Authority

While I appreciate the critical approach Nieto assumes in discussing a multicultural educational pedagogy, I feel as though there are some gaping spaces that she fails to address or even acknowledge. She argues that school policy must engage with a shift from constructing the narrative of low/v/high achieving students, to a focus on identifying the conditions which create that divide. She discusses how best to enable students to achieve. She echoes arguments posited by Rogers and Jacatot in discussing the ways a teacher’s expressed doubt in a student’s capabilities castrates that ability. She speaks to Foucauldian theory when arguing that any type of policy change in a school must “take into account the structural and institutional barriers that reflect and reproduce power differentials in society” (148).

However, what Nieto does not touch upon when she discusses how to best cultivate an educational environment conducive to a student’s achievement and critical engagement with their education, is what “student achievement” means. How does she define success?

Anne-Marie Chartier and Jean Hebrard discuss in their piece (Literacy and Schooling from a Cultural Historian’s Point of View) the historical spaces learning/reading has occupied. They write: “The simple act of reading, by creating a contagion of feeling, could raise the least educated people to the level of the great minds…it could ‘reach them in the depth of their souls, and little by little, arouse in them ideas and feelings that they might never have discovered without this distinguished commerce with the elite of our race’” (279). Here they identify the ways in which, historically, education has always involved itself with strategically installing values upon the consciousness and daily realities of a group of people. They discuss how the children of both the elite and the working class read the same things, and how that dissemination of knowledge worked as a unifying force which, while not negating the function of the Church, replaced it—both the Church and the School, functioned to untie the French people; perhaps the vessel changed, but the values remained.

Nieto’s negligence in identifying what the objective of education is, what a “student’s achievement” means, opens the space for that achievement to align itself with another subliminal structure of power. Central to the way she structures a multicultural education, is the role the teachers and the school play in encouraging students, in validating and legitimating their “achievement” ability. Apart from whatever power structures that definition of achievement constructs, the agency still resides in the power of the teacher and the school. Neito explains that a teacher and a school must construct a caring environment, in which students believe in what they are told when they are told that they can achieve. However, herein lies a commitment to authority. How can a school teach students to resist authority and validate themselves, rather than teach that authority how to be a positive force?

Is this missing the point? Is this naive?