Book review/Compte rendu

Leslie G. Roman and Linda Eyre, eds. Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality in Education. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. 288.

Reviewed by Kari Dehli

Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 11:2 (Fall/automne 1999)

This anthology brings together critical analyses of the politics of equality and difference across an unusually broad range of educational sites, questions, and perspectives. Several articles deal with attempts to introduce and/or to defend critical and anti-oppression pedagogies and curricula in school and university classrooms. Others consider how universities respond to complaints from groups and individuals historically excluded or marginalised from the academy. Some analyse resistance to critiques and pedagogies that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, challenging established canons and normative subjects. Still others emphasize New Right assertions of traditional morality and values in education. Some deal with the restructuring of educational organization and governance. One paper even takes up the possibilities and dangers of entering the virtual and borderless domains of cyberspace.

Contributions from Canada, the United States, England, and Australia suggest that struggles over equality (or equity) and difference in education transcend national territories, at least among Western nation-states. The editors regret that they could not obtain chapters from a wider range of scholars, particularly from “third world” locations. Most authors do at least reflect critically on the locations from which they speak, and several quite explicitly interrogate the construction of normative practices and defence of boundaries in educational sites, especially universities. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s brief preface suggests, this anthology opens up important questions about representation, knowledge, and accountability of “first world” educational institutions (and those who work and study there) to subjugated people and knowledges.

One important theme brought initial papers together: whether the concept of “backlash” helps us to understand reactions against anti-oppression interventions in education. Some contributors build their papers around this question, arriving at quite different answers, while others provide richly detailed accounts of struggles around difference and equity in specific educational domains.

Initially I thought to frame my review around what seemed an expression of backlash from teacher education students in one of my courses last year. Their angry responses to Himani Bannerji’s “Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Canadian Nation” (included here) both astonished and depressed me. Bannerji’s paper is a critical account of how she learned her “geography lessons” about Canada, first as a mythical and nostalgic space from a distance as a child at school in India, later through close and violent encounters as a woman variously positioned as dependent, minority, visible, non-white, and other. She argues that sexist and racist practices are integral to Canada’s history as a colonial and capitalist nation-state and to our national identity. Reading Dangerous Territories helped me rethink my students' responses in more nuanced and contextual ways, not least to question the presumption that good pedagogy and learning can ever be free from emotional investment and conflict. A significant merit of this collection is its authors' refusal of simple binary and linear arguments inherent in notions of backlash, posing the interventions and practices of progressive teachers or activists against reactionary students, colleagues, and administrators. Both the interventions undertaken in the name of emancipation and responses to them are far more complex and ambivalent than simplistic notions of progress and backlash can convey. In very different ways, the authors suggest that the contemporary terrain of education politics is unstable and confusing, one which cannot be understood in the binary terms of much critical analysis. At the same time, they emphasize the necessity to recognize strategic openings as well as dangers, for example Jane Kenway’s argument for the possibilities of feminist practice on the internet. For Alice Jane Pitt and Patricia Elliott, psychoanalytic theory provides a fruitful way to comprehend students' responses to feminist teaching and women’s studies curricula, while Dorothy E. Smith and Davina Cooper rely on close reading of documents to analyse responses to, respectively, critiques of university “chilly climates” and New Right attempts to assert “traditional” values in education.

The contemporary politics of education are dealt with by asking who are authorized as subjects of education and what counts as knowledge. Papers by Richard Cavell, Aruna Srivastave, and Howard M. Solomon assess struggles over the criteria for knowers and knowledge in university curricula and promotional reviews. Whereas some authors take up notions of struggle and resistance in public expression and discursive organization, Solomon writes about how shame and shaming operate to shore up elitist notions of what counts as scholarship, and to privatize challenges to them. Srivastava’s layered interpretation of her experiences as an anti-racist teacher and minority woman professor provides examples that echo those of Solomon, although their positions within their respective universities, and their senses of support and scope of intervention provided, are quite different. These papers raise important questions about when, whether, how, and at what (different) risks and costs, issues are maintained as ‘private’ or opened to public scrutiny.

