Educational Philosophy and Theory
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Peers on Socrates and Plato
Jim Mackenzie
To cite this article: Jim Mackenzie (2014) Peers on Socrates and Plato, Educational Philosophy
and Theory, 46:7, 764-777, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2013.794690
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Date: 23 August 2017, At: 17:53
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014
Vol. 46, No. 7, 764–777, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.794690
Peers on Socrates and Plato
JIM MACKENZIE
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Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney
Abstract
There is more to be said about two of the topics Chris Peers addresses in his article Freud,
Plato and Irigaray: A morpho-logic of teaching and learning (2012, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44, 760–774), namely the Socratic method of teaching and Plato’s stance
with regard to women and feminism. My purpose in this article is to continue Peers’s discussion of these two topics.
Keywords: feminism, Plato, Socrates, Socratic method
In his 2012 paper, Chris Peers considers a link between a conception of learning
drawn from Freud and some of his commentators, and a conception of teaching
drawn from Plato’s Theaetetus. Freud’s psychoanalysis relied on startlingly few clinical
cases, and his reports of these have been combed through many times both by
supportive and by critical commentators.1 Peers concludes by asking whether ‘the fact
that teaching is traceable to the masculine imaginary constitute [sic] a factor in the
instability, the patent unreliability of the teaching machine?’ (p. 770). This conclusion
echoes that of another paper by Peers, also interrogative, ‘Have we overlooked other
modes of communication simply by privileging language and speech?’ (2008, p.
250).2 There is more to be said about two of the topics Peers addresses, about Socrates’ teaching (both as described in Plato’s Theaetetus and elsewhere), and about Plato’s stance with regard to women and feminism. My purpose in this article is to
continue the discussion of what Peers has said on these two topics.
Socrates’ Teaching
There is a picture of teaching which many people regard as natural and obvious——so
much so that they never question it, or perhaps even realise that they hold it. The
picture is this: the teacher has some knowledge, the learner does not, and teaching is
the process whereby the teacher puts the knowledge, or a copy of the knowledge, into
Ó 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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the mind of the learner.3 Peers invokes this picture when he speaks of ‘a prevailing
didactic style’ in which ‘a certain authority is both presumed and concealed in assuming the role of speaker’ (p. 761), and of ‘the authority to speak’ as ‘fundamental to
the praxis of pedagogy’ (p. 760). He says that ‘The shape and form of teaching refers
[sic; shape and form?] to the dominant forms by which social and political authority
were (and continue to be) demonstrated, i.e. speech and language. But it [sic; the
dominant forms?] also implies the hierarchy bound up in the authority to speak:
didacticism makes sense as an assumption of authority’ (p. 768), ‘an educational
ontology that pretends to a direct, causal relation between instruction and knowledge’
(p. 770). He describes the role of language in education and in other aspects of life
thus: ‘In this way pedagogy (and all other modes of public, didactic authority) have
traditionally employed a sense of language as a universal code or structure to render
themselves transcendent of the body, gender-neutral, as well as sexually innocuous.’
(p. 770).4 Further, ‘The idealization of teaching bears the pretence of saying: “I am
identical with myself” so that regardless of who says “I,” You are the pupil, the listener, who is submitted to my authority, my speech.’ (p. 770).
Peers ascribes didactic teaching to Plato and to Socrates: ‘…the means by which
this image of Socrates-as-teacher has emerged historically is through an assimilation
of “teaching” with Socrates-as-didact’ (p. 766); ‘as didact he [Socrates] enables Plato
to describe an ideal scenario in which questions usually get responses that provide the
subject with an opportunity to speak at some length in explaining a position’ (p. 767).
For his ascription, Peers cites only a single work by Plato, the translation of the Theaetetus in Cornford’s Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (1935).5 This is a very narrow textual
base, and when dealing with Plato’s views on knowledge and its objects a rather
unfortunate one. Cornford was avowedly defending the thesis that in the Theaetetus
Plato still held the Theory of Forms as it is given in the Meno and the Republic.6 This
thesis has fewer adherents today than it had three quarters of a century ago. It is hard
to understand why Peers has limited himself like this when it is now so easy to consult
different editions and translations.7
‘Socratic teaching’ is commonly taken to mean a kind of teaching which does not
accord with the picture of didactic teaching, which does not proceed by telling or
instruction from a position of authority.8 As Aristotle said, ‘…Socrates used to ask
questions and not to answer them; for he used to confess that he did not know,’
Soph.El. 34 (183b7). The Socratic teacher questions the learner from a position of
real or pretended ignorance. Socrates repeatedly disclaimed having any knowledge to
transmit to anybody. Indeed, he does so several times in the very dialogue Peers has
chosen to discuss (Theaet. 150c–d, 157c, 161b, 189e; cf. Meno 80c–d). His method of
teaching was quite different from the didactic approach.9
Socrates tells us, in Plato’s account of the speech he made at his trial, that his
friend Chaerophon had asked the Delphic Oracle whether anybody was wiser than
Socrates, and had been told ‘No’.10 Socrates explains that he came to understand that
the god had meant that whereas other people had false and confused beliefs which
they thought were knowledge, he at least knew how little he knew, and in that sense
was wiser than they were (Apol. 20e–21c). His way of investigating whether other
people did know as much as they claimed, what became known as the ‘Socratic
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method’, was to ask them short questions requiring short, often Yes/No, answers.11
His questions were deployed to force answerers into inconsistency (elenchus), thus
exposing their ignorance, numbing them as an electric fish does (Meno 80a, 84b); for
a fuller description, see Boghossian (2012). Plato represents Socrates asking questions
in this way, rather than speaking didactically from a position of authority, in his elenctic dialogues, specifically the Alcibiades I, Charmides, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias,
Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Meno, and Protagoras, and also in
Book One of the Republic. The other author who knew Socrates and whose dialogues
featuring him survive, Xenophon, also shows Socrates asking questions rather than
telling or instructing. In his case the questions are almost always merely rhetorical,
Socrates putting his (in reality, usually Xenophon’s) positive views in interrogative
form. The questions are not co-ordinated with each other, what is asked does not
depend on the previous answer, and they never result in the checkmate of an inconsistency. Perhaps Xenophon knew that Socrates’ teaching somehow involved asking
questions, but hadn’t grasped how Socratic elenchus works (cf. Ryle, 1966, p. 122).
Peers, however, does not treat Socrates as one who asks questions and traps the
answerer in an inconsistency, but as one who has positive doctrines to impart and
who instructs the hearer. Admittedly there are passages in the one dialogue Peers
relies on, the Theaetetus, as in the Republic after Book One, in which Socrates does
behave in this, for him unusual, way.
In the Theaetetus Plato is reconsidering issues he had addressed in the Meno, and it
is useful to compare the two. In both dialogues, Socrates asks for a definition and is
given a list of examples instead. In both the model for knowledge is mathematics, and
specifically the incommensurable (Waterfield, 1987, p. 139). In both, Socrates’ reputation for perplexing people is mentioned (Meno 80a, Theaetetus 149a). In both there
are allusions to Socrates’ forthcoming trial (Meno 94e–5a, 99e; Theaet. 210d). And in
both Plato offers analogies to explain Socrates’ unobvious, non-didactic method of
teaching.12 Both analogies emphasise that, in contrast to didactic teaching, the teacher
does not need to know beforehand what the student will come to learn as a result
of the interaction. This is a kind of pedagogic praxis to which, pace Peers (p. 760),
‘the authority to speak’ is not ‘fundamental’. In the Meno, what Socrates does is compared to reminding someone of something forgotten, and in the Theaetetus, he compares himself to a midwife helping the learner to bring forth an idea.13
In the Meno, 82b–6a, Socrates takes a Slave Boy who clearly has no knowledge of
geometry (in that he twice gives the wrong answer to the question of a theorem), and by
questioning the Boy and drawing simple diagrams under his instruction, leads him to
the theorem. Socrates claims that he has only questioned the Boy to find out his opinions, not told him anything (Meno 84d), and that if the Boy knows the theorem at the
end he must have known it all along, even though when first questioned he appeared
not to (85b, c).14 The Slave Boy episode is unusual in that Socrates’ questioning results
in a positive thesis; significantly the thesis is a geometrical theorem.15 Peers says that ‘…
the characteristics of such dialogue as it was practiced in Greek antiquity remain effective, to some extent’ (p. 768). They do indeed. The technique Socrates used with the
Slave Boy in the Meno still works with modern university students, even though one
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might have hoped that by completing secondary school they would have had more
mathematical understanding than an untaught child in ancient Greece.16
Plato’s analogy for this process in the Meno is recollection, just as in ordinary life we
jog each other’s memories about such things as where someone left the keys by asking
questions in an orderly way. This is a familiar example of how someone who does not
know a solution can help guide another person to it. Socrates tells us his method consists, not of telling the learner something (since Socrates disclaimed authority), but of
asking questions ‘in the right order’ (Meno, 82e).17 There is, however, a crucial
difference between the recollecting by the key-loser and what Meno’s Slave Boy does.
