Against Common Sense

Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice

Kevin K. Kumashiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317657699
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The phrase "teaching for social justice" is often used, but not always explained. What does it look like to teach for social justice? What are the implications for anti-oppressive teaching across different areas of the curriculum? Drawing on his own experiences teaching diverse grades and subjects, leading author and educator Kevin Kumashiro examines various aspects of anti-oppressive teaching and learning in six different subject areas. Celebrating 10 years as a go-to resource for K-12 teachers and teacher educators, this third edition of the bestselling Against Common Sense features:

• A new introduction that addresses the increased challenges of anti-oppressive teaching in an era of teacher evaluations, standardization and ever-increasing accountability.
• End of chapter teacher responses that provide subject-specific examples of what anti-oppressive teaching really looks like in the classroom.
• End of chapter questions for reflection that will enhance comprehension and help readers translate abstract ideas into classroom practice.
• Additional readings and resources to inspire students to further their social justice education.

Compelling and accessible, Against Common Sense continues to offer readers the tools they need to begin teaching against their common sense assumptions and toward social justice.

I Movements Toward Anti-Oppressive Teacher Education

Preparing Teachers to challenge oppression is not easy. Indeed, anti-oppressive teacher education (i.e., approaches to teacher education that work against oppression) faces significant barriers. Many people in society do not acknowledge that everyday practices in schools often comply with or contribute to racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression. Many people do not agree that change is needed in the oftentimes invisible ways that schools and society favor or privilege certain groups or identities and disadvantage or marginalize others. And those people who do must challenge common-sensical views of what and who schools and teachers are “supposed” to be that draw on historical traditions and cultural myths that make change difficult. Common and commonsensical notions of “real” or “good” teaching do not involve challenging oppression and can actually help to perpetuate rather than change the oppressive status quo of schools and society.

Traditionally, teacher education programs have contributed to this problem by not significantly troubling the ways that dominating views and practices of “good” teachers contribute to oppression and hinder anti-oppressive change. Teacher educators have not always agreed with the public: In recent years in the United States, ballot initiatives and governmental dictates have increasingly attempted to prescribe only certain approaches to teacher education as a way to ensure that “good” teachers are produced, and many teacher educators have protested and resisted such dictates for being oppressive (leading them to be criticized for being “out of touch” with the public). But many teacher educators similarly rely on commonsensical ideas of good teaching. Even teacher educators committed to social justice seem to depart little from discourses of teaching that have historically had currency and privilege in U.S. society. And when they do wish to depart from commonsensical discourses, they often confront institutional demands, disciplinary constraints, and social pressures that significantly hinder their ability to bring about change.

Over the course of two years, from 2000 to 2002, I examined eighty elementary and secondary teacher education programs across the United States that made explicit a goal of addressing issues of anti-oppressive education. The programs varied by type of institution (public and private/religious universities and liberal arts colleges). The programs also varied by geographic location (across the United States and in urban, suburban, and remote areas). Although all the programs shared a commitment to anti-oppressive education, they varied in their terminology (using such terms as social justice, multiculturalism, equity, diversity, feminism, critical) and the programmatic implementation of this commitment (through course topics, course assignments, program requirements, mission statements, and/or field placements). Initially, my list of possible teacher education programs grew to over two hundred institutions, identified in several ways: my previous knowledge of the programs, the publications and activism of individual faculty members in the programs, referrals by teacher educators familiar with anti-oppressive educational issues, and searches on the Internet. Expecting that programs would be working toward social justice in ways responsive to their unique social and political contexts, I selected a diverse group of programs that represented a broad yet balanced range of practices, types of institutions, sizes, and geographic locations.

For all institutions, I surveyed the most recent materials available (including program descriptions, certification requirements, mission statements, course descriptions, and course syllabi) in print and on the Internet. I focused primarily on the language used to discuss anti-oppressive educational issues and the discourses that framed or were framed by that language. For exactly half of these institutions, I supplemented my analysis of written materials by informally interviewing (in person and over e-mail) faculty and students about their programs’ visions and/or practices of anti-oppressive teacher education. These programs were a representative selection, based on type of institution and region. As expected, the programs varied significantly in content and requirements. However, in my search for shared discourses or common movements among them, I did find that the programs discussed, in some form, at least three types of teachers that they aimed to prepare: teachers who are learned practitioners, teachers who are researchers, and teachers who are professionals. In chapter 1, I describe each movement and point to the potential of each one for complicity with various oppressions as well as for anti-oppressive change.

