Dennis Carlson

"Throughout much of this century, the dominant idea of community in America was represented by what I will call the "normalizing community". Within normalizing communities, some individuals and subject positions (white, middle class, male, heterosexual, etc.) get privileged and represented as "normal", while other individuals and subject positions (i.e black working class, female, homosexual, etc.) are dis empowered and represented as deviant, sick, neurotic, criminal, lazy, lacking in intelligence, and in other ways, "abnormal" . (Carlson,233)


Dennis Carlson holds an extremely strong argument in stating that schools need to learn to fight back against oppression for "marginalized" or underrepresented students. While Carlson's argument for the LGBT students is a prominent one, this concept applies to ANY form of marginalized student. Carlson often refers to the "normalizing" effect where people refer to "normal" students as those who are poster children for SCWAAMP and how the "abnormal" bunch of students are those whose identities are being slowly erased as a result of being denied a persona in society.
While Carlson commonly refers to the oppressed LGBT community, it is extremely typical for this concept to be found in an city school, where minorities and underrepresented groups are given unwanted titles. What Carlson argues, is that titles and ideas like such need to be fought against by both schools and educators alike. Not only is the idea wrong, but it is dangerous to a student's identity. Unless work is done, Carlson states, the student's identity to the educational community with be erased, absent, and invisible.

Peggy McIntosh

"I think whites are carefully taught to not recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day , but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks." ( McIntosh, 2)

Peggy McIntosh, a well-known American feminist and anti-racist, speaks in her widely embraced work, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" about the unseen "white privilege" that surrounds us each and every day. She is well known for her work in feminist movements and is extremely sharp at pointing out what exactly white privilege is. While her stance on issues of gender and race may give readers the impression that she would appear as a "middle aged, ruthless African American woman", she is actually a white woman of European descent who has spent long years working to persuade others of her theories. Her idea of "white privilege" is not only unavoidable, but it is also undeniable. In the American classroom, everything: income, family life, race, gender, and lifestyle, all play a core role in proving the accuracy of "white privilege".

McIntosh explores how it is an unseen complex that white children are unknowingly held at a higher standard than children of color in a given American classroom. In things such as hand-raising, group assignments, and even the clique creations at recess in elementary schools, whites are not taught to see or look for the privilege they are given in American society. Take an average suburban school in Whoville, RI, for example; the community will likely behold their own prejudices over any neighbors who do not happen to be white. Chances are also high that the middle-class school will have classrooms where the few children of color will be sitting closely with all of the white children, unless forced. There is bound to be a clique problem within the school where the non-white students are grouped together and are looked at in a more negative stereotype by teachers and administrators alike. Everything from posters to ads, to sports photographs throughout the school will likely prove that "whiteness" has been vastly spread throughout this school.

Lisa Delpit

"...a black mother, in whose house I was recently a guest, said to her eight year old son, 'Boy, get your rusty behind in that bathtub.' Now, I happen to know that this woman loves her son as much as any mother, but she would never have posed the directive to her son to take a bath in the form of a question...Consequently, as Heath suggests, upon entering school the child from such a family array not understand the indirect statement as a direct command. Both white and black working-class children in the communities Heath studied 'had difficulty interpreting these indirect requests for adherence to an unstated set of rules."(Delpit 34)

Lisa Delpit wrote a piece titled. Other People's Children, in order to discuss a theme that she labeled the "culture of power". Delpit describes the "culture of power" to be a a set of five issues which highlight "silenced dialogue" which provide members of the middle to upper class with cultural capital in schools. One of the aspects of "culture of power" which Delpit focuses on is interactional styles between teachers and students. She claims that teachers carry into their classrooms interactional styles from their home life. She goes on to make the claim that people from the middle and upper classes introduce discipline and generally communicate to their children indirectly as a way to de-emphasize power. Members of the working class, on the other hand, are generally much more direct with directions to their children. Like seen in the quote above, a mother from the working class would be more likely to form a direction as a demand such like, "Boy, get your rusty behind in that bathtub" where a mother from the middle or upper class would be more inclined to state the direction as a question such like, "would you like to take your bath now?". This large gap of interactional styles has a strong impact on students who are placed in classrooms with a teacher of a different social background.

