Becoming Critical

Description

This innovative book is a collection of autoethnographies by a diverse group of contributors who describe and theorize about the critical moments in their development as social justice educator/scholars in the face of colonizing forces. Using a rhizomatic approach, the editors' meta-analysis identifies patterns of similarity and differences and theorizes about the exercise of agency in resistance and identity formation. In our increasingly diverse society, Becoming Critical is a wonderful resource for teacher education and sociology of education as it presents an alternative methodological approach for qualitative inquiry. The book contributes to students' understanding of the development of critical theories—especially as they pertain to identities. The contributors make use of the work of critical scholars such as Collins, hooks, Weber, Foucault, and others relevant to the lives of students and educators today.
Section I: Introduction and Overview of Book

1. Introduction and Conceptual Framework: Critical Theory, Social Justice, Power, and Autoethnography
Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa

Section II: Critical Race Autoethnographic Case Studies

Section II Introduction: Authoethnography and Critical Race Theory
Muhammad A. Khalifa

2. Auditioning for Whiteness: Autoethnography and Critical Race Theory in the Early Schooling Experiences of an African-American Man
Michael E. Jennings

3. To Keep It Real or Not to Keep It Real: The Dialectics of the Chapellian Contradiction
Nosakhere Griffin-EL

4. Blue Collar Scholar: Social Class, Race, and Life as a Black Man in Academe
 Mark S. Giles

5. Too Black, Yet Not Black Enough: Challenging White Supremacy in U.S. Teacher Education and the Making of Two Radical Social Misfits
Brenda G. Juárez and Cleveland Hayes

6. Unbecoming … Responding to Colorblindness: An Autoethnography
 Joy Howard

Section III: Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Case Studies

Section III Introduction: Critical Feminisms: Gendered Experiences of Oppression and Resistance
Felecia M. Briscoe

7. From Fundamentalist Mormon to the Academy: A “Plyg” Girl’s Experiences with the Evolving Sexist Double-Blind
Felecia M. Briscoe

8. Where Did the Girls Go?: The Role of Socialization and Institutions in Silencing Female Voices
Damaris Moraa Choti

Section IV: Critical Intersectional Autoethnographic Case Studies

Section IV Introduction: Intersecting Dimensions of Identity, Oppression, and Resistance
Felecia M. Briscoe

9. “You Look Like a Wetback; You Shouldn’t Have Any Trouble”: Deals We Make with the Devil on the Road Less Traveled
Elizabeth de la Portilla

10. A Critical Autoethnography of a Black Man from Detroit: Resisting the White Imaginative’s Criminalization of Black Men
Muhammad A. Khalifa

11. Working the Hyphens: Ethnographic Snapshots in Becoming Critical-Female-Black-Scholars
Aisha El-Amin, B. Genise Henry, and Crystal T. Laura

12. We’re All Half-Breeds Now … in a Not so Ivory Tower
Miguel de Oliver

Section V: Advances in Rhizomatic Understanding

13. Autoethnographic Sensemaking: What Does Our Criticality Mean? Patterns and Divergences
Muhammad A. Khalifa and Felecia M. Briscoe

14. Rage, Love, Transcendence in the the Co-Construction of Critical Scholars Identities: Escaping the Iron Cage of Technical-Rationality
Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa

References
Contributors’ Professional Biographies
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic studies
• Education

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456560
• Langue: English

Extrait

Becoming Critical
Becoming Critical

T HE E MERGENCE OF S OCIAL J USTICE S CHOLARS
Edited by
FELECIA M. BRISCOE
and
MUHAMMAD A. KHALIFA
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2015 Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Becoming critical : the emergence of social justice scholars / edited by
Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5655-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5656-0 (e-book)
1. Social justice—Study and teaching (Higher) 2. Critical pedagogy. 3. Minorities in higher education—United States. 4. Minorities in higher education—United States—Biography. 5. Teachers—Training of—Social aspects—United States. I. Briscoe, Felecia, editor of compilation.
II. Khalifa, Muhammad A., 1975–
HM671.B44 2015
378.008—dc23 2014027593
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First, we thank and acknowledge all of the courageous authors who have contributed to this book.
We also thank our research assistants, who have been invaluable: Sara Harrington, Elizabeth Gil, and Carol Gines.
Contents
Section I Introduction and Overview of Book
1 Introduction and Conceptual Framework: Critical Theory, Social Justice, Power, and Autoethnography Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa
Section II Critical Race Autoethnographic Case Studies
S ECTION II I NTRODUCTION : Autoethnography and Critical Race Theory
Muhammad A. Khalifa
2 Auditioning for Whiteness: Autoethnography and Critical Race Theory in the Early Schooling Experiences of an African-American Man
Michael E. Jennings
3 To Keep It Real or Not to Keep It Real: The Dialectics of the Chapellian Contradiction
Nosakhere Griffin-EL
4 Blue Collar Scholar: Social Class, Race, and Life as a Black Man in Academe
Mark S. Giles
5 Too Black, Yet Not Black Enough: Challenging White Supremacy in U.S. Teacher Education and the Making of Two Radical Social Misfits
Brenda G. Juárez and Cleveland Hayes
6 Unbecoming … Responding to Colorblindness: An Autoethnography
Joy Howard
Section III Critical Feminist Autoethnographic Case Studies
S ECTION III I NTRODUCTION: Critical Feminisms: Gendered Experiences of Oppression and Resistance
Felecia M. Briscoe
7 From Fundamentalist Mormon to the Academy: A “Plyg” Girl’s Experiences with the Evolving Sexist Double-Bind
Felecia M. Briscoe
8 Where Did the Girls Go?: The Role of Socialization and Institutions in Silencing Female Voices
Damaris Moraa Choti
Section IV Critical Intersectional Autoethnographic Case Studies
S ECTION IV I NTRODUCTION: Intersecting Dimensions of Identity, Oppression, and Resistance
Felecia M. Briscoe
9 “You Look Like a Wetback; You Shouldn’t Have Any Trouble”: Deals We Make with the Devil on the Road Less Traveled
Elizabeth de la Portilla
10 A Critical Autoethnography of a Black Man from Detroit: Resisting the White Imaginative’s Criminalization of Black Men
Muhammad A. Khalifa
11 Working the Hyphens: Ethnographic Snapshots in Becoming Critical-Female-Black-Scholars
Aisha El-Amin, B. Genise Henry, and Crystal T. Laura
12 We’re All Half-Breeds Now … in a Not so Ivory Tower
Miguel de Oliver
Section V Advances in Rhizomatic Understanding
13 Autoethnographic Sensemaking: What Does Our Criticality Mean? Patterns and Divergences
Muhammad A. Khalifa and Felecia M. Briscoe
14 Rage, Love, and Transcendence in the Co-Construction of Critical Scholar Identities: Escaping the Iron Cage of Technical-Rationality
Felecia M. Briscoe and Muhammad A. Khalifa
References
Professional Biographies of Contributors
Index
S ECTION I
Introduction and Overview of Book
C HAPTER O NE
Introduction and Conceptual Framework