In chapters 2 through 5, I explore alternative discourses on what it could mean to center teacher education on challenging oppression: preparing teachers for crisis, preparing teachers for uncertainty, preparing teachers for healing, and preparing teachers for activism. I do not suggest that the first three discourses should be abandoned, and the alternative ones wholeheartedly adopted, nor do I argue that the various discourses do not, in some ways, overlap. However, I do suggest that we not continue to privilege the first three discourses in teacher education programs and that we instead look critically at the contradictory ways that they help us to work toward social justice. No practice is always anti-oppressive, and teacher education programs have a responsibility to explore the anti-oppressive changes made possible by alternative discourses on teaching.

1 Three Teacher Images in U.S. Teacher Education Programs

DOI: 10.4324/9781315765525-3

The Diversity and Complexity of teacher education programs across the United States make it difficult, if not impossible, to say that this is what they are all like. It would be problematic to oversimplify the important work being done in teacher education programs that aim toward social justice, and it would be regrettable to dismiss their work based on such oversimplifications and generalizations. Such are not my goals. Rather, my goals are to examine the popular images of “good teachers” that seem to inform the ways that we are preparing our future teachers, and then to illuminate the hidden ways that these images can hinder our efforts to challenge oppression.

In what follows, I describe three images of “good teachers”—teachers as learned practitioners, teachers as researchers, and teachers as professionals—that emerge across U.S. teacher education programs working toward social justice, and I examine ways that they can hinder anti-oppressive change. Admittedly, I produce portraits of these images that are shared across the programs and thus are quite general and simplistic. I wish to emphasize that I am not suggesting that any teacher education program is intentionally producing teachers that mirror my simplified synthesis, nor am I suggesting that no program goes above and beyond these images as they produce teachers who can work against oppression in multiple, complex, and insightful ways. Rather, I am suggesting that, even in programs doing incredible work, there are insidious ways in which commonsensical ideas of teaching and teachers influence our goals and thus can hinder our movement toward social justice. I acknowledge the discomfort involved in critiquing programs that we have worked hard to create, especially since I have taught in some of the programs that I surveyed. However, I encourage readers to interpret my analysis not as a dismissal of all that we are doing, but rather as an example of the kind of ongoing work we need to do as we continue to find new ways to improve our programs and challenge the status quo.

Teacher as Learned Practitioner

Sometimes humorously, sometimes not, the materials of some teacher education programs refuted or toyed with the popular refrain that “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” as a way to recruit talented and high-achieving students into their programs. Such responses were symbolic of a larger movement among the programs to produce knowledgeable, skillful, and learned teachers. The materials of the programs included discussion—sometimes at length—of what students would be learning and why such learning was important. Although cultural myths would have many believe that teachers are self-made and learn how to teach only through experience and not through study, materials were often quite insistent that the programs aimed to teach students to teach in ways that did not merely repeat commonsensical approaches to teaching.

Students needed to learn three main things. First, they needed to learn about young students, especially dominant theories of who they are, how they develop, and how they learn. It seemed to be taken for granted that the more teachers know about how students learn, the more they can raise student achievement, and as has been the case for the past century, this meant learning about psychology: Educational psychology was the field most required by the programs. In fact, courses on “theories of learning” often consisted solely or primarily of psychological theories, implying that they are one and the same. The programs devoted some attention to differences among students, such as racial, class, and gender differences, though differences in language, sexual orientation, and religion were less noticeable.

Second, students needed to learn about what they will teach and to demonstrate this knowledge against the learning standards in their fields of study. Research has sometimes attributed low student achievement to teachers who teach in subject areas where they have not earned an academic major or minor. Perhaps not surprisingly, with some flexibility for nonstandard majors, programs required that students either major in their area of certification or take a certain number and/or distribution of courses in their area, as well as have a certain grade-point average. No program required that students take significant course-work in critical perspectives on their field, such as multicultural critiques of mathematics, feminist histories of the natural sciences, postcolonial perspectives on English literature, and queer re-readings of history, which parallels the requirement that students learn and demonstrate proficiency in the fields as the fields have traditionally been defined.

Third, students needed to learn about how to teach, from classroom management to instruction in the disciplines. The programs showed much variability in teaching how to teach, from the amount of course-work they required in “methods,” to the amount of time and the timing of field experiences, to the level of involvement of practicing teachers. This variability is perhaps not surprising, given the extant research on the difficulties teacher education programs face in helping students to challenge their preconceptions and teach in ways that question tradition or common sense and that implement different theories or approaches. This variability is also not surprising, given the emphasis programs placed on the notion that learning how to teach is a complicated process that does not necessarily have one answer. Nonetheless, there were consistencies. Many programs constructed their curricula in a scaffolded way, where there was some sense of progression from foundational knowledge to advanced knowledge. All programs required some blending of theory with practical experience, ranging from observations of others in earlier coursework to reflections on one’s own teaching in methods courses. Almost no program made central use of readings and assignments on anti-oppressive methods that focused on differences, equity, power, and oppression.

