable and problematic (Foley 1997; Valencia 1997). Evidently, the students’ perceived failures at school become attributed to internal individual traits (often tied to family and community).

In the context of students considered as ‘cultural minorities’, schooling can perpetuate deficit thinking through entrenched systems and practices that are often racist in their genesis. Delpit’s (2006) work, for instance, brings attention to how the cultures and languages of students from African American and native American backgrounds are perceived as liabilities and problems when measured against the standard dominant (and powerful) culture and language (i.e., English). This includes educators’ negative perceptions about the students’ cultures and home languages; specifically, those that are considered inferior (Debnam et al. 2023, Erling et al. 2022; Mellom et al. 2018). Stanton-Salazar (1997) also argues that the dominance of psychologically based perspectives in education can overemphasise individual attributes to explain low school achievement among minoritised students whilst downplaying the power relations that disadvantage such students as they participate in learning. As a consequence, deficit perspectives can then exempt or exclude inequitable schooling arrangements as a possible source of students’ perceived underperformance (Valencia 2010).

Current literature on deficit thinking has mostly focused on external factors that can position minoritised students at a disadvantage with little exploration about how the notion of positionality can inform current conceptualisations of deficit perspectives. Appearing mostly in literature that examines researcher reflexivity, positionality relates to how individuals locate themselves within a perceived and understood reality of how the world is structured and organised (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000). Whilst concepts such as ‘standpoint theorising’ (e.g., Hekman 1997), and ‘positioning theory’ (Harré 2015) resonate with positionality, their focus is often on micro-interactions and the unit of analysis is embedded in the utterances or spoken discourses in social interactions. Positionality, on the other hand, relates to broader social relations enabling a more panoramic viewpoint that, for the purposes of this paper, enables conceptual deliberations of the merits of positionality to the practice of CRPs. Deficit perspectives are very much tied to the individual’s identity constituted by the interrelations of race, gender, class, and other signifiers of identity (Maher and Kay Tetreault 1993). Within the literature on researcher reflexivity, examining positionality compels researchers to understand and attend to the relations of power that exist between researcher and participants (i.e., those being researched), and the knowledge structures that are embedded within these relations.

The application of ‘positionality’ in discussions of educational practice is evident in research that aligns with social justice agendas. On the one hand, there are studies that examine how positionality shapes the social justice teaching practices of educators who identify as ethnically or racially minoritised (e.g., Lahiri-Roy, Belford, and Sum 2023; Parsons 2008; Zamudio et al. 2009). On the other hand, and more relevant to this paper, literature also examines how students of historically minoritised backgrounds inhabit and perform their positionality in educational contexts. Takacs (2002), for instance, illustrates the necessary and complementary relationship between positionality and epistemology. He advocates for teaching and learning practices that encourage students to reflect on their positionality so they develop an appreciation of the multiplicity of worldviews that they (will) encounter in daily life. Positionality, in a ‘translocational’ sense,¹ also unfolds in Keddie’s (2012) work as a significant consideration for educators who engage with the pedagogical possibilities of painful and difficult knowledges. This is because positionality denotes the variable ways that power dynamics play out in different contexts and interactions that can position individuals in either empowering or disempowering ways.

Positionality, as informing the notion of deficit perspectives, engenders the concept of ‘internalised deficit perspectives’, often apparent among minoritised students’ narratives about participating in Westernised educational systems. Internalisation of deficit perspectives are visible (and audible) in research narratives where English language learners describe themselves as inferior, stupid, and illegitimate in social interactions that employ English discourses (Duff 2002; Norton-Pierce 1994; Patchen 2012). These internalised perspectives, as demonstrated in research, inhibited English language learners from participating due to fears of criticism and humiliation.

