Learning Privilege

Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling

Adam Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135901196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How canteachers bridge the gap between their commitments to social justice and their day to day practice? This is the question author Adam Howard asked as he began teaching at an eliteprivate school and the question that led him to conduct a six-year study on affluent schooling. Unfamiliar with the educational landscape of privilege and abundance, he began exploring the burning questions he had as a teacher on the lessons affluent students are taught in schooling about their place in the world, their relationships with others, and who they are.

Grounded in an extensive ethnographic account, Learning Privilege examines the concept of privilege itself and the cultural and social processes in schooling that reinforce and regenerate privilege. Howard explores what educators, students and families at elite schools value most in education and how these values guide ways of knowing and doing that both create high standards for their educational programs and reinforce privilege as a collective identity. This book illustrates the ways that affluent students construct their own privilege, not, fundamentally, as what they have, but, rather, as who they are.

1

Teaching the Affluent

“Mr. Howard, why are we learning about those people? This isn’t about social issues. Those people are just bad business people,” Jonas,¹ one of my seventh-grade advisees, insisted during a discussion about homelessness.

“We’re discussing it because homelessness is a big problem in our country and even in our city. It’s an important issue for us to be aware of instead of just ignoring it,” I responded.

Jonas replied, “Yeah, but it’s because they don’t spend their money right and don’t get jobs to get them out of their situation.”

Another boy sitting across from Jonas added, “It’s a problem because they just don’t want to work so they can live in a house. They’re too lazy to get a job.”

“I think it’s because they don’t make the good decisions in life and it’s gotten them where they’re at,” another boy told us.

“Why do you think they don’t make the right decisions?” I asked. “What makes people not make good decisions?”

“I think Jonas said it. They’re bad businesspeople,” one of the boys replied. Fortunately, the bell rang, because I did not know how to respond to their comments at the time. It was one of those moments as a teacher when I couldn’t come up with the right response or the perfect question to challenge students’ thinking. Their beliefs about homeless people represented a world-view in opposition to what I held to be true. I was speechless.

During my first year of teaching, I met with 10 seventh-grade boys for 45 minutes 2 days a week to cover a broad range of issues—everything from puberty to larger societal concerns. It was a designated time for them to feel safe (no girls around) to discuss personal and societal issues openly.² On this particular day, I started our discussion by asking them if they had ever seen a homeless person in our city. At first, all of them declared that they had not. Although our city did not have a large homeless population, a visible number of people lived on our downtown streets. To probe further, I asked them if they had attended sporting or other events downtown. Finally, one advisee said that he had seen two homeless men sitting outside the entrance of a sporting event asking for money. “I wasn’t about to give them money, and nobody else was going to either, because they were drinking and would have just spent it on getting drunk,” he reported. After he gave this example, most of the boys said that they also had seen a homeless person at some point in their lives. I discovered that the reason they hadn’t remembered coming across a homeless person at the beginning of our conversation was because they ignored them. We continued to talk about homelessness in a very general sense until Jonas questioned the value of “learning about those people.”

Later that same year, with another group of students, a discussion of the welfare system emerged from an assigned reading in my sophomore English class. The majority of the students in the class argued that the system did not work, that their parents should not be forced to “support” the poor through their taxes, and that those who were receiving government assistance should just get a job. For the sake of exploring the issue further and sharing my own beliefs, I proposed an opposing argument to them that supported the welfare system: “Some people are forced to rely on the government to survive. They are put in situations where they don’t see alternative options for providing for their families. Their circumstances in life are very different than what we take for granted,” I argued. My response provoked a debate that eventually spread to the various issues relating to poverty.

The importance of this class discussion for me was in learning my students’ perceptions of poor people. One of my students commented, “Our parents have worked hard for what we have. We shouldn’t be forced to give it to people who don’t do anything.” Another student intensely argued, “Those people just want a free ride and want everything handed to them without working for it.” The central point of their argument was that since their parents had worked hard, they deserved their wealth and were not obligated to share it with the poor. In their perspectives, wealth meant working hard and poverty meant laziness. The discussion concluded with a student pointing out, “Besides, we don’t have to worry about them. Don’t you know that’s the reason why we have woods around [our neighborhood]? It blocks the view of [the adjacent poor community] so we don’t have to see them.” Again, the students posed the question, “Why are we discussing those people?”

These two exchanges with my students made me realize that I was not being the type of teacher that I wanted to be. At the right moments, I was not asking the necessary questions to challenge their privileged assumptions of how the world works. I was not engaging my students in the types of conversations that were essential to teach them important lessons about living more justly and meaningfully. Frustrated, I spent the summer after my first year of teaching trying to figure out how to become a better educator. I came to some new understandings that summer—new understandings about privilege and new understandings about myself and my work as a teacher. I came to new understandings of what types of relationships I wanted to form with my students in order to understand their understandings (Duckworth, 1987). I entered my second year of teaching more prepared and more determined to challenge their privileged ways of knowing and doing.

