Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Race, Class, and Gender
CHAPTER 76
Using Critical Thinking to Understand
a Black Woman’s Identity: Expanding
Consciousness in an Urban Education
Classroom
ROCHELLE BROCK
Rochelle: Oshun is my alter ego. She is the power of my African past and my African American present
that I call forth when I am attempting to write myself into understanding. For me Oshun is
the manifestation of critical thinking. She provides educational psychology with a taste of non-
Western cognition—a dimension sorely lacking in contemporary manifestations of the discipline.
This chapter moves us to think about what Black women’s ways of seeing (understanding there
is diversity within the category) might offer psychologists working in the educational domain.
Many subjects touched my soul, many inspired thought, anger, concern for the future and growth.
Looking back, the discussions and readings about language, oppression, interracial dating, the
American Indian, the Chicana woman and the “place” of the African American woman influenced
my being the most. My mood of the day was determined by how well our discussion went in
class. If the discussion was frustrating, I was frustrated all day long. If I was enlightened by
the class discussion, all day I felt a glow of newly discovered knowledge (Racism and Sexism,
p. 103).
Oshun: What to you is critical thinking?
Rochelle: The ability to deconstruct and reconstruct your world?
Oshun: How is it accomplished?
Rochelle: It’s never completely accomplished. It’s really more of a process, something to be constantly
worked at. Accomplished denotes an end point or finished product and critical thought is a
constantly changing entity.
Oshun: How does it relate to you as a teacher?
Rochelle: I begin and end with it. It’s central to my being and therefore my pedagogy.
Oshun: How does that centrality manifest itself in your teaching?
Rochelle: It means that the most important thing I can give my students is the skill to critically analyze all
and everything in their life. If, in my pedagogy, I provide my students with the tools to politicize
their world, then I’m happy.
Oshun: Politicize?
Rochelle: Yes, understand the social, historical, political, and economic realities of a situation. I want to
instill in them a new way of thinking, a new mode of cognition—the knowledge to both read the