In a similar way that deficit thinking finds roots in racist discourses, the notion of internalised deficit perspectives is intimately related to conceptions of internalised racism. Resonating with the empirical data, Paradies (2006, 151) defines internalised racism as ‘the incorporation of racist attitudes, beliefs or ideologies within the actor’s worldview’. Other related concepts have also been linked to internalised racism, such as ‘internalised oppression’, and other scholars have expanded this to discuss internalised racism’s affective dimensions as a relational process (see Seet 2021). The notion of internalised racism, however, is not novel and strongly resonates with some concepts within postcolonial scholarship,² broadly speaking. For instance, Frantz Fanon (1967) elaborated on the process through which colonialism and consequently racism could be internalised through the notion of ‘colonial mentality’, and thus showed how ‘space and place were the objects of colonial domination, but the reformation of minds – through language, education, and more – was where subjectivities could be, and were, shaped’ (Jilani 2023, 3). Relatedly, Du Bois (1995) also writes about the concept of ‘double consciousness’ to depict the process of the colonised individual’s be(com)ing as reflecting somewhat oppositional ideologies of the ‘colonisers’ and that of the ‘colonised’. Anzaldúa (1987) reinforces a similar phenomenon through the concept of ‘mestiza consciousness’ revealing the quandary confronting individuals encountering a ‘cultural collision’ navigating through incompatible frameworks of existence. The works of Fanon, Du Bois, and Anzaldua cited here are not exhaustive of their rich corpus of scholarly work, nor those expanding on their scholarship. It is not the goal of this paper to provide a genealogical conceptualisation of internalised racism and internalised deficit perspectives. Instead, this serves as recognition of the depth of literature – spanning various geographical locations – that reinforces deficit perspectives as an internalised process and thus gestures towards a consideration of positionality as relevant to pursuing anti-racist education.

Although it was tempting to use internalised racism to capture the experiences described by the students, I subscribe to the notion of using internalised deficit perspectives to signal its relevance in revealing the potential for schooling practices. The notion of ‘deficit’ signals shortcomings and reflects pathological perspectives of difference. Arguably, it also reinforces Freire’s (2005) contentions about the accepted ‘banking system’ of education as a metaphor to describe how students are regarded to have entered schools as empty vessels that need (re)filling by teachers. As such internalised deficit perspectives relate to students’ acceptance of the tacit agreement that non-dominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds are not legitimate forms of knowledge.

Conceptually, positionality also invites the possibility for a more strengths-based worldview among minoritised students as they participate in English dominated spaces. Research, for instance, that examines verbal communication and micro-interactions among students and teachers demonstrates that students are capable of manipulating discourses to subvert traditional interactional styles that fixedly position educators as figures of authority vis-à-vis students as passive learners (Candela 2005). By attending to ‘children’s initiatives in the constitution and legitimisation of social practices in order to perform academic tasks’, students’ identity negotiations are revealed as performances that contribute to facilitating parity of participation between teachers and students (Candela 2005, n.p.). As such, the concept of positionality makes it compelling to examine pedagogical arrangements as potentially facilitative of internalisations of either deficit perspectives or a more strengths-based and empowering attitude towards diverse cultural and linguistic resources for teaching and learning.

Countering internalised deficit perspectives through culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks: accentuating positionality

Culturally responsive pedagogies (CRPs)³ – with its increasing variants – have been earmarked by scholars as successfully transformative approaches to improving the educational outcomes of students from historically minoritised backgrounds. More specifically, Morrison et al. (2019) highlight that:

the foundational works by Gloria Ladson-Billings brought CRP into the spotlight by presenting a cogent rejection of deficit discourses, based on her own research of successful cross-cultural teachers and on educational and anthropological scholarship that had been emerging throughout the preceding decade. (16)

Among the scholars recognised as foundational to and pioneering of the culturally responsive approach, Gay (2002, 2018) is also prominently cited and credited in literature. Gay (2002, 26) defines culturally responsive pedagogy as teaching ‘to and through [diverse learners’] personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishment’. Such conceptions align with anti-deficit and strengths-based educational approaches (Sleeter 2012).

