However, discursive constructions are key, as Michel Foucault argues. They set limits on what is imagined as possible (Weis, 2003, p.86).
There is widespread agreement on the importance of education as a vehicle of ideological change (Fine and Weis, 2003; Apple, 1995; Greene, 1995; Freire, 1970a; Dewey, 1931). Apple (1995) asserts that schools, as a critical “arm of the state” (p.48) produce as well as distribute knowledge, belief and norms. He states, “reproduction is only secured after considerable ideological work and is thus susceptible to educational work of an oppositional or counter-hegemonic kind” (p.158) and that “[schools] can provide a significant terrain over which serious action can evolve” (p.10). Further, “how we act on the world…is in part determined by the way we perceive it” (p.63), therefore, if students have a changed understanding of the world, they may be positioned to act on it differently. He emphasizes that both cultural and politico-economic action are necessary at the same time (Apple, 1995), reflecting Nancy Fraser’s contention
that both redistribution and reproduction need to be addressed simultaneously in order to generate change in existing dynamics (Fraser and Honneth, 2003).
Many theorists and practitioners agree that the dialogic nature of learning is a crucial factor in the transformation of our current hegemonic ideology (Freeden, 2003; Apple, 1995; Greene, 1995; Taylor, 1992; Freire, 1970a), and Gintis (1980) argues the emancipatory potential of liberal discourse (p.191).
Based on Freire’s philosophy, Shor (1992) outlines an ‘empowering’ alternative pedagogy that incorporates (among other principles) a commitment to dialogic learning, democratic practices, critical reflection, student activism and
multiculturalism (pp.33–35). Martin (2004) claims that engaging students in dialogue about their everyday concerns and “encouraging them to make
connections with the broader exploitative social structures and relationships” (p.2) (in Freire’s model) can foster critical consciousness. Further, theorists point to the importance of the creation of public spaces (Habermas, 1991; Greene, 1995; Arendt, 1958) “within which potentially more socially democratic articulations and educational visions might be formed” (Pedroni, 2006, p.113).
We should think of education as opening public spaces in which students, speaking in their own voices and acting on their own initiatives, can identify themselves and choose themselves in relation to such principles as freedom, equality, justice, and concern for others (Greene, 1995, p.68). Fine (2000) argues for the creation of “safe” spaces as critical for interrupting the reproduction of existing social inequities, “a space in which racial, gendered, and economic power are self-consciously analyzed and interrupted; a space in which re-vision is insisted upon…” (Fine, et al, 2000, in Fine and Weis, 2003, p.117). Fine emphasizes “the power of the space in freeing an imagination for racial justice” (ibid, p.132) in which “power and differences are explored, community is built, and education for democracy flourishes” (Fine, 2003, p.7).
Gutting (2005) in discussing Foucault, asserts that “when thoughts change, the causes are the social forces that control the behavior of individuals” (p.50), and that politics are always local. Apple extends this idea when he says that “structural changes in our society need to be prefigured in local experiments” (p.115). Consequently, if the local politics of schools can be changed, then we have the opportunity to change the behavior that supports inequity. Gandin (2006) believes that hegemonic discourse can’t control all points at all times, and advocates counter-hegemonic action in schools with the goal of making oppressed groups agents in their worlds. He discusses as an example the approach taken by Citizen Schools, which employed the hegemonic discourse of education as a tool to feed capitalism (emphasizing the importance of education to get money
allocated) and disarticulated it from hegemonic goals, then re-articulated it to their own ends, creating citizens in schools, not consumers of schools (pp.221-22).
Fraser (2003) states that “poor and working people may need…to build class communities and cultures in order to neutralize the hidden injuries of class and forge the confidence to stand up for themselves” (p.24). Students sharing a physical and social space for 7 hours a day have a unique opportunity to forge these communities if the social forces of administrators and teachers are working to encourage and support this effort, rather than discouraging it in the interests of behavioral control and social reproduction. Greene (1995) points to the role of teachers in fostering positive change in the hegemonic dynamics in schools. “I am convinced that, in the domain of education today, people can choose to resist the thoughtlessness, banality, technical rationality, carelessness, and “savage
inequalities” (Kozol, 1991) that now undermine public education at every turn” (p.2). Dewey (1931), Freire (1970) and Greene (1995) identify education as the
site of change in the inequities that characterize our society. Dewey (1931) conceives knowledge as a “change in reality” (p.54) and Freire discusses the need to render abstract realities concrete so that “reality has ceased to look like a blind alley and has taken on its true aspect: a challenge men must meet” (1970a, p.96). Greene (1995) states that, “where people cannot name alternatives or imagine a better state of things, they are likely to remain anchored or submerged” (p.52). She adds, “When teaching, responding to the grasping consciousness of a young student in his or her distinctiveness, we can only continually combat life’s anesthetics, moving individuals to reach out toward that horizon line” (p.30).
