Luykx, Aurolyn, and Josiah McC. Heyman, “The limits of critical pedagogy: teaching about...

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The limits of critical pedagogy:teaching about structural obstacles tostudents who overcame themAurolyn Luykx a & Josiah Heyman aa Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Texas atEl Paso, El Paso, TX, USAPublished online: 15 Mar 2013.

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The limits of critical pedagogy: teaching about structuralobstacles to students who overcame them

Aurolyn Luykx* and Josiah Heyman

Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA

(Received 23 February 2012; final version received 21 December 2012)

This article focuses on efforts to critically analyze the social reproductivefunctions of schooling with a group of pre-service teachers in the US–Mexicoborder region, and on students’ reactions to these efforts. The students – allfemale, predominantly Mexican-American – had experienced both educationaldiscrimination and academic success, and heavily invested in the dominant viewof schooling as a meritocracy where individual talent and motivation regularlyovercome structural obstacles. We argue that the students’ ideologies and experi-ences of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and language predisposed them toresist analysis of systemic inequalities in schools; we also examine the implica-tions of this resistance for their future success as teachers. We conclude withrecommendations for balancing structural pessimism and strategic optimism inthe classroom, and for bringing students’ personal and social histories to bearon the contradictions between schooling’s promise of social mobility and itstendency to reproduce social inequality.

Keywords: teacher education; critical pedagogy; Latino education

Introduction: borderland students in higher education

Educational systems in advanced capitalist societies display fundamental tensionsbetween contradictory goals. On the one hand, they enable social mobility, provid-ing democratic access to educational (and eventually occupational) opportunities; onthe other hand, they are one of the central social mechanisms ensuring efficient pro-duction of a stratified workforce. Similarly, schools are portrayed as the crucible ofcultural citizenship, where young Americans (and those aspiring to that status) areimbued with a set of “shared values,” such as patriotism, faith in representativedemocracy, individual responsibility, teamwork, and respect for (limited) diversity;at the same time, however, schools are places where ideologies of white supremacy,colonialism, patriarchy, American exceptionalism, and the linguistic hegemony ofEnglish are reinforced daily. In teacher preparation programs (as in K-12 education),students’ own social positioning is key to how they will respond to these tensions.

While borderland students’ struggles to earn a college degree are evidence ofthe stratification of opportunity in US society, those same struggles embody, formany, the realization of the American dream. The promise of mobility motivatesthem; the dominant ideology of school as a democratic meritocracy is a solace to

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013Vol. 26, No. 3, 346–368, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.762479

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them. Given the formidable obstacles to their success, they are justly proud of theiracademic achievements. The academic failures or levelled aspirations of their rela-tives and peers contrast with these students’ own experiences of persistence andaccomplishment, and they tend to interpret these differences in terms of individualattributes and opportunities, rather than as manifestations of aggregate inequalities.Before long, they will be called upon to guide a new generation of border childrenthrough the racialized obstacle course of American schooling. Their professionalidentities, pedagogical practice, and ideologies about education, opportunity, andinequality will all be shaped by the ways in which they understand and managethese contradictory elements of their own education.

These contradictions shape the ways in which students from marginalizedgroups respond to critiques of mainstream schools. Theorists and practitioners ofcritical pedagogy cannot assume a natural correspondence between their ownperspectives and those of subaltern students. Below, we examine some of the chal-lenges involved in introducing borderland students to critical perspectives onschooling. These challenges arose in part from the students’ investment in the cur-rent system; as pre-service teachers near to concluding their undergraduate degreein education, their perceptions of schooling (and their own identities) were tightlybound up with their own experiences of academic success. Additionally, they antici-pated entering the teaching profession with the mission of elevating other border-land students, intellectually and socially. To the degree that they conceived ofschooling as a political institution, they saw it as a benign one. The articulation oftheir experiences with the ideas to which we as faculty wished to expose themproved a difficult negotiation that called into question some of the assumptions ofcritical pedagogy. We have tried to draw from that experience some lessons forborderland educators that take into account the complex context in which ourstudents learn.

Theoretical framework: doing critical pedagogy with subaltern students

Without pretending to reduce the entire field of critical pedagogy to a singledefinition, there are certainly some key arguments that all those who identify withthat field collectively embrace. Among these are that educators and educationalinstitutions should display a commitment to democratic principles, and to combatinginstitutionalized inequalities such as racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, etc.Many self-professed critical educators would likely include capitalism in that list aswell, though many others believe that significant, even transformative social changecan occur even within the framework of capitalist society. Nonetheless, if weconsider critical pedagogy not just in terms of classroom practice, but as a subfieldof social theory, its roots in Marxist thought leave little doubt that capitalism loomslarge among the things it is critical of.

Another tenet of critical pedagogy is that schools are key institutions in thereproduction of social inequality. It is here that critical educators and theorists breakradically with mainstream discourses about education, which overwhelmingly viewschools as benign institutions dedicated to improving children’s social opportunitiesand to increasing the nation’s pool of knowledge and skills. Critical pedagogy holdsthat the unequal distribution of educational resources – the restricted opportunitiesoffered to some groups of children, the persistent imperialist/racist/patriarchalmythos that shapes the curriculum – are not “design flaws” of schooling, but rather

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design features, central to the functioning of the social system. Whereas mainstreamcritics often claim that schools are ineffective at fulfilling their designated missionof general social improvement, advocates of critical pedagogy (and their theoreticalforebears) claim that schools are operating as intended: that their much-ballyhooed“failures” are in fact manifestations of their effectiveness at reproducing a stratifiedsociety (Anyon, 1980; Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Johnson, 2006; Labaree, 1997;Rothstein, 1974; Spener, 1988; Varenne & McDermott, 1998, among others).

A third tenet of critical pedagogy is that schools not only reproduce social andeconomic inequality, but also function to mystify the sources of inequality and theirown role in maintaining it. In a seminal essay, neo-Marxist social theorist Althusser(1989) focused on schools as a key ideological state apparatus charged with nor-malizing capitalist social relations. It does this by framing the social stratificationrealized in schools as the politically neutral, logical outcome of merit-based sortingof students. Consequently, what has come to be known as the “meritocracy myth”is another of critical pedagogy’s prime targets (Kincheloe, 2008; McNamee &Miller, 2009; Sacks, 2001; Zamudio, Russell, Rios, & Bridgeman, 2010).

There is ample scholarship debunking the meritocracy myth and documentingthe ideological biases of school curricula (Apple, 1979/2004, 1988, 1996; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault, 1998/2000; Macedo,Gounari, & Dendrinos, 2003; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007; Noboa, 2005; Spring,2004; Urciuoli, 1996; Valenzuela, 1999; Weis, 1988; Weis, McCarthy, & Dimitria-dis, 2006; among others) and the negative school experiences suffered by working-class, minority, and immigrant students (Fine, 1991; Kozol, 1992, 2006; Oakes,1985/2005; Valenzuela, 1999). Thus, the key elements of critical pedagogy’s trans-formative project include not only “filling the gaps” in the curriculum, but enjoiningstudents in an analysis of the standard curriculum’s priorities and silences (Giroux,1992). Linking such analysis to students’ own knowledge and experience is a cru-cial means of constructing a more challenging, affirming, and empowering contextfor learning (Apple & Beane, 2007; Freire, 2004; hooks, 2003).