Although the notion of cultural responsiveness has evolved over time, an added complexity to CRP is the way it contends with the dynamic and evolving notions of ‘culture’. Indeed, it is the treatment of culture that makes conceptual distinctions between CRP and other closely related concepts such as multicultural education. For instance, whilst multicultural education and CRP both have roots in emancipatory forms of education to address racial oppression, multiculturalism has over time become watered down due to the ways that ‘culture’ is regarded as a stable entity reduced to mainly (and sometimes solely) expressions of holidays, food, and clothing (e.g., Adam and Byrne 2023). Another example is the often-associated concept of ‘culture-based education’ that is focused and designed to meet the needs of specific ethnic and cultural groups. This is exhibited in bilingual education models that have reportedly produced positive outcomes in student engagement, well-being, and achievement (e.g., Erling et al. 2022). However, as argued by Morrison et al. (2019), both approaches consist of features of CRP, but fail to account for and attend to the temporal and spatial dimensions of ‘culture’ that make culture always evolving and ever shifting. As such, I would argue that ‘culture’ is very much tied to the concept of ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al. 1992) which then requires an appreciation of and openness towards cultural hybridity (see González 2005).

A synthesis of research on CRP has led Morrison et al (2019; see also Morrison, Robbins, and Gregory Rose 2008) to generate three key features to enacting culturally responsive pedagogy: ‘high academic expectations, cultural competence (of students), and critical consciousness’, offering a launch pad to rationalise the need to engage with the notion of positionality. More specifically, I locate my discussion in the third concept (critical consciousness) as a basis to unpack the contributions of positionality. Critical consciousness involves developing students’ knowledge and skills for engaging with power dynamics in society, how power is translated in the classroom, and what this then means for a socially just educational context (Ladson-Billings 1995; Morrison, Robbins, and Gregory Rose 2008). Building on the work of Ladson-Billings, Morrison et al. (2008) reiterate the importance of critical literacy among students and for teachers to engage with students’ lifeworlds in curriculum and pedagogy. This aspect of critical consciousness aligns well with Delpit’s (2006) assertions about the culture of power as enacted within the classroom and the benefits of engaging students about these issues and their consequences. It also echoes Paulo Freire’s (2005) concept of conscientização that asserts educational experiences must examine and understand the relations of dominance and suppression in present-day realities. As demonstrated thus far, CRP makes an invaluable contribution to subverting the deficit positioning of minoritised students and communities by advocating the need to illuminate the cultures of power that make schooling arrangements complicit in its inability to engage with and build on the students’ strengths and resources.

CRP’s capacity to challenge deficit perspectives can be augmented by attending to the internalisation of deficit perspectives. Positionality offers a lens to appreciate the sociological processes informing how students negotiate with their identities, not only in terms of complicity with deficit thinking, but also the potential for subverting socially mediated deficit notions, and what these might mean for culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks. Current enactments of CRPs, however, have not fully and explicitly reckoned with the existence and appearance of internalised deficit thinking among students, which empirical research discussed in the previous section reveals; nor have CRPs engaged more directly with the concept of positionality, in general, which the key findings narrated in the next sections would encourage.

Background and context for research: methodological approach

This paper draws from a research project that sought to examine the perspectives and experiences of students and educators about ‘participation’ in a culturally and linguistically diverse classroom context. I focussed on a key construct shaping student participation captured through the notion of ‘positionality’. More specifically, I posed the question: How might positionality inform and enrich the concept and practice of culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks?

The research design followed a qualitative case study of an Australian composite primary classroom that consisted of primary 5 and 6 students (ages 9–11). Located in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the fieldwork site for this paper displayed characteristics of ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007). The classroom reflected over 20 cultural and linguistic backgrounds from the students. This was represented in the 11 student participants who consented (together with parental/carer consent) to take part in the project. Based on participant self-identification, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds represented by the students included Arabic, Fijian, Russian, Malaysian, Samoan, Persian, Afghani (Urdu), Indian, Pakistani, and Albanian. By contrast, the teachers assigned to the class were predominantly of White mono-cultural and monolingual backgrounds. Of the nine educators who consented to participate in the project, only three spoke languages other than English, which were Dutch, Greek, and Singhalese.

Throughout the fieldwork, I gave careful consideration to maintaining ethical standards in the conduct of research and reporting of data as guided by the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (NHMRC 2007). This research project was granted permission by the Victorian Department of Education. The project was also given ethics approval by the University of Melbourne.⁴ The fieldwork consisted of ethnographic observations, semi-structured and informal interviews, and focus group discussions (with written activities) for two school terms, lasting approximately 5 months. Analysis of data followed a thematic analysis that was informed through various theoretical frames including Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) logic of practice and critical pedagogical frameworks (i.e., Gay 2002; Ladson-Billings 2014) to analyse taken-for-granted schooling arrangements and illuminate the ways that these can be symbolically violent for students of historically minoritised backgrounds. The narratives analysed in this paper primarily come from semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with students.

