Thinking about Power and Schooling Through Educational Theorists

Multiethnic practitioner researchers explore issues of power and schooling in relation to curriculum studies in the South. We discuss how the articulation and examination of issues of power and schooling are illuminated in 20 key texts of prominent educational thinkers (e.g., Bell, 1992; Dewey, 1931; Foucault, 1977; Freire, 1970/1992, 1998; Giroux, 1998; Grande, 2004; hooks, 1994; Illich, 1972; Kozol, 1992, 1981/1993; Lee, 2012; Nussbaum, 2010; Palmer,1998; Saïd, 1994; Schubert, 2009; Takaki, 1993; Watkins, 2011; Whitehead, 1929/1957; Zinn, 1980/2003). We particularly explore how 20 educational thinkers cultivate critical consciousness through counternarratives to explore issues of power and schooling such as race, gender, class, power, and place to contest the official or metanarrative that often portrays disenfranchised individuals and groups as deficient and inferior. The counternarratives in 20 key texts help tell silenced and neglected stories of repressions, suppressions, and subjugations that challenge stereotypes of Southern women, Blacks, and other disenfranchised individuals and groups and encourage examination of the forces of slavery, racism, sexism, classism, religious repression, and other forms of oppression on the life curriculum in schools, neighborhoods, and communities in the South. There are six specific purposes to the session. One purpose is to understand multiple theories of power. A second purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of pedagogical practices. The third purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of institutions in contemporary schooling. The fourth purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of policies and contexts in contemporary schooling. The fifth purpose is to explore the contradictions and complexities of competing theories of power