In recollection, the answer was once known and then forgotten. But as Meno testifies
(85e), the Boy has never in his life known the theorem or studied geometry. What
Socrates’ method results in is like recollection, not an example of it. Even so, Socrates
mischievously pretends to believe that the Boy must have known the theorem before
he was born (81b–d, 85c, and 86a–b; and see Leibniz, 1765, p. 77; Ebert, 1973), and
even suggests that all learning is really recollection (81d, cf. Phaedo, 72e–77a).18
In an earlier paper Peers (2008, p. 246) docilely endorsed Dover’s image (1978,
p. 202) of education as transference symbolised by phallic penetration. Yet soon after
(p. 249) he quoted Colleran (1950, pp. 122–123) as saying that Socrates maintained
that truth ‘resides internally within the mind’, which implies that nobody teaches or
transfers it to another, and that Socrates draws that truth out of the other person,
‘delivers’ it. Plato’s use of sexual imagery as a metaphor for the relation between
teachers and students (e.g. the beginnings of Laches and Charmides) is hardly unexplored (Vlastos, 1969). The didactic model of teaching does indeed lend itself to a
sexual analogy: the teacher penetrates the mind of the learner, and implants knowledge
there. Nevertheless, this particular metaphor is not apposite here: penetration is not
at all what Socrates does to the Slave Boy’s mind with the theorem. He encourages
the Boy to attempt answers, and to discover what is wrong with his attempts, until
the Boy comes up with an answer, the theorem, which withstands further challenge.
If this is analogous to any sexual activity, it is to a kind very different from what is
suggested by Peers’s frequent references to the anatomical differences between the
sexes.19
In the Theaetetus, what Socrates does is compared to the role of a midwife in childbirth (148e–151d). Though Peers says, ‘Socrates’ patients are male, not female: the
exclusion is a way of ensuring that the junction between didact and respondent is
secure’ (p. 768), Plato is comparing real midwifery, in which the patient is a woman
and the outcome is a baby, with a kind of teaching in which the patient need not be
female, and the outcome is an idea. The point about midwives in Greece being past
childbearing is not (as Peers seems to think, p. 766) that Socrates is an old man, but
that he does not himself give birth to ideas. And Socrates unlike a midwife not only
helps the new idea (baby) into the world, but tests it to see if it is rather a false phantom.20 Most new ideas, it seems, are false phantoms and destined for destruction in
an elenchus.
The two analogies are somewhat different from each other. The analogy with recollection implies that all of us have the answers within us——the technique should work
with anybody, even a Slave Boy——and also that the answers are right.21 The analogy
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with midwifery implies that the technique works only on those who are ‘pregnant’
with an idea, and also that the idea may be ‘still-born’, or incorrect (Waterfield,
1987, p. 141). Plato’s explanation in the Theaetetus of what Socrates does is a development from his account of it in the Meno, but in neither case is it didactic.
Plato and Women
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Peers says,
The community in which both Socrates and Plato lived was composed of
men; the kind of pleasure imagined by Socrates in relation to the dialogue
is based upon a concept of the Good that was carefully and systematically
confined: it could and can (still) only be maintained with respect to masculinity by giving the feminine a hierarchically subordinate status, in which
women become objects of exchange among men (Irigaray, 1985b, pp. 170–
197). So Plato and Socrates would never include women in the ideal
dialogue because, as the ideal form of social exchange the dialogue is a
denial of a prior moment of sexual or familial exchange, in which economic roles
have already been assigned. (p. 768, emphasis in original)22
This ignores Plato’s manifest lack of interest in women as ‘objects of exchange among
men’ in a market-like arrangement. He was hostile to private property of any kind
(Resp. iii 416d; iv 421d–3a) and advocated rather the nationalisation of the means of
reproduction (Resp. v 457d–461e.23 Irigaray is implying that neither Plato nor
Socrates ever included women in serious dialogue of the kind in which teaching and
learning occurs.24 We need to consider the evidence for this in the case of each of
them. They were Athenians, and women were more secluded in Athens than in other
Greek cities (particularly Sparta), and in Greece generally more than in other
Mediterranean civilisations of the time.25 We read little of other Greek thinkers
engaging in educational exchanges with women. Therefore even slight evidence of
such exchanges by Socrates or by Plato would be significant.
Socrates did not run a school. Indeed, he is reported by Plato in several places as
having been contemptuous of those who took money for teaching:
All of us have the picture of Socrates, followed by his troop of upper-class
young men, strolling round the bankers’ tables and the market place of Athens. Every now and then he waylays some citizen, a politician, maybe, or an
orator or a rhapsode, and subjects him for an hour or two to ordeal by the
Socratic Method. (Ryle, 1966, p. 175)
Ryle then argues that this picture is fanciful, and that nothing like it could have
happened in the reality of the market place. ‘Such interviews did not occur. They are
Plato’s invention.’ (p. 178). In whatever venues Socrates engaged in conversations, it
is probable that in most cases everybody present was male, simply because that was
the way Athenian life was conducted. Whether or not he could have debated in the
market place with men, he could not have done so with women. And women, or at
least respectable women, did not attend dinner parties in ancient Greece. There
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were massive social barriers against Socrates ever taking women seriously in discussion. Nevertheless, we have several indications that he did precisely that. In Plato’s
Symposium (210a–212b), Socrates calls the priestess Diotima of Mantinea his teacher.
In the Phaedrus (235c), he praises the writings of Sappho. In the Menexenus (235e,
236b) he describes Aspasia the companion of Pericles as a teacher of rhetoric and a
composer of speeches. (For whether and how this may be ironic, see Trivigno, 2009.)
Xenophon presents Socrates citing Aspasia as condemning lying by matchmakers
(Mem. 2, 6. 36), and as an authority on household management (Oec. 3. 14). Though
we know little for sure about the historical Socrates, both our immediate sources
report him acknowledging women as authorities. What evidence we have tells against
the view that he required ‘sexual sameness’ as a condition for the teacher–pupil
relationship.
Plato himself did run a school, the Academy. Diogenes Laertius lists some of his
students including two women, Lastheneia, who like Diotima came from Mantinea,
and the cross-dressing Axiothea of Phlius,26 and later notes that both continued their
studies under Plato’s successor Speusippus (Vitae, 3. 46 and 4. 2). There are thus
several references to Socrates and to Plato conversing seriously with women and to
learning resulting from these exchanges. Neither Socrates nor Plato was quite so
opposed to ‘includ[ing] women in the ideal dialogue’ as Peers affirms.27
In his Oeconomicus, Xenophon describes a conversation between Socrates and
Critoboulos, whom we know from Plato (Euthyd. 306d) as the elder son of Crito, the
prosperous farmer who appears in Plato’s Euthydemus, Crito, and Phaedo. Plato tells
us that Crito regarded arranging for the education of one’s sons as a more important
contribution to their welfare than choosing a wife to be their mother or providing
financial security for them, and that he hoped that his own sons would learn philosophy (Euthyd. 306d, e). By introducing Crito’s son Xenophon is playfully indicating
that he is replying to some of what Plato had shown Socrates and Crito saying about
the education of the young (Stevens, 1994, p. 216). In Xenophon’s dialogue, Socrates
identifies wealth with usefulness rather than possessions, and ascribes success in running a household to moderation and hard work. When Critoboulos presses him for
more detail Socrates disclaims any such knowledge and instead reports what he says
are the views of Ischomachus, who had emphasised the importance of educating one’s
wife about household responsibilities. From Socrates’ report, Ischomachus plainly
took the wife to be docile and not very bright, and completely ignored any role for a
husband in a marriage except as providing wise and kindly supervision. Again
Xenophon’s choice of this character is significant. There had been a major scandal
after Ischomachus died because his widow Chrysilla, who had moved in with her
daughter and son-in-law Callias, promptly became pregnant to the son-in-law, leading
to her daughter’s attempting suicide (Andocides, 1896, pp. 80–82). So when
Xenophon has Ischomachus promising his wife that she will retain her status into old
age (Oec. 7. 20), the reader is intended to remember that she will indeed still retain
sufficient attractiveness to rival her daughter.28
When we turn to his blueprint for an ideal society, we find that Plato argued that
there would be complete gender equality among the ruling class. Women could be
guardians (Resp. v 451e, 454e, 456b).29 The family would be abolished, and children
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cared for by servants employed by the state (Resp. v 460c). All potential guardians,
girls and boys alike, would receive precisely the same education (Resp. v 451e–2a,
466c–d, vii 540c, Laws vi 781a–d, vii 804e–6c, 813b, e, 814c, viii 829b, 833c, 854a).
This may be less appealing than it at first sounds: the classroom activities would
consist largely of mathematics (Resp. vii 525b–531c, 536d, Laws v 747b),30 and
outside there would be vigorous physical education, including fighting with swords
and footraces in armour over distances up to 20 km (Laws viii 833b–e).