Critical Theory, Social Justice, Power, and Autoethnography
F ELECIA M. B RISCOE AND M UHAMMAD A. K HALIFA
We, Felecia and Muhammad, began our academic careers as middle school science teachers in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Detroit, Michigan, respectively. Our teaching experiences led us to become deeply troubled by the systemic practices that disadvantaged minority and low-income students in these two very different cities. One of our primary goals in earning our doctoral degrees was to help develop knowledge that would create a more equitable educational system. Yet, more than 20 years after teaching in the public schools, I (Felecia) received the following e-mail from one of my brightest and most highly motivated teacher education students:
You ever been in a place, where everybody is real depressed, but they don’t really know it. It is where the tedious and mundane are worshipped … The least bit of creativity and inspiration has been excised. People rule through fear and intimidation. The staff is treated like children. People wonder what is wrong with our kids. We aren’t doing them any favors, except making them sick of school. We have tested them to death. When we aren’t testing them, we are pre-testing them or teaching them test strategies. Richmond worships at the altar of standardized testing. There is no room for heretics or non-believers. (A. Jackson, personal communication, September 16, 2008)
Mr. Jackson, an African American man, was one of the most creative and motivated students I have encountered in my more than 20 years of teaching in higher education. He wrote the letter during his third year of teaching in an urban majority Black elementary school. I reflected a long time on this e-mail, asking myself questions about what had happened to this very promising teacher and how such an environment was affecting the lives of the children he taught. I came to the conclusion that somewhere we had taken a wrong turn in our understanding of what an equitable school system should look like. The current punitive approach of standardized testing, fear, intimidation, and so forth was the result of neoliberal accountability policies and was supposedly done in the name of achieving equity.
Muhammad had similar experiences both personally and through his own children’s education. When he first began his teaching career on the east side of Detroit in the late 1990s, he encountered such an intense culture of standardized test fraud that he thought it was just part of the way that education really happened. The rationale he was given for cheating on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, or MEAP, was that “the wealthy White suburbs cheat on the MEAP, so we cannot compete unless we do it.” The same culture that caused despondency in Felecia’s students led, on the one hand, to conformity with a high-stakes neoliberal reform imposed on Detroiters. Ironically, this was followed by a resistance to the neoliberal reform, ultimately through an elaborate culture of staff working behind the scenes to increase the MEAP scores of Detroit students.
We have spent many hours discussing what different kinds of understandings might help our educational system to actually become equitable. We would also like it to become one in which teaching and learning occur, not within a technical-rational testing framework, but within a framework that encouraged the intrinsic joys of teaching and learning. Those discussions led to our present objectives. The first segment of this chapter focuses on the book’s objectives. The second segment describes our conceptual framework. Finally, we present an overview of the book’s organization and content.
Objectives
Our objective is to develop an understanding of the different paths taken by people of various races/ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, national origins, abilities, and genders in their development as critical scholars. We develop this understanding through a qualitative meta-analysis. These autoethnographies delineate key events and points in our lives that have shaped us into the critical scholars we are today. As critical autoethnographies, they focus on power relations embedded in those events and the authors’ responses to colonizing relationships of power. Despite being positioned in different spaces, all the authors have developed critical perspectives in their teaching and/or research. There are two levels of findings and two levels of critical social theory development. Each of the 11 authors conducts the first level of analysis on her or his own life using and expanding on current critical theories. We, the editors, conduct a second level of analysis by identifying common and divergent themes and the relationship of those themes among the 11 case studies. Thus, this book contributes to the development of critical theories—especially as they pertain to identities—and qualitative methodologies, as well as the literature on social justice education. Accordingly,