A Paradox in the Classroom: How Objectivity Cultivates Uncritical Teachers

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	• White Teacher Vivian Gussin Paley Harvard University Press, 2000 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent

This book will really bring to light exactly how children learn to identify themselves. This book will reinforce the truth that prejudice is learned and that adults play a huge role in the value systems that children adopt. You'll also find a few things in here that make you giggle...after all the book is about a kindergarten class.

I was Color Blind

This book helped me overcome my color blindness. As a teacher of 17 years, I always thought the best way to address differences was to just igore them and embrace similarities. White teacher taught me that we need to also celebrate each others differences.

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White teacher

Used this for a college class! Great book! Paley was very ahead of her time in dealing with multi-cultural issues in early childhood education settings.

A Paradox in the Classroom: How Objectivity Cultivates Uncritical Teachers

Vivian Paley's groundbreaking work, White Teacher, ushers one through an array of intimate experiences with and reflections about the challenges she faced as a white teacher, working to develop a pedagogy free of the marginalization and neglect that disproportionately affect the educational experiences of many non-white children. Paley's evolving understanding of the complexities of teaching white and black students together in the racialized America of the 1970's emerges from the frozen frames of the United States' educational past as uniquely relevant for teachers in the twenty-first century. Within the first four lines of the forward of her 2000 reprinting of White Teacher, Paley is praised by James P. Comer, M.D. and Alvin Poussaint, M.D. for, among other things, her ability to "remain objective" in the midst of her "deep personal involvement." Considering the essentiality of critical thinking to the pedagogy of effective and influential teachers, I find these practitioners' reference to objectivity not only inappropriate and harmful for all teachers, but also offensive, especially to the generations of teachers, whose voices and contributions have been habitually and historically excluded from major conversations in education because they have been deemed too subjective.

Whether it be intentional or not, applying the label of objectivity to Paley's writing, evokes associations with scientific inquiry and thus to the notion of "an objective truth," which unjustifiably elevate the status of White Teacher and in effect, belittle the opinions of educators perceived by outsiders as unable to estrange themselves from their students - most often in terms of a shared racial or gender identification. I believe Paley understood and meant for White Teacher to document her personal recollections of and working conclusions about how to promote equity as a white teacher in a classroom in which black and white children learn together. Paradoxically, Comer and Poussaint's attempt to validate Paley's words silence the individuals about whom she was writing, unveiling the common and potentially detrimental conclusion many teachers have reached after reading White Teacher. For educators to denote Paley's depictions as objective implies or necessitates the existence of a subjective and therefore inferior "other." The understanding that underlies and maintains this reciprocal relationship has no place in teacher education because it hinders the ability of teachers to question and think critically. Furthermore, assertions about the objectivity of Paley's work subtly undermine and invalidate the knowledge, experiences, and opinions of the marginalized children and educators to whom Paley sought to give a voice through her impassioned writing.

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good read

I have only gotten half way through this book, but so far it is really good. I am studying to be in the education field and this book is an insight to how different children are and how you have to appeal to each one of them. Paley is a wonderful author and is good at describing her situations. I would recommend this book to anyone intereted in teaching children and anyone who wants an insight to how children behave and why. Definately a good book.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Vivian Paley presents a moving personal account of her experiences teaching kindergarten in an integrated school within a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood. In a new preface, she reflects on the way that even simple terminology can convey unintended meanings and show a speaker's blind spots. She also vividly describes what her readers have taught her over the years about herself as a "white teacher."

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