Dangerous Territories can be read as a contemporary history of education politics and change, a history in which those of us who work as educators are both participants and observers. For example, the analyses by Jill Blackmore and Smith of sexism and racism in an Australian and a Canadian university utilize different approaches but suggest similar kinds of resistances to critiques which challenge normative masculinities within universities. Blackmore relates how a sexual harassment complaint at Ormond College in Melbourne became a flash-point for a wide-reaching media debate about feminism in universities, frequently framed as a 'discourse of derision' against gains made by women in Australian universities and in the public sector. Smith conducts a close reading of a sequence of documents originating with a report by female graduate students and untenured faculty on the “chilly climate” they experienced in the University of Victoria’s Political Science Department. On two different continents, remarkably similar textual strategies and rhetorics were deployed to trivialize women’s complaints and to frame them as individual “instances” of accusation and defence, rather than as protests against everyday practices in universities that privilege white, heterosexual men.

Several papers analyse the classroom as a ground where equity and difference are contested, approaching the dynamics of knowledge production, curriculum, pedagogy, learning and resistance in wide-ranging ways. I found myself reading some of the chapters in relation to each other, puzzling about how, for example, Pitt’s and Elliott’s post-structuralist use of psychoanalysis could be mobilized to read Celia Haig-Brown’s or Linda Eyre’s accounts of teaching gender equity and sex education courses.

I was particularly caught by Pitt’s interpretation of student resistance in introductory Women’s Studies courses, and by her argument that such anti-oppression courses in fact provide a narrow range of subject positions for students and instructors to identify with and occupy. She argues that the structural grammar of Women’s Studies positions heterosexual, white women as its normative subject, with an assumed—and rarely challenged—capacity to (re)mark on the otherness of those occupying “minoritized” positions. Her illustrative example is “the lesbian,” but I wondered if Pitt’s mode of interpretation could be used to read some of the Grade Seven conversation transcripts that Leslie G. Roman and Timothy Stanley provide to illustrate how students negotiate understandings of, and investments in, discourses of race, nation, and diaspora. While these young people struggle to position themselves in relation to the identity ‘Canadian’ and to each other, they generate what Pitt calls minoritizing positions. When a teacher creates an innovative and anti-racist curriculum, we must wonder if the underlying question for students becomes “How can I be a Canadian in this class?”

Several articles provide excellent examples of how contemporary educational issues can be historicized and contextualized. Cooper and Didi Herman’s papers on the rise of the Christian Right in the United Kingdom and the United States gave me a new appreciation of the differentiations within the Christian Right, its history as social movement, and its impact.

Jane Kenway’s paper concludes the book, literally taking readers into a new terrain—cyberspace and the internet. I found it appropriate and intriguing that the book opens with historically contextual chapters tracing movements which shore up values of nation and family, and ends with an exploration of the impact of computer technology on teaching and learning. In many ways education institutions have become a contested terrain between movements which on he one hand seek to shape knowledge and learning in terms of so-called information technology and virtual futures, and on the other see the school as a site where “traditional” values are threatened and in need of defence. Every bit as complicated and potentially dangerous as more explicit sexist, racist, and homophobic conduct and curricula, the moves to wire every classroom and to computerize ever greater aspects of educational work are transforming the territories of education, breaking down borders even as new walls of exclusion and containment are constructed.

This timely collection contributes richly detailed and perceptive analyses of how educational policies and practices have come to be constituted so that questions of effectiveness and efficiency now prevail over “other” concerns, rendering many of the authors and the students to whom they feel accountable are marked as marginal and different. At the same time, many papers offer exemplary illustrations of a range of conceptual strategies and methodologies, useful both for their content and for how their approaches might be modified and applied elsewhere. Most of all, Dangerous Territories raises important and troubling questions for anyone who wishes to practice and promote critical education in contemporary schools and universities.

Kari Dehli
OISE/University of Toronto

Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 11:2 (Fall/automne 1999)