As critical border educators, we believe that an empowering education mustmake a radical break with students’ early school experiences, which (for most ofour students) were marked by the multiple marginalizations of ethnicity, nationality,and language. However, experience has taught us that we must deal not only withstudents’ negative educational legacies, but also with the ideological consequencesof a particular experience of success – one that emphasizes the triumph of pluck,hard work, and other individual qualities and de-emphasizes the impact of structuralobstacles. In many aspects, border students’ perceptions and narratives of theireducational experience reflect the axioms of critical antiracist pedagogy: the funda-mental assumption that low-income, immigrant, or non-English-speaking studentsare no less intellectually able than middle- or upper-class white children; the valueof family support, including that of parents who may themselves be unschooled;and the importance of authentic, caring relationships between teachers and students.At the same time, many of our students adhere firmly to some of the dominanteducational discourse’s central tenets: that talent and drive regularly trump socialdisadvantage; that individual strivings against adversity are a fair test of a child’sacademic potential; that parents whose involvement with the school does not followinstitutional expectations “don’t care” about their children’s education; and thatschools are basically well-intentioned institutions whose purpose is to decreasesocial inequality by offering avenues to social mobility.

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Especially for female, working-class, immigrant, and/or minority students, thereis thus a double-sided quality to their academic success. Collective awareness ofhistorical injustices, social stratification, and racial privilege exists alongside a deepinvestment in ideologies of individualism, competition, and meritocracy. The institu-tional mechanisms through which students have risen to the brink of professionalstatus have tracked/channeled them into specific positions in the workforce (in thiscase, that of public schoolteachers), while fostering an ideology that constructsthese outcomes as the products of personal choice. For many, it is the combinationof these apparently contradictory strands that has been the driving force behind theirown educational success.

In this context, a tension arises between two of the above-mentioned axioms ofcritical pedagogy: the emphasis on students’ own knowledge and experience, andthe critique of educational institutions as they currently function. Consider, forexample, the following statement by critical educator Ira Shor:

Because it deposits information uncritically in students, the banking model [ofteaching] is antidemocratic. It denies the students’ indigenous culture and their poten-tial for critical thought, subordinating them to the knowledge, values, and language ofthe status quo. (1992, p. 33)

Our own experiences with working-class students reveal this statement to beproblematic, in that it assumes that the students’ genuine, underlying, or “indige-nous” frameworks are in clear opposition to the status quo. In fact, subaltern stu-dents’ experiences and ideologies often have a complex relationship to the statusquo. A stronger formulation from Shor takes students’ culture as a starting point,but stresses the need for teachers to purposefully articulate it with a critical view ofsocial inequalities:

To be democratic implies orienting subject matter to student culture – their interests,needs, speech, and perceptions – while creating a negotiable openness in class wherestudents’ input jointly creates the learning process. To be critical in such a democraticcurriculum means to examine all subjects and the learning process with systematicdepth; to connect student individuality to larger social and historical issues; to encour-age students to examine how their experience relates to academic knowledge, topower, and to inequality in society; and to approach received wisdom and the statusquo with questions. (1992, pp. 16–17)

This statement acknowledges that a pedagogical emphasis on students’ ownexperience may not automatically lead to a critical perspective on traditional school-ing. In fact, the shift from individual experience to collective social critique andaction implies a pedagogical challenge. Indeed, when Shor presents concrete exam-ples from his own teaching experience, he focuses on his confrontation withstudents’ individualistic ideologies, and the ensuing classroom struggle towardcollective critical awareness (e.g. 1992, pp. 61–67, 118, 178–179).

More recent work emerging from the critical race theory perspective, especiallythe “LatCrit” movement focusing on the experience of Latino students and scholars,stresses the importance of indigenous counternarratives/counterstories that pushback against the dominant discourse about education (Giroux, Lankshear, McLaren,& Peters, 1996; Tumang & de Rivera, 2006; Yosso, 2006; Zamudio et al., 2011). InYosso’s words:


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Instead of blaming Chicano/a students or community cultural traditions [for pooracademic outcomes], a counter-story addresses the structures, practices and discoursesthat facilitate high dropout (pushout) rates along the Chicano/a educational pipeline …Counterstories reflect on the lived experiences of People of Color to raise criticalconsciousness about social and racial injustice. (2005, pp. 4, 10)

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that not every narrative offered by asubaltern subject is a counternarrative, in the same way that (as Marxist scholarshave observed) people’s ideologies are not directly predictable from their class posi-tion. The students described below – pre-service teachers from ethnic minority,working-class, and/or immigrant backgrounds – live and study amidst a tangle ofcontradictory circumstances. They interpret information about schooling from withincomplex understandings of their own past and current educational experiences –experiences not only of discrimination, marginalization, and forced assimilation, butalso of unprecedented social mobility and access. Consequently, their interpretativeframeworks combine notions of education as both a democratizing and a stratifyinginstitution. Their developing understandings of schooling include both the structuralbarriers that they have confronted as students, and the individualist ideologiesthrough which they have been socialized to interpret their success. Whereas Yossoasserts that “counterstories listen to the voices and experiences of racism’s victims”(2005, p. 15), many of our students would undoubtedly reject their categorizationas “victims.”

These observations point toward significant challenges in thinking through thecontent side of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy involves both dialogic, interac-tive instruction and socially critical content (i.e. content that interrogates existingsocial arrangements and ideologies from a social justice perspective). Such contentis not self-evident from the political stance of the instructor, nor does it emergespontaneously from interaction with students, even if they are empowered to engagein a critical exploration of social questions. Rather, critical content involves acomplex nexus of considerations at the intersection of course subject matter andstudents’ own lives and histories (e.g. Shor, 1980, pp. 1–40, 1992, pp. 211–236).

Other researchers have described this dynamic among working-class collegestudents in the USA. Anne Aronson (1999), teaching at Metropolitan State Univer-sity in St. Paul, Minnesota, found that the topic of social inequality was fraughtwith contradictions for her students, caught as they were between their hope forindividual upward mobility and their fear of downward mobility. The acute natureof this dilemma resulted in incoherent shifts between critical views of social injus-tice and faith in the existing system. Catherine Pari (1999), teaching at the Boroughof Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York, found thatstudents (many of them non-white, working-class immigrants or children of immi-grants) generally resisted class analysis, although they readily used racial/ethniclabels and analysis. She reports that, “differentiating people by class seemed unfairor discriminatory to these students, whereas class denial seemed to promote equalityand was needed for the upward mobility promised by the college” (1999, p. 137).Students were reticent about describing working-class life, which was close to manyof them, and seemed quick to distance themselves from the very poor and home-less, while they loved to describe their fantasies of suburban middle-class life.

In exploring the complicated intersection of student experiences (cultures) andpolitical subject matter, it is important to emphasize that course content matters.


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Aronson, Pari, and Shor draw their examples of participatory, critical pedagogyfrom writing, literature, and media courses; all of these address political questions,but they do not necessarily force the harshest contradictions of educational structureand experience to the surface.1 In our central case, taken from a teacher educationcourse, that is exactly what happened.