Internalisation of deficit perspectives in superdiverse educational contexts

Research on deficit perspectives has predominantly focused on revealing entrenched schooling arrangements that contribute to the marginalisation and deficit positioning of students’ cultural backgrounds and home languages (e.g., Liddicoat and Jowan Curnow 2014). This was illustrated in one of the findings from this study that revealed the lack of holistic and systematic approaches to integrating the cultural and linguistic resources of students to the teaching and learning experiences. As such, efforts to do so (or lack thereof) were at best tokenistic, and at worst symbolically violent. It was only during celebrations of Harmony Day or Refugee Week that educators turned their attention to the diverse cultural experiences of the students, and very little effort was made to sustain such engagement in daily lesson content and activities. Moreover, teachers were enforcing an ‘English only’ rule in the classroom despite school leaders assuring me that there existed no school policy suggesting this. Elsewhere, I have expanded on these experiences, and specifically, the general discomforts felt by educators in engaging with diverse cultures and languages (Cabiles 2021).

The manifestations, however, of deficit perspectives within the lived experiences of students remain unexplored. In what follows, I discuss two themes from the analysis of data contrasting two dispositional tendencies of students with regard to their home languages and cultures. The narratives highlighted below were responses to questions such as: ‘Do you talk about your cultures or cultural traditions to your friends and teachers in school? Why or why not?’ ‘Do you use your home language/s when you’re in school? Why or why not?’ The first theme (below) relates to the internalisation of dominant racio-linguistic attitudes towards marginalised cultures and languages. The second sub-section illustrates subversive dispositions that are demonstrative of strengths-based approaches to home languages and cultures.

Internalisation of racio-linguistic deficit thinking

They bullied me about my religion … They said, uhm, you have long hair, and they touch me on my hair, and they said, ‘Oh, it’s a button’. You get angry. (Ramis)

The quote above exemplifies the racialised micro-interactions encountered by students in schools. Ramis was an amiable and enthusiastic student participant who was 10 years old and in Primary 6 at the time of the fieldwork. Ramis had an Indian cultural background and spoke three languages other than English (Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu). His family moved to Australia when he was one-year-old as economic migrants and Ramis had been attending the same school since Primary 1. Ramis and his family practiced Sikhism and for this reason Ramis wore his hair long and went to school wearing the Sikh turban, pagri. Ramis’ narrative, quoted above, reveals the playground bullying that occurred during his early primary years, bullying he experienced with peers because of his cultural background. Elsewhere I have written about how Ramis demonstrated agency through his maturity, candidness, and initiatives during my field work (Cabiles 2022). During this conversation, for instance, Ramis looking at me, started to giggle and so did I, both of us recognising the humour behind the racist encounter.⁵ Nonetheless, remnants of this experience continued to impact Ramis’ attitude and behaviour towards how he participated in learning. When asked if he talked about his culture or spoke one of his home languages in school, Ramis stated:

I feel like I’d be bullied again … (sighs) … because I got bullied because of my culture. That’s why … We just speak [Punjabi] to each other. We would never speak it to someone else because we feel like, we feel stupid to speak it to someone else because they don’t understand it.

The internalised deficit positioning of one’s cultural background is evident in Ramis’ statement above. By ‘we’, Ramis was referring to his peers who were either of Indian or Pakistani backgrounds who also spoke Punjabi. Ramis sheds light into the affective dimension of speaking one of his native languages, a cultural marker, and a key element in identity construction. As Delpit (2006) asserts: ‘ … the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community and personal identity’. It is the reference to ‘feel[ing] stupid’ when using a native language or mother tongue in an English-dominated context that indicates Ramis’ internalisation of deficit thinking.