Greene (1995) considers the role of curriculum in laying a possible foundation for change.
Only when the given or the taken-for-granted is subject to questioning, only when we take various, sometimes unfamiliar perspectives on it, does it show itself as what it is- contingent on many interpretations, many vantage points, unified (if at all) by conformity or by unexamined common sense. Once we can see our givens as contingencies, then we may have an opportunity to posit alternative ways of living and valuing and to make choices” (p.23).
Nicholson (2005) agrees, stating, “For Marxists, including Freire, praxis is regarded as an active process of critical engagement with experience aimed at disrupting established power relations, on both a material and intellectual level” (p.43).
2.3.1 The Role of Curriculum
If resistances are found, if even only on an informal level we find men and women in our businesses, factories, and elsewhere struggling to maintain their knowledge, humanity and pride, then curricular action maybe more important than we realize (Apple, 1995, p.81).
Apple (1995, 2006) argues for the importance of a curriculum that teaches the history of workers’ struggles and visions: “the history of what people strived for, of the visions of a more equitable society, and of the demands for and
struggles over them, all of this needs to be made visible and legitimate once again” (p.157). In support of introducing to students a politicized curriculum incorporating collective action, unionization, and workers’ rights, he states,
Their own current conditions remain relatively unanalyzed, in part because the ideological perspectives they are offered (and the critical tools not made available) defuse both the political and economic history and the conceptual apparatus required for a thorough appraisal of their position. The possibility of concerted action is forgotten (ibid, p.117).
He believes, as Fraser does, that both cultural and politico-economic action are necessary at the same time, and advocates for the political education of teachers. I think that Apple’s emphasis on the potential efficacy of reintroducing curriculum about labor history is overstated. However, I agree that it is a necessary step in mitigating existing dynamics, particularly if the school environment can be altered to become a “contested discursive space within which potentially more socially democratic articulations and educational visions might be formed” (Apple, 2006, p.113). Further, I think that giving students access to new language (collective action, power asymmetry, etc.) in an environment in which they have membership in a changed dialogue, has the chance to change their orientation to inequity and oppression.
Bernal (2006) details a culturally specific approach to developing leadership in Chicana youth through the Mexican American Youth Leadership Conferences in East Los Angeles. The women who participated remembered the experiences as helping them develop a “sense of community and family
responsibility” and “a consciousness” through mentoring by older Mexicans who “were opening up our eyes” (p.144). As a result of this culturally relevant teaching approach, in which leadership was reconsidered as a collective process where members of a group were “empowered to work together synergistically
toward a common goal or vision” (p.149), the participants formed Young Chicanos for Community Action (YCCA), providing student leadership in the 1968 School Blowouts in East Los Angeles, in which students successfully demanded improvement in their under-resourced, violent, and failing schools. This example of schools offering students (in this case, unintentionally) leadership curriculum which utilized their cultural orientation, community of origin, and explicit teaching about power, resulting in their reframing of leadership as a culturally defined dynamic that raised their consciousness and allowed them to transform community ties into a political force, offers a practical application of the theory discussed above, and introduces the importance of collectivity and community orientation for urban students of color.
It is essential that we remember that the reproductive process in which these students in schools…participate is not all powerful. It is contested. There are elements of good sense in it. There are alternative collective practices generated out of it on… the cultural level. (Apple, 1995, p.118) Sennett (2003) acknowledges the challenge of deconstructing the
bricolage, disassembling a culture into pieces, then packing it for travel, but, as Arendt (1961) argues, we must
decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world (p. 196).
A consideration of the ideology of community currently at work in schools, and its effect on students, follows.