Dorothea Wender described what she saw as the basic problem of Plato’s feminism
thus: ‘Plato both despised women as a class, and advocated more liberation and
privilege for them than any man in history had ever done, so far as we know’ (1973,
p. 82). Her resolution was to attribute Plato’s feminism to his misogyny, that is, his
dislike of women, and to what she calls his paedophilia, his sexual preference for
young men aged around 18 to 20.31 Heterosexual men and men who like women and
enjoy their company are by these very facts dependent on women. Xenophon, for
example, clearly liked women and relied on them. Consequently he could not envisage women taking a greater part in political affairs. Who would look after him and
bring him his slippers and the Greek equivalent of cocoa in the evening? But Plato
disliked women. (Wender provides an extensive collection of misogynistic remarks
from Plato’s dialogues.) He never married. He was wealthy (Diogenes Laertius, Vitae
3. 3 and 3. 9), and attended by servants. (Several are mentioned in his will, Diogenes
Laertius, Vitae 3. 42). If he wanted somebody to cuddle at night, it would be a young
chap with a cute smile he had met at wrestling training. Women played no part in his
life. If they wanted to go and discuss politics or run the government, he would not be
inconvenienced in the slightest. Wender concludes: ‘He [Plato] did not like us or
admire us. But he felt it would be just and expedient to give us a chance. Xenophon
liked us, and felt that it was important to keep us just the way he liked us. It is a
difficult choice for many women. It is hard to give up being liked’ (1973, p. 90).
Even if teaching has the ‘instability, the patent unreliability’ Peers finds in it, I suspect
‘the fact that teaching is traceable to the masculine imaginary’ (p. 770) is not a factor.32
Notes
1. The assumption that the psychological processes affecting early childhood development
everywhere resemble those found in upper middle class families in Vienna in the late nineteenth century now appears narrowly Eurocentric (and see Bloch & Sperber, 2002).
2. Peers says ‘Although symbols and images can each be codified, the fixing of meaning is easier when graphic symbols accompany stipulated phonetic sequences’ (2012, n. 5, p. 771).
Picture-dictionaries for educational purposes go back to the enormously successful Orbis
pictus of Comenius (1658), and nowadays they can provide not only graphic symbols but
sounds and even video clips. Still, their efficacy for ‘the fixing of meaning’ should not be
overestimated. Should the entry for ‘dog’ portray a kelpie or a poodle? What picture should
accompany the phonetic sequence ‘prime number?’ See further Leibniz’s insistence against
Locke on the difference between a sense-derived image and a cognitive idea, using the
examples of ‘chiliagon’ and ‘eternity’ (1765, pp. 261–263), and Wittgenstein’s warnings
abut the limitations of ostensive definitions (1953, i, xx 27–38, pp. 13e–19e).
Peers on Socrates and Plato
771
3. Even towards the end of his life Foucault took for granted that education was the transmission of knowledge from a teacher who had it to a learner who did not, in other words the
didactic picture:
I don’t see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to
him, communicates skills to him. (Foucault, 1988, p. 18)
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4.
5.
6.
7.
Freire had mocked the didactic picture as the ‘banking’ concept of education (1972, p. 58);
Marx too had mocked it in the third of his Theses on Feuerbach (1888, x 3, p. 283).
Some events which were certainly ‘modes of public, didactic authority’ and which employed
language nevertheless did not render themselves ‘transcendent of the body.’ The Nuremburg rallies of the 1930s, for example, were ostentatiously bodily displays.
He refers to passages by Plato only by the pagination of the Cornford translation. When
dealing with works which exist in many editions and translations, it is usual and courteous
to assist the reader by referring to the text in a way which is independent of the particular
edition one is using: hence we identify passages from the Bible by the book, chapter, and
verse, and passages from Shakespeare by the play, act, scene, and line. For Plato, the norm
is to use the Stephanus number, indicated as a matter of course in modern editions and
translations including Cornford’s.
Cornford (1935, p. 2). Others have argued that Plato was more open to change. Indeed,
Ryle held that Plato’s ‘captivation by the Theory of Forms was of relatively short duration,
lasting, perhaps for about the half-dozen years from say, 370 to 364’ (1966, p. 102). See
further Waterfield (1987, pp. 241–246) and Chappell (2011, x 3).
For the Theaetetus in particular, there is also Chappell (2005), patterned on Cornford’s
model of translation with running commentary, but responding to an additional seventy
years of scholarship.
In an earlier paper, Peers (2008, p. 240) cited Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Epic of
Gilgamesh (2004). This is more readable than some of the stuffier versions produced by
scholars of the field (e.g. George, 1999), but as Mitchell did not read the languages of the
original and used other translations into modern languages as his sources, his version may
be suspected of being less reliable. Peers says flatly, ‘The king [Gilgamesh] cannot share his
passion, anxiety, fear and hope with a woman’ (2008, p. 241). In George’s version, we read
that when Gilgamesh reaches Shiduri’s tavern by the sea-shore at the edge of the world, he
tells her of the death of his beloved friend Enkidu, and of his fear that he too will die in
words which share his passion, anxiety, fear and hope with her (X. 69–71, p. 78).
Unfortunately restricted permission prevents the reproduction of these three lines from
George’s translation from being published in a form which would enable reproduction
consonant with English copyright law in the various forms in which Educational Philosophy and Theory is published.
8. In some law schools, the name ‘Socratic method’ is given to a kind of ritualised bullying in
which the professor humiliates one student after another by asking questions until an inadequacy is revealed in the student’s preparation of the assigned reading (though contrast Reich,
2003, and Boghossian, 2012). This situation is very different from that of those with whom
the historical and the Platonic Socrates conversed. They were not dependent on him for
marks or grades, and (except in such cases as Tim. 17b, 26a–d) had been under no expectation to prepare for the encounter. I shall henceforth ignore this meaning of the phrase.
9. Bettany Hughes begins the introduction to her The Hemlock Cup with the words: ‘When
Socrates comes into focus, in Greece in the fifth century bc, he is no didact’ (2011, p. xix).
10. Socrates takes care to emphasise Chaerephon’s record supporting the anti-oligarchic side
in Athenian politics (Apol. 21a; Popper, 1966, ch. 10 x v, text to n. 49, pp. 193–194, and
772
11.
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12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
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n. 56 (5) e6 to ch. 10, p. 310; and Hughes, 2011, esp. pp. 196ff. and 329ff.; though contrast Waterfield 2009, especially pp. 180–181). Peers strangely ignores the political dimensions of Socrates’ situation.
In his ‘customary style’ (Apol. 27b); in the elenctic dialogues most answers and most questions are brief. Both Protagoras (Prot. 329b) and Gorgias (Gorg. 449c) promise to answer
Socrates concisely. This makes Peers’s remark quoted above, that Socrates’ ‘questions usually get responses that provide the subject with an opportunity to speak at some length in
explaining a position’, difficult to understand.
Elsewhere Plato offers yet more images for Socrates’ method. In the Phaedrus 276e–7a, he
compares teaching by the use of dialectic to planting a seed in the soul of the learner. In
the Republic iv 435a, he likens producing knowledge by comparing two things to producing
a spark by rubbing sticks together. In the Apology 30e, he compares the effect of Socrates’
questions to that of a gadfly stinging a horse into wakefulness.
Peers says, ‘…this sense of in-between-ness is the basis on which the midwife becomes relevant, as a metaphor for something standing in between an original source, i.e. man, and
something that is empty and false unless it is appropriately endowed, i.e. woman’ (p. 767).
The one who stands in between the man and the woman is not the midwife, but the chaperon. The midwife’s job comes later.
The way Socrates frames his questions may give the Boy hints as to what answers he
expects, but if the questions are asked more neutrally, or even as if the opposite answers
were expected, the procedure still works, as anybody can demonstrate with a naı̈ve subject.
Further, though we do not know how the theorem was first proved, it is not clear that any
process essentially different from the conversation between Socrates and the Boy could have
been successful. If the theorem was first proved in a Meno-like conversation, whoever was
playing the role of Socrates could not have hinted which answers would lead to the theorem
because ex hyp. nobody yet knew what the theorem was. Therefore how the questions are
loaded in Plato’s presentation is not sufficient to explain Socrates’ demonstration.
Friends of Hirst’s Forms of Knowledge would not be surprised that the knowledge demonstrable in this way is mathematical (Hirst, 1965; Mackenzie, 1998).
Peers suggests in his n. 15, p. 772, that in Greece master-pupil relations ‘were typically
framed by sexual favours’. As Marrou says, ‘for the Greeks it [pederasty] was the normal
mode, the standard type of all education’, though he qualifies this by explaining that ‘the
school itself existed merely to give technical instruction, not education’ (1948, p. 31) and
admits that ‘…the peoples of Greece did not all react to pederasty in the same way’ (p.