Analysis of structured social inequalities (race, gender, and especially class) canevoke complex emotions in academically successful students from non-traditionalbackgrounds. Confronted with their own victimization by and/or complicity in pro-cesses of social stratification, many take refuge in deeply rooted individualisticinterpretations of social mobility.2 While one can interpret this persistent individual-ism as an imposed framework, a mystifying ideology characteristic of (though notexclusive to) the USA, this is not the whole story. Educational individualism is notsimply “false consciousness” that can be shattered or transcended through the devel-opment of “critical consciousness.” Rather, it is a penetrating ideological webthrough which people make cognitive and emotional sense of their experiences inschools and in the larger society. To dismiss it without careful consideration doesnot do justice to students’ lives, nor is it a realistic pedagogical strategy whenfacing deep sedimentations of ideas and experiences.

In a parallel instance, Magda Lewis (2000) probes the logic of female students’ambivalence and resistance toward critical feminism, concluding that:

Pedagogy that is grounded in simple notions of false consciousness … does not sup-port knowledge invested with the meanings students ascribe to their own experiences.This not only buries the complexity of human choices in an unproblematized notionof self-interest but, further, can only offer validating or supplementary educationaloptions without transforming the conditions under which we learn. By fusing women’semotional and concrete lives through feminist critique, it is possible to make problem-atic the conditions under which women learn, and perhaps to make a feminist politicalagenda viable in women’s own lives wherein they can transcend the split betweenpersonal experience and social form. (2000, pp. 101–102)

Shor refers to this process as “desocialization.” Whereas he applies the conceptto his white, working-class students’ ideology of “competitive self-reliance” (1992,p. 118), our goal here is to explore a different but no less significant context for thiskind of political/pedagogical work. In doing so, we strive to avoid a glib adherenceto radical political content and to maintain a healthy respect for the complicated res-onances of that content to students’ own experiences and processes of reflection.Specifically, we aim to understand the life experiences and ideological frameworksof working-class, Mexican-American, female education students as they engage inclassroom dialogs about structural inequalities in schools, from their social positionas individual successes/survivors of those same inequalities. This process challengednot only students’ ideologies of schooling, but our own as well.

Background and methodology

We teach at a large public university serving mostly students from the US–Mexicoborder region – immigrants and children of immigrants. Over 75% of the studentbody is Mexican-American, and another 8–10% is Mexican nationals who commutedaily or weekly from across the border. The latter are by no means the only oneswho face the challenge of studying in a second language; many of our US-born


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students also struggle with academic and written English. At least half of thestudents come from working-class backgrounds; many are the first in their family toattend college. For most, the demands of academic life compete with the demandsof wage labor and/or caring for children. Although it is one of the least expensivefour-year colleges in the country, tuition, fees, parking, and textbooks are expensiverelative to students’ incomes; as a result, around 60% receive some form offinancial aid.

Although our students have already been “sorted” through many years ofschooling, their progress within academia’s skewed meritocracy is by no meansprobable or easy, compared to more privileged, “mainstream” students. Just beingin college is a noteworthy achievement in a state where barely half of Hispanicstudents graduate from high school on time.3 Correspondingly, our students are amix of the relatively privileged, the most persistent, and the luckiest among theirpeer group.

In a “majority–minority” city like ours (where over 80% of the population isMexican or Mexican-American), Mexicanness does not carry the stigma that it doeselsewhere in the USA. Nonetheless, the generalized acceptance of ethnic diversityin the region masks profound economic, educational, and linguistic inequalities.Additionally, many inhabitants live with the legal vulnerabilities that immigrants(documented and undocumented) typically suffer. But with the historical shift fromenforced ethnic segregation to a more complex, multidimensional system ofrelations based on class, race, gender, language, and immigration status, structuralinequities along the US–Mexico border have become probabilistic rather than abso-lute. Prominent examples of individual Hispanic “success stories,” decreasing publictolerance of blatant racism and the softening of more obvious barriers to socialmobility make it easier to justify persistent inequities in “meritocratic” terms.

The descriptions and analysis presented below are drawn from an undergraduateteacher education course in “Applied Critical Pedagogy,” taught by Luykx in 2005.The class consisted of 21 female, predominantly Mexican-American students in thefinal semester of their program; in addition to university-based courses, all weredoing their practicum as student interns in local elementary schools. At the time,the course was not conceived as the setting for a research study; rather, Luykx’sposterior reflections on the semester’s experience led her to review students’ com-ments from throughout the semester, as recorded in her own notes, email exchangeswith students, and on web-based discussion boards. From these data sources, com-ments were chosen that most clearly illustrated the perspectives and positions stakedout by different groups of students. While this necessarily involved a selective rep-resentation of students’ comments, our aim was to crystallize the key points of adialog that stretched across an entire semester, so as to shed light on certain theoret-ical and pedagogical implications that emerged from the debate. In this sense, thepresent work can be considered both an auto-ethnography (from Luykx’s perspec-tive) and a case study of a specific cohort of students at a specific moment in theircollege career.

Applied critical pedagogy: “too much” democracy?

Critical pedagogy rests firmly on the recognition of certain “social facts” – forexample, the unequal distribution of educational opportunities among differentsocial groups – that radically challenge popular notions about meritocracy, and the


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role of individual ability and effort in achieving social rewards. While we maintainthat teachers can and should help students to discern the effects of structural obsta-cles to social mobility (their own and others’), the challenge is how to do this in away that is empowering rather than debilitating. In the group of pre-service teachersthat form the focus of the present analysis, many found critical perspectives onschooling discouraging, and vociferously rejected them on those grounds. Faith inindividual agency and the basic fairness of the current system was deeply ingrainedin their early schooling, familial values, and cultural socialization (and in other ele-ments of their teacher education program), often sitting uncomfortably alongsidetheir awareness of discrimination and marginalization. In their own narratives ofschooling, these young women consistently de-emphasized the influence of ethnic,class, and historical factors; however, they frequently referred to the importance offamily, as a source of guiding values in their lives and crucial support for theirprofessional ambitions.

Given the complex and contradictory nature of our students’ lived experiencesand ideological frameworks, it was probably unrealistic to expect them to eagerlyembrace radical critiques of schooling without some personal struggle. Additionally,most public discourse about inequality in the USA is framed in terms of discrimina-tory attitudes, rather than structural constraints and institutionalized privilege. Forthose steeped in this discourse, it can be hard to perceive structural inequalities thatdo not manifest as explicit discrimination. As Shor notes: “It is hard to gain a struc-tural knowledge of the whole, a conceptual or systemic appreciation of society,when you are always dealing with pieces and fragments making big demands onyou” (1980, p. 35). This strikes us as a crucial insight into how students (and teach-ers) from minoritized groups experience their trajectory through schools.

