The Struggle for Identity in Today's Schools
Cultural Recognition in a Time of Increasing Diversity
Edited by Patrick M. Jenlink, Faye Hicks Townes
Not available to order
Publication date:
16 April 2009Length of book:
232 pagesPublisher
R&L EducationISBN-13: 9781607091080
The Struggle for Identity in Today's Schools examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity. What surfaces throughout the chapters are two lessons to be learned in relation to identity. The first lesson is that identities and the acts attributed to them are always forming and re-forming in relation to historically specific contexts, and these contexts are political in nature, i.e., defined by issues of diversity such as race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, gender, and economics. The second lesson presented by the authors is that identity forms in and across intimate and social contexts, over long periods of time. The historical timing of identity formation cannot simply be dictated by discourse. The identities posited by any particular discourse become important and a part of everyday life based on the intersection of social histories and social actors. Importantly, the social-cultural use of identities leads to another way of conceptualizing histories, personhoods, cultures, and their distributions over social and political groups.
This fascinating collection offers a much-needed alternative perspective on usual understandings of what needs to happen in schools that are increasingly populated by diverse students and homogenous faculty. The book's juxtaposition of cultural recognition and identity politics within the contexts of contemporary schooling provides educators with frameworks for thinking more carefully about what they do and say every day in interactions with students, parents, and others in the community....