The internalisation of deficit perspectives towards home languages were also evident in other notable responses from the students. First, I quote (below) from my interview with Parisa who is of Afghani background and spoke Dari at home with her parents but rarely with her siblings. Unlike her older siblings who were born in Afghanistan and then migrated with the family to Australia, Parisa was born in Australia. She has attended the school since Primary 1 and was in Primary 5 at the time of my fieldwork. During other conversations with Parisa, she talked about assisting her parents to communicate in the English language such as responding to her father’s work-related text messages and phone calls. In school, however, Parisa stated:

I don’t talk [Dari in school]. If someone knows, I don’t say anything. It’s kinda embarrassing … I don’t know it that much, but I just I know it. But I don’t wanna talk about it.

Parisa’s feelings of embarrassment again reveal the internationalisation of deficit thinking about certain home languages, in this case, Dari. Not all languages are perceived and accepted equally. Languages other than English have historically gained prestige and popularity (including French, Spanish and Portuguese) as part of colonisation and at present, as a function of neo-liberalism (i.e., their value in the global market and trade) (Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert 2010). However, languages that have little economic value globally tend to be regarded with less prestige, and consequently, not necessarily given attention in schooling. These would include the languages of many asylum-seeking populations including Dari, the language of Parisa’s parents from Afghanistan. Parisa, however, did not disclose if her family has a refugee background or otherwise. The discussion illuminates though that the way society and schools position other languages as subordinate and inferior can be accepted by individuals (and students) as a taken-for-granted norm, and thus, lead to a process of internalising such deficit perspectives.

A similar deficit narration of home languages can be gleaned from my conversation with another student participant, Harry, who has a Russian cultural background. Harry spoke Russian in the presence of both maternal and paternal relatives but did not seem comfortable sharing this linguistic repertoire in school. More specifically, he shared:

I don’t like speaking [Russian] when I’m like in public, but at home, I’m okay with it. I don’t know. It’s just … I don’t know. I’m just not used to it.

Unlike the responses from Ramis and Parisa, Harry’s response appears less emotionally charged. However, him ‘not liking to speak Russian when in public’ when he did try at home or with relatives has similar undertones to the other responses. That is, their home languages brought them shame or humiliation rather than affording them a sense of pride.

Internalised deficit perspectives, as revealed in these students’ narratives, relate to the negative and deficit perspectives students have about their linguistic, and in general cultural, skills and knowledges which then lead to their non-engagement with these cultural resources. The narratives reveal that the internalisation of deficit perspectives is tied to the ways that the students’ home languages, as cultural markers of their identity, were positioned negatively in schooling and in broader society. Positionality captures how students are locating their languages (and their use of it) from their frameworks of how the linguistic landscape is structured and organised. Although there was, as contextualised earlier, an unwritten English-only rule in the school, complying to this rule was not the primary reason articulated in the narratives highlighted above. Instead, the students expressed feelings of discomfort and embarrassment towards the use of their home languages. Drawing from the work of Bourdieu (1990; see also Reay 2015), these emotional responses appeared as a ‘collective habitus’ among these students demonstrated through an internalised deficit disposition or perspective towards their home languages.

Writing about the Australian context, with implications beyond it, Indigenous scholar of Narungga, Kaurna, and Ngarrindjeri backgrounds, Lester-Irrabina Rigney (2020) highlights the necessity for critical reflection and/or taking a critical activist orientation. He describes this as: ‘in dialogue with others, the student engages differing views and critique their own practices and behaviours. Educators engaged in critical literacies, share power in all learning environments and engage children in social justice work for change to their local challenges (586). Attending to the notion of positionality by engaging with a sociological understanding of the processes in the internalisation of deficit perspectives aligns with CRPs’ tenet on critical reflection. Such possibilities are illuminated in the next section. In pockets of (what I would refer to as) ‘subversive junctures’, students reveal that prevailing deficit thinking – whether internalised or emanating from external conditions – can be transgressed for more meaningful and engaging learning experiences.

Subversive junctures and the promise of superdiverse classroom contexts

For some students, subverting the unwritten rules and expectations around engagement with cultural and linguistic backgrounds were evident in how they described small group interactions with peers. Subversive junctures are episodes and narratives that challenge the status quo of the school. Based on earlier descriptions of the school, there was a general lack of deep engagements with the students’ diverse cultural resources. As such, subversive junctures are spaces where students subvert the unwritten rules that potentially supress their identities.