The course got off to a rocky start; during the second meeting, the studentscalled a “time out” to express their concern about perceived gaps in their degreeprogram – specifically, a lack of training on classroom management and assessmentstrategies – and to ask that I4 use the course to remedy those gaps. Apparently, theterm “pedagogy” in the course title had led them to anticipate a class dedicated toinstructional strategies, and they were dismayed when I explained to them that “crit-ical pedagogy” meant something rather different. They viewed their professionalneeds as practical, not political: designing lesson plans, assessing students’ masteryof curricular benchmarks, and maintaining control over their classrooms. Thoughone of my central aims for the course was to reveal how such standard practicesare in fact political, the students were more interested in mastering the routines ofschooling than in deconstructing them.

The students’ demands evidently reflected not only their desire for more prepa-ration in certain areas, but also a wish to avoid certain topics that they perceived astiresome and irrelevant to the daily demands of classroom teaching. As criticaleducators, we believe that examining how social power and educational resourcesare distributed along lines of culture, language, class, and ethnicity is essential topreparing teachers for the border region – indeed, for any region. However, most ofthe students considered these topics to be esoteric, hackneyed, or (paradoxically)both. They claimed that the “multicultural ed stuff” was already familiar to themfrom other courses, though they had evidently not found previous encounters withit convincing.5 To them, the required senior-year course in critical pedagogy repre-sented yet another institutional hurdle on the road to graduation, which many wouldhave preferred to forego.


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Despite the disruption of my well-laid plans for the course, I admired the students’proactive attitude and felt that my commitment to critical pedagogy required that Itake their concerns seriously. Thus, two weeks into the semester I was scrambling toredesign my syllabus, balancing students’ input with my own priorities. However, asnegotiations over the course content dragged on, some of the less vocal studentsbecame frustrated. (I learned this only much later, when reading students’ end-of-semester reflections.) Unbeknownst to me, the power dynamic between professor andstudents was not the only one affecting these negotiations; divisions were presentamong students themselves, though they were not initially obvious to me. These divi-sions aligned with students’ varying levels of English fluency, inasmuch as the Span-ish-dominant students (who all sat together at one table) were more hesitant toparticipate actively in class discussions. As one such student wrote in her reflection:

We had to spend two or three class meetings just listening to the same persons onhow they wanted to manipulate your class. It is true that in our table we do notparticipate enough but it is because we know those persons that like to contradict theinstructors … you have valid reasons to listen to us as a new instructor at theuniversity, [but] that kept us away from learning.

Evidently, some students felt there was such a thing as “too much democracy” inthe classroom. While some appreciated the chance to have input in planning thecourse, not all felt that they had equal opportunities to be heard, and many wereimpatient for me to invoke my authority to cut off the debate.

Significantly, this latter group (“our table,” in the above excerpt) consisted ofthe students who were Mexican nationals. Throughout the university, those studentswho commute from the Mexican side of the border tend to be more privileged eco-nomically and educationally, as witnessed by their families’ ability to send them toa US college. On the other hand, they are at a linguistic disadvantage relative totheir classmates who grew up in the USA and attended US schools. Limited fluencyin English makes many Mexican students reluctant to speak out in class; it mayalso be that their educational socialization in Mexico instills in them rather differentexpectations with regard to professorial authority and students’ speaking rights.Although the Mexican students in the applied critical pedagogy course eventuallymade known to me (via email) their dissatisfaction with the amount of class timespent negotiating the syllabus, they were unwilling to directly challenge “thosepersons” who persisted in questioning my plan for the course.

Structure, agency, and deficit thinking: students wrestling with achievement gaps

Eventually, our curricular negotiations more or less resolved, I moved into discus-sions about how schools reproduce social inequality, via the ethnic and class-basedstratification that occurs under the guise of “meritocracy.” However, drawing stu-dents into this dialog proved difficult. When confronted with the fact that nearlyhalf of the state’s Latino youth fail to graduate from high school, several studentsbalked, perceiving such information as depressing and disempowering. Some putforth facile counter-examples to “disprove” structural explanations for persistentachievement gaps: for instance, that Bill Clinton rose from a lower middle-class“broken home” to the US presidency. Some even claimed that they “would ratherbe ignorant” and continue believing, albeit naively, that all their pupils had an equalchance of success.


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While such blanket optimism about the life chances of students from marginal-ized groups can be empowering, it also dovetails neatly with hegemonic discoursesthat attribute social and educational inequalities to the personal or cultural character-istics of minority students and their families.6 These young women had alreadylearned that “deficit thinking” was frowned upon in the College of Education; nonewould admit to believing that race or class determined academic ability, and yet theyresisted alternative explanations for educational inequalities. Although they acknowl-edged the realities of poverty, linguistic subordination, and immigrant parents’ lackof “cultural capital,” they believed such social factors were regularly trumped byindividual drive and motivation. Not once in class did they acknowledge that highlytalented or determined students could also succumb to structural limitations, for rea-sons beyond their control; nor would they engage the question of whether achieve-ment gaps should thus be ascribed, not to class or racial differences in intelligence(an explanation which they unanimously rejected), but in “drive and motivation.”Despite their public disavowal of deficit thinking, they continued to pin the causesof school failure on students and their families. Appeals to their own educationalexperience – a key element of critical pedagogy – were seldom effective in leadingthem toward more critical analyses; rather, they interpreted their own educationalsuccesses as further evidence against structural theories of social inequality.

The students’ resistance to examining their own educational trajectories in termsof collective marginalization or privilege led them to cast non-successful children asindividual failures, rather than as the predictable products of structural discrimina-tion. In class discussions and in their student teaching journals, they repeatedlyexpressed their frustration with kids who were “bad,” “lazy,” “unmotivated,” or“uninterested in learning,” and parents who “don’t care” (almost always parentswhom they had not met). Their own experiences of “beating the odds” were muchmore salient to them than the broader contours and social origins of the “odds”themselves. In short, they saw “structure” and “agency” as mutually exclusiveexplanations of school success or failure, rather than as equally valid factors whosearticulation must be analyzed and explained.

In part, it was difficult to engage students in forceful critiques of ethnic, class,and gender discrimination precisely because they were surrounded daily by academ-ically successful Latinos/as. Their own efforts and those of their classmates hadbeen rewarded with not just the promise, but the reality of social mobility; not sur-prisingly, they felt not only empowered by but invested in the meritocratic view ofeducation. From the perspective of a critical educator or social theorist, minorityand low-income students’ presence in academia serves partly as a foil for underly-ing ethnic and class hierarchies, deflating radical critiques of inequality and allow-ing those hierarchies to continue reproducing themselves with only minorvariations. But to those whose lives have been transformed by such “variations,” itis difficult (and perhaps even insulting) to characterize them as “minor.” Onestudent expressed this perspective in her end-of-semester reflection:

For us being at the university means as much as I am sure [it] means for you havinga Doctor’s degree … Since I was in high school, I had to work to help my householdand that made me set other priorities. My situation is not unique. I have to work, goto school and take care of an ill parent. It takes time and money to do all those things.Probably you will hear similar situations from many of the students from UTEP,because in El Paso many of the people come from poor families and they had to facemany problems to be able to accomplish a better life.


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Nevertheless, this student’s (private) acknowledgment of the difficulties commonlyfaced by UTEP students did not lead her to embrace a structural critique of thosedifficulties. Were students perhaps hesitant to speak of such things in a whole-classsetting, out of fear that they would be perceived as “making excuses” or “playingthe victim card”? Or did they interpret professors’ efforts to draw attention to theircollective disadvantage as somehow belittling their aspirations? Unfortunately, thetense dynamic of the class itself did not foster the sense of trust and rapport thatmight have allowed us to resolve these questions.

