Critical Pedagogy with the Oppressed and the Oppressors: Middle School Students Discuss Racism and White Privilege.

This article examines what can happen when teachers and students work create a dialogic space, taking up issues of race, culture, and privilege in classroom discussions. The study focuses on middle school students of culturally and economically diverse backgrounds as well as their 2 White teachers. In English and social studies classes, eighth graders studied cultural conflict and resolution, including a unit on and White privilege; the article discusses how both White students and students of color responded this curriculum. This study has implications for how pedagogy can be enacted in this type of setting: where students identified with groups traditionally considered oppressed learn with students whose racial and cultural backgrounds are identified with the oppressors.INTRODUCTIONI'm going know and remember that my life is better because I'm White, and that I need show others that this is wrong.-A1 (eighth-grade student)Many teachers recognize the need for in today's diverse schools. Yet some educators have struggled teach about race, culture, and power in a meaningful way. This article explores what can happen when middle school students take up issues of and White privilege in classroom discussions. Eighth-grade students of varied racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds are the focus of the research, a study of English and social studies classes led by two early-career, White, male teachers. The research questions that guided this study are as follows: How do individuals in a diverse middle school classroom react discussions of race, culture, and White privilege? What new problems and possibilities can emerge in this dialogic space?Banks and Banks (2004) explain that the chief aim of is achieve educational equity, ensuring that all students can attain academic success. In addition, effective pedagogy helps students cultivate the knowledge, dispositions, and attitudes needed join with one another to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good (p. xi). AI (all names are pseudonyms) showed in his response above that he was able leam from and with his classmates of color and felt prepared do antiracist work.However, the phrase multicultural education has been coopted and used describe approaches and activities that do not align with the field's original intent. As a result, researchers have applied theories education, giving rise the term critical multiculturalism. According May and Sleeter (2010), multiculturalism focuses on structural analysis of unequal power relationships, analyzing the role of institutionalized inequities, including but not necessarily limited racism (p. 10, emphasis in original).The title of Paolo Friere's (1970/2000) seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, reveals an inherent problem with enacting pedagogy in American classrooms: their diversity. We need examine how White students and teachers can work with students of color disrupt systems of White privilege and in their classroom, school, and society at large. The classroom in this study, therefore, helps us envision how an alliance between the oppressed and the oppressors can form in a dialogic space, embodying practice.THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKTalking about race and is not easy. Research shows that it can be particularly challenging for people from White, middle class backgrounds (Cross, 2005; Huerta & Flemmer, 2005). Many White students and teachers struggle see how Whiteness is normalized, how race is relevant their own lives (Greene & Abt-Perkins, 2003). Yet it is important recognize that this phenomenon is not only due the individual, power-seeking resistance of White people (Flynn, Lensmire, & Lewis, 2009). …