Stay Classy

Appleman's chapter on "Reading Literature Through the Lens of Privilege and Social Class" was easy to relate to my classroom experience. At the high school I have been placed at for student teaching, which I will refer to as Dartmouth, there is a unique socio-economic dynamic. Dartmouth is located in what, in Saskatoon, is referred to as the "core-neighbourhoods". This is a euphemistic way of saying "inner-city". However, Dartmouth also has an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. This creates a rare mix of privileged and underprivileged students. 

There is a large cohort of Aboriginal students at the school, some of whom are highly academically successful. Yet, many of these students face the cultural, social, racial, and economic barriers that disproportionally affect the Aboriginal residents of this province; this is the maddeningly unjust reality in which we live. 

On the other end of what we might conceive of as the "spectrum of privilege" are the students in the IB program. These are the classes I have been working with. This group consists of about half Caucasian students and half students of colour. Of the students who are visible minorities, none are identifiable as Aboriginal. This group is comprised of students with African, Asian, and Polynesian origins. Many of these students were not born in Canada. The fact that they are racial minorities is something they share with the Aboriginal students of Dartmouth; although, they may have more dissimilarities than similarities in their experience of privilege. 

The students in the IB program have experienced a kind of privilege that many of the Aboriginal students have never known. Anthropologist John Ogbu terms these two kinds of groups "voluntary minorities" and "involuntary minorities". The former group, the IB students, have come to be in their position by choice. Often they were born outside of Canada, and their families moved here for work, or opportunity, or both. Though they speak English as a second language, they speak the prevailing arcolect with far more proficiency than most Aboriginal students. Conversely, the Aboriginal students would be considered "involuntary minorities". They belong to a systematically oppressed people, and have suffered a legacy of institutionalized racism that they in no way chose. The opportunities available to these two groups of racial minorities are bipolar.

The salient point here is that the students -white and non-white- in the IB program are united by class and privilege more than the white IB students and Aboriginal students would be united by Canadian citizenship or speaking English as a first language (although a significant number of Aboriginal students may speak an indigenous language as a first language). The fact that many or most of the students in the IB program come from middle class, highly educated households may be a stronger unifying force than race. However, in the halls of Dartmouth, the IB students do not interact with other students, particularly those relegated to the underclass based on their oppression of their people. 

So far this is all rather abstract, but reeling the rhetoric in for a moment I simply wonder what it would be like for students in the IB class to do an exercise in reading through a social class lens. I wonder where the students in that course, particularly the voluntary minorities, would place themselves on the five rings that Michael used with his students. It would be intriguing if these students would identify with their social class over their racial or ethnic identity. I wonder if a student not born in Canada would realize that they still experience privilege here to a degree that Aboriginal peoples seldom do.

I wrote in an assignment early in this term that class has become nearly irrelevant to the generation in high schools now. I posited that class discourses had been swallowed by gender-based, racial, ethnic, religious, and other discourses. Class is not something on the minds of today's youth. I though this was not necessarily a bad thing as I started my career as a teacher candidate. I thought of class as anachronistic. I believed that the social justice battles of the 21st century would be fought on the fields of race and sexuality. I believe I believed incorrectly. 

Seeing how class is still tied to privilege and how it can still create social stratification in a high school, I think it is something that needs to be taught. Exercises like reading Hamlet through a class lens are essential to getting students to recognize that class is not dead, is not irrelevant. It is alive and it has great influence on interaction in classrooms and schools. Acknowledging this fact, and getting students to acknowledge it is essential if we truly want to teach for social justice.