Reviewed by Alice E. Ginsberg

Gorski, Paul C., Kristien Zenkov, Nana Osei-Kofi, and Jeff Sapp, eds. Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts. Sterling, Va.: Stylus, 2013. 256pp.

“The point here is that, because we are socialized to experience the world in particular ways, we must work to free ourselves from the constraints of common sense.”

                                            —Gorski, 96

    While many of the topics addressed in Cultivating Social Justice Teachers—such as racism, poverty, and homophobia—are hardly new to teacher educators or courses in teacher education programs, the ways in which they are explored in [End Page 169] this phenomenal new book most certainly are. Even if you already identify yourself as a social justice teacher or progressive teacher educator, you will undoubtedly find yourself thinking, Why didn’t I think of that? Part of what makes this book so provocative is the way the contributors’ chapters focus on their own creative, inquiry-based, and highly interactive strategies and assignments to help students through the “learning bottleneck.”

    In the introduction, the editors describe what 

they mean by a “learning bottleneck”: this is when 

students are learning about a social justice issue, 

maybe even coming closer to being about to view 

it through a new perspective or critical lens, but 

still not fundamentally able to operationalize it in 

their practice. The book takes the stance that 

educating social justice teachers goes way beyond 

teaching content knowledge or seminal theories; 

student teachers need to understand how they 

came to construct and reconstruct their own 

identities and positionality in the classroom, and 

the resulting impact on their students. One of the 

editors, Jeff Sapp, explains that the most commonly 

asked questions in teacher education are “what or 

how will you teach?” while we frequently ignore the 

more significant questions around who: “Who is the 

self that teaches? How does that quality of my 

selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my 

students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?” 

(200).

    In other words, the book does a noteworthy 

job of connecting key theories around cultural 

identity, power, privilege, equity, and social justice, to an array of unique assignments and teaching reflections that force students to become critical consumers of these same theories—often using themselves as the primary texts for discussion. The book strongly encourages bringing students to a “liminal state,” that is, “when learners are caught in dissonance as they grapple with possibilities of new ways of seeing in light of old ways of knowing” (5).

    Moreover, the book suggests that too often we approach teaching social justice purely from a deficit perspective, one that does not take into account important concepts like intersectionality, structural oppression, agency, representation, and voice. We ask questions like How can we help people in poverty? or How can we make the world more equitable for people discriminated against based on their race or sexuality? yet frequently ignore the mirror questions around what it means to have and to recognize the role of systemic oppression in creating “unearned” privileges. When we talk and think about privileges in the classroom, we need to ask hard questions, such as Who constructs them? How do they interact and sometimes shift emphasis? Who benefits from them? If we change one system (e.g., capitalism, meritocracy, separation of church and state, immigration laws) how might it affect another? Moreover, we need to be prepared to ask ourselves even more complex questions about how to make those in power conscious of their various privileges and to consider what their lives would be like if these privileges were eliminated or restructured. As one contributor, Warren J. Blumenfeld, suggests, the process is similar to “moving students from cultural tourism” toward “critical multiculturalism” (130).

    One of the first chapters—“The Art of Teaching Intersectionality” by Nana Osei-Kofi—provides an excellent framework for reading the rest of the book. As a “threshold concept,” intersectionality must be at the heart of any discussion or exploration [End Page 170] of oppression and justice. Warning against using intersectionality as a “buzz word,” (which it is fast becoming), Osei-Kofi suggests specific strategies that

ask students to actively consider “how structural forces shape the ways they construct their own identities and how processes of socialization (re)produce a particular hegemony” (17). Suggesting a range of activities—

including literature, photography, and collage—Osei-Kofi emphasizes the importance of “unmapping” and “denaturalizing a space.” For example, after asking her students to work in groups to “conduct photographic surveys of our campus” and present their findings to the class, Osei-Kofi requires them to think about “what messages the space conveys; who belongs; what knowledge is privileged; and what the space says symbolically

about history, power, and privilege” (21).

    Other chapters are equally engaging, dealing with a range of social justice issues from homophobia and heteronormativity to essentialism, meritocracy, the culture of poverty, white privilege, religious freedom, and the politics of immigration, to name but a few. Each chapter includes a rich discussion of how the teacher used innovative ways to engage students in inquiry-based discussion, self-reflection, and critical pedagogy. Perhaps

equally important, the contributors reflect on their own successes, failures, and uncertainties about the politics of this kind of teaching. Nowhere is it suggested that social justice teaching is easy or straightforward. This is not a “how-to” book, despite its many concrete suggestions.  In chapter 4, for example, Mollie Blackburn discusses why it is so difficult to address gender issues in the classroom, especially the construction of gender

and gender identity: “It’s just so much easier to be a teacher and student without messing with this system of oppression.  It is easy to divide our class into lines of boys and girls and lead them into separate bathrooms and locker rooms, not even questioning whether the labels they were assigned at birth align with how they experience the world. . . . I wanted students to recognize which, if any, gender rules and regulations they followed, honored, and even enforced” (52, 57).

    Similarly, in chapter 11 Jeff Sapp responds to a prominent multicultural educator’s distressed email: “Every

semester some little piece of me dies knowing that some gay-hating person passes my course and is going to get through the program and become a teacher and mess up some kids in the process.  How do you handle it?” Among other strategies, Sapp suggests that teacher educators provide students with “counternarratives,”

such as “invite speakers who are both queer and spiritual and let them speak on their own behalf” or “organize

a panel discussion of queer people of faith with a loving, rational person of faith who disagrees with homosexuality and let them model loving dialogue to students” (197) According to Sapp, the overall point

here is not to forcefully change right wing, fundamentalist beliefs, as much as to create a bilingual classroom where queer students’ voices are safe and centered.  “Show students how dialogue is done, how disagreement can be done with grace and beauty” (197).

