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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, CRITICAL RACE THEORY, and ANTIRACIST EDUCATION Implications for Multicultural Education

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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, CRITICAL RACE THEORY, and ANTIRACIST EDUCATION Implications for Multicultural Education CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, CRITICAL RACE THEORY, AND ANTIRACIST EDUCATION Implications for Multicultural Education Christine E. Sleeter Dolores Delgado Bernal California State University, Monterey Bay University of Utah Multicultural education grew out of social protest move- administrators are White and bring a worldview that tac- ments of the 1960s, particularly challenges to racism in itly condones existing race and class relations. For exam- education. Banks (Chapter 1, this volume) traces the ple, Sleeter (1992) studied a group of teachers who had roots of nlulticultural education to the ethnic studies volunteered to participate in a staff development project movement of the 1960s, which is itself a legacy of earlier in multicultural education. Of 26 who discussed what ethnic studies pioneers such as Carter G. Woodson and multicultural education meant to them by the second year WE.B. DuRois. During the 1960s, in the context of social of the project, 7 White teachers saw it as irrelevant to activism addressing a range of manifestations of racism, their work and 6 White teachers saw its main purpose as comniunity groups, students, and ethnic studies scholars helping students learn to get along with each other. Eight pressed for the inclusion of ethnic content in the cur- teachers (1 African American and the rest White ESL or riculum in order to bring intellectual counternarratives to special education teachers) saw multicultural education the dominant Eurocentric narratives. Multicultural edu- as building students' self-esteem in response to exclusion cation thus began as a scholarly and activist movement to of some students' experience in school and the wider soci- transform schools and their contexts. Over time, as more ety. Five (2 African American and 3 White) had more and more people have taken up and used multicultural complex conceptions, but only one of these directly con- education, it has come to have an ever wider array of nected multicultural education with social activism. In meanings. In the process, ironically (given its historical short, almost all of these educators filtered their under- roots), a good deal of what occurs within the arena of standing of multicultural education through conceptual multicultural education today does not address power discourses of individualism and psychology and took for relations critically, particularly racism. This chapter will granted as neutral the existing structures and processes review some of today's critical discourses for their impli- of school and its relationship to communities. cations for multicultural education. Our intent is not to ALthe same time that multicultural education has move multicultural education away from its core con- been acquiring a range of meanings, many theorists and ceptual moorings, but rather to anchor the field more educators (inside and outside multicultural education) firmly in those moorings. who are concerned about racism, oppression, and how Many contemporary renderings of multicultural edu- to build democracy in historically racist and hierarchical cation examine difference without connecting it to power rrlulticultural societies have advanced perspectives that or a critical analysis of racism. This is probably because explicitly address social justice. To distinguish these per- the great majority of classroom teachers and school spectives from nonc~lticalorientations toward multicultural Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Antiracist Education 24 1 education, some have begun using the tern1 critical multi- synthesis of this analysis; in the process it suggests the cult~lralism(e.g., Kanpol & McLaren, 1995; May, 1999a; need to expand the dialogue among critical pedagogy, crit- Obidah, 2000). ical race theory, antiracist education, and multicultural Some conceptions of critical multiculturalism fore- education. ground racism. On the basis of an analysis of teacher edu- cation student responses to a discussion of race, Berlak Ia-~.."s(.j~**~~~~. I."S_-I4 X I l .--vj__n) A 1 . - 5 =I +v r- , and Moyenda (2001) argued that liberal conceptions of CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND multiculturalism support "white privilege by rendering MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION institutional racism invisible," leading to the belief that -.,n-P-l.-*V-wL * L, '.,LIZI._*I I * .--J-.-T --.