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- Title
Editorial: Why affirmative critique?
- Authors
Gunnarsson, Karin; Hohti, Riikka
- Abstract
Having completed my Master's study on power in the classroom, I had a tremendous feeling: I had discovered so much. The ethnographic research had been eye-opening. Everything related to my Foucault-inspired notion of power and discourse - how thoroughly embedded we were in power structures and webs of power relations. I saw and realized now things that others hardly noticed within the business-as-usual. For example, the teacher of my research class was obvious to how she was reinforcing discourses of normalised gender within the seemingly innocent everyday practices of school. I felt uneasy about talking to the teacher about what I had noticed. I was afraid that it could hurt her feelings, make her feel negative about herself as teacher. I still don't know whether she read my study. I also struggled to find ways of talking about my study with the pupils of the class, about the games that the girls enjoyed, the ways in which they learned to be disciplined as they lived their everyday lives. I did feel the urge to inform them about the critical aspects I had discovered - that all their actions reflected power and even if they did not know it themselves, they were constantly reproducing restricting discourses. The auditorium is full of people. Here we are, educational scholars at an international conference. The keynote speaker presents an ongoing research project. It concerns schooling, gender and racism. The PowerPoint slide gives an example of how student's racist comments are met with silence from the teachers. We read how the teacher ignores and diminishes other students' attempts to raise these issues. The response from the auditorium is laughter - of surprise for the teachers' way of acting? at how foolish the teacher appears when ignoring the students' questions? how absurd the situation seems? The analysis dismantles the teachers' difficulties with handling the racist comments from students. And there it ends. I leave the auditorium sad and angry. What had this critical analysis been part of producing? Retelling the story of incompetent teachers, not fulfilling their obligations. Is that the story we want to tell?
- Subjects
MASTER'S degree; ETHNOGRAPHIC analysis
- Publication
Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2018, Vol 9, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1892-042X
- Publication type
Editorial