Abstract
Introduction
It is a rare teacher who has not stumbled across the idea of social justice at some point during his or her educational trajectory. Reactions to the term are, of course, varied and, at times, contradictory – from the indifferent student teacher who believes that achieving social justice lies firmly outside his or her daily classroom remit to those who, once beginning their careers, yield to institutional demands, and focus their attention on helping students achieve adequate grades. Others, by contrast, remain quite enveloped by the term, particularly those engaged in critical pedagogy. Nevertheless, working towards social justice in the classroom, even for those committed few, is not without its problems.
From the Freirean (1972) concept of conscientisation to Henry Giroux’s (1981) call for schools and classrooms to be models of active and critical citizenship, student teachers – particularly those of us belonging to so-called ‘under-represented’ groups in higher education – can initially be swept away by the seductive discourse of social justice and its accompanying vocabulary of activism, equality, solidarity and emancipatory learning. Certainly, many of us would like to foster and promote egalitarianism in our classrooms, a space where students’ critical consciousness can flourish and admittedly. Such ideas can provide us with much fertile theoretical ground to explore and debate during conference season. However, how many of us out there are left scratching our heads after such discussions, puzzled as to how we might translate such grand theory into pedagogical practice?
Troubling knowledge, troubling power
What might anti-oppressive education look like when translated into the lived experiences of teachers and students in a classroom? How does one actually teach against oppression? These are just two of the questions Kevin K Kumashiro addresses in this third edition of Against Common Sense, a book dedicated ‘to all educators who, often at great personal risk, teach against oppression’. Although the book is primarily targeted at K–12 teachers – equivalent to the United Kingdom's primary and secondary school sectors – and teacher educators, the premise behind it will surely resonate with those working, and indeed studying, in higher education classrooms, given the current challenges in teaching towards social justice in a sector increasingly dominated by the relentless marketisation, privatisation and new managerialism of neo-liberal policies (Lynch, 2006). There is much risk for educators who work against such ‘common-sense’ narratives in a profession facing increasing casualisation and what Stephen J Ball (2003) describes as the ‘terrors of performativity’. How might an individual teacher promote anti-oppressive change against a backdrop of ‘targets, indicators and evaluations’ (Ball, 2003: 215)?
Fortunately, Kumashiro (2015) does recognise these contradictory discourses from the opening pages, acknowledging the ‘institutional demands, disciplinary constraints and social pressures’ (2) often stacked against those working against oppression in the classroom. Nevertheless, rather than placing the blame solely at the feet of the education institution, he turns his analytical gaze to the views and practices of the profession itself, critically examining the idea of the ‘good’ teacher and arguing that ‘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’ (ibid). This is a particularly salient point, reminding the reader that our understandings of ‘good’ teaching are largely dependent on time and place or, as Brown and Baker have argued, based on ‘historically and spatially situated discourses, constructed in such a way as to encode dominant ways of understanding people and ways of seeing the world’ (2007: 105). According to Kumashiro, troubling or problematising such discourses, with regard to how we teach and how students learn, is the starting point for anti-oppressive education. Troubling knowledge is thus troubling power.
The ‘good’ teacher
The book itself is divided into two parts. Part one, titled ‘Movements toward anti-oppressive teacher education’, is largely based on Kumashiro’s empirical research, which examined 80 elementary and secondary teacher education programmes recognised for addressing issues of anti-oppressive education. The author is careful to point out the kaleidoscopic nature of teacher training programmes across the United States. Nevertheless, it is from his research into such programmes that the following three images of ‘good’ teachers emerge: teachers as learned practitioners, teachers as researchers and teachers as professionals. As learned practitioners, Kumashiro argues that, alongside the importance of knowing one’s subject and how to teach that subject, student teachers must also be made aware of the limits of their knowledge, including the fact that there is only so much we can know about our students. What we do know (i.e. what counts as knowledge), regarding teaching and learning, is ‘because certain people asked certain questions and used certain frameworks to produce the answers’ (8). We must therefore recognise that knowledge is always partial.
Needless to say, any concrete effort at problematising existing knowledge must first problematise knowledge creation. It is all too easy, Kumashiro reminds us, to conduct education research, as ‘we have traditionally conceptualised research’ and, consequently, ‘use methods that perpetuate harmful social relationships, and present and use the results of the research in ways that comply with or contribute to different forms of oppression’ (11; original emphasis). Anti-oppressive research, by contrast, is not too dissimilar to anti-oppressive teaching in that it recognises – just as teaching can never be fully learned – research is ‘never complete’ and ‘never neutral’ (13). There is a continuing need to problematise the power inherent in the research process and recognise the subjectivity of the researcher, despite any claims to the contrary. This line of thinking is also applied to the final image of the teacher as professional, with Kumashiro noting that such an image is ‘as normative as the cultural myths of the teacher’ (16). He also questions the current ‘common sense’ in education policy which positions the increasing professionalisation of teaching with an automatic improvement in the quality of teaching, arguing that such professionalisation does not necessarily offer the possibility of ‘better-quality’ education for all students, given how ‘it is entirely possible for a professional to be complicit with oppression’ (16).
In the remaining chapters in this first section, Kumashiro goes on a meander through preparing teachers for crisis, uncertainty, healing and activism; drawing on theoretical perspectives from queer theory and an activist strand of Buddhism known as ‘socially engaged Buddhism’ (46). Admittedly, I found the latter discussion to be less engaging in comparison to those provided in previous chapters. Nevertheless, some of the ideas presented did give me pause for thought, in particular the reminder about the limitations of knowledge centred on binaries (e.g. teacher/learner, us/them) and the need to sometimes ‘let go’ of existing knowledge in order to move towards anti-oppressive education, despite the discomfort in doing so (48).
In Part two of the book, titled ‘Preparing anti-oppressive teachers in six disciplines’, Kumashiro explores the practical implications of the theoretical ideas offered in Part one. The subsequent chapters discuss the realities of anti-oppressive teaching in specific subject areas (social studies, English literature, music, ‘foreign’ languages, natural sciences and mathematics), with each chapter ending with succinct memoirs from teachers presenting their own vignettes from the classroom and exploring their experiences of teaching towards social justice. Readers are encouraged to view the examples provided not as ‘blueprints’ for anti-oppressive teaching practice, but rather as ‘case studies’, and are invited ‘to imagine what additional examples might look like in their own classroom’ (60). Again, the focus is on opening up dialogue between teachers as to what they could do in their classrooms, rather than providing prescriptive answers as to what teachers should do.
Conclusion
I would encourage anyone with an interest in social justice and education to pick up this book, which offers an accessible and thoughtful discussion of existing teacher education and pedagogical practice. Kumashiro does not seek to provide answers to any of the questions posed throughout the book. On the contrary, the reader will most likely be left with more questions than answers upon reaching the index. Nevertheless, perhaps that is the whole point. Interrogating the ideas shared in the book is the starting point for anti-oppressive education. I suspect Kumashiro would agree.