"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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
One of the Carlson points that has always stuck to me, would be an issue that I watched on one of my first weeks at Harry Kazirian.As I have mentioned in the past, the student aid who came into the room once a week was not always the most understanding person. On one of the weeks, I couldn't help but notice that she continuously walked right past the two white kids who were in the class, and did not offer them any help at all. She did not check to see if they needed any assistance in the newly learned math they were practicing. Instead, she hovered entirely over a section of the classroom where all students of hispanic descent were seated. Each and every time one of the students in this group moved in the wrong way (looked around or something that was not concerning this paper), she would scream and shout at them for "being lazy" and not trying. What I soon came to find out was that the two white children, who she had passed multiple times, both needed assistance and were trying extremely hard to get her attention. All at once,in a sense,two "under represented" groups were being "normalized and stereotyped" in the classroom by someone they called an official. The white children were "assumed" to be intelligent already, (while they were actually slower learners than the rest), and the Hispanic children were now looked at as being "instantly lazy and irritable" before they could even begin to show signs of success.
ReplyDeleteI don't really see how you are connecting this back to the heart of Carlson's main ideas. Be more explicit in naming the connection.
ReplyDelete