There are an overwhelming number of teachers from the middle class who use indirect directions with their students and expect all students to obey equally. This places students who are raised under a more direct and demanding authority at a very strong disadvantage. Unfortunately, children who do not understand these forms of directions are often confused as being disobedient. What Delpit is trying to show here is that the "culture of power" of indirect interactional styles places children from working class families at a disadvantage in the classroom. While students of the middle and upper class take to these passive directions better than others, the example quoted above exemplifies that interpreting indirect demands are more difficult for any student and that all would prefer direct, clear, demands. It is the responsibility of all teachers to become aware of "rules and codes of power" such as their personal interactional styles and work to determine ways that are unbias for students of all backgrounds, classes, and cultures. In this particular instance, Delpit claims that the best way for teachers to provide their students with directions is to use authority; to give clear, direct, demands.

Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer

"While additional emphasis on charity might lead to service learning activities that raise self-esteem, impel students into new experiences, and demonstrate the value of scholastic abilities in real-world contexts, educators who focus on a transformative vision would want to carry this work one step further. For them, it is the combination of service and critical analysis, not either by itself, that seems most likely to promote interest in and insight into these complex social issues." (Kahne and Westheimer)

This quotation from Kanhe and Westheimer's piece, In The Service of what? The Politics of Service Learning, focuses on their main argument of the different between service for charity and service for change. This article suggests that educators and policy makers spend too much time focusing on promoting service learning rather than determining the values and goals they are set out to accomplish through this process. By describing a few different examples, Kahne and Westheimer prove that service learning projects can individually serve different purposes and highlight a variety of values. The idea of service for charity is based upon the notion that an individual volunteers his or her time to give back to the community and to experience the joy of committing a civic duty. Service for change, on the other hand, includes a deeper analysis of why and how a particular group needs service which aids the volunteers with an understanding to form relationships and help solve the problem together.

Even though both forms of service learning provide substantial learning experiences for the volunteers, Kahne and Westheimer would argue that service learning for change provides much more successful experiences for the groups receiving the help. Service learning for change focuses more time on a successful action plan rather than mindlessly volunteering time for the benefit of the volunteer. If people would focus on the goals of their service learning projects and determine who they are trying to aid, more time could be spent putting together activities that make positive impacts on the lives of others instead of donated time, money, and effort to causes that leave people continuously in need.

Richard Rodriguez

"Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of individuality by becoming assimilated into public society...They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private identity by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public identity." (Rodriguez 38-39)

Richard Rodriguez is a Mexican immigrant who moved to California with his family at the young age of six. As a child, Rodriquez was forced through the difficult transition from living in Mexico to the United States. Many American traditions were new to Rodriguez and different from those of his family; the English speaking language being the most difficult adjustment. The elementary school in which Rodriguez was enrolled allowed him only to speak English, even though he solely spoke Spanish at home. This led to a distinct separation between the cultural traditions he used at home from the cultural traditions used in school; what Rodriguez labeled as his public versus private identity.

Rodriguez claims that even though it would have been comforting for him if his teachers addressed him in Spanish and involved his private identity in the classroom by allowing him to speak Spanish, he insists that it would have prolonged his growth towards a public identity. It was not until his family had insisted that he speak English at home and there was a "clash of two worlds" (Rodriguez 35) that Rodriguez was truly determined to learn the language and become comfortable in this overwhelmingly different environment. Having Spanish as a private identity provided Rodriguez with a place to escape from his public identity and prevented him from assimilating with the American culture.

Many bilingual educators push the theory that students who lose aspects of their culture, such as their traditional language, are also losing a piece of their individuality; that it is necessary that children who are learning English as a second language to maintain their primary language as well and work on both skills collectively. Rodriguez claims that even though giving up his private language resulted in a loss of closeness and communication with his family as well as a piece of childhood, keeping his private identity held him back from belonging to his public identity and being successful in America. The achievement of public identity is made possible through the process of assimilation, and though refraining from assimilation and embracing it have different disadvantages, Rodriguez would argue that a public identity makes for a much less difficult future.

Citation:
Santa Ana, Otto (ed.) Tongue Tied (2004)