The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power and Educational Struggles.

THE SUBALTERN SPEAK: CURRICULUM, POWER AND EDUCATIONAL STRUGGLES

By Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. Burns. Routledge, 2006

In response to Gayatri Spivak's (1988) question "can the subaltern speak?," the authors in this volume collectively demonstrate that, yes, the subaltern can and do speak. They also expand and complicate the very notion of the subaltern. Like Spivak, the authors here raise questions about the politics of who is listened to and who is actually heard. Unlike Spivak, the authors in this volume do not always refer to traditionally subordinated groups of people. In the introductory chapter, Michael Apple and Kristen Burns remind readers that "subalternity does not always mean political and educational progressivism" (p. 23) and invite readers to explore the complexities of identities in the three sections that follow: "In Whose Voices?," "National Contexts," and "International Contexts." By introducing the book's eleven chapters with a walk through historical, pedagogical, and political contexts, Apple and Burns set the stage for readers to question both who operates in the subaltