Samples and summary of faculty scholarly activities - St. John Fisher ...

deconstruct white able-bodied, monolinguistic, middle to upper class, heterointerior_
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232 What’s Knowledge Got to Do with It?
sexual male, privileged, Christian orientations to pedagogy that have been
pervasive in teaching. Historically “othered” and “over-researched groups (indigenous
peoples, people of color, people of low-socioeconomic status) do not need
to become further eclipsed by the gaze of a ‘new’ multiculturalist, perhaps better
informed yet self-indulgent in attempting to reframe the research to continue
privileging white ways of knowing. For this to happen pedagogical praxis must
continually seek to challenge the traditions that have negotiated and defended
whiteness’ ability to “…perpetrate domination . . .” (Gopnik, 1999, p. 66) in a
dance where practitioners “…pretend to study the manners and customs of all
people” (Halliburton, 1999, p. 793) in the attempt to write the history of white
peoples, for white peoples, and by white peoples and claim to know what others
know about the knowledge of their knowing.
Thus, our conclusion is to offer as a beginning, an invitation to a different
more complicated, vexing dance where ideas keep time and rhythm and where
tough questions take the lead; this dance is a challenge to past practice. We
agree that the dance never ends, and we can only approximate the steps even
for ourselves let alone those who we teach. We know that we do not know who
will continue to dance or, if continued, what the steps will be. We can continue
to dance ourselves and reflect on the tempo and form of those rhythms. We can
then, in turn, demonstrate those moves to others in a transparent attempt to
share the dance. In the dance lies a simultaneous self-consciousness and abandon
that opens the possibility of becoming a more self-aware human being who might
become a more adept teacher.
References
Asante, M.K. (1987). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Belenky, M.F., Clinchy, B.M., Golderger, N.R. & Tarule, J.M. (1996). Women’s ways of knowing.
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Bell, D. (1995). Racial realism. In K. Crenshaw, N. Gotanda, G. Peller, K. Thomas (Eds.)
Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (pp. 302–314). New York,
NY: The New Press.
Collins, P.H. (1992). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of
empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The
New Press.
Dixson, A. D. (2003). “Let’s do this!:” Black women teachers’ politics and pedagogy. Urban
Education, 38(2), 217–235.
Dixson, A. D. (2005). Extending the metaphor: Notions of jazz in portraiture. Qualitative
Inquiry, 11(1), 106–137.
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Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michelle Erklenz-Watts and Jim Wood 233
Dixson, A.D. (2006). What’s race got to do with it?: Race, racial identity development and
teacher preparation. In E. Watbe Riss & H. Richard Milner’s (Eds.) Race, ethnicity, and
education: The influences of racial and ethnic identity in education, Vol. 3.
Dixson, A.D. (2008). Taming the beast: Race, discourse and identity in a middle school classroom.
In S. Greene’s (Ed.) Literacy as a civil right: Reclaiming social justice in literacy
teaching and learning. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers.
Dixson, A.D. & Fasching-Varner, K. (2008). What not to do: Culturally relevant pedagogy in
the classroom. In Compton-Lily’s (Ed.) Breaking the silence: Recognizing and valuing the
social and cultural knowledge of children. Newark, DE: International Reading Association
Publications.
Donmoyer, R. (2001). Paradigm talk reconsidered. In V. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of research
on teaching (pp. 174–190). Washington, DC: American Educational Research
Association.
Fendler, L. (1999). Making trouble: Prediction, agency, and critical intellectuals. In T. S.