    In chapter 5, Curt Dudley-Marling explores ways for teachers to overcome another threshold concept, deficit thinking, which has become an increasingly common explanation for the achievement gap in urban education. Rather than see deficits as something inherent within a student, Dudley-Marling suggests that we

need to understand the way that schools create and exploit these deficits: “From this perspective, disability is a cultural construct, not the result of individual traits or deficits” (73). Dudley-Marling talks about a teaching method called “interpretive discussion,” a kind of action research that involves blending student readings with guided discussions, including video and audio recordings, debriefing sessions, collecting student reflective writing and using a teacher research journal. In one particularly striking passage, Dudley-Marling quotes a student conversation, in which one student asks the question, “Can a culture enable without disabling?”

(77). Ponder that one.

    

    Chapters 6 and 11 take on related issues of essentialism, meritocracy, and the culture of poverty. In chapter 6, lead editor Paul Gorski critiques the widely read work of Ruby Payne, whose essentialist explanations of poverty rest on the assumption that the U.S. is a true meritocracy. In other words, if you are poor, you must not be smart enough or trying hard enough. Activities are designed to help students hear

essentialist language (through critical discourse analysis) and answer the question, “What makes these sorts of messages difficult to spot when we are not intent on spotting them?” and to respond to the statement, “What looks like a dropout is often a push-out” (86). Likewise, in chapter 12, Jody Cohen and Alice Lesnick ask students to explore and articulate their own stories of access, including “their mistakes, chances missed and taken, aspirations and varying degrees of support from families and schools” (215–16). Cohen and Lesnick describe a pedagogy of “overlying”—a facilitation tool and inquirybased teaching method that includes some obvious but often counterintuitive pedagogies, such as: “Suspend the inclination to wrap up an issue and instead use strategies to stay with the process” and “Look to pile up ideas rather than sift, sort, and rank them.”

    Chapters 7 and 8 explore white privilege and Christian privilege through a series of activities designed to help students understand the ways that “self” and “other” are socially constructed and politically loaded. Darren E. Lund and Paul R. Carr remind us that “most of us (White people) have never been taught to think of ourselves as racialized beings. . . . For students to be able and willing to reflect critically on the concept

of White privilege, to break through this bottleneck, they need to come to terms with the possibility that their own experience many not be the universal one, especially for the racialized Other” (109–110).  Referencing Peggy McIntosh’s now iconic essay, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” students are asked to describe themselves (e.g., in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and then to “reflect on which dimensions of identity each of us is more likely to notice, highlight, ignore, or avoid” (114). After marking each item on their list with a “+” or “–,“ students are asked to “think of specific examples of reversed situations—that is, times when the positive identity markers could work against them, and the negative ones could become privilege

markers” (115).

    In addressing Christian privilege, Blumenfeld likewise engages his students in what he calls the “Multiple Identities Project” where students use themselves as “texts.” They describe and analyze themselves from at least four vantage points: body identity, social identities, moral/ ethical/affective identities, and students’

own educational experiences (130). After coming to a deeper understand of their own biases and standpoints, students are then in a much better position to interrogate topics such as the teaching of Christopher Columbus and broader issues of colonization.

    Chapters 3 and 9 both address different aspects of literacy, which is not explicitly an identity but is deeply embedded in the ways that schools teach, engage with, and ultimately assess students. Chapter 3 is written in the form of a graphic novel, and focuses on ways that teachers can use literary texts to challenge “nomos,” or

normative practices. Likewise, in chapter 9, Zenkov et al. argue that the concept of “literacies” is a threshold social justice concept with which many future teachers struggle, “because the most basic assumptions about what counts as literacy often rely on these pathological ideas about children’s and young adults’ abilities

to read, write, speak, listen, present, and create. Educators, school systems, and our academic evaluation methods unwittingly operationalize this deficit orientation daily” (147). Innovative pedagogies, such as a “Student Literacy Map Assignment,” emphasize student literacies inside and outside of school and help

prospective social justice teachers re-conceptualize literacy away from the simple ability to read and write standard English.  The authors seek to understand literacy as a much broader range of expressions, skills, and knowledge that students hold and use contextually and subjectively.

    Chapter 10 raises a currently very politicized social justice issue: teaching about immigration. Author Edward Olivos critiques discourses that frame immigration as “solely an individual or group choice,” that “idealize a mythical glorified past” or “paint undocumented immigrants as lawbreakers and burdens on society.” Olivos stresses the need to teach immigration within a larger sociopolitical context that considers connections between immigration and consumerism/profit. Olivos’s assignments help his students to explore how word choice is not neutral, asking students to provide descriptors of terrorist, illegal, welfare queen, etc. He then goes on to describe a “Field Work” component of his class that takes place in San Diego, Tijuana, and northern Oregon. Notes Olivos:  “I argue that there is very little substitute for interacting with people who are living their lives as immigrants in the United States. Moreover, there is no substitute for experiencing at least a taste of the harsh conditions undocumented immigrants endure to enter the United States” (181).

    As one reads through these extremely creative and compelling approaches to helping students overcome cognitive bottlenecks around social justice issues, Cohen and Lesnick sum up the book’s overall stance. In an appendage to one of their assignments on critical literacy they plead of their students: “Please let your brains hurt as you consider what you might create for this project.” 

Alice E. Ginsberg

Notes

1. Sapp, quoting Palmer J. Parker, The Courage to Teach (1998)