Breaking Bad Habits of Race and Gender: Transforming Identity in Schools

by Sarah Marie Stitzlein

Overview

Every day teachers encounter moments of racial and gender tension in their classrooms. In the most drastic cases, these situations erupt into overt conflict or violence, while in other instances they go largely unnoted. Such incidents reveal that despite equality legislation and the good intentions of many teachers, racial and gender problems persist. How can teachers more effectively handle these moments? How can they prevent them in the future? This book is the first to unite two major schools of educational philosophy, traditional American pragmatism and contemporary poststructuralism, to offer both theoretical and concrete suggestions for dealing with actual classroom race and gender related events. While schools are one of the most common settings of race and gender discord, this book upholds schools as the primary location for alleviating systems of oppression. For it is within schools that children learn how to enact and respond to race and gender through the cultivation of habits, including dispositions, bodily comportment, and ways of interacting. In a spirit of social transformation, this book argues that when students learn to inhabit their races and genders more flexibly, many classroom problems can be prevented and current social structures of identity-based oppression can be alleviated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742563599
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sarah M. Stitzlein is assistant professor of education at the University of New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 2 DEWEYAN HABITS
Chapter 3 A HISTORICAL LOOK AT THE MAKING OF RACE
Chapter 4 REDOING GENDER WITH JUDITH BUTLER
Chapter 5 FLEXIBLE HABITS OF RACE AND GENDER
Chapter 6 CULTIVATING FLEXIBLE HABITS IN SCHOOLS

Editorial Reviews

Stitzlein makes a great theoretical case for the intelligent treatment of race and gender in schools. This is an important and timely book that Rowman & Littlefield will be happy to have published.....

Gregory Seals

Stitzlein makes a great theoretical case for the intelligent treatment of race and gender in schools. This is an important and timely book that Rowman & Littlefield will be happy to have published.--Gregory Seals, College of Staten Island, CUNY

From the Publisher