27). Education in modern universities is not typically ‘framed by sexual favours’, though
such things have occurred. Jane Gallop declared that ‘graduate students are my sexual preference’ (1997, p. 86), and of her own experience as a student she writes: ‘I learned and
excelled; I desired and I fucked my teachers. And they taught and challenged me, criticized
and praised me; they let me see them as men and never stopped taking me seriously as a
student. I felt that in their eyes I was both a desirable woman and a serious scholar’ (1997,
p. 42).
The ancients were quite familiar with how ordered questioning promotes recollection (our
earliest source, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, says that it is drawing on Greek predecessors,
3. 23, 38). Cicero’s example of recollection through ordering (De Oratore, 2. 86, 352–3)
became the basis of what was called artificial memory through places and images (artificiosa
memoria ex locis et imaginibus) (Yates, 1966, pp. 1–2).
Klein (1965) describes the recollection theory as a myth (p. 95), and concludes his meticulous investigation by asking, ‘Are we not led to the conclusion: we have to withhold our
assent to the thesis that learning is recollecting?’ (p. 168).
As Peers says, ‘Phallomorphism is characterized by ubiquity’ (2012, p. 765). It is indeed, at
least in his own work; for example his notes 8, 10, and 12 (pp. 771–772), and the first paragraph of the conclusion to his (2008), p. 250. Though it seems Freud did not say so himself, the law of identity sometimes applies even to a cigar (pace Hiller, 1922)
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20. The exposure of infants deemed unacceptable was a custom in classical Greece, but unacceptability was determined by the father (or in Sparta, by the elders) rather than by the
midwife (Patterson, 1985, p. 108). In practice, midwives’ involvement in the birth process
and their greater familiarity with new-born infants doubtless enabled them to influence the
outcome either way (pp. 114, 116). Plato endorsed infanticide (Resp. v 460c).
21. Peers says that ‘“Truth” is meant to imply “belief” and “certainty” as investments that yield
pleasure…’ (p. 761). But on conventional accounts of truth, something may be true without
being believed. Cassandra’s prophecies may serve as examples.
22. ‘Irigaray, 1985b, pp. 170-197’ is Irigaray, 1978, a discussion of the first chapter of Marx’s
Capital. It says nothing about Plato’s concept of the Good.
23. He also proposed that those who distinguished themselves in war should have unfettered
sexual access to whomever they wished, and that it should be illegal for anyone to refuse
them (Resp. v 460b, 468c). Popper is rightly horrified by this suggestion (1966, ch. 8 x vi,
p. 150, text to n. 42).
24. In an earlier paper, Peers said:
The entire paradigm of teacher and pupil, oscillating through an endless dialectic of
teaching and learning that is, by now, and in a global sense, seemingly beyond dispute,
emerged through this specific ritual in which men came to love each other through their
common values, which found their expression in physical and sexual desires that were
bound up with sexual sameness. (2008, p. 244)
Teaching and learning had been essential parts of human life for many thousands of years
before the classical period in Greece and its specific rituals. Further, it is generally the case
that how a social practice ‘emerged,’ whether by this we mean its actual beginning or
merely the earliest examples we happen to be familiar with, may differ from its subsequent
manifestations. The first permanent European settlements in Australia were British penal
colonies. The organisation that runs the Wimbledon tennis championships began as a club
to promote the playing of croquet (Tingay, 1974, p. 24). Our word school is derived from
the Greek rvokg, ‘leisure.’ It is especially important to avoid taking something’s origin as a
measure of its validity if one wishes, as Peers does (2012, p. 760), to appeal to the work of
Heidegger (Farias, 1989; Rockmore, 1992). Although Socrates says that in every task the
beginning is the most important part (Resp. ii 377a–b), there is no general reason to privilege any moment in a thing’s history, let alone the first.
25. A relevant comparison in this respect is Etruria:
There is no doubt that in Etruria (as, later, in Rome) woman’s place in society was
remarkably high, and certainly quite different from that of the Greek woman. The fact
that women took part with men in banquets, far from being a sign of dissolution——as
maliciously stated by many Greek writers, astonished and scandalized at a custom quite
foreign to the Greeks of classical times——is a mark of social equality: yet another link
between the civilization of ancient Etruria and the customs of the modern western
world. (Pallottino, 1978, p. 137)
See further Bonfante Warren (1973) and Ginge (1996).
26. According to Mary Renault (1966), the actor Niko (Nikeratos) shared adventures with Axiothea in Syracuse while they were trying to help Plato. The appeal of Plato’s philosophy to
women lasted several centuries. Diogenes Laertius addressed his Lives of Eminent Philosophers to an enthusiastic female Platonist (3. 47, cf. 10. 29), and the mathematician Hypatia
was a follower of Plato (Dzielska, 1995).
27. It has been suggested that women may have contributed even more substantially to intellectual life among the ancient Greeks, for example by Butler (1897), a conjecture dramatised
by Graves (1955); see Ebbott (2005).
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28. Foucault (1990) discussed this passage, but completely missed Xenophon’s point. He took
the pontifications about the role of a wife attributed to Ischomachus quite literally (see
especially pp. 161–162), treating them as reflecting the opinions of Xenophon himself and
even those of ancient Greeks generally.
29. Plato’s arguments for this (Resp. v 451d–7b) reveal that his feminism was what was in the
1970s called ‘anti-essentialist’, unlike Irigaray’s:
But the truth of the truth [sic] about female sexuality is restated even more rigorously
when psychoanalysis takes discourse itself as the object of its investigations. Here, anatomy is no longer available to serve, to however limited an extent, as proof-alibi for the
real difference between the sexes. The sexes are now defined only as they are determined
in and through language. Whose laws, it must not be forgotten, have been prescribed by
male subjects for centuries…[Women’s] exclusion is internal to an order from which
nothing escapes: the order of (man’s) discourse. To the objection that this discourse is
perhaps not all there is, the response will be that it is women who are ‘not-all.’ (Irigaray,
1975, pp. 87–88, emphasis in original)
A generation before she wrote this, Alan Turing (1950) had proposed what became known
as the Turing Test for whether machines can think, in which the machine must pretend to
be a person in a teleprinter (i.e. text only) interrogation. Turing explained that he developed this idea from the Imitation Game, a teleprinter interrogation of someone’s gender.
The game would not have been worth playing unless much language spoken by women was
so far from being ‘prescribed by male subjects’ that many men had difficulty in simulating
it (and similarly for women with men’s language). Jane Austen famously tried to avoid representing direct conversations in men-only contexts, though in fact she did so twice, both
times between a father and son, in Mansfield Park (1814), II. ii and III. iv, as Mullan
(2012, pp. 185–186) reminds us. Since Irigaray wrote, students of sociolinguistics have
investigated the genderedness of language extensively (Lakoff, 1975; Spender, 1980;
Coates, 1986; Tannen, 1990; Mulac, Studley, & Blau, 1990; Thomson & Murachver,
2001; Ebbott, 2005; Cameron, 2007), and the centuries-old secret Chinese women’s script,
Nu Shu, has been revealed to the world (Zhou, 2004; See, 2005). Irigaray’s notion that discourse is of its nature masculine is more difficult to defend than it was 30-odd years ago.
30. Plato recommended such studies as geometry and astronomy (Resp. vii 524e–531c), though
Irigaray would perhaps prefer fluid mechanics as less overtly masculine (1974, p. 109). One
looks forward to a derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid motion from Newton’s Second Law in the question-and-answer style Socrates used with Meno’s Slave Boy.
31. Diogenes Laertius (Vitae 3. 31) and Athenaeus (Deipnos. 13.56 589 = 1854. vol. 3, p. 940)
ascribe to Plato a love affair with the courtesan Archeanessa, but the poem about her they
attribute to him is elsewhere more plausibly attributed rather to Asclepiades of Samos
(Sens, 2011, p. xcix; Clack, 1999, p. 69). Anyway, having written a poem to somebody is
not conclusive evidence of a love affair. Vlastos, denying that Plato was bisexual, says: “In
every passage I can recall which depicts or alludes to the power of sexual desire the context
is homosexual.” (1969, n. 74, p. 25).
32. Work for the whole article was hindered by the inadequate funding of Australian academic
libraries.
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Equity & Excellence in Education
ISSN: 1066-5684 (Print) 1547-3457 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ueee20
Autoethnography, a Chicana's Methodological
Research Tool: The Role of Storytelling for Those
Who Have No Choice but to do Critical Race Theory
Minerva S. Chávez
To cite this article: Minerva S. Chávez (2012) Autoethnography, a Chicana's Methodological
Research Tool: The Role of Storytelling for Those Who Have No Choice but to do Critical Race
Theory, Equity & Excellence in Education, 45:2, 334-348, DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2012.669196
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EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, 45(2), 334–348, 2012
C University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education
Copyright
ISSN: 1066-5684 print / 1547-3457 online
DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2012.669196
Autoethnography, a Chicana’s Methodological Research
Tool: The Role of Storytelling for Those Who Have
No Choice but to do Critical Race Theory
Minerva S. Chávez
California State University, Fullerton
This article investigates the role of autoethnographic research as the methodological tool of choice for
a Chicana who positions herself along the liminal perspective. I posit that testimonios, autobiographical educational experiences, must be used as valid ethnographic research to contribute to existing
knowledge around issues of educational equity. Producing autoethnographic research acknowledges
and validates my Chicana presence as well as draws attention to my marginal position inside dominant
structures of education. Autoethnography and critical race theory are the manners in which I think
about the world and the ways I have chosen to engage in educational research. My work is derived
from personal experience in Los Angeles urban schools and later in elite institutions of higher education. These distinct locations present a unique opportunity to problematize the internalized forms
of class and racial structures that permeate educational institutions. Grounded in my own educational biography, testimonios frame my research perspective to interrogate the role that educational
institutions play in the creation of particular ideologies in working-class students of color.