After one particularly frustrating class session, I sent a long email to thestudents, outlining what I considered to be the key points of our unresolved debate.I stressed the need to get contrasting explanations out on the table where they couldbe subjected to rigorous analysis, and urged them to avoid the traps of argument-by-anecdote or euphemistic language that obscured potentially controversial claims.Pushing them to weigh the merits of competing explanations of educationalinequalities, and to formulate some of their own, I wrote:

… when you assume that educational success is [solely] a result of individual driveand motivation, it is deficit thinking that is lurking underneath that assumption …[Given that] you don’t believe that intellectual ability is unevenly distributed by race,how do you explain the achievement gaps among ethnic groups? Do you think that“motivation” is unevenly distributed by race? If so, how would you explain that?

I ended the message with the following questions:

What do YOU think are the reasons underlying “achievement gaps”? There is over-whelming evidence that educational success IS unevenly distributed by race and socialclass. So, if you don’t think it’s schools that stratify students into “losers” and“winners” (by SES, race, etc.), then who or what is doing it? Students themselves?Their parents? If you don’t have a definitive answer yet, that’s fine, but I need toknow your thoughts on it.

One student sent the following email response (the general sentiment of whichwas echoed by several others):

I feel that if we believe our students can succeed then this will be conveyed to ourstudents and this will make them feel they can be successful... [Understanding] theobstacles minorities face when looking at the “big picture” is depressing. Just becauseI learn to understand the educational system does not mean I can change it …. In fact,I feel that if I familiarize myself with the “system” and all of the obstacles and preju-dices facing minorities, this will only leave me bitter and this what will be expressedin my teaching. I guess I just don’t want to see the “big picture.” I want to focus allof my energy on the “little picture” going on in my classroom. Maybe this makes meignorant, but this is how I feel. I want to care about my students and make them feelthey can do anything they want to. I guess this is my belief and I just don’t feel Ineed to be open to change it. Does this make me closed-minded? Possibly. But I thinkthis is what will make me a good teacher.

This student’s cogent explication of her position affirms the importance ofpositive expectations from teachers to promoting student success. However, whatalso stood out in her argument were her frank avowal of ignorance as empower-ment and her pessimism about possibilities for social change. While acknowledgingthat she had learned something about the “big picture” of how the educational


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system functions, she explicitly rejected that knowledge as not useful to her in herrole as a future teacher. Nonetheless, her elucidation of her position also points tosome possible strategies for addressing these issues.

First of all, let us examine the claim that one will be a better teacher if oneignores empirical information about the structural inequalities affecting one’s stu-dents. The student cited above makes a valid point in arguing that bitterness overthe “big picture” is not an empowering position from which to help children suc-ceed. However, the assumption that information – knowledge – necessarily leads tobitterness is debatable. In later iterations of the course, I found the metaphor of anobstacle course to be helpful in communicating the utility of being well-informedabout the “big picture.” If children must navigate multiple obstacles in their pursuitof academic success, teachers who are cognizant of these obstacles will be betterable to assist their students by pointing out the obstacles and suggesting strategiesfor overcoming them. Also, helping children understand that many obstacles are notof their own making – i.e. are not the result of their own personal or familial defi-cits – seems like a more empowering strategy than letting children take the blamefor factors that are beyond their control.

This is not to argue that students have no agency or personal responsibility fortheir academic achievement; simply that analyzing the interplay of personal andsocial factors can help them avoid the crushing sense of personal incompetence andinternalized racism that may otherwise come to define their school experience. Evenyoung children become aware, through their experiences and observations, of thegendered, racial, and class-based patterns shaping school success and failure;throughout this process, they should be exposed to competing explanations of socialinequality, and to the analytical tools for evaluating them. Aside from providing amore empowering alternative to self-blame and hopelessness, such analysis alsohelps young people develop a clearer picture of how society actually works, whichcertainly must be at the center of any democratic notion of education.

The second argument raised in the student’s email is that a clear view of society’sinner workings leads to defeatism: “Just because I learn to understand the educationalsystem does not mean I can change it.” On the one hand, teachers’ desire to focustheir energies on the “little picture” of the individual classroom is as understandableas it is widespread. On the other hand, the insistence on focusing only on “thosethings we can change” begs the question of how we determine the limits of our powerto transform societal conditions. In fact, there are numerous instances of teachers, par-ents, and students, armed only with information and an understanding of injustice,who have organized to bring about real change in their schools and communities. Thecivil rights era is replete with historical examples, but more recent accounts are alsoavailable (Nathan, 1996; Shirley, 2002; Turner & Font Strawhun, 2004/05). In short,the notion that ordinary people cannot make change is not only false, it is also part ofwhat allows oppressive conditions and structures to remain in place.

Subjectivity and social analysis: how students’ and professors’ identities shapethe pedagogical encounter

The realization that social inequalities are deeply embedded in the structure ofschooling can have a debilitating effect on students, at least initially. Faith in thepower of talent and gumption to overcome all odds may in fact be a survival strat-egy for students who are economically disadvantaged but academically ambitious;


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perhaps their Horatio Alger-style ideology helps them persevere through difficultiesto which they otherwise might succumb. It may also be a defense against ethnic,class, and gender-based stigmas from the larger society; in other words, arguing thatacademic and economic failure is a result of individual behaviors rather than mem-bership in any particular social group allows students to distance themselves fromnegative stereotypes of Mexican-American women.

Interestingly, there was less resistance to structural interpretations of minorityschool failure among the Mexican students, who tended to be from a higher eco-nomic stratum than their Mexican-American classmates. As mentioned above, thismay be partly due to cultural differences regarding the propriety of arguing withone’s professors. However, the Mexican students’ prior socialization differed inother ways as well. They were well aware of their own (fairly conspicuous) classprivilege and the role it played in facilitating their access to a US university. Differ-ences in national ideologies around social class may also have played a role; inMexico, class-based analyses are more widely circulated and public awareness ofsocial stratification is less muted, while in the USA, even those quite far from themiddle of the economic spectrum (on either end) tend to see themselves as “mid-dle-class,” and class-based explanations of inequality tend to be actively marginal-ized in public discourse (Alper & Leistyna, 2006).

As was mentioned earlier, critical race theory stresses the importance of “coun-ter-narratives,” originating in the experiences of people of color, to provide alterna-tive and/or oppositional discourses to the dominant perspective. Counter-narratives“help counteract stereotypes and expose the contingent nature of presumed universaltruths … they are also important for the way they help provide a sense of place andbelonging” (Zamudio et al., 2011, p. 145). However, not all students find that“sense of place and belonging” in counter-narratives that are rooted in a collectiveethnic experience of subordination. As we have seen, the students described hereinshared and circulated certain stereotypes of Mexican immigrant parents and chil-dren; they themselves seemed to find their “sense of belonging” in what they per-ceived as a new generation of academically successful Hispanic women. In fact,most of them (like many other students at UTEP) rejected the label “Chicano/a” (oreven “Latino/a”) as belonging to an earlier, more politically militant generation.They saw not activism but education – their own and that which they would impartto their future students – as the solution to collective marginalization.

