Classrooms, for me, are often little sparks of optimism that get lost in the despair and division that haunt many people today. While I resist discourses that treat education as the solution to all of our problems, I do believe that schools are essential to changing social dynamics and creating a more informed and empathetic society. Since many young people spend more time at school than at home, teachers play an important role not only in the process of learning content like literature and science, but are also crucial to the sentimental and moral education of young people, which I consider just as important (if not more important) than learning to add and subtract fractions.
The articles we’ve read this week engage in this role of teachers in a variety of ways through classroom discourse, using analytical tools of discourse analysis to reveal underlying process of distinction within the classroom. García-Sánchez’s (2016) piece is particularly telling in this regard. She shows the ways in which methods of inclusion and participation can, in fact, produce exactly the opposite effect, albeit unintentional (306). In the Spanish classroom she researches, she finds that Moroccan and Roma students are marked as the outsiders through a process of tokenization and hybridity erasure (293). Betsy Rymes (2016) explains how classroom discourses are sections of, and in part controlled by, larger social contexts and that critical reflection and individual agency are potential methods to tinker with the machinery of discourse (49). Rymes advocates for a repertoire approach to work towards denaturalizing the relationship between perceived identity categories and intellectual competence. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire provides us with ways to develop critical methodologies to work towards combatting these naturalized sociopolitical dynamics.
To be critical of these critical approaches, I am not particularly convinced that simply adopting a repertoire approach will challenge deeply engrained ideologies of race, gender, class, and their relationship to educational competence. This is one aspect of a process that requires a long, difficult, intentional, and sometimes painful process of reflection, reading, and discussion, which relies on two aspects of life that most teachers do not have: time and resources. While I agree with the intent of the article and believe in its potential to make educators more aware of how they can reproduce established and naturalized inequalities, I question its effectiveness because of its idealization of the reality of teachers’ lives and schedules. Like many attempts for education reform, the implementation becomes unfeasible due to complete lack of attention to the resources required for something like these approaches to work. Furthermore, it seems important to be wary of the power we place on language; as we’ve seen in Rosa & Flores’ (2017) work, language use is simply one aspect of a larger process of construction of social inequalities. Like education, language cannot be, and we shouldn’t think of it as, the solution to all of our problems; rather, we need to always keep in mind the historical and colonial constructions of the language use that reproduces marginalizing discourses.
