Thursday, March 31, 2011
Monday, November 15, 2010
Standpoint and Politics - Tom
Lewis’s political standpoint is evident from the first pages of her dissertation. One of the vignettes she offers talks about her childhood, in which she was a minority within a “white” institution (1-2). Later on, as a student teacher, she worked within an institution which she tells us was abjectly racist, where people overtly and unapologetically treated whites as superior to blacks (3-6). So, in essence, her dissertation flows from out of these experiences, from her ‘racial’ orientation to life. What I mean by that is that ‘race’ is the primary lens through which she sees the world. This absolutely has political implications. How does it play out throughout the dissertation?
There are scenes Lewis describes from the schools that mirror her experiences fairly faithfully. For example, at the Whitney Young school, she discusses the parallels of the school’s disciplinary statistics with those of American prisons (121-125). Black boys disproportionately visit the disciplinarian, Mr. Martinez. And, according to students, parents, and teachers, this has something to do with the fact that the school culture is set up such that black male youth culture is treated as problematic. Here the actual facts, thoughts, concerns, and analyses of community of study bear out racial injustice much in the same way that Lewis described her earlier experiences in the vignettes at the beginning of the book. Her political orientation has purchase. Another fine example comes from the student named Jennifer (126-130). Jennifer describes a situation from school in which a fellow student whose mother had recently died is treated as a behavior problem. What is so great about these descriptions is that include the local actors’ analyses of their situations. These analyses are constitutive of the affairs they describe. We do not just get Lewis imposing her own ideas onto the situation and onto the people she studies.
However, for much of the dissertation, Lewis does impose her own understandings, analyses, and political opinions onto those she studies. There is a rather oblique example of this toward the end of Chapter Seven, where Lewis interviews a parent who recently moved her family out of a “rough” neighborhood (259-260). She charges the parent with using the word “rough” as a euphemism of “black”. Yet she provides no evidence that this indeed is what the parent meant. Although we have no evidence that this parent made any mention of race in her interview, Lewis concludes that “race is clearly at issue in her decisions about where to live and send her child to school.” She writes as if she knew the mind, the hidden thoughts, of this parent. She is absolutely making this stuff up. This is audacious, dishonest scholarship, and it has political implications.
As a sociologist, Lewis brings theories to her field of research. This is expected. The problem for Sociology is to get its theories to faithfully match up with the empirical world. Lewis’s theory (with major political implications) is that ‘race’ (which, according to her is derivative of “racism" (8)) is the primary social fact through which the world (the school here) is assembled and acted out. Well, how does this theory fit with the empirical evidence Lewis delivers? Sometimes it fits quite faithfully. Much of the time, however, rather than considering adjusting her theory, Lewis bends, stretches, and distorts the empirical world to fit her theory. This leads to a larger political question of the proper role of the researcher.
Throughout this dissertation, Lewis suggests that the people she studies are deluded by false consciousness. They are incompetent to their affairs. They do not realize the way in which ‘race’ shapes their lives. If only they could come to the same realizations Lewis has come to, their lives would be made better. The veil of false consciousness would be lifted from their eyes. Implicitly, Lewis assumes that she, the researcher, sees the world better than the local students, teachers, and parents see it. She believes that she has a better, more sophisticated set of eyes than do they. Is this because she has a degree from a university? Has society granted her superior epistemological authority over those she studies? The major political suggestion that Lewis makes in her dissertation could be that the researcher is more competent to the affairs of other people’s lives than they are. Do we, in our society, accept this? Frequently throughout the dissertation Lewis makes moralizing judgments about her objects of study (students, teachers, parents). Does a Ph.D. grant us authority to be the arbiters of other people’s (people without advanced degrees) morality? Does the degree give us the authority to tell them that they are wrong about the affairs of their lives and that we have the answers; that if they would only understand their own lives as we understand them they would then be cured of what ails them?
To answer this question, I would have to say that in some cases, yes, the natives are deluded by false consciousness. They are incompetent to their own affairs. They could stand to benefit from the trained eye of an observer. However, how often is this the case? In what situations is the researcher helpful? Yet, in what situations is the researcher merely conceited and audacious? This is a question we each must discern for ourselves. In my judgment, Lewis does offer useful (practical in a Pragmatic sense) ways of seeing and understanding the worlds she observes. Frequently, however, she is audacious and irresponsible in advancing, with missionary zeal, her own private politics upon people who are perfectly competent to their own lives and who likely do not appreciate her air of moral authority.
Writing - Rachel
“Understanding what race was and how it worked became a more prolonged quest – a job, a responsibility, something that I needed to do if I really was going to try to make an impact on the world and be a good teacher.” (p. 3) – indicates her seriousness about the subject and her profound interest in knowing.
Begins with research and analysis, telling us about her role in the different school systems, setting up a picture for us: “They said things like, “You’re different from the other teachers;” or “You could never be a real teacher, you’re too nice.” (p. 44) or “At Foresthills I was more likely to receive a request to “just talk during lunchtime.” (p. 47), then transfers to a mix of telling and showing (p. 52)
Sometimes the long footnotes lead us away from the dissertation, as the “short story” was so interesting, examples on pp. 49, 59, 64, 93, 106, 193, etc. – this broke the monotony of the elongated explanations, especially in Chapter 2. Makes the author more accessible, but a bit too long…..
Transitions into “showing of informal interviews and conversations” to create perspective into classroom and race as a “school process”, then discussion to develop perspectives from different sides of a particular setting. (pp. 68, 72) – these discussions are consistently backed up with theoretical positions or continued interview snippets that re-assert the point. (p. 75)
Many of the people were identified and background information was given based on observation, often giving insight into her role with different participants at the different schools:
Ms Keyser – identified in relationship to the school that she worked in, others just listed as “teachers”.
Pat, Mr. Martinez, etc.
A mother of a “Latina” daughter (p. 72)
Jan Marquis: “A white 3rd grade teacher” (p. 138)
Marina: in relation to her classroom (pp. 164-166)
Framing the Methodology - Ali
This is an ethnographic study (p. 10; p. 31) that takes place over a period of one year at three different elementary schools in Bayside, California. While at each school, Lewis utilized participant observation (p.32), field notes and in-depth interviews (p.33). For her field note taking she used both hand written notes and computer typed notes while she observed. Her participation was limited to monitoring students in the classroom and on the schoolyard. She also gave one presentation. Beyond those experiences she mainly observed. Lewis completed several interviews of students, teachers, parents, school staff and school administrators. All of her interviews were formal except for some of the teachers and some students. Some of the teachers and students were informal conversation. The purpose of her ethnography was to build into an inductive theory expansion of current theories of racilization and identification (p. 32) from participant observation and in-depth interviews (p. 33). Lewis chose California and specifically Bayside because of its racial diversity and political climate (p. 34). In order to select the schools, Lewis used theoretical sampling (p. 34). She ended up “weeding” out schools to get to three different settings. These settings are: 1. Typical urban school 2. An alternative, bilingual school and 3. A suburban school (p. 35). She spent four months in each school.