Pondering Pedagogical Paradoxes

At the 2008 meeting of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender, I attended a panel focused on confronting feminist paradoxes. Panel convener Erika Kirby facilitated a conversation about difficult moments feminists face that cause us to reflect on our values and how we apply them in our everyday lives. In small groups, we participants talked about reconciling feminism with heterosexual relationships, religious faith, views about human sexuality, wardrobe choices, and many other topics where we seem to navigate tensions in our feminist principles and practices. As I read the four books that make up this review essay, that panel resonated with me again. As feminist teachers (and scholars, activists, and thinkers), we face paradoxes regularly. The four books reviewed here, to varying degrees, may help us do that (or may complicate our work in productive ways).

Laurie Cooper Stoll’s Race and Gender in the Classroom: Teachers, Privilege, and Enduring Social Inequalities takes up and leaves us with questions about how primary school teachers can or should address issues related to race and gender in their classrooms. In an argument I found persuasive and compelling, though not at all surprising, Stoll contends that teachers rely on a social equality maxim, an idea rooted in the myth of meritocracy, that assumes all students who work hard can succeed, regardless of their social locations. In an ostensibly postracial and postgendered America, people interpret information about race and gender through a lens of social equality, even when material reality suggests that race and gender continue to inform and contribute to a matrix of domination that produces inequality for women and people of color. The whole book seems to adopt and struggle with a paradox frame: Many people view education as a solution to social inequality, but how can education solve problems of inequality when education itself, as a social institution, remains biased?

Through a method of institutional ethnography that involved interviewing and observing eighteen teachers in a Chicago suburb, Stoll found that teachers recognize racism but simultaneously downplay the role of race in the construction and maintenance of social inequality. Teachers wanted to make their classrooms colorblind. Like some of the students in the classes I teach, the educators in Stoll’s study wanted to stop talking about race. When they addressed race explicitly in their classrooms, the teachers tended to celebrate multiculturalism by highlighting the achievements of individual people of color. Such lessons never critiqued systemic and structural racism and as a rule tended to frame racism as a historical rather than current problem.

Teachers’ approaches to gender differed from their views on race. Stoll found that teachers more often endorsed essentialist and deterministic understandings of sex in ways they never would for race. For instance, the teachers Stoll interviewed would never say black students have natural intellectual deficiency compared to their white counterparts; teachers regularly assumed, however, that the differences they noticed between the boys and girls in their classes resulted from innate sex differences. Further, teachers willingly and intentionally segregated class activities by gender. By contrast, when academic tracking meant that students ended up segregated by race, teachers recognized the racial segregation as problematic.

Throughout Stoll’s discussion of teachers’ approaches to race and gender, she seems frustrated that when teachers address racism or sexism, they often do so from a frame of liberal individualism. Never, Stoll laments, do these public school teachers try to explain and critique patriarchy or the structural forces of white supremacy in their second and third grade classrooms. Without clearly suggesting how one might introduce the concept of patriarchy to eight-year-olds, Stoll eventually acknowledges toward the end of the book that teachers face a number...