Untangling the Grip of White Privilege in Education through Consultation and Systems Change: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the articles in the special issue, School consultation grounded in social justice: Dismantling white privilege in education. The authors first highlight salient aspects of each of the five articles. The article ends with a call to action for educators to use consultation to effect systems change that will interrupt white privilege and racist practices in education.     

Becoming Teachers for Social Justice: Raising Critical Consciousness

This article shares processes and practices which foster students’ critical consciousness. Critical consciousness, the core of social justice teaching, is a heightened awareness of the world and the power structures that shape it. Teachers can become forces for equity and change by: challenging students to reflect critically on their beliefs and the sources of these beliefs; using text to guide students to look outwards and discover the perspectives and challenges of others; selecting texts purposefully to heighten student awareness of issues of power and equity; teaching students to read texts critically, listening carefully for the points of view of others often ignored or silenced; creating space for dialogue beyond text; and finally, making the world their classroom, blurring the boundary between schools and communities as students research the world and take steps toward change in ways that recognize and re-value our common humanity. Becoming teachers for social justice entails moving students through intentional processes and practices to foster critical consciousness in the hope of effecting change.     

Race is nowhere and race is everywhere: narratives from black and white South African university students in post‐apartheid South Africa

This paper examines the life history narratives of a group of 12 black and white male and female undergraduate students at a historically white Afrikaans medium university, now undergoing its own transformation in post‐apartheid South Africa. Conceptualizations of identity and discourse across four elements of context, setting, situated activity and self are employed to examine their accounts. Three framing discourses, comprising the official storyline of a rainbow nation and new higher education policies, the formal storyline of institutional change, and the informal space of relationships and interactions are used to analyse student narratives in terms of how they produce, reproduce and transform race and identity. What emerges is a complicated picture in which identities cannot be simply read off either from the official discourse or from colour and culture as the levels of discourse articulate and collide with a history of racial separateness and context and setting, with particular identity effects.

What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? (Mills, 1959 Mills CW (1959) The sociological imagination (London, Oxford University Press) [Crossref] [Google Scholar], p. 7)     

Can students within higher education learn to be resilient and,educationally speaking,does it matter?

This paper presents a critical appraisal of resilience and its associated concepts within the context of higher education. It addresses wide‐ranging definitions of resilience, encompassing endurance and adaptability, and seeks to understand how these definitions impact on the learning experiences of students. As theoretical and empirical work on resilience has burgeoned in terms of adolescent experiences of education, the rise of interest has not been matched by that in studies of adult learning, particularly within university settings. This is despite the growing importance of retention studies, which have clear and important links to how well students manage their learning ability in adversity. Realization of the potential embodied in this concept to alter for the better, together with ways of conceptualizing learning and teaching, however, will remain constrained unless teachers within higher education pay attention to the resilience narratives that individual students present, and how teaching strategies can affect their learning trajectories. The paper examines some factors that impact on students’ learning within higher education, and theorizes how teaching and assessment may be adapted to promote resilience in all its forms.     

You and CO2: a Public Engagement Study to Engage Secondary School Students with the Issue of Climate Change

School students are growing up in a world with a rapidly changing climate, the effects of which will become increasingly apparent during their lifetimes. We designed and pilot tested “You and CO₂”, a STEAM program designed to encourage students to reflect on their personal impact on the environment, while also appreciating their place within society to bring about positive societal change. Over three interlinked workshops, students analyzed the carbon footprints of some everyday activities, which they then explored in more detail through interacting with a bespoke piece of digital fiction, No World 4 Tomorrow. The program culminated with students producing their own digital fictions, allowing them the freedom to explore the themes from the previous workshops with a setting and focus of their choice. We reflect here on the experience of running the You and CO₂ program and on the themes that emerged from the students’ original digital fictions.

     

Expectancies as mediators in the differential-reward conditional discrimination performance of pigeons

In a series of within-subject experiments employing a two-choice delayed conditional discrimination task, pigeons chose correctly more often when kind of correct choice and kind of reinforcer were perfectly correlated than when uncorrelated. Correct choice behavior fell to chance levels when the correlation was reversed or when it was removed by using only one kind of reinforcer. Implications for mediation theories are discussed, with the conclusion being that, although the possibility that instrumental mediators are present in this situation cannot be dismissed, the overall pattern of results indicates that classical mediators are of principal importance in this type of task.