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Frames of Reference: The Impact of Race on Teaching Strategy and Classroom Discussion

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Abstract

In this article, I examine the role of teacher racial identity on teaching strategy and the treatment of race in classroom discussions. I explicate how the pattern of minimizing the negative racial comments made to English language learners played out in participants’ teaching and how it is reflective of socially constructed notions of race and racial discourse. The treatment of racial issues, in this sense, can be seen as a microcosm of larger social, historical, and political factors that shape individuals’ thinking about equity and diversity. I argue that by analyzing these underlying factors in teacher education courses, the unconscious and often subtle ways that stereotypes based on race, culture, or English language proficiency, can be demystified and disrupted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teaching & Learning, College of Education, Washington State University Vancouver, Vancouver, WA, 98686-9600, USA

    Tonda Liggett

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  1. Tonda Liggett
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Correspondence to Tonda Liggett.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Racialized Discourse

  • What tone of voice is used when discussing race?

  • When does race enter the conversation?

The Grammar of Racialized Discourse

  • What truth-claims or representations of race are made?

  • What objects or styles are referred to when discussing race?

  • What objects do the discursive representations refer to?

  • What styles of reference are found in the figures of speech, metaphors, categories, or expressions of racialized discourse?

  • **What relationship is there between racialized expressions and the preconceptual plane?**

  • What hypothetical premises (‘great chain of being’, classificatory hierarchies, etc.) are made about human kind and the differences between them (both mental and physical)?

  • What judgements are made about ethical choices (e.g., domination and subjugation, entitlement and restriction, disrespect and abuse)?

  • How does racialized discourse incorporate a set of institutional regulations, directions, and pedagogic models (e.g., apartheid, separate development, educational institutions, choice of educational and bureaucratic language, etc.)?

  • What is the interplay between the location, arrangement and displacement of racialized discourse and the preconceptual grounds of it?

The Preconceptual Elements of Racialized Discourse

  • What aspects of the racialized discourse are reflective and constitutive of power?

  • What are the underlying power relations of the discourse or expression?

  • How are racialized expressions normalized in the broad social context?

  • Does classification and the ordering of phenomena into categories, catalogues, indices, inventories, etc. claim to reflect the natural order of things?

  • Is there a racial ordering that implies a racial hierarchy (e.g., hair texture, smell, body size, head shape, correlates of skin color) with natural, physical, and/or behavioral expectations?

  • How is racial differentiation described?

  • How is difference and/or otherness explained?

  • How is difference excluded?

  • What is the outcome of implicit or explicit deliberation about race?

The Social Conjuncture of Racialized Discourse

  • What macrosocial conditions have enabled racialized expression to emerge and pervade social and personal identity?

  • What common assumptions of truth (naturalism, intellectualism, rationalism, empiricism) authorize racist exclusions?

  • What social conditions have contributed to the expressibility of racialized discourse?

Discursive Power and the Body of Racist Expression

  • How does racial exclusion become institutionalized and taken up in unity?

  • What connection does racist exclusion have to discourse of the body, i.e., “body talk”?

  • What justifications are given in racialized discourse?

  • Does this justification refer to entitlements, rights of accessibility (to enfranchisement, opportunity, or treatment), endowments (goods and the means thereto); and conversely, denial (disenfranchisement or restriction), prohibition (to entry, participation, or services), and alienation (of goods and the means to them)?

The Racist Subject

  • How pervasive is the racist expression in terms of (1) the authority of racist articulation, (2) the question of human agency, and (3) the formation of subjectivity?

  • What is the mediation between the self and society?

  • How are discursive expressions passed along, inherited, reproduced, and transformed to suit prevailing social conditions?

  • How does the discourse underlying racism codefine subjectivity and otherness?

  • Does racial exclusion include as general principles scapegoating (e.g., a conspiracy theory), rationalizations (like inferiority), or rational stereotyping (e.g., a normative judgment appealing to factual evidence?

  • Are other factors such as fear and conformism used for racial exclusion?

  • How is individual identity defined by discourses of difference, i.e., an “identity-in-otherness”?

  • Are others defined reductively as a way to exclude them?

  • How is racial discourse normalized?

(Adapted from: Goldberg, David Theo. (1993). Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell Press).

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Liggett, T. Frames of Reference: The Impact of Race on Teaching Strategy and Classroom Discussion. Urban Rev 40, 386–402 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0087-9

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