The most profound and liberating politics come from the interrogation of our own social locations, a
narrative that works outward from our specific corporealities. “For silence to transform into speech,
sounds and words, it must first traverse through our female bodies,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa (1990,
p. xxii). It is, in my opinion, the contemplation of the body that is essential in the development and
evaluation of an epistemology of Chicana thought and culture. (Cruz, 2001, p. 658)
I am an anomaly in higher education: a working-class, Chicana, first-generation college student
with a Ph.D. This unique situation leaves me to wonder, as an assistant professor, how does an
anomaly conduct educational research?
Since the beginning of my higher education studies, and in particular, graduate school, I have
found that when I write, I am unable and unwilling to create the traditional “academic distance”
between the papers I produce and the voices of my educational experiences. The identification
of “distance” here is meant to convey the deeply theoretical and intensely abstract papers that
are characteristically valued in higher education for their objectivity and their distance from
educational practices. From this perspective, distance also encompasses the prized invisibility of
the researcher. Admittedly, the production of what are traditionally deemed objective measures
Address correspondence to Minerva S. Chávez, California State University, Fullerton, College of Education, Secondary
Education, College Park CP-600, Fullerton, CA 92831. E-mail: mchavez@fullerton.edu
AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: THE ROLE OF STORYTELLING
335
of investigation is undeniably valuable within specific educational goals and contexts. However,
the actions and behaviors of our everyday lives—the instances that serve to inform theory—are
set aside as researchers prioritize measures to maintain objectivity.
What is needed is a break from this restrictive pattern too often found in academic texts and
discourses. It is important to emphasize that to disrupt forms of knowledge that render the author’s
identity inconsequential, I deliberately chose to situate myself at the margins of this academic
sphere. Here, in the margins, is a space where my stories, intertwined with the experiences of my
community(ies), are read alongside academic settings and serious texts. Producing autoethnographic research acknowledges and validates my Chicana presence as well as draws attention to
my marginal position inside dominant structures of education.
These spaces, the margins, can also be contextualized as the liminal position. I do not stand
alone in this consciousness-raising space. Women of color often reside in this location to fully
develop research that centers the connections between “experience and consciousness” (Collins,
2002, p. 158) so that we may affirm our existence and “provide a truth far greater than any telling
of a tale frozen to the facts” (Moraga, 2011, p. 4). Anzaldúa (1987) refers to this space as the
“Borderland” or the ability to “inhabit multiple selves without feeling incoherence” (Hurtado,
1989, p. 414). While I cannot be as confident that there are no “incoherent” feelings in this space,
I am convinced that at a minimum, feeling fine with these forms of multiplicity makes for an open
mind about the possibilities for change. In addition, the justification to theorize narratives serves
to further emphasize the complex relationships between the personal and the political as they
pertain to the formation of student ideologies in the construction of their individual beliefs and
actions toward education. Further pushing the concept of positionality, Rendón (2009) reflects
on this space as a setting primed for “unlocking the polarities” (p. 68) that facilitates the process
of disrupting “old belief systems” (p. 68), thus helping to contribute to the production of more
inclusive and progressive shifts in ideologies concerning educational equity.
Ideology has been a curious concept to me even before I knew the existence of the word. As
I traveled the educational pipeline, my educational stories have unavoidably been impacted by
the hegemony of dominant educational practices. My stories are thus an attempt to recreate the
instances where I collide with hegemonic ideological constructs. As an autoethnographer, my role
serves to unpack the repercussions on my educational identity all along the pipeline. Exploring
the development of particular identities may help inform research in understating how Latinas/os
and other marginalized students of color experience educational institutions in order to acquire
more specific knowledge of their academic successes and failures. I elaborate on this point later
in the article.
LA CHICANA: THE FOCUS ON ONE WOMAN’S STORY
I was born and raised in a Spanish-speaking, working-class city called South Gate, located just
ten miles from downtown Los Angeles in California. The city derives its name rather practically;
South Gate is positioned as the south “entrance” to downtown LA. It is cradled between the cities
of Compton and Downey, both within walking distance from our home, but worlds apart. Growing
up, Compton as well as the neighboring city of Lynwood, was a city demographically composed
primarily of African Americans, although today, large influxes of Mexican and Central American
immigrants live in both these cities (Camarillo, 2005). Compton, which had a notorious reputation
at the height of the Crips and Bloods turf wars, contained a large number of housing projects
336
CHÁVEZ
lodging the poorest of them all (Flores, 1997). Conversely, Downey, in our minds, was filled with
large, beautiful homes owned by middle-class, white families. The buzz between the students
around the time we reached high school was their spirited aspirations of moving to the next city
over: “When I grow up, I’m going to live in Downey!” We did not claim other nearby cities, like
Bell, Cudahy, and Huntington Park, as our future home since they were demographically similar
to South Gate. Moreover, given that most of us were not exposed to real opulence and privilege,
Downey, in our eyes, was the “city of gold.” Sadly, no one ever made us question the racial or
class implications explicit in these statements.
My parents are Mexican immigrants who speak little English and have a basic general education. As a child, I attended elementary, middle, and high school in the city of South Gate, part of
the Los Angeles Unified School District. By the time I reached third grade in the early 1980s, the
neighborhood schools’ ethnic demographic became increasingly Latino (Zonta & Ong, 2003);
at the same time, the majority of these schools became declared Title 11 schools (Stein, 2004;
Timar, 1994).
Unfortunately, these shifting demographics and the high increase in poverty created an educational atmosphere where college was rarely discussed or even encouraged for the majority
of the student body. So while my parents continuously stressed the importance of going to college, significant formal educational resources were unavailable; and when they were, they were
inadequate. This situation is not unique to the schools I attended nor is it news that schools
remain in very similar conditions today; other researchers have come to similar conclusions in
their investigations inside overcrowded under-resourced schools where students of color are the
majority (Kozol, 2005; Oakes, 2002; Oakes, Mendoza, & Silver, 2004).
As a consequence, I entered college underprepared yet ripe for critical comparisons on the
subject of educational disparities. I formally learned about the process of writing as an undergraduate student in a small, elite, private, liberal arts college located in Western Massachusetts
that was incredibly patient with me. I spent endless hours sitting alongside my writing instructor
during those college years, meticulously going over my drafts with Professor Levinson2 as he
pointed out everything from basic grammar errors to opportunities for deeper analysis. Four years
of intense writing instruction and mentoring, however, can only begin to make a small dent after
all those years of being under-schooled. As a result, writing is not a pleasant task for me. I struggle
greatly with it while I kick, scream, and procrastinate. Writing, in my opinion, feels more like an
unruly younger sibling than best friend you love to hang with.
Despite this serious writing setback, I still claim to have gained a steady intellectual development. Possibly because of it, I have been reflective of my schooling experiences in critical
ways and even more so when I became immersed in the economically and culturally privileged
educational settings of higher education. I relate to my own sense of awakening with the words
of a working-class man Freire (2003) encountered in a discussion group:
Perhaps I am the only one here of working-class origin. I can’t say that I’ve understood everything
you’ve said just now, but I can say one thing—when I began this course I was naı̈ve, and when I
found out how naı̈ve I was, I started to get critical. (p. 35)
In my case, the distinctions that brought on my comparative critiques were evident on many
levels. Witness the use of the word “distinctions.” With this word, I imply the deep-rooted recognition that I traveled to and from an array of radically different educational settings. These distinct
locations, coupled with extensive theoretical development in graduate school, offer me a unique
opportunity to understand the internalized forms of class and racial structures that permeate
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337
educational institutions (Apple, 2003), for they are grounded in my own educational biography.
Against this backdrop, an important aspect that emerges is the implication of educational institutions to “proudly affect consciousness, identity, cultural cleavage, and social antagonism”
(p. 5). Producing autoethnographic texts thus contributes to those cultural struggles taking place
in education. These texts serve as a tool of “subaltern resistance” (Gonzalez et al., 2003, p. 234)
to “challenge the very legitimacy of political and cultural dominance” (Apple, 2003, p. 5). Detailing my uncommon educational trajectory and drawing on it as a way to frame my research,
takes advantage of this unique position to interrogate the role that educational institutions play
in the creation of particular ideologies in working-class students of color. In order to facilitate
the process of unlocking dualities (Rendón, 2009), I heed the call to describe the “specificities of
situations” (Apple, 2003, p. 5) in education that have not been previously identified. This includes
holding educational institutions “up to rigorous questioning” (Gandin & Apple, 2003, p. 193) by
those who benefit least from the ways these institutions now function.