Challenging Privilege

The longer I taught at the school, the more I realized that my students did not feel safe to make mistakes in their competitive pursuit of academic success. Mistakes were understood mostly as weaknesses and not as part of what it means to be human. My students did not know how to work through failure. Consequently, they dodged failure at all costs, which led to behaviors such as cheating and other forms of dishonesty. They were willing to do whatever it took to be the best but were not willing to form independent meanings or to be creative.

In challenging privilege, I needed to create an environment in the classroom to encourage my students to be more honest and to take risks. In working toward this goal, I first allowed myself to become more open and honest with them. I shared with them what I found important, even when my values did not correspond with the conservative nature of the larger educational community. I allowed my strengths and weaknesses to surface. Unlike the façade that I put on during my first year, I let them know that I did not have all the answers. “I don’t know, but let’s find out,” was a response that I was no longer afraid to give my students. By showing them that I didn’t have all the answers, they got to know me as more than just one who provided them with knowledge, but also as a human being who struggled to understand and who made mistakes. They began to gradually understand that if I as their teacher approached learning and teaching in this way—a noncompetitive, honest way—then at least in my classes they had the freedom to do the same.

One classroom practice that I introduced as a way to establish this honest environment was sharing my writing with students. I gave them not only what I considered to be my best work, but also pieces of writing (e.g., poetry, short stories) that I wanted to improve. When I began to do this, they did not know how to respond honestly, because they had been taught not to challenge their teachers at this level. I was even going a step further by asking them not only to challenge me but also to give me suggestions for improving my work. In order to have my students break through what they had been taught not to say to their teachers, I set up a process for them to critique my writing—a process that required them to be critical. They eventually became willing to give me the type of feedback that I was asking from them. They also began to feel more comfortable with receiving critical feedback about their own work. Activities such as peer editing and working in writing groups were more effective in developing my students’ writing skills, because they understood why these activities were important in their becoming better writers. They came to understand the importance of working together and became a little less consumed with trying to outdo each other to be the best. They were not as competitive as they had previously been with each other.

In creating an open and honest environment, my students had to learn how to offer and exchange feedback in a respectful way, which was different from how feedback was typically provided by the adults in their lives. Their parents’ feedback, for example, had more to do with control and economic power than a process of their working with school officials to improve their children’s education. As a parent frankly told me soon after I started teaching at this school, “We pay a lot of money for our kids to go here, and we should have a say in how things are run.” They wanted to make sure that they were getting their money’s worth. The school was forced to “listen” to parents’ feedback but rarely engaged in thoughtful dialogue with families. Parents and educators rarely had the types of conversations that would have allowed them to learn from each other. For the most part, parents engaged in conversations about the school as consumers who wanted to get their money’s worth. In my classroom, I attempted to model a different way of giving feedback—a way that was not connected to privilege. I devised methods to generate respectful, collaborative, and honest feedback from my students. For example, students and I worked collaboratively to determine what activities, methods of assessment, and assignments were educationally effective. My students also wrote evaluations and provided verbal feedback about my teaching throughout the year. This free exchange of respectful and mutual feedback gave opportunities for my students to work with me in constructing the best environment for their learning. It also allowed them to see the value of working with, instead of working against, others.

This collaboration between my students and me was essential in establishing a classroom community. The school placed a theoretical emphasis on building such a community. For example, teachers attended numerous in-service workshops on the characteristics of a respectful and collaborative school community, and we were introduced to various methods of building community in our classrooms and during school activities. But as a community, we never worked toward this respect and collaboration. We just talked about it. We did not try to make our school community less competitive so that connections could be formed. The school’s competitive environment disrupted connection, making closeness among members of the community impossible. In facilitating a community-building process, I encouraged students to be active rather than passive in their learning. They needed to do the work it took to build a community. Everyone needed to participate in class discussions and activities so that each person was contributing to what we were doing. I recognized, though, that each student could share his/her opinion and contribute in his/her own way. I wanted students not only to participate, but also to contribute their own uniqueness to the process. For example, I had one student who did not want to speak during class discussions. I tried various methods to urge him to share his understandings verbally with the class, but none of my approaches worked, until I discovered his love for drawing. I then recommended that he draw as a way to communicate his understandings. He enthusiastically accepted this suggestion and created drawings to share with the entire class for the rest of the school year. His drawings allowed his voice to be heard and served as an alternative model for communicating ideas to the entire class, which encouraged others to find their voices in various ways.

Although at first my students on the whole resisted being more honest and open, most of them eventually felt safe and comfortable enough to share their ideas and beliefs with the class, to share their understandings even when they didn’t have everything figured out, and to let me know when they needed more and/or something different to form an understanding. In this classroom community, my students and I could make mistakes and work through them both independently and collectively. They formed better working relationships with others and me and came to understand more deeply what it meant to be human.

