Working in Class by Hurst Allison L.;Nenga Sandi Kawecka;

Author:Hurst, Allison L.;Nenga, Sandi Kawecka;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Those shifts include the following: recognizing that “cultural awareness is not enough”; promoting “justice first, then conflict resolution”; recognizing and “rejecting deficit theory”; “transcending the dialogic surface” and “acknowledg[ing] the power in-balances”; “acknowledging sociopolitical context”; claiming “‘neutrality’ [maintains the] status quo”; and “accepting a loss of likeability” as a consequence of “speak[ing] truth to power” (Gorski 2008a, 522–23).

Deficit thinking is tantamount to “blaming the victim” and provides both the classroom teacher as well as the larger educational and political institutions a means to shift the responsibility from themselves onto the students and their families. Valencia (2010) described six characteristics of deficit thinking: blaming the victims, oppression, pseudoscience, temporal changes, educability, and heterodoxy. Within this chapter we discuss deconstructing the deficit thinking of individuals who will be classroom teachers as well as recognizing the larger institutional and political influences that encourage deficit thinking.

In addition, there is the necessity for students to wrestle with the political forces that may have benefited them as individuals and likely will inhibit them as teachers. Our students are middle- and upper-middle- class students; many are second- or third-generation college graduates. Raised with a middle-class/affluent sense of entitlement, how do they also come to understand that their success often comes at the expense of others and is built more on their privilege than their merit?

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