Judith Butler, Race and Education by Charlotte Chadderton

Author:Charlotte Chadderton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

I observed that, on average in CE classes, the teacher’s voice can be heard for between 2/3 and 4/5 of teaching time (other research suggests this is standard, for example Young 1984). Thus discussion time for each pupil in classes of 25–35 students was very limited indeed, as was the opportunity to listen to other pupils’ views. If a pupil wishes to speak at all, she or he has to bid for this privilege. Most teachers have a system of raising hands or bidding for the floor, which of course makes sense in terms of maintaining order in (normally crowded) classrooms. However, the pattern encourages conformity, complicity and obedience rather than debate. When students simply reply instead of bidding, they tend to be negatively evaluated and might even be ignored (Mehan 1979, 101), whether or not they have made a valid point.

So are students able to resist at all, and if so how? A Butlerian analysis of some of the students’ responses suggests that students in fact, were frequently able to subvert the exclusive norms of Britishness using parody. This is not a resistance which will lead directly to educational reform, or a more widely accepted inclusive form of Britishness . In general, Butler argues, only forms of authoritative speech have performative force, and will appeal to others’ psyche.

However, the ongoing citing of the norms, and the parodying of these norms, suggests that for these young people, the norms are not fixed or unchangeable, they can potentially be subverted. Implicit within their responses is a more inclusive citizenship. Butler would not argue that these resistances can change anything on their own, rather she would argue that such subversion exposes the assumed fixedness, truth and naturalness of discourses such as Britishness as non-original and constructed. ‘As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself’ (Butler 2008, 188). Indeed, by parodying Britishness , these students show that Britishness , as a subjectivating discourse, can be performed differently, and made to mean something different—if only for a moment. It could also be argued that the students might emerge, to other students or perhaps to themselves, as learner -citizens (Kitching 2014), ‘whose learning aligns with, contradicts or opposes the prevailing terms of good studenthood’ (p. 17). Although the students in the following examples are not good students as designated politically or culturally: they are not white, they are working class, they attempt to challenge race and class stereotypes, if their resistances are seen as acts of learner-citizenship, (Kitching 2014, Kitching’s italics) potentially they produce subjects ‘implicated in unforeseen ways of disassembling racialised education relations’ (Kitching 2014, 17).

The following example comes from a CE lesson at school 5, where the theme of the lesson was unclear. The context in which this extract took place, was the teacher saying that he felt that no one was allowed to mention colonialism anymore. When people talk about not being allowed to mention colonialism anymore, in fact a not infrequent statement,

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