A Kinder Story: Fall 1978
It was the big day. Mom dressed me in bell-bottom dark green jeans with a polyester screen tee,
the one with the yellow cap sleeves. It was an itchy choice for a dry Southern California summer,
but it was my favorite tee, and I wanted to wear it for the grand event. I had practiced counting to
100 all month and was eager to reap the rewards: a striking certificate with my name beautifully
handwritten across the center acknowledging my impressive accomplishment along with a giant
lollipop the size of my head.
Mom and I found Ms. Stevens, my kindergarten teacher, scrambling about corralling her
students, asking them to form “nice and neat straight lines, one for the boys, one for the girls.”
Mom prodded me toward the girl line, outside the classroom doors as she did every morning
after having dropped off my sister in first grade on the other side of the school playground. Mom
made her way back out the school gates and waited while she chatted with the other mothers who
watched their kids until each teacher filed their students into the classrooms, shutting the door
tightly behind them. When the kinder playground cleared, mothers and babysitters disbursed too,
taking the local gossip with them.
“Minerva!” Ms. Stevens exclaimed as I passed her on my way into the classroom, “Are you
ready to count to 100 today?”
I smiled up at her and nodded. She lowered herself to my level and smiled at me so broadly
that I watched her eyes disappear amidst the wrinkles hugging her round face.
“We’ll see, little girl,” she said. “We’ll see. It’s such a hard task! Heavens!! And you only
speak a little English.” She patted my back and said, “But you can do it! You can do it!”
I know I could do it, I said to myself. I counted to 100 even before I started kindergarten. I
counted while I sang along with The Count on Sesame Street on PBS everyday. I also recited
my numbers beside my sister, Carla, last year when she practiced for her kindergarten class. I
watched as Carla returned triumphantly with her certificate and giant red lollipop in hand for
having accomplished such a grandiose feat for such a small kindergartener. Now it was my turn,
and I could hardly wait to count for my own class. It was so exciting.
After Ms. Stevens took attendance, she collected our lunch tickets and read us a short story.
When she finally exclaimed, “It’s time, kindergarteners!” I felt like I would burst from the
excitement.
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Such anticipation was equally shared among the students in my class. We all squealed in
delight, and a flurry of movement ensued among us.
Ms. Steven made us sit in rows so that we were better able to see the student reciting the
numbers. The counting had begun when she called us up in alphabetical order.
Most students did not have any problems counting, but when the Latina/o students stepped up
to face the class, Ms. Stevens stopped them repeatedly. “No, Maria. It’s not tu, it’s pronounced
twoooooo, whooo, whooo.” She corrected Maria, stretching out the vowel of that poor three letter
word before exaggerating the “w” sound at the end. I watched her mouth do strange things just
to say two. “Again,” she requested. “Let’s hear that oooo, oooooo and whooo whooo at the end.”
And so there was Maria, flustered but determined, singled out by Ms. Stevens for her improper
English pronunciation. It was even more painful to watch when Jose’s turn came up. Every
number was corrected so much that Ms. Stevens lost her patience and exclaimed, shaking her
pointer finger at him, “Jooossaayyy, it looks like YOU didn’t practice your counting.”
Jose turned tomato red.
“You’ll need to practice harder at home. Why don’t we try again next week?” But it really was
not a question. It was more of a declaration and an easy way to move things right along.
I witnessed several English-only speaking students take their place toward the front of the
classroom, reciting their numbers flawlessly and I noticed how Ms. Stevens did not interrupt
them even once.
Then it was my turn.
I walked up to the front, faced the class and in a nervous move instantly began tugging at the
flaps of my cargo jean pockets. “1, 2, 3, . . . ” I began, delivering my numbers as if they were
second nature, thinking about the next one to come, when an odd feeling overcame me. I quickly
managed to count all the way to 49 and stopped dead in my tracks. A few seconds went by, and I
shut my eyes tight trying hard to find my lost voice. Where did it go?
But I knew where it went. I simply could not retrieve it from where it was.
“Ah haaa . . . ” Ms. Stevens prompted me to go on, “Forty-nine . . . ”
I stared at her with all my insides screaming, “Fifty!!! I know it’s 50!” Say it, I encouraged
myself. Just say it. But it was too late. I heard my inside voice pronounce 50 and knew Ms. Stevens
would not approve of its sound. I had heard my inside voice say “feet-tee” and recognized that it
was wrong. Say 50, I encouraged myself. Fifty. But no amount of self-prompting worked. Why
could I not simply skip it and say the rest of the numbers? I can do it, I know I can, but my inside
voice insisted on Feet-tee.
“Minerva?” Ms. Steven asked gently. “Did you practice ALL your numbers at home?”
I lowered my head and shook it.
“You can sit down,” Ms. Steven whispered. “Stanley, you’re next, and don’t you disappoint
me.”
I returned to my place on the colorful carpet surrounded by students who proudly displayed
their certificates and giant lollipops on their laps.
THE PERSONAL ROLE OF METHODOLOGY
From the onset, I acknowledge that my educational research does not ignore the premise that we
are all in a relationship with existing social, political, and economic conditions that are structured
hierarchically to one another. An important reason to do autoethnographic research is to help
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339
uncover relations of domination in the “ordinary” fabric of educational contexts. One way to
do this is by problematizing how we live our daily lives, for it is in the social, political, and
cultural practices that our perceptions of the “common sense” are formed that, in turn, affect how
we live our lives (Apple, 1995). Underlying my discussion on autoethnography as a research
methodology for the marginalized is the principle that hegemonic forms of ideology are not
to be taken lightly and, therefore, must be highlighted as I consider how aspects of my own
student identity were formed in relation to particular ideological constructs, such as the use
of language in the Kinder Story above. Macedo, Dendrinos, and Gounari (2003) remind us that
“simple communication implies linguistic interactions between humans in given historical, social,
and cultural contexts” (p. 25). Furthermore, the idea of using autoethnographic research in the
Kinder Story calls attention to how dominant forms of assimilationist ideology function within
educational institutions in shaping students’ behaviors in schools. In my case, I felt silenced
brought about by my feelings of shame in language use by a well-meaning teacher who engaged
in practices of linguistic discrimination. To be a “nice” teacher, Nieto (2010) claims, is not enough.
A quote from Apple (1995) summarizes the implications of ideology in our lives:
[I]deologies [are] filled with contradictions. They are not coherent sets of beliefs. It is probably wrong
to think of them as only beliefs at all. They are instead sets of lived meanings, practices, and social
relations that are often internally inconsistent. They have elements within themselves that see through
to the heart of the unequal benefits of a society and at one and the same time tend to reproduce the
ideological relations and meanings that maintain the hegemony of dominant classes (Richard, 1979).
Because of this, ideologies are contested; they are continually struggled over. Since ideologies have
both “good and bad sense” within them, people need not be won over to one side or the other, if you
will. Particular institutions become the sites where this struggle takes place and where these dominant
ideologies are produced. The school is crucial as one of these sites. (p. 14)
As a Chicana researcher, I use educational narratives in order to focus on the concept of
ideology and to draw attention to how ideology plays out in more nuanced ways. To be sure, the
theoretical concept of ideology is heavily abstract and complicated. For this reason, I unravel
ideological underpinnings by underscoring their appearance in the various educational settings
where I have traversed, or rather, transgressed, by behaving properly—that is, according to white
norms and privileges. But I do not fool myself in thinking that my proper behavior in elite
institutions, and not-so-elite institutions, such as urban schools, has been without conflict. My
very presence, the presence of the brown, female body and the lived experiences contained within,
after all, is a reminder of class and racial inequities. Speaking about the role of people of color in
institutions of higher education, Córdova (1998) observes:
Our presence, as working-class people of color (especially women of color), in an institution which
values itself on its elitist criteria for admission, forces the debates and challenges previously sacred
canons of objective truth. Our presence, therefore, and the issues we raise, threaten the class legitimation function of the University. It is probably for this reason that our presence here is so complex—and
so important (p. 18).
Ultimately, I am influenced by the work of Córdova and others (Carter, 2005; Delgado Bernal,
2006) to think about important relationships in schools and the ways that ideologies are formed as
they directly relate to issues of power. Current forms of academic and personal relations between
the adults in urban schools and the students who attend them are created under dehumanizing
conditions that limit the capacity for students and their teachers to build relationships based on
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conscientização (Freire, 2003)—the ability to connect the social, political, racial, and economic
contradictions that frame our contexts in ways that require us to mobilize against those existing
conditions that serve to oppress and dehumanize us. Without conscientização, the situation turns
troubling as the effects of these conditions limit students’ abilities to be academically successful.
