The limits of role modeling as a basis for critical multicultural education: the case of Black male teachers in urban schools

Abstract

This article provides a critical analysis of the political significance of role modelling as it relates to envisaging a critical multicultural approach to educational reform. While not rejecting role modelling outright, it calls for a commitment to questioning the limits of common sense understandings that underpin the logic of gender and racial affiliation and homogeneity upon which it is based. The focus is on Black male teachers, given the attention that has been paid to their role in field of boys' and multicultural education. The article draws on theoretical and intersectional frameworks that raise some epistemological concerns about the logics of racial and gender affiliation that lie at the heart of role modelling discourses. While stressing the limitations of role modelling as a basis for a critical multicultural pedagogic reform project, particularly as it pertains to the role of Black male teachers in the schooling of disadvantaged Black male students, it does not reject the political and transformative potentialities of their embodied presence in urban schools. By drawing on case study narrative accounts of two Black male teachers, the article presents an intersectional analysis that attends to the organizational, intersubjective, representational and experiential dimensions of race, gender and sexuality that are implicated in these men's everyday understandings of their pedagogical actions and identities in particular urban school contexts in Toronto. While pointing to the limits of role modelling, the cases are employed to draw attention to the crucial significance of the embodied presence of these Black male' teachers as transformative intellectuals with regards to their self-reflexive articulated activism in the urban school classroom. The article concludes with an exhortation to rejecting the master narratives of racial and gender homogeneity that lie at the heart of a politics of role modeling, but does not reject the political significance of and need for the representation of Black male teachers in urban schools.

Becoming Neoliberal Subjects: Power and Identity Formation in a Mentorship Program for Latino Boys

“…This locates the deficit within the boys themselves (Baldridge, 2014), shifting the focus away from the structural racism in the United States. Programs similar to MBK have led to the over idealization of male teachers of color (Martino, 2015;Phillips & Nava, 2011), often propagating men of color as a fix-all solution for "problematic" boys (Baldridge, 2017). In this paper I argue that this turn to successful men of color as mentors and role models has served to reify deficit understandings of boys, promoting an idealized Latino masculinity that is upwardly mobile, heteronormative, and merit-based.…”

Resisting the Neoliberal Role Model: Latino Male Mentors’ Perspectives on the Intersectional Politics of Role Modeling

“…First, scholars of gender and sexuality have criticized the notion of role modeling to be “grounded in reductionist and essentialist notions of racial and gender affiliation” (Rezai-Rashti & Martino, 2010, p. 38). In this critique, the discursive and performative act of defining a positive male role model is inextricably linked to dominant and confining notions of gender, race, and sexual identity (Britzman, 1993; Martino, 2015; Martino & Rezai-Rashti, 2010). The strong focus on the masculine gender of men who are teachers can lead male teachers to function as systems of surveillance for proper masculinity among their students (Martino & Frank, 2006).…”

“…The second conversation I engage is the growing concern for the ways neoliberal discourse has become the hegemonic framework to understand and address the problem of race in education (Apple, 2006; Baldridge, 2014; Clay, 2019; Lipman, 2011). Specifically for boys and young men of color, neoliberal policies have commonly offered the addition of male of color role models for boys of color as catchall solutions to the problems facing this group (Baldridge, 2017; Martino, 2015; Singh, 2018). This framing of the problems facing boys of color, however, erases and minimizes structural racism in schools and, instead, locates the problem in individual boys themselves (Dumas, 2016b).…”