Below, I discuss several sets of quotes. They illustrate the potential for cultural responsiveness in ‘superdiverse’ teaching contexts by depicting how the use of home languages among peers of similar cultural backgrounds can be productive learning opportunities. The first quote highlighted below is from Mateen who came from a refugee background and was often described by teachers as quiet and reserved. During my fieldwork, Mateen attended a separate English-as-additional-language (EAL) class about three times a week. From my observation notes, I saw him converse in Persian with one of his peers in the EAL class which he confirmed:

[I speak Persian] sometimes when we go back to our seats to do our work.

Mateen’s use of his home language was a way of capitalising on his bilingualism to improve his participation in the classroom. The EAL teachers noted that Mateen still lacked confidence in the use of English language, and as such, had not been transitioned out of the EAL classes for two years. Arguably, this can be understood as a deficit positioning of Mateen with a lack of consideration of the classroom conditions that constrained and facilitated Mateen’s engagement.⁶ For instance, literature on bilingual education provides compelling evidence that productive and empowering engagements occur when students are encouraged to employ and build on their full linguistic repertoire for learning as captured in approaches like translanguaging (e.g., García and Li 2015) and content language and integrated learning (CLIL) (e.g., Coyle 2007).

Another student, Roya, also spoke about the social benefits of talking in her home language with other students who were able to speak Dari. Roya was described as a confident and friendly student who was eager to learn English and was fast-tracked out of the EAL class compared to other students. In an interview, she shared:

It’s like funny. We say funny things to each other, and then we start laughing. And ah … you know, it makes us good friends.

In a similar vein, quoted below is Liana, a student participant of Samoan background who spoke Samoan at home and was described by the class teacher as a confident and friendly student. Liana started going to the school when she was in Primary 1 and was in Primary 5 at the time of my fieldwork. Based on observation notes, Liana had formed a peer friendship group that she regularly sat with during independent and group work. In an interview, she disclosed:

The people that sit on my table. Uhm, they speak their language and I’m like, I speak to them about my language, and they ask me questions about my country … Sometimes I talk about, like, the bad things that happens like the big tsunami and that. And sometimes, I get like sad. But then they talk about their country and they say, ‘Oh, we have the yummiest food’, and then I’m like, ‘Oh yeah!’ And then I start talking about the food I have in my country … it’d be good if they learn my culture and I learn about their culture ‘cause not everybody is the same in our class. So, I’d like to learn more about their culture, and uhm, learn about my culture’.

Liana’s narrative illustrates the often-spontaneous ways that intercultural learning takes place for a group of students that come from diverse cultural backgrounds. It also speaks of Liana’s (and her friendship groups’) openness to learning about each other’s cultures and languages. Whilst this condition holds the promise of possibilities for culturally responsive schooling practices, the quote also exposes the complexities inherent in implementing cultural responsiveness. As Liana highlighted, ‘not everybody is the same in our class’, a depiction of the intensely diverse cultural identities evident in the classroom.

An intensely diverse classroom context, such as my fieldwork site, offers fertile ground for teachers to employ and potentially expand on cultural responsiveness in teaching and learning. CRPs, since their inception, have been empirically examined in relatively homogenous classroom contexts in terms of ethnicity (Morrison et al. 2019). Despite seemingly homogenous ethnocultural backgrounds, however, it is also well acknowledged that diversities in individual experiences of race and culture shape the multiple identities of students in the classroom. Furthermore, many contemporary classrooms in those considered as ‘Western societies’, not just Australia, are increasingly constituted by diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Such are the challenges and opportunities offered by superdiversity for CRPs.

CRP’s key principles hold many possibilities for superdiverse classroom contexts, and it remains an expansive and malleable approach to enact social justice and equity in schooling (Morrison et al. 2019). Yet crucial to CRP’s success rests in its ability to consider and attune to the lifeworlds of students, and more prominently, their perspectives and views about reality and how they situate themselves in these. Within these subversive pockets of schooling, students’ narratives assert an asset-positioning of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They rehearse the possibilities of intercultural understanding and learning. It is here that the concept of positionality establishes its relevance to culturally responsive pedagogical frameworks by providing the social conditions and arrangements which, as Rigney (2020) reinforces, ‘connect learning strongly to student life-worlds’ and avoid tendencies to ‘essentialise and/or homogenise student identities and cultures’ (586).