-*,=a. ir--m% r;r r. injustices will disappear if people simply learn to get Critical pedagogy can be defined as "an entry point in the along (p. 94). They stated that "central to critical multi- contradictory nature of schooling, a chance to force it culturalism is naming and actively challenging racism and toward creating conditions for a new public sphere" other forms of injustice, not simply recognizing and cel- (Giroux, 1983, p. 116). According to Giroux (1992), crit- ebrating differences and reducing prejudice" (p. 92). ical pedagogy should "explore how pedagogy functions McCarthy (1995) argued that various models of multi- as a cultural practice to produce rather than merely trans- cultural education rest far too heavily on attitude change mit knowledge within the asymmetrical relations of power as a means of social transformation and take for granted that structure teacher-student relations" (p. 98). Theorists essentialized racial identities, failing to situate racial of critical pedagogy view schools as "contradictory social inequality within global relations. Critical multicultural- sites" (Giroux, 1983, p. 115) in which class relations are ism "links the microdynamics of the school curriculum not simply reproduced but also contested through the to larger issues of social relations outside the school" (p. actions students and educators construct every day. As 43). Similarly, in an effort to join antiracism with multi- such, youth could learn collectively to construct a new cultural education, May (1999a) stated that critical mul- democratic public sphere. Critical pedagogy, then, offers ticulturalism "incorporates postmodern conceptions and a language of both "analysis and hope" (McLaren, 1991, analyses of culture and identity, while holding onto the p. 30). Gay (1995) described many conceptual parallels possibility of an emancipatory politics" (pp. 7-8). between multicultural education and critical pedagogy Other conceptions link multiculturalism with critical and advocated an active coalition between the fields. pedagogy (Kanpol & McLaren, 1995; Kincheloe & Stein- Critical pedagogy can be traced to at least two berg, 1997). Kanpol and McLaren used the term critical genealogical roots: (a) critical theory and the Frankfurt multiculturalism to emphasize that "justice is not evenly School and (b) the work of Paulo Freire and Latin Amer- distributed and cannot be so without a radical and pro- ican liberation movements. The Frankfurt School, which found change in social structures and in terms of a devel- began in Germany prior to World War 11, connected a opment of historical agency and a praxis of possibility" Marxist analysis of class structure with psychological the- (p. 13). Obidah (2000) described herself as a critical mul- ories of the unconscious to understand how oppressive ticulturalist because the tools of both critical pedagogy class relations are produced and reproduced. The cultur- and multicultural education have helped her link a alist paradigm of the Frankfurt School emphasized dynamic conception of culture, identity, and lived expe- human agency, focusing on the lived experiences of peo- rience with an analysis of power structures and pedagogy. ple and how consciousness is formed within class strug- This chapter explores the implications of critical tra- gles. The structuralist paradigm analyzed how oppressive ditions for multicultural education in order to connect it political and economic structures are reproduced, but it more firmly to its transformative roots and to encourage tended to ignore or deny personal agency (Giroux, 1983). dialogue across contemporary critical traditions. We real- The rise of Nazism in Germany caused many members of ized that in order to keep the chapter manageable, we the Frankfurt School to flee to the United States, where could focus on only three traditions. We selected critical theorists in many disciplines took up critical theory Crit- pedagogy, critical race theory, and antiracist education. ical theorists do not necessarily practice or write about The chapter therefore omits groundbrealung work in mul- critical pedagogy. In the 1980s, theorists such as Henry ticultural feminism (e.g., Collins, 1990), critical cultural Giroux and Peter McLaren applied critical theory's ana- studies (e.g., Hall, 1993), and disability studies (e.g., Lin- lytical tools to pedagogy, creating a "pedagogy of critical ton, 1998), which also have implications for multicultural theory" (Pruyn, 1994, p. 38). According to Giroux education. Each section that follows provides a brief (1983), critical pedagogy seeks to "bridge the agency- genealogy, implications, and limitations for each of the structural dualism" of the Frankfurt School by viewing three bodies of literature as they relate to multicultural youth culture as a site of cultural production, social strug- education. The final section of the chapter sketches out a gle, and social transformation (p. 139). 242 Knowledge Construction and Critical Studies A second genealogical root of critical pedagogy is the also critique them. McCarthy (1998) noted that too often work of Freire (1970, 1973, 1976) and Latin American "culture, identity, and community are narrowly read as liberation movements.
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