Chapter 12: Deconstructing Otherness: Social Studies Teachers’ Discursive Representations of Middle Eastern Populations

Fundamental to the establishment of social order are collective identities (Kimmerling, 2001). Identity is not immutable, but rather constructed to produce a coherent representation of the social world. This coherence is predicated upon perceptions of sameness within and differentness between groups (Bourdieu, 1985). Collective identities are produced to provide a sense of security through trust, obligation, and cooperation among group members (Brewer, 1999). The knowledge that contributes to their production is disseminated within particular social contexts, including schools as institutional sites of identity formation (Apple, 1996, 2004). Through education, youth become “similarly located” as they are socialized (Mannheim, 2011; Seixas, 2009). As school knowledge is organized, determinations are made regarding what sort of knowledge merits legitimizing (Banks, 2005). This has an effect of creating silences whereby certain voices and forms of knowledge are displaced from the formal learning processes that facilitate collective identity formation (Trouillot, 1995). In this respect, the knowledge found in schools is not necessarily value-free (Giroux, 2011).