Considerations of Intersectionality in CMW: Intersections of Gender/Race and Gender/Ability Creates Privileging and De-Privileging Spaces for Men Elementary Teachers.
This workspace will present the challenge/opportunity of intersectionality in Collective Memory Work, inviting workspace attendees to consider intersectionality as a complicating factor in the CMW study coordinated by the workspace author. The study sought to explore the privileging and de-privileging experiences of a group of elementary-teaching men in the southeastern United States. Study results in part revealed intersections of gender/race and gender/ability for three participants (one Asian-American, one Black, one Deaf). In our work, participants revealed and concluded that – when examining privileging and deprivileging contexts – considerations of gender were incomplete without also considering gender/race or gender/ability.
The workspace activity will include examining a complete CMW narrative from Harold, an Asian-American teacher, as he navigates his place in an American profession where the expectations of fellow educators is that those who teach young children are (White) women. If time permits, the workspace will also examine narrative and analysis dialog excerpts from Forrester, a Deaf teacher who reveals that teaching context and his
Deafness interact to create privileging and deprivileging, and AJ, an African-American teacher, whose unique position as the only African-American man in a school serving an African-American community privileges him in ways not experienced by his White men colleagues.
Intersectionality has been an accepted element of critical studies in education, the introduction of Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). Theorists and researchers have also established that Critical Race Theory can be applied to ethnic groups like the Deaf (Duquette, 2000, Foster & MacLeod, 2003, Lane, 2005) and Asian Americans (Endo, 2015; Kohli, 2016). Workspace attendees will be asked to consider how these approaches to intersectionality inform/challenge Collective Memory Work and its participants.