Of course, the contours of classroom discussion are shaped not only by stu-dents’ ethnic and class identities, but by those of their professors as well. Students’interpretations of what professors wish to impart to them are filtered through theirperceptions and assumptions about the latter’s own social identities. Critical educa-tors cannot assume that radical credentials will be enough to earn students’ trust, orthat expressions of solidarity will easily convince students that professors are “ontheir side.” Faculty who highlight their own ethnic or working-class roots may beperceived as downplaying their own privilege, or as asserting a superficial solidaritythat is belied by their institutionalized authority and their power over students’futures.7 Conversely, professors who explicitly acknowledge their own class or eth-nic privilege may appear to students as boastful or condescending – as apparentlywas the case with the student quoted above, who defensively compared her high-school degree to my Ph.D. In short, the mutual examination of life trajectories is adelicate dance that can just as easily damage the rapport between teacher andstudents, as strengthen it.


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Students’ assumptions about professors’ social identities can lead them to inter-pret critical political content in unexpected ways, especially in the early weeks ofthe semester when participants are just getting to know one another. In an earlyclass discussion of how social stratification affects children’s life chances, I com-mented that no children from the elementary school in which we were meeting (abilingual school serving mostly low-income Mexican and Mexican-American stu-dents) were likely to become president of the USA, despite administrators’ rhetoricto the contrary. Several students became incensed at this, interpreting it as a com-ment on the children’s abilities, rather than as a critique of our money-driven politi-cal system. Similarly, I once made an (admittedly rather glib) comment about howan important function of schooling is to stratify students and determine “who willget the crappy jobs.” This drew umbrage from one young woman whose husbandwas a truck driver; she asserted without hesitation: “There are no crappy jobs!”While I admired her readiness to stand up for the dignity of working-class labor, Ialso had to clarify that my intention had not been to disparage that labor but toacknowledge the realities of exploitation. For me, a “crappy job” is not one thatdoes not require a college degree, but rather one that breaks the body, deadens thespirit, and pays substandard wages – jobs that many of these students were all toofamiliar with.

In a similar vein, efforts to acknowledge or accommodate difference throughone’s classroom practice may be viewed by students as stigmatizing. For example,when students worked in small groups, I sometimes placed the Spanish-dominantstudents together, so that ease of communication would not constitute a barrier totheir conversation and their contributions would not be overwhelmed by those ofthe fluent English speakers (as so often happens in classrooms with differing levelsof English fluency). Later, one of them told me that she considered this (and, infact, any mention of their “difference” from the other students) to be discriminatory.(In subsequent classes, I found that if I made clear that Spanish was an acceptablemedium for classroom discussions, students would often use it in their group workwithout any explicit direction from me.)

In fact, tensions between Mexican and Mexican-American students were an every-day reality at UTEP. Throughout the campus, these tensions manifest in various ways:criticisms of some students’ “border Spanish” (or lack of Spanish), disparaging com-ments about economically privileged “international” students, conspicuous spatialsegregation in public areas. Nevertheless, there seemed to be a tacit agreement on allsides to ignore such differences in the classroom. Early in the semester, during anexercise on different kinds of social diversity, one student remarked: “There’s notmuch diversity in El Paso, everyone’s Mexican!” Unwilling to let this pass withoutcomment, I called students’ attention to all the ways in which the local Mexican andMexican-American population was internally differentiated: income level, educationallevel, language fluency (in both English and Spanish), occupation, immigration status,skin color,8 etc. Students grudgingly acknowledged these differences but did not seemeager to make them a topic of discussion.

One result of these experiences was my decision, in later versions of the course,to spend the first few weeks not only establishing guidelines and expectationsaround course content, assignments, assessment criteria, etc., but also in what I havecome to call identity work. For example, students interviewed each other and thenwrote, read, and discussed narratives of their personal educational trajectories; insmall groups, they shared thoughts about their own ethnic identities and what these


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implied for them as future teachers; they collectively examined the privileges theyenjoyed and the disadvantages they endured in relation to body type, race, gender,language, age, (dis)ability, etc.; some even wrote remarkable poems about theirrootedness in particular places or traditions (e.g. Lozano, 2007). In other words, wetake the time to build a learning community and discover what each of us brings tothe pedagogical encounter. From this exploration, students come to see that criticalpedagogy is not simply “content” delivered by a generic professor to generic stu-dents; rather, who we are shapes the knowledge we create. Since that first difficultsemester, I have found that political content is more productively engaged if theclass knows something about who is presenting that content, from what perspective,and why. For example, students can be persuaded to talk about their early experi-ences as “low-tracked” or otherwise marginalized students, but only after I haveestablished, over the course of several weeks, that I do not consider those negativeexperiences to be credible indicators of their ability or worth.

Part of college students’ socialization involves developing an identity as an“educated person,” distinct from the uneducated (see Levinson, Holland, & Foley,1996). Inhabiting this new subjectivity usually entails disassociating oneself fromprior identities defined by the stigmas of poverty, racism, and linguistic and culturalmarginalization. Critical educators must acknowledge this process, and theindividual empowerment it provides to the upwardly mobile, while also combatingits divisive tendencies and striving to develop a broader social solidarity in ourstudents. The conflicts and negotiations examined thus far suggest some ways inwhich this might be done.

Implications for pedagogy: fostering strategic optimism in the classroom

The classroom experiences described above demonstrate that the sense of empower-ment and accomplishment felt by successful subaltern students is potentially threa-tened by the notion that the social and institutional obstacles they had to overcomeare not “design flaws” of schooling, but rather design features, essential to thesocial functions of the system. Certainly there were momentary breakthroughs,when students appeared to grasp how their own academic success could function tosupport dominant claims of the meritocracy’s allegedly non-discriminatory nature,even while institutionalized discrimination persists. But even during those moments,it was hard to convince them that acknowledging the ways in which children’s lifechances are shaped by race, class, language, and nationality need not lead to despair– any more than counter-examples of successful working-class/immigrant studentsshould justify a view of schooling as completely benign.

While it is important to acknowledge the structural obstacles that many studentsface, researchers and educators alike have too often contributed to the litany of fail-ure that dominates discussions of minority education. The constant drumbeat ofresearch studies, press accounts, political speeches, and everyday conversation link-ing low-income students, immigrant students, and students of color to academicfailure risks reinforcing a sense of its own inevitability. It is equally important tobuild (and broadcast) a vision of achievement for such students – one that combinesacademic excellence with political efficacy – and to emphasize that this is not a uto-pian dream but a present reality. There are myriad success stories of teachers andcommunities doing transformative work in and outside of classrooms,9 but theseseldom garner as much public attention as do the “failure stories” (which, tellingly,seem to focus more on test scores than on classrooms).