Wherein lies the problem? It is certainly important that teachers try to know their students, know their subjects, and know how to teach, and programs should continue to ensure that teachers are learned in these ways. However, it is equally important that teachers know the limits of their knowledge. There is much that teachers can never know about their students, such as the students’ experiences and desires of which even the students themselves may not be aware, and these excesses can get in the way of addressing students and tailoring lessons to them. Furthermore, even if teachers could fully know their students, the dominant frameworks being used to know students, as with any theory or perspective, are necessarily partial, making only certain insights possible and others, impossible. Psychological models are not the only ways to know our students, and different models or lenses can lead to different insights. It is problematic, then, to privilege only certain (psychological) ways of knowing students.

So, too, with coming to know the disciplines. Learning a subject matter often requires that students learn what some have defined as the official knowledge in the field and think as do experts in the field. For example, there are many ways to think mathematically and many ways to use mathematics, including ways that we have yet to realize. Different ways can lead to different social and political out-comes, as when a way of thinking mathematically privileges certain values or when a way of using math benefits only certain groups in society. Yet, those leading the field of math education have incorporated into the “learning standards” only certain ways of thinking and using. Learning to standards in the disciplines is a practice of repetition, of repeating or perpetuating only certain ways of knowing or doing the disciplines, and since any perspective or practice is partial, learning to standards is a practice that reinforces the privilege of only certain perspectives and groups in society.

This is true even when learning how to teach. What counts as the knowledge and skills that students need to learn to become teachers (as defined by state credentialing agencies or national accrediting organizations) have become privileged because certain people asked certain questions and used certain frameworks to produce the answers. What counts as official knowledge in teacher education cannot help but be partial, regardless of how it is defined and by whom. So, while learning more knowledge and becoming learned practitioners may help to address some oppressions in society, it can help to perpetuate others. This is not to say that teachers and students should not be learning what programs are currently teaching. Rather, it is to say that teachers and students need simultaneously to learn about the limitations and political ramifications of their knowledge.

Fortunately, some teacher educators are working to steer the movement of making teachers learned practitioners in anti-oppressive directions, and their work comes in the form of troubling knowledge. Here I mean troubling in both senses of the word. First, troubling knowledge means to complicate knowledge, to make knowledge problematic. This does not mean to reject knowledge. Rather, it means to work paradoxically with knowledge, that is, to simultaneously use knowledge to see what different insights, identities, practices, and changes it makes possible while critically examining that knowledge (and how it came to be known) to see what insights and the like it closes off. When teacher educators ask, What do psychological perspectives tell us about youth and learning?, they also ask, What other knowledge about youth can we learn from gaps in psychology or from theories and methods other than psychological ones? When they ask, What do the disciplines as currently defined and taught tell us about who we are and the world in which we live?, they also ask, What are different ways to learn, use, and critique the disciplines, as well as different ways to think disciplinarily? When they ask, What does educational research tell us about how to teach?, they also ask, What are ways that current educational research makes only certain ways of teaching desirable and doable and thinkable? They tell us that teachers and students need to see knowledge, especially the official knowledge of schools, as political and partial. Particularly regarding the standards for learning, they tell us that students do need to learn toward the standards (since the standards reflect what knowledge and skills are valued in society), but also need to think critically about the partial nature of the standards.

Second, “troubling knowledge” means knowledge that is disruptive, discomforting, and problematizing. In addition to disrupting the knowledge that is being taught or that was already learned, some teacher educators are teaching or constructing knowledge that is itself already disruptive. Too often, the value of knowledge in teacher education stems from its ability to be applied in the classroom and to make our teaching “effective” or “successful.” That is, what makes knowledge in teacher education valuable is the comfort or assurance it allows us to feel in our subsequent teaching. Valuable and desirable knowledge is that which makes “good” teaching possible, and recent calls for a “knowledge base” in teacher education often target just this kind of knowledge. In contrast, what is not often desired or valued is knowledge that reveals ways that common views of “good” teaching are neither possible nor desirable, and perhaps more significantly, ways that engaging in what many define as “good” teaching can actually be quite oppressive. It is not often comforting to learn things that make our students or our disciplines or the process of teaching even more difficult to know. Not surprisingly, what teachers often desire learning is a comforting knowledge that helps us to stay blinded to those aspects of teaching that we cannot bear to see, especially aspects that comply with oppression. What is comforting, at least at a subconscious level, is a repetition of familiar, doable, commonsensical practices, not disruption and change.

In response, some teacher educato...