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.     

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.     

Age and Socialization Effects on the Development of Social Comparison Motives and Normative Ability Assessment in Kibbutz and Urban Children

We hypothesized that tendencies to explain interest in peers' work in terms of mastery-promotion or of relative ability assessment is related both to the development of the normative conception of ability and to educational emphases on cooperative or competitive learning goals. Study 1 tapped acquisition of the normative conception, normative self-assessment, and reasons for looking at others' work among 208 kibbutz and urban Israeli subjects at ages 4–8. Results confirmed that acquisition of normative understandings was associated with a shift from mastery to ability explanations in urban, but not kibbutz, children. Study 2 revealed similar differences in the frequency of mastery versus ability assessment reasons among 48 kibbutz and urban third-grade children asked to explain the videotaped glances of an unfamiliar child. Thus, cooperative learning settings seem to maintain interest in using peers to promote mastery, even after acquisition of the normative conception.