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A key feature of hegemony is its tendency to naturalize the status quo and limitour perceptions of what social action can achieve. Thus, a crucial first step towardtransformative action is refusing to accept the limits set by the existing social order.Luykx (1999) frames this as a balance between structural pessimism and strategicoptimism. We see glimmers of strategic optimism in students who defend their pur-poseful ignorance of “the big picture” by arguing that more of their future pupilswill graduate from high school if their teachers believe they will. There is somemerit to this argument; teachers who view structural obstacles as insurmountableare likely to hold low expectations of disadvantaged students, and to display passiv-ity in the face of social conditions that need transforming. Still, though blind ideal-ism is undoubtedly less damaging than untempered pessimism, teachers’pedagogical efficacy can be limited by ignorance or denial of the real structural bar-riers affecting their students. Devising and implementing strategies to combat socialinequality requires a clear-eyed analysis of its causes and effects. The willingness todo this analysis (and to engage one’s students in it) is what makes our optimismstrategic, distinguishing it from simple (acritical) hopefulness.

Our challenge as critical educators is to make our students aware of the oppres-sive ideologies and practices that shape our society, without pushing them towardfatalism or cynicism. There is ample evidence that when teachers engage studentsin collective analysis and critique of social inequalities, they foster deeperinvolvement and higher levels of learning among students from marginalizedgroups. However, a pedagogical focus on structural barriers to equity can also dis-courage and disempower students, if it is not continually infused with a sense ofpossibility and agency. Our aim is to inspire our students toward transformativeaction, not to convince them that any attempts to combat social injustice are futile.

What pedagogical tools might promote these goals? One technique we havefound useful is to share autobiographical essays by outstanding students from work-ing-class or immigrant backgrounds, who found academic success only after beingpushed out of school by negative experiences or discouraged from attending collegeby indifferent teachers or counselors. Given the characteristics of our student body,UTEP is a potentially rich source of such essays. By conveying in poignant andhuman terms, the institutional barriers and patterns of discrimination that character-ize our school systems, these essays highlight the authors’ close calls with educa-tional and social failure. Rather than reinforcing the ideological notion that“individual motivation triumphs over all,” they usually evoke feelings of empathywith the authors, not only as college peers, but as the confused and discouragedchildren they once were. These stories of talented young people who came peril-ously close to dropping (or being pushed) out of the educational system generallyarouse feelings of both relief and dismay in our students, igniting a determinationto not let these situations continue when they themselves become teachers.

In order to lead students toward a deeper engagement with the social contradic-tions of schooling, educators must unpack not only the experiences and ideologiesof their students, but also their own assumptions about how students’ social andideological trajectories position them with regard to critical political content. Thisrequires close attention to the contradictions that students themselves bring to theclassroom. The border setting provides excellent source material for illustrating howthe social stratification (rather than outright exclusion) of a minoritized ethnic groupserves to defend an unjust social order from deep transformation. This workrequires a more intimate examination of students’ own class/ethnic/gender/national


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identities, which is difficult to achieve in the space of a semester, especially giventhe constant pressure to cover subject matter content. It is our belief that makingstudents’ lives an integral part of the subject matter is essential if they are toincorporate critical political content into their view of themselves as educators, andhopefully into their own pedagogical practice.

Clearly, this sort of work takes time, as well as a commitment by the professorto make his or her own identity vulnerable to the same sort of examination. In caseswhere white professors are teaching students of color, this is especially necessary.At the very least, students should learn that class, racial, and national privileges areconstructed in relation to less privileged identities, that neither exists without theother. Therefore, if (for example) students are directed to discuss their own ethnicidentifications in small groups, it is helpful for the professor to join one or more ofthe groups. “Identity work” around race and class asks a lot of students, and aproductive sense of collective undertaking is created when professors show thatthey are willing to ask the same of themselves.

Additionally, interpersonal exploration of how students’ initial perceptions maynot match up with classmates’ notions of their own ethnic identity can have a muchgreater impact than abstract admonitions against stereotyping. Luykx was part of aparticularly powerful example of this when she joined a small group of four stu-dents directed to describe their respective ethnic identities to each other. At firstglance, the students (all male) appeared to consist of one Anglo, one Mexicannational, and two Mexican-Americans. The discussion revealed that the supposedAnglo in fact had a Mexican grandmother and spoke Spanish; the supposedMexican student (who was the most “culturally Mexican” of all the students, andstruggled mightily with English) was in fact a US citizen; the single Mexican-American student felt his ethnic identity to be compromised by the fact that he didnot speak Spanish; and the fourth student was in fact not Mexican-American at all,but Chilean-American. So much for “no diversity here, everyone’s Mexican.”

Whereas the above-mentioned strategies are applicable to many kinds of class-rooms, our experiences at UTEP suggest several specific strategies for teacher edu-cators. First of all, we must help students sharpen their analytical skills byexamining both the power and the limits of “striving” (hard work, good study hab-its, etc.). We might direct them to gather statistical evidence on graduation andretention rates of Hispanic students (and on the state’s manipulation of this data), orto reflect on the educational trajectories of their less academically successful rela-tives or peers whom they nonetheless consider “smart” and “motivated.” Withoutdiminishing the significance of their own achievements, we must keep them mindfulof those who did not manage to overcome the many obstacles to high schoolgraduation.10

Critical educators in other geographical settings more often face the challenge ofmaking students aware of their own privilege, of deflating the sense of entitlementso common among white, middle-class, English-speaking students. In contrast,those of us serving a largely immigrant and working-class student body have aresponsibility to communicate to students that they deserve their success – but with-out reinforcing the notion that those who did not succeed simply did not deserve it,or did not want it badly enough. By examining how their own and others’ educa-tional paths have been shaped by both individual and structural factors, pre-serviceteachers may transcend the ideological notion of “deserving” and “undeserving”children, and realize that abstract qualities such as “intelligence,” “motivation,” and


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“potential” are not fixed, but rather emerge from the ebb and flow of structuralconditions and personal circumstances. Qualities that were structurally defined asliabilities at earlier stages of their lives, such as coming from a working-class,cross-border family or speaking English as a second language, can become assets ifthey are embraced and mined for their pedagogical potential. Pre-service teachersare critically positioned to multiply this effect, modeling for their own future pupilsa critical awareness of structural obstacles and the resilience and skills to overcomethem.

In addition to the “identity work” described above, engaging pre-service teach-ers in the critical examination of institutional routines and relationships in theirinternship schools is also valuable. When they can “put themselves in the shoes” ofother educational subjects – struggling readers, English language learners,immigrant parents, students whose homework must take a backseat to wage laboror child care – they come to see that educational institutions that seem friendly andbenign to some can appear as intimidating or oppressive to others. This is an impor-tant first step in confronting, in concrete terms, the many ways in which schoolsfunction to reproduce inequality.

It is also crucial that the “bad news” about schools be followed up by “goodnews,” for schools can be places of creativity and comunitas as well as of domina-tion and stratification. Our students need to experience the many ways in whichcritical social analysis can empower young people, promoting success for marginal-ized students rather than discouraging it. Pre-service teachers (and everyone else)should be exposed to a range of examples of how ordinary people have successfullyeducated and organized themselves to combat inequality. For example, Dennis Shir-ley’s book Valley Interfaith and School Reform, which chronicles the successes (andthe limitations) of low-income immigrant communities organizing in and throughschools, is now a regular fixture in my course syllabi, as are materials of and linksto numerous educators and organizations confronting educational injustice aroundthe country.11 I also make sure that students realize that some of our best coursereadings were written by the critical educator Kelley Dawson Salas when she her-self was a pre-service teacher in an alternative certification program (see Salas,Tenorio, Walter, & Weiss, 2004).