Along with facilitating ways for students to have better relationships with each other, I expanded the curricular scope of my classes to present diverse perspectives, experiences, and contributions, particularly those that had been traditionally omitted from the school’s official curriculum, which outlined specific content that was considered essential for college preparation. I understood that curriculum—and how it was defined—was political because it was the medium through which consciousness was formed in students (Sleeter, 2005). In Pinar’s (2004) words, “The school curriculum communicates what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the future” (p. 20). As a teacher who was required to implement the school’s official curriculum in my classes, I negotiated the “givens” (using specific books, structuring tests to resemble the SAT and other college entrance exams, and so on) to include subject matter that represented experiences and ideas of diverse cultural groups and women. Keeping the requirements in mind, I used a variety of curricular materials to teach my students important lessons about life, such as relating to others, living meaningfully and justly, and being open to diverse perspectives. I presented this content in ways that allowed my students to connect with what they were learning on a personal level, instead of only on an intellectual level.

For example, in my history course for seniors, I developed a framework for our approach to history and the process of understanding the past from the feminist perspective that Susan Griffin (1992) provides in A Chorus of Stones. In Griffin’s understanding, history is not a record of isolated events that happen only to particular groups of people in particular places, but instead “is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed … our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung” (p. 8). To develop this framework, my students and I spent the first part of the year wrestling with this nontraditional perspective of history. This coming-to-understand process provided the necessary means for us to establish a questioning tone for our study of history throughout the year. By “tone,” I mean a norm for both our approach to subject matter and our discussions of that subject matter.

In this class, I also used texts such as Howard Zinn’s (1980) A People’s History of the United States to provide stories and interpretations of history different from those in the required textbook. We read both traditional and alternative works to identify the differences and similarities in their interpretations of historical accounts. During the Civil War unit, we watched parts of Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to understand how films have contributed to the perpetuation of a racist understanding of history. It is important for students to know, for example, that Birth of a Nation influenced the rebirth of the KKK, and films since then have constructed a particular history that supports white supremacy.

Our analysis of films and texts provided a means for my students to locate the political, economic, and social forces at work in constructing understandings of history. Most importantly, examining conflicting stories of our past and the influences of our past on our present further provoked students to question. For the most part, students no longer readily accepted dominant, official perspectives, but instead understood learning as a questioning process and knowledge as politically and socially constructed. This also provided students the opportunity to question me and for me to challenge them in their assumptions about the world beyond the walls of our school. The act of mutual questioning facilitated a classroom community wherein we were all teachers and learners and were all struggling for understanding.

This questioning approach to studying history initially frustrated most of my students. They wanted certainty that couldn’t be found through this critical approach. This learning and teaching process recognized that knowledge did not come in a neat, convenient package to be opened and discovered. Coming to understand is a messy, not always direct process and requires us to become more critical of what we study and what we hold to be true. Most students eventually worked through their frustrations and began to ask important questions that challenged dominant forms of knowledge. My students also applied this critical approach to their daily lives outside the classroom. For example, a student told the class that he was at the movies with a group of friends and, as he explained, “couldn’t stop thinking” as he watched the film. Another student reported, “Everything we read and watch seems to be giving us messages about society and people. I was watching the news with my parents the other night and wondered what the reporter was leaving out so that we think a certain way.” Throughout our class discussions, other students shared similar stories of moments when they applied critical analysis to the world around them.

This questioning process frustrated my students because it also challenged them to think and talk about their privilege. It challenged their privileged ways of knowing and doing. My students had been socialized to speak and act in particular ways that protected their privileged assumptions of the world from being challenged. They knew what to say and what not to say and when they could be honest about their beliefs and when they needed to not disclose their opinions. Their socialized behaviors prevented them from genuinely participating in classroom discussions and activities. Therefore, although they had certain unpleasant assumptions about those different from them, they were really good at knowing what not to say.

In an effort to encourage my students to be honest, I created a classroom environment where students could voice their ideas and beliefs even when their understandings were not “socially acceptable.” I recognized that I could not challenge them to think beyond their privilege without surfacing their privileged assumptions. Initially, students tried to find out how far they could go by making outrageous comments, which really didn’t represent their thoughts. They wanted me to say, “OK, the game is over. We can go back to playing it safe and pretending we don’t believe certain things.” I responded, however, by continuing to provide them a space for free expression of their ideas. Eventually, students used this “free expression space” as an opportunity to ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Teaching the Affluent
• 2. Revisioning Privilege
• 3. In Pursuit of Excellence
• 4. College-Oriented Desires and Expectations
• 5. Trust
• 6. Honoring Traditions
• 7. Giving Back
• 8. Outsiders Within
• 9. Privileged Perceptions of the Subjugated Other
• 10. Interrupting Privilege
• Notes
• References
• Index