Chapter 5: Creating Force Field: Rethinking Uses and Consequences of Anti-Oppressive Pedagogical Activities

A graffiti slogan scrawled by contemporary British street artist and political activist, Banksy, reads: “Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie” (Banksy, 2006, p. 188). By implication, this metaphor for a passivity accompanying personal awareness of privilege echoes Wilder’s (2018) claim that it is “easy to fall into a rut of woke passivity, where one pays lip service to social issues because to not do so is socially unacceptable” (para. 2). Banksy’s terse play on irony also aptly presents three constituent characteristics of privilege that are problematic when they coincide: [A1] The ability to recognize disparities in the world, [A2] leading to a passive response, [A3] that re-centers the self as primary concern. In the current chapter, privilege as an often-predominant focus of social justice work in education will be critiqued, and especially anti-oppressive pedagogical activities focused on unpacking racial privilege (see McIntosh, 1989). One of these activities, the Privilege Walk, will be deconstructed relative to its consequences that include: [B1] spotlighting and commodifying marginalized students, [B2] oversimplifying social disparities, [B3] a static framing of deficit, and [B4] a dominant centering of structural advantage over anti-oppressive resistance. As an alternative, the chapter describes—through allusion to an undergraduate university course on anti-oppressive pedagogy—how the author and a group of students created an activity, Force Field. This pedagogical activity engages an active, relational, more nuanced approach to better making sense of oppression in the world (Kumashiro, 2000), and how oppression runs throughout the personal and public spheres of social life. In an emergent manner, this activity highlights [C1] the need for intersectional and contextual fluidity, [C2] reckoning with privilege as requiring the accompanying need to reckon with power and positioning, and [C3] ongoing dialogic reflection and negotiation among activity participants. As such, Force Field aids in the sociopolitical development, perspective shifting, and critical consciousness raising (Freire, 2000; Watts & Hipolito-Delgado, 2015; Watts, Williams, & Jagers, 2003) of student teachers, adding a political dimension of the teacher as transformative intellectual (Giroux, 1985) to existent literature on critical reflexive practices (Schön, 1983; Brookfield, 1995) among practicing and aspiring educators.