An Exclusionary Tale, Fall 1986
Dr. Sanders was our middle school principal, known for his loud, belly-shaking jolly laughs.
They were the kind of laughs that reminded us of Santa. He resembled the mythic man, too:
large, round, and white. The principal’s charm made all the students feel as if Dr. Sanders was
their best friend, and so he was treated like a Hollywood celebrity around campus, especially
during lunchtime. The principal would wrap his enormous arms around us, enveloping all the
middle-schoolers into a colossal side bear hug. It was quite possible that he could fit as many
as 30 giggling students within his reach. He would ask us how we were and often inquired
about our parents or older siblings, “How’s your mother?” or “How’s your brother doing in high
school? What is he now, a sophomore?” A boisterous laugh and the usual warning followed every
sentence, “I’m going to call them to make sure!”
Dr. Sanders delighted me until I learned about whom I truly was in the eyes of the school
principal; I was in eighth grade, attending to my duties as an office aide, my favorite period of the
day. I was stuffing teacher’s mailboxes with weekly school newsletters, hot off the copy machine
in the main office one early afternoon when I overheard a conversation.
“Dr. Sanders?” Ms. Whiteford, the friendly main office secretary stopped the principal on his
way in from roaming the campus after the last lunch period.
“Yes, gorgeous?” he replied heading toward her desk, picking up all the red jellybeans from
her overflowing candy platter and popping them into his mouth several at a time.
“Well. I’m a bit worried,” she began. “We haven’t received any of the math textbooks, and it’s
already three months into the new school year.”
“That’s it?” he commented, surprised.
Selecting the orange jellybeans this time, Dr. Sanders looked at her. “Well, um, yes,” she
continued. “The teachers are complaining, saying that the students have nothing to do.”
“No rush,” he said. “These kids are gonna be factory workers anyway.”
He broke out in laughter and the rest of the staff laughed along with him as if it were the
funniest joke he’d ever cracked. The staff didn’t seem fazed by his revelation. In those days, unlike
today, the middle school office staff was made up of older, white ladies who aligned themselves
with the principal’s interests or, rather, forgot that they themselves were working-class folk, too.
Dr. Sanders went back to his office, sat in his beautiful, high-back, leather chair and continued
with his day; business as usual for everyone at South Gate Middle School. Meanwhile, I continued
stuffing teachers’ mailboxes with the weekly newsletter banner across the top announcing, “South
Gate Middle School is a great place to be, nice place to learn!”
A CHICANA’S RESEARCH TOOL OF CHOICE: AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
Stories are the ways humans make sense of their worlds. Stories are essential to human understanding and are not unique to autoethnography. Stories are the focus of Homeric literature, oral
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341
traditions, narrative analysis, and fairy tales. Given their importance, I argue that stories should
both be a subject and a method of social science research (Ellis, 2004, p. 32).
There are good reasons to use autoethnography. In calling my research autoethnographic, I
mean to accentuate how this method uses one’s own experience in a culture to look at our culture
and ourselves. In doing so, I emphasize the direct ties between individual lives and larger notions
of social formations and historical processes (Chávez, 2010). Additionally, autoethnography can
be defined as the union of “autobiography, story of one’s own life, with ethnography, the study
of a particular social group” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 6). Ellis (2004) explains autoethnography
in this way:
Autoethnography refers to writing about the personal and its relationships to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness. Back
and forth autoethnographers gaze: First they look through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing
outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing
a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.
As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and the
cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. (p. 38)
Although social scientists now use the term autoethnography to refer to studies that include
the researcher and his or her experiences in the field, as well as to express in a narrative form
how people “do” culture, I use the term autoethnography as it was originally conceived, that is,
“cultural-level studies by anthropologists of their ‘own people,’ in which the researcher is a full
insider by virtue of being ‘native,’ acquiring an intimate familiarity with the group, or achieving
full membership in the group being studied” (Ellis, 2004, p. 38).
To elaborate, instead of the traditional ethnographic study of immersing oneself in “the field”
of another culture, autoethnography allows me to center my own educational experiences. My
elite graduate school experience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, uncovered the insight
that it was popular for privileged, well-educated Whites to conduct research in urban schools
for a period of time in order to gain an understanding of the failures of urban schooling. But
as an educational researcher and a product of urban schooling, am I now supposed to ignore
these experiences? That is unlikely; I consider it an advantage that I now have the tools to use
these experiences to produce new knowledge from an organic position. Delgado Bernal (2006)
speaks of this Chicana epistemology as research that is generated from “collective experience and
community memory” (p. 114). In order to ensure the integrity of these experiences and memories,
autoethnographic work enables me to extract my K-12 years of “research” at the same time that
critical race theory (CRT) then becomes the theoretical validation that demands that I speak up.
There are compelling reasons to do this kind of research; I am optimistic about the effects
of two particularly stimulating elements in autoethnography. Foremost, it is the unconcealed
and unapologetic use of emotion utilized by the researcher in the writing style that contains the
possibility to position readers in an unconventional spot: squarely alongside the “despised other”
(Apple, 2006b, p. 683): the Chicana protagonist. This positionality creates an opportunity for
dissonance or what Rendón (2009) describes as a “dialectical space where new understanding
might emerge through the integration of polarities” (p. 68). Thus, autoethnography becomes an
effective method to engage academic readers by pulling them away from interpreting this research
as simply a distant “unit of analysis” text. If done well, autoethnography has the potential to
create conditions of emotional jarring. Moreover, autoethnography has the possibility to create
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relationships that can be based on more basic human feelings to create authentic and meaningful
connections (Rendón, 2009). In a similar fashion, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) describe
stories by people of color as a way to “catalyze the necessary cognitive conflict to jar dysconscious
racism” (p. 58). In such situations, I contend that these jolts have the potential to contribute to
engendering closer relationships with the “marginalized other” through storytelling. Coles (1989)
observed:
[S]tories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new
directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen,
comrades, advisers—offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might
make surroundings. (p. 159–160)
I consider how this initial sense of connection, empathy, or differing perspective may begin
to uproot those firmly planted in detrimental common sense ways of understanding difference.
The notion of being uprooted, the sense of being lifted up and off the hegemonic center, must
be channeled by bringing these new relationships into the margins so to de-center dominance in
order to produce more equitable educational spaces.
I call attention to the use of autoethnography. This methodology has been practiced since
the early 1970s (Anderson, 2006), yet it is still at the margins of mainstream forms of research
methodologies (Jewett, 2008). Autoethnography confronts and defies traditional investigative
methods. In addition, autoethnography challenges the role of objectivity in research since it
underscores the positionality of the researcher in this investigation. I am exceedingly comfortable
in this methodological zone; hence, autoethnography and the use of CRT are an attempt to reclaim
representational space. I do this to have an unconventional voice, with an unconventional story,
and still be included in the academy.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY: WEAVING STORIES WITH THEORY
Given the above discussion, I tenaciously use my autobiographical experiences as valid ethnographic research to contribute to existing educational knowledge around issues of educational
equity. I wish to build on critical race theorists, like Delgado (2009), Montoya (2002), and
Solórzano and Yosso (2002, 2009), who make claims to the liberatory and empowering effects
of this epistemology. These theorists rationalize the margins as a place for counter-storytelling,
and they justify the role of critical race theory as a framework that:
(a) foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process . . . [I]t also challenges the
separate discourses on race, gender, and class by showing how these three elements intersect to
affect the experiences of people of color; (b) challenges the traditional research paradigms, texts, and
theories used to explain the experiences of students of color; (c) offers a liberatory or transformative
solution to racial, gender, and class subordination; and (d) focuses on the racialized, gendered, and
classed experiences of students of color. . . . [I]t views these experiences as sources of strength and
(e) uses the interdisciplinary knowledge base of ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, history,
humanities, and the law to better understand the experiences of students of color. (Solórzano & Yosso,
2002, p. 24)
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343
The use of critical race theory is easy to understand. The level of experience that is required
to do critical race theory for me has been ripe from the beginning. Solórzano and Yosso (2002)
explain critical race theory in education to be “a set of basic insights, perspectives, methods,
and pedagogy that seek to identify, analyze, and transform those structural and cultural aspects
that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions in and out of the classroom” (p. 25).
Additionally, they developed five elements that highlight the framework. First, they include “the
intercentricity of race and racism with other forms of subordination” (p. 25). This aspect of critical
race theory acknowledges that racism does not stand alone, that racism is a facet of other forms
of subordination that include, for instance, gender, class, language, and sexuality. These features
of intercentricity call attention to race and racism in relationship to other forms of oppression.
The second advantage to using this theoretical framework includes “the challenge to dominant
ideology” (Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000, p. 63). This aspect of CRT questions the pervasive
American narratives of equal educational opportunity by challenging claims of neutrality at the
same time that it exposes the liberal discourse of colorblindness as a tool to reframe and protect
white privilege (Leonardo, 2004) and the historical and contemporary forms of whiteness as a
property (Harris, 1993).
