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- Convenors:
-
Sofie Smeets
(Utrecht University)
Nina Hosseini (University of Amsterdam)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- G5
- Sessions:
- Thursday 27 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In response to classroom tensions educators often employ perspectives of niceness. Yet, niceness can maintain and reproduce the social inequities educators want to combat. By increasing insights in dynamics of niceness in this panel, we want to contribute to more equitable education.
Long Abstract:
Recent examples of discussions on transgender rights, Black Lives Matter protests, reproductive rights, migration as well as on Covid-19 measures and the Russo-Ukrainian war show how freedom of expression can often be related to rising tensions in classrooms and educational institutions. However, navigating social justice and safety issues, educators often feel the need to draw from niceness, kindness and empathy to avoid confrontation, discomfort and polarization. Additionally, doubts about their capacities required to facilitate these heightened debates, and possibly existing discursive limits of educational institutions feed in to this need.
However, several scholars (Pascoe 2023; Ladson-Billings 2004) have argued that niceness does not resolve societal tensions in education, but hinders socio-political understanding of systemic injustices related to race, gender, sexuality and religion, and instead maintains the dominant status quo.
Yet what does niceness in an educational context mean? Which processes (words, actions, movements, expressions, performances) reveal niceness, and how does niceness relate to other concepts such as kindness, good intentions, benign diversity? Is there are potential to niceness, and what are its limitations or alternatives? What role do educator’s sense of agency and discursive limits in educational institutions play? And in which ways is it related to the reproduction of dominant structures such as white supremacy and heterosexims?
In this panel, we aim to further conceptualize niceness in education from critical, anthropological perspectives and connect it to the struggle for educational equity. With this understanding we hope to contribute to the dismantling of reproduction of inequities in education.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 27 June, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a literature review on social justice teacher education, we illustrate dilemmas around niceness, emotions and discomfort experienced by student teachers and teacher educators in teacher education aimed at disrupting systemic inequities.
Paper long abstract:
Based on a literature review, we discuss common challenges in social justice-oriented teacher education. For example, resistance and emotional responses are to be expected when addressing issues like white privilege (e.g. Ohito, 2020; Hyland, 2010; Rolon-Dow et al., 2020). When analyzing these emotions, it is important to acknowledge that they are not individual, apolitical experiences: Emotions can stem from systemic inequities, influence the sense of connection or distinction between groups, and can hinder social change (Ahmed, 2014). Although various authors show how these responses and the resulting discomfort can be employed as teachable moments, they also carry the risk of creating situations that are unsafe or place a large toll on student teachers, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. As a result, teacher educators may resort to niceness to avoid conflict and discomfort. This means social justice teacher educators are often navigating a delicate tension. Introducing issues of racism in the classroom may evoke stigmatizing remarks or put students from marginalized backgrounds in a position where they must explain or even defend their reality of oppression (Matias & Grosland, 2016; Berry et al., 2021). However, not addressing it or staying ‘neutral’ as a facilitator can lead to silencing or reproduce harmful dominant discourses (Galman et al., 2010; Jones, 2016). By illustrating dilemmas around niceness from empirical and theoretical literature, we aim to contribute to our collective understanding of what happens in education that aims to transform systemic inequities, but can often (unintentionally) reinforce the injustices it is trying to disrupt.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that practising “education as the practice of freedom” requires pedagogy and texts that do not simplify or pacify but provoke and agitate and foster a just relationship with the context of learning.
Paper long abstract:
Is the university classroom operating as a space to safeguard and privilege every student’s experience and feelings, rather than one where we can interrogate and reflect on experiences and contexts that reproduce power structures? This paper examines the feasibility of implementing "Education as the Practice of Freedom" at Teachers College, Columbia University, through bell hooks' writings on education and change. It is based on my engagement and ethnographic work during a four-month long course devoted to studying selected texts by hooks. I ask if texts and pedagogy can radicalise cis men to organise and deconstruct the privilege they gain from patriarchy (and other power structures if they do so). This is inspired by my observation that my white male peers and I (as a caste privileged cis male student), were not uncomfortable while working through hooks’ texts with the collective mission of deconstructing (any) benefits some of us gain from power structures. I argue that questions over pedagogy and content cannot be separated from the context of the classroom and the institution. Learning about the demographics of students, professors and staff in the institution and its various programmes, the history and political economy of the institution and neighbourhood, including organising efforts by students, staff and professors, and degree-related requirements is key to learning about the context. I argue that practising “education as the practice of freedom” requires pedagogy and texts that do not simplify or pacify but provoke and agitate and foster a just relationship with the context of learning.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents discursive strategies that render white race talk nice and manage not-nice educational inequality. I draw on 18 months of fieldwork in German schools to argue that distancing, minimising, and defending keep whiteness nice, and expressed happiness/sadness signal niceness to others.
Paper long abstract:
Research on white race talk often focuses on dismissals, discomfort, and ignorance - not-nice moments and manoeuvres. The paper argues that this focus risks obscuring how race talk can happen nicely, even happily, and how this helps manage the not-niceness of racialised inequality especially in such a ‘nice field’ as education.
The paper draws on 18 months of fieldwork in and around schools in a mid-size German city, including work and volunteering as a classroom aide, participation in school open days, and interviews with educational staff/administrators (55) as well as parents (33). Transcripts and field notes were analysed in the tradition of critical discourse studies and coded thematically using NVivo.
I argue that distancing, minimising, and defending offered ways to deal with not-niceness, read (accusations of) racism, and kept whiteness nice. These strategies acknowledged racism but made it palatable; kids’ slurs were “playful”, teachers “not possible” to accuse. Expressions of laughter, happiness, and sadness, meanwhile, performed that innocent white people not only said nice things but did so the nice way: with a smile, a chuckle, a heartfelt yet helpless “things are unfair.”
This paper adds to the growing body of critical work on niceness in education by exploring its discursive dimension and underlines how it protects whiteness. I highlight how nice talk was race evasive not in semantics, as ‘colorblind’ speech is often characterised to be, but in consequence. Nice-washed race was rehabilitated as a conversational topic, but critical, anti-racist speech got curtailed and racism remained out of focus.
Paper short abstract:
In my ethnographic research with Dutch higher education teachers I see a focus on good intentions in their inclusivity practices, also when tensions arise. Their varying responses confirm an individualized understanding of inclusivity, leaving little space for structural educational inquality.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years diversity and inclusivity have become important items on the policy agenda of Dutch higher education institutions. Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences aims to be a school where everyone feels welcome, regardless of their background. In broadly defined terms the school urges educators to create inclusive learning environments for all students. When educators engage with the call for more inclusion, the lack of a conceptual framework becomes problematic and raises different questions: How do teachers engage with inclusivity? How do they shape their inclusivity practices and how do these practices inform us on their understandings of diversity and inclusivity in higher education? Based on ethnographic fieldwork with educators in higher education I see that teachers draw from personal experiences and interests and create inclusivity initiatives based on general principles of pedagogy and educational theory. Their intentions to positively contribute to inclusion overrule related tensions and discomfort in education. I observed how teachers evade, trivialize, patronize, (re)negotiate amongst others in response to highlighted frictions, marginalizations, power differences and confronting understandings of diversity and inclusivity. Yet despite varying reactions, educators remain focused on their good intentions. I conclude that in this process a generalized and individualized understanding of inclusion prevails leaving little space for understanding and discussing structural inequality.