Perhaps most importantly, we can model activism for our students, sharing withthem our extracurricular activities in pursuit of a more just society and providingthem with opportunities (and extra credit) to get involved outside the classroom. AsBill Bigelow, editor of Rethinking Schools, notes: “If we neglect to include an activ-ist component in our curriculum, we cut students off from the possibility of socialchange. We model apathy as a response to the world’s problems” (1994, p. 38).

The student population served by UTEP is one that, a generation ago, wouldhave had little hope of attending college at all. Few of our students are aware ofthe specific struggles and actors that brought about much-needed changes in thatregard. In contrast, they are sharply aware of their status as counterexamples tobroader social patterns of opportunity and failure, and of the familial investment rid-ing on their aspirations. Undermining this awareness – this identification with amodel of success that is intensely promoted in their families and communities – infavor of a vision of society that portrays them as simple cogs in the machine ofsocial reproduction is neither strategic nor kind, and is likely to provoke defeatismand resentment. Students should be encouraged to read their personal and collective“counterstories” as narratives of power and agency, but ones that come with


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responsibility. Ideally, their success will inspire them to reject the complacency ofindividual satisfaction and political quiescence, and to work towards an educationalsystem where extraordinary persistence and herculean sacrifice are not minimumrequirements for every low-income or immigrant student who wants to attendcollege.

At its best, college should help students envision not only their individual careerpaths, but collective solutions to patterns of social inequality and subordination.The central message we hope to communicate to pre-service teachers is that an edu-cator’s responsibility is not just to help students “beat the odds” by learning to navi-gate a system that is stacked against them, but to change the odds. It is importantto challenge the facile “every-child-can-succeed” rhetoric that allows faculty andstudents to gloss over the difficult contradictions of students’ lives. Facing hardtruths about schools and society can, “lead students and teachers together, not tothe solution of problems but to direct intelligent engagement in the struggles thatmight lead to solutions” (Kohl, 1994, p. 135). In a working-class, commuter univer-sity like ours – which, as Linkon (1999, p. 3) points out, reflects the majority settingof higher education – deep, reflective learning implies a continual process of thought-ful self-examination, using the resources of students’ own experience along with theaccumulated knowledge and perspectives of our various disciplines. By gettingstudents’ assets and vulnerabilities, both individual and collective, out onto the table,we provide them with more and better tools for constructing liberatory pedagogies oftheir own.

Notes1. Also, writing courses offer more flexibility in subject matter than do content-driven

courses, as Shor recognizes (1992, pp. 73–79). While questions of how to approach orinclude content do present opportunities for teacher–student collaboration, it is also ourview that teachers should retain authority to make sure that certain topics and ideas arecovered. This is relevant, insofar as students may initially skirt disturbing topics, asdiscussed in the text.

2. Of course, this process is not unique to college students. Foundational work such asSennet and Cobb (1972), as well as more recent research such as Hoschild (1995) andJohnson (2006), reveal the persistence of working-class and ethnic minority families’adherence to ideologies of meritocracy and the “American Dream,” even as structuralbarriers to social mobility intensify.

3. Official statistics on state graduation rates are notoriously unreliable; the use of mislead-ing indicators and outright fraud have led to at least one lawsuit (Leung, 2004). TheTexas Education Association website states that the grade 9–12 longitudinal dropout ratewent from 11.4% in 2007 to 10.5% for the Class of 2008 (TEA, 2009a, 2009b). How-ever, this is substantially lower (in fact, less than half) than what their own enrollmentdata would suggest. McNeil’s (2005) calculations of Texas graduation and dropout rates,based on her own analysis of TEA data, are drastically different than those given byTEA for the same period. McNeil claims manipulation of student data at both the stateand district levels (see also Shapleigh, 2010). The articles in Valenzuela (1999) examinethe disproportionate impact of Texas’s test-based “accountability” system on Hispanicstudents in greater detail.

4. In this narrative, the pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” refer to Luykx, who taught thecourse. “We/us/our” refer either to the authors' joint analysis, or to Luykx and her stu-dents, which is made clear by context.

5. Although they were not familiar with the specific readings chosen for the course, thetitles – “Social Reproduction in Theoretical Perspective” (Chapter 2 of MacLeod, 1995),“Conceptualizing the Notion of Deficit Thinking” (Chapter 1 in Valencia, 1997),


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“Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning” (Ogbu, 1992), etc. – were enough forthem to discern (and reject) the direction in which I planned to take the class.

6. For a historical analysis of this perspective, see Valencia (1997).7. See Urrieta (2009) for a nuanced discussion of the challenges of critiquing educational

institutions from the inside.8. Though the supra-category of “Mexican” is often used to refer to all those (Mexican-

born and US-born) who are descended from citizens of Mexico, differences in skin colorare a salient (though imprecise) marker of social class. Also, the region is home to atleast one indigenous group of significant size; while members of this indigenous groupare most conspicuous as beggars or street vendors in the (Mexican) regional capital, anumber of UTEP students also acknowledge at least partial indigenous ethnicity, oftenthrough a grandparent.

9. See Apple and Beane (2007), Ladson-Billings (1994), Perry, Steele, and Hilliard (2003),Shirley (1997, 2002); the student case studies in Nieto and Bode (2007); as well as theconsistently inspiring work of teacher collectives like Rethinking Schools and Teachingfor Change.

10. On occasion, I (Luykx) have kept an empty chair at the front of the classroom, as avisual reminder for students of those peers who did not make it to college, in spite oftheir strivings.

11. This point was recently brought home to me once again, while preparing a PowerPointpresentation on the school-to-prison pipeline. The data were so grim that I myself wasdepressed before I finished it. However, my discouragement lifted when I realized (luck-ily, before I showed it in class) that I had neglected to include the crucial final slide:“What we can do about it.”

Notes on contributorsAurolyn Luykx is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at ElPaso. She is the author of The Citizen Factory: Schooling and Cultural Production inBolivia (SUNY Press, 1999) and co-author (with Okhee Lee) of Science Education andStudent Diversity: Synthesis and Research Agenda (Cambridge University Press, 2006), aswell as numerous articles on schooling and language policy for linguistically and culturallymarginalized populations in Latin America and the USA.

Josiah Heyman is a professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department ofAnthropology and Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the editor of Statesand Illegal Practices (Berg, 1999), and the author of Finding a Moral Heart for USImmigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective (American AnthropologicalAssociation, 1998), Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora,Mexico, 1886–1986 (University of Arizona Press, 1991), and more than 70 scholarlyarticles, book chapters, and essays. His most recent publications are “Culture theory and theUS–Mexico border” in A Companion to Border Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and (withJohn Symons) “Borders” in A Companion to Moral Anthropology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).He has also participated in numerous community initiatives addressing public policy andhuman rights in the USA–Mexico border region.

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Luykx, Aurolyn, and Josiah McC. Heyman, “The limits of critical pedagogy: teaching about...

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