The third element explains “the commitment to social justice” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002,
p. 26). Solórzano and Yosso are clear to acknowledge the contradictory forms that exist in
educational settings, voicing their understanding of the ways in which schools function both as
oppressive institutions and institutions where forms of resistance against hegemonic practices are
to be found and cultivated. Therefore, the call for social justice by critical race theorists requires
the eradication of “racism, sexism, and poverty and the empowering of subordinated minority
groups” (p. 26).
The fourth component calls for “the centrality of experiential knowledge” (Solórzano & Yosso,
2002, p. 26). Critical race theorists call for the recognition of diverse forms of knowledge, created
by people of color, as a challenge to hegemonic forms of understanding the experience of the
“despised others” (Apple, 2006b, p. 683). In particular, the methods by which people of color are
choosing to describe their knowledge include forms of “storytelling, family histories, biographies,
scenarios, parables, cuentos, testimonios, chronicles, and narratives” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002,
p. 26). Critical race theorists call for the validation of these ways of understanding the world
as a form of resilience and resistance by people of color and express the need to include and
legitimize these diverse texts when considering alternative forms of understanding our existing
social (dis)order.
Finally, the fifth element argues for a “transdisciplinary perspective” (Solórzano & Yosso,
2002, p. 26) Critical race theorists recognize the importance of generating new knowledge from
the diversity of academic disciplines, in a sense, mirroring our intersecting social realities. Of
most prominence in CRT are the fields of “ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, history,
law, and other fields to guide research that better understands the effects of racism, sexism, and
classism on people of color” (p. 27).
The Perfect Marriage: CRT and Autoethnography
At the center of this discussion is my perspective that has been marginalized. I use critical race
theory because I have no choice; it is what I know and how I come to know. It is the heart
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of my epistemological frame. By grounding my work within CRT, I intentionally underscore
the interrelated roles of schools as apparatuses assisting in the process of capital accumulation,
legitimation, and production—thus calling attention to the impact on the ideological roles that
educational institutions play in the sorting practices that influence the formation of particular
identities (Apple, 2006a). By weaving theory and narrative together, my testimonios aim to
problematize the ways in which diverse educational institutions have influenced my ideological
perspective regarding race, class, and culture.
Both stories included in this piece are offered as illustrations of the impact of ideology that
help emphasize particular forms of identity development as a student of color in urban schools.
Without the use of testimonios, without the power of the first person account and the role of
bearing witness to educational injustice, my ability to challenge dominant perceptions around
language and class would be limited. Accordingly, the use of the Kinder Story sets the tone for
my trajectory in education: a story that encompasses my position from the margins. In retrospect,
speaking with an accent in kindergarten and being judged against fluent English speakers brought
about my own silencing, as was the case at various other moments in my education. Developing
resiliency sometimes means that it was simply wise to stay silent. Elenes (2000) argues for the
need to voice such testimonios as a way to “situate knowledge” (p. 115) uniquely gained from
the perspective of the oppressed. Indeed, these testimonios reveal the contradictions inherent in
my developing identity as a student, for they serve to identify the moments when I consciously
succumbed to ideological dominance and those when I rebelled against it, such as was the
result of the Exclusionary Tale. Solórzano and Delgado Bernal (2001) describe this rebellion as
a characteristic of “transformational resistance” that occurs when oppressive situations create
an “I’ll prove others wrong” (p. 319) attitude in the Chicana student. I recall the principal
incident and his comment most vividly when I needed to push myself through difficult and
challenging experiences in education. In essence, testimonios trace the path that reveals a “map
of consciousness” (Elenes, 2000, p. 115) as I developed ways to proactively navigate dominant
ideological settings in schools. My testimonios, generated from oppressive situations, cement my
desire for social justice and fuel the need to improve schooling conditions for those students of
color who follow.
Marrying CRT with autoethnography constructs the testimonios of the anomaly in unique
ways. Together, they represent new alternatives in thinking about the voices that have been
excluded in the academy. I draw on storytelling in order to provide a more critical understanding,
in particular, of the urban school experience and its consequences on the shaping of student
identities as a result of the inferior schooling conditions that are typically found in such schools
(Fernandez, 2002). Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) argue for “voice” in the form of storytelling
as an integral component of critical race theory. As they contend, voice is:
[A] first step on the road to justice [that] provides a way to communicate the experiences and
realities of the oppressed. Thus, without authentic voices of people of color (as teachers, parents,
administrators, students, and community members) it is doubtful that we can say or know anything
useful about education in their communities. (p. 58)
Indeed, without this voice, educational institutions would be limited in their perspective in
constructing more equitable schooling conditions for all students. How I chose to think and
write about the function of storytelling in my new role as an educational researcher is worth
noting. To be sure, this theoretical lens and autoethnography represent the political forms of my
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345
development; more significantly, however, they are inextricably intertwined with my personal
development. Critical race theory already spoke to these forms of intimate connections (Delgado,
2009). Critical race theory and autoethnography are the manners in which I think about the world
and the ways I have chosen to describe my experiences.
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC LIMITATIONS
It is important to consider the limitations of autoethnographic writing as a research tool. First, from
an educational researcher standpoint, this form of writing will routinely suffer for its difficulty to
claim generalizability from a single autoethnographic account. However, centralizing the voices
and stories of subjugated scholars of color facilitates understanding how “sociotemporal notions
of oppression and the normalization of racial inequality in public schools and society” (Duncan,
2005, p. 2) function to produce particular student identities. Hence, recognizing racial and class
inequality in American schools cannot fully be examined without capturing the narratives of
those who lived through these experiences.
Second, given that the researcher and the participant are the same individual, many scholars will
be “teetering on edge,” so to speak, by this epistemological framework. Some have claimed that
autoethnographic writing must be balanced delicately so as not to tread on the side of essentialism
(Buzard, 2003). However, the obligation to make scholarly contributions to the development of our
own critical consciousness is imperative. Rendón (2009) furthers this positionality by claiming
that the “work of transformation is not only about changing what is ‘out there’; it is about
transforming what is ‘in here,’ our own internal views and assumptions” (p. 48). Understandably,
the limitations imposed by the construction of self-knowledge are challenged by our humanness
as we “interview ourselves” to discover that we must rely on our fragmented sense of memory
or our limited capacity to understand and reflect upon our own experiences. I want to make
clear that in the act of retelling, we are simultaneously reinterpreting the events we choose to
depict regarding our lived experiences. Thus, while stories are many times fragmented bits and
pieces of our own collective memory, these instances serve to deepen our understanding of the
ways in which social relations are embedded within existing hegemonic structures—in this case,
educational institutions.
CONCLUSION
“Autobiographical stories really make theory and history come alive, don’t they?” (Ellis, 2004, p. 23)
The stories I research are my own—the stories of my understandings and perceptions regarding
my schooling experience, the data that make up my educational experiences as a workingclass Chicana who traveled through the (treacherous) educational system, relatively unscathed.
I emphasize relatively—the seemingly successful educational ways, according to mainstream
notions of understanding educational success; that is, success measured by a bachelor’s degree or
a graduate degree from a college or university (Huber, Huidor, Malagon, Sanchez, & Solórzano,
2006). This is an important form of analysis in the face of reigning positivistic methodologies.
At the same time, autoethnography combined with critical race theory serve to highlight the
much larger critique of the effects of schooling on poor and working-class students of color. It
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CHÁVEZ
is a deliberate attempt on my part for the personal and cultural to become indistinguishable as I
demonstrate that trying to separate the two creates subtractive schooling conditions (Valenzuela,
1999). If schools are serious about successfully educating Latina/o students and other students of
color, the autoethnographic texts from a Latina who “made it” could uncover factors that led to
such “success” across the educational pipeline. I wish to include my narratives as opportunities to
assist in “unlock[ing] polarities” (Rendón, 2009, p. 68) experienced in education. In a more fitting
sense, Rendón contends that “unlocking the polarities requires surrendering old belief systems
and working with our growth edges as we begin to uncover larger truths that join two realms
of reality” (p. 68) to produce new forms of knowledge and understandings of our practice and
our role within these educational spaces. Expanding on Rendón’s notion of unlocking polarities
to dislodge outdated forms of thinking about what constitutes truth, narratives in the academy
further the scholarly contribution of a more complicated analysis of social inequality in schools.
Toward this end, stories capture the nuanced forms of how oppression and inequality function in
educational settings told from the perspective of those who experienced such microagressions,
the subtle form of racism (Sue, Lin, Tortino, Capodilupo, & Rivera, 2009). As a result, I bear
witness to the experiences of those schooled in urban educational institutions. I find myself armed
with educational theory, writing stories that push me to be inwardly reflective as I consider ways
to transform educational institutions into more socially just places that recognize the diversity of
all our students. Inward reflectivity, therefore, is certainly a good place to start if our sustained
goals are to change these highly politicized and unequal structures within the field of education.
NOTES
1. Title I was enacted in 1965 with the passage of t...
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