Positionality matters: towards critical pedagogical framings of cultural responsiveness

Recognising positionality’s role in building a culturally responsive classroom necessitates engaging with the diverse identities and perspectives of students as foundational to the process. Positionality relates to the ways power differentiates individual identities, and how these identities are performed in social contexts. As such, positionality is an individuals’ internalisation of the structures and hierarchies, shaped by power dynamics, that manifest in the wider society. For some, being positioned at an advantage because of wealth and membership of a dominant culture can facilitate a more comfortable disposition. For others who come from positions of relative disadvantage, they can internalise deficit ways of being that mirror the conditions from where they originate. Understanding the latter, of course, has been the focus of this paper’s contribution to conceptualisations of CRPs.

Key findings, discussed in the previous section, offer a convincing argument that engaging with positionality matters for a broader understanding of the influence of deficit thinking and the possibilities for a more strengths-based approach. Historically minoritised students can hold deficit perspectives about themselves and inhabit deficit stances in the classroom setting. This can manifest in the ways that they talk about and engage with their cultural and linguistic resources. Internalised deficit perspectives are embodied; similar to the process of osmosis, it is the diffusion of society’s mistreatment of cultures, ethnicities, and languages that are different and do not occupy a position of privilege or prestige towards individual dispositions. These are manifested through students’ feelings of discomfort in talking about (and using) their cultural resources as demonstrated by students like Ramis, Parisa, and Harry who were inhibited from mobilising their linguistic and cultural resources in the school environment.

CRPs have yet to attend to the pitfalls of internalised deficit perspectives by specifically mobilising one of its principles: critical consciousness. Although critical consciousness is one of the key tenets of CRPs – featuring pedagogic elements such as critical literacy, power sharing in the classroom, and analysing power dynamics in society – it is not explicit about positionality. In other words, there is a general lack of analysis about how broader relations of power shape student worldviews and dispositions. The discussion in the previous section asserts that a consideration of positionality needs to inform current conceptualisations of CRPs to facilitate richer and more thoughtful discussions about the different ways that individuals can be complicit in perpetuating relations of dominance and inferiority. The goal, however, is not to castigate or encourage self-loathing. Instead, it seeks to enrich students’ understandings of the situatedness of one’s habits and dispositions in the hopes that one’s lived experiences become a starting point for productive conversations to address issues of racism and oppression that limit participatory parity for students of minoritised backgrounds. Here, I take my cue from Pearl (1997) who proposed that:

One of the most important history lessons that students need to learn is the history of deficit thinking and how that thinking has impacted and continues to impact their lives. Such a lesson cannot be delivered to students; it must be discovered by them. To learn about deficit thinking, students cannot be consumers of knowledge. They cannot have information handed to them by historians; they must become historians. (218)

In engaging with positionality, CRPs can also benefit from an appreciation of the diverse dispositional possibilities of historically minoritised students. Findings discussed in the previous section reveal that students have the capabilities to subvert deeply rooted dominant schooling paradigms. For instance, Mateen, Roya, and Liana offered a glimpse into the learning possibilities of intercultural exchange among students. They described the benefits – academic, relational, and affective – from discussing and learning about diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Rather than displaying an internalised deficit thinking about their own (and others’) cultural resources, the narratives of the students demonstrate strengths-based understandings and utilisation of these resources. Evidently, students can position themselves through a strengths-based framework and locate themselves from a perspective of resource-full participants in the learning environment. By recognising that students perform diverse subjectivities, the implementation of CRPs can be further enhanced by attuning to the students’ lifeworlds and engaging with their voices in (re)imagining a culturally responsive classroom.

