Abstract
It can be difficult for teachers, particularly white, middle-class teachers, to recognize how their own raced, classed, and gendered identities impact their instructional decisions and the ways in which they respond to different groups of students. Candace R Kuby’s book, Critical Literacy in the Early Childhood Classroom: Unpacking Histories, Unlearning Privilege (2013), is an attempt to do just that. In her book, Kuby describes her experiences as a summer school teacher carrying out a critical literacy project with a group of kindergarten students. Kuby had two objectives in mind when designing her project: to explore what it means to engage young children in a critical literacy inquiry and to use auto-ethnographic methods to examine how her own identities shaped her pedagogical decisions and interactions with students. Kuby’s decision to use autoethnography to explore her own experiences with race while carrying out a critical literacy inquiry stemmed from her belief that critical literacy teaching often fails to consider one’s own positioning relative to how power and race operate in society. To that end, Kuby identified “critical narrative events” from her own life that were related to race. Examining these events and juxtaposing them with her experiences during the critical literacy inquiry allowed her uncover her own privileged positionings and to make sense of the issues that arose during the summer school session.
Kuby’s book is presented in two sections. The first section, entitled “Histories, Contexts, Ideologies, and Pedagogical Beliefs,” consists of three chapters that provide the background for understanding Kuby’s study. In Chapter one, Kuby describes the theoretical frames she uses in her work, including autoethnography, Whiteness theory, critical sociocultural theory, and critical literacy. In particular, as noted above, Kuby makes a strong argument for using autoethnography and Whiteness theory to draw attention to the way questions of race and power play out in the classroom – issues that might be otherwise overlooked during a critical literacy inquiry. Chapter two describes critical narrative events from Kuby’s own life that illustrate how her raced, classed, and gendered identities were shaped, highlighting her relatively privileged position as a white, middle-class woman growing up in the Southern part of the United States. These critical narrative events are also significant in that they document Kuby’s growing awareness of how race and class operate both in society and in her personal and professional lives. Throughout the rest of the book, Kuby refers to these critical events in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her experiences with critical literacy teaching.
In Chapter three, Kuby presents an overview of her project, the research site, and her students. This chapter – which includes a chart describing the unit as a whole – is among the most practical and useful chapters in the book. This description of the unit will be helpful to teachers who are new to critical literacy and are unsure of how to develop units with their students. Kuby explains that critical literacy involves encouraging children to identify and address inequities that they witness in society and are generally prompted by incidents or events that personally affect the students who are participating in the inquiry. The impetus for the inquiry Kuby carried out with her students was an incident that involved other teachers at the school telling the children that they were not allowed to sit on a particular bench during recess. Only teachers could sit on this bench, which was in one of the few shady spots on the playground. Kuby decided to use the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycotts as a way of encouraging her students to explore questions of fairness in relation to the bench incident. Kuby acknowledges that others may feel that it was inappropriate to compare what happened to her students with the bus boycotts. I myself was uncomfortable with Kuby’s decision to compare the bench incident with something as complicated and historically significant as the fight to end segregation. Despite this concern, I feel that Kuby’s book has important things to say about critical literacy teaching and the process of grappling with questions of race. Exploring issues related to race and one’s own role in the way power operates in society is not easy. Kuby’s openness and honesty about her own missteps are part of what makes this book appealing and accessible to teachers who are hoping to carry out similar kinds of projects with their students.
The second section of the book, entitled “Moments of Consciousness Raising,” consists of six chapters. Each presents Kuby’s critical literacy inquiry from a different angle. This allows her to develop a multilayered interpretation of what happened during the unit. The chapters in this section can be divided into two categories: those that are primarily concerned with issues of race and positioning and those that focus on critical literacy teaching. Chapters five and seven are among the former. Both address issues related to Kuby’s experiences as a white teacher talking about race and the discomfort and uncertainty she experienced. In Chapter five, Kuby examines how her own encounters with racial disparities as a child shaped her understanding of the bench incident, the pedagogical decisions she made during the unit, and the interactions she had with students. In particular, she describes how she responded to one student’s questions about segregation and considers how her own histories – as a white person and as someone who had witnessed segregation first hand – informed her responses to her students’ questions. Chapter seven explores the important role that language played in classroom discussions – particularly with regard to how she and her students positioned themselves vis-à-vis Rosa Parks and the other people on the bus that day. The value of these chapters for readers is that they present an honest description of one white teacher’s struggle to uncover how her privileged position impacts her teaching. Kuby’s example could be used to prompt other white teachers – who may or may not have previously considered these questions – to examine how race operates in their own lives and classrooms.