The different ways that students internalise broader social and cultural depictions of non-dominant cultures is reflective of the concept of habitus from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu (1990, 53) defines habitus as a ‘set of durable, transposable dispositions … that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can only be adapted to their outcomes’. Habitus denotes the inclinations that guide how individuals react in particular ways and whilst the concept brings to the fore the social conditions that organise dispositions, conceptually, habitus is characteristically generative (Thompson 1991). Writing about the habitus, post-Bourdieusian scholars have hinted at its evolving and dynamic potential and also its transformative possibility (e.g., Mills 2008; Reay 2004). However, the conditions setting the stage for habitus’ transformation – whether psychological or socially mediated in its nature and to what extent – has yet to be fully explored (see also Kenway and McLeod 2004). What is more relevant to the arguments posed in this paper, so far, is Thompson’s (1991, 23) declaration (in his reading of Bourdieu) that individuals can be actively complicit in the maintenance of dominant forms of knowledge (also referred as symbolic power) when ‘those subjugated … believe in the legitimacy of power and the legitimacy of those who wield it’.

By engaging with positionality CRPs can potentially facilitate transformative discussions and students’ understandings of their own positionalities in relation to schooling arrangements and conditions. Students’ ‘cultural competence’ is identified as one of the key principles of CRPs where students are given opportunities to re-define the existing curriculum, demonstrate their funds of knowledge, and co-facilitate building relationships between schools and their communities (Gay 2018). Based on the arguments posed, I contend that without a consideration of positionality, oppressive relations of power cannot be fully examined and addressed. Power relations and how these are embodied in different ways and to varying degrees by historically minoritised students need to be an explicit feature of CRPs to facilitate the agenda of empowerment.

Critical theory, including critical pedagogies, foreground issues and relations of power in their approaches that can benefit the framework of CRPs. There are already different ways that CRPs and critical pedagogies overlap which includes the foregrounding of students’ lived experiences and the focus on mechanisms of oppression in society translated in schooling (e.g., Hickey-Moody and Horn 2022). These principles are complementary and critical framings of CRPs can bolster the centrality of power relations to include the concept of positionality.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that deficit perspectives can manifest in an internalised sense as students embody oppressive and racist discourses and orientations in their daily lives. Positionality, as argued here, is socially constructed and mediated, and historically inherited. At its core, positionality is a product of power mediation and negotiation. As such, individuals have the potential to inhabit different positionalities, and examining these is critical for CRPs. As Ladson-Billings (2014, 83) affirms, critical consciousness is a concern for all students; ‘we also want those in the mainstream to develop the kinds of skills that will allow them to critique the very basis of their privilege and advantage’. A consideration of positionality in applying and implementing CRPs is instrumental to this agenda.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants—educators and students—who volunteered to take part in this research and were generous of their time and attention throughout the fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Melbourne [Melbourne Research Scholarship].

Notes

1. Keddie (2012) also used the term identity to denote positionality, and the two concepts can be commensurable. In this paper, however, I use the concept of positionality to emphasise the ways that relations of power shape the subjectivities of the students as they participate in learning.

2. I use the reference ‘postcolonial’ in this paper with recognition that terms such as decolonial and anti-colonial are sometimes used synonymously but have their onto-epistemological distinctions. To emphasise how colonialisation sticks and remains through individual’s psyche which then invokes ‘complicity’, I use the term postcolonial to signify this process (see also Davis and Walsh 2020).

3. Often referred to as ‘culturally responsive pedagogy’, in this paper, I have chosen to refer to the plural ways that this framework has been practiced and applied in various contexts (see Morrison et al. 2019). As such, I use the term culturally responsive pedagogies, abbreviated throughout this paper as ‘CRPs’.

4. Ethics ID for this project is 1749542.1.

5. The participant and myself, both racialised individuals, came to an understanding of this racist innuendo as also humorous, and that the affective ambivalences produced in such encounters is part of our embodied wisdom. Drawing from the perspective of feminist standpoint theorising, I find resonance about this experience in the concept of epistemic advantage. That is, ‘those who are underprivileged with respect to their social positions are likely to be privileged with respect to gaining knowledge of social reality’ (Rolin 2009, 218).

6. I’ve written about Mateen’s increased participation in another article (Cabiles 2021) resulting from curricular content that allowed him to make connections with his personal historical experiences.