A perspective missing from these chapters is an examination of how students of color reacted to these discussions. This points to one of the dangers of using autoethnography as a method of inquiry. Kuby was so focused on understanding her own experiences as a white person that she identified primarily with the white students in the classroom. As a result, the experiences of students of color were overlooked. In that sense, the book silences a group of students who are already marginalized in classroom settings.
While the other four chapters in the second part of the book continue to address questions related to race, they also highlight issues related to critical literacy teaching. As such, they will be of particular interest to teachers hoping to learn more about the process of designing and implementing critical literacy inquiries with young children. Chapter four details how Kuby came to the decision to focus her inquiry on the bench incident. Using flashbacks from her own life of times when she witnessed forms of discrimination, including homophobia, Kuby examines her reaction to the bench incident and her decision to design a unit around it. As a child and young adult, Kuby did not feel like she had the right to question authority and speak out against the injustices she witnessed. She sees the exploration of the bench incident as a means of teaching her students that they can name and challenge the injustices that they see in the world around them. In Chapter eight, Kuby attempts to re-define the “social action” component of critical literacy teaching. Typically, critical literacy inquiries are meant to prompt students to act on the world in some way in order to address the injustice they have studied. However, Kuby argues that, especially when working with young children, it is not always necessary to carry out a social action that reaches beyond the walls of the classroom. The children in Kuby’s class produced multimodal representations of their feelings about segregation to share with classmates. Despite the fact that these representations were shared only in the classroom, Kuby views them as public acts and, as such, a form of social action. Kuby reasons that social action on a micro scale can be as significant as macro-level actions, especially for young children.
I would argue that the chapters that focus on critical literacy teaching are particularly helpful for readers who are teachers in that they capture the messiness of this type of teaching and the fact that there is no road map to follow. For example, in Chapter four, Kuby highlights her uncertainty about how to proceed when her students do not seem to want to discuss the bench incident. This brings up an important question that teachers may face: how to decide when to pursue a topic and when to move on to one that is of more interest to their students. In Chapter six, Kuby explores other issues that might arise for teachers during a critical literacy inquiry. In particular, Kuby focuses on what it is like to negotiate curriculum with students. In so doing, she raises important questions about the role the teacher plays in this kind of instructional situation. How much power does or should the teacher have? Do the students feel compelled to agree with the teacher’s point of view or are free to voice their own opinions? Kuby’s discussion of the difficulties she encountered and the doubts she felt powerfully illustrates that there is not one clear way to proceed when engaging in this kind of teaching. I think Kuby’s honest depiction of her experiences will resonate with other teachers and will help them accept the fact that there is not a single right way of handling difficult topics and situations.
Overall, Kuby has produced a thoughtful representation of what it meant for her to critically examine how race and power operate in her personal life and in her classroom. Kuby’s work, like that of her students, can be read as a form of social action. In laying bare her experiences, Kuby makes a powerful argument for the importance of white teachers confronting their own privilege and examining how it shapes their teaching. She also provides a real world example of what it is like to engage in this kind of work – one that documents the discomfort that comes with examining one’s own white privilege; the missteps that one invariably makes when discussing difficult issues with children, and the inherent unpredictability of negotiating the curriculum with students. As such, I believe that this book could be a useful tool for a range of readers, from practicing teachers who are interested in critical literacy teaching to teacher educators who want to prompt their students to consider important issues related to racial identity and teaching. Kuby’s work is not perfect, as she freely admits, but reading about her journey may help others find the courage to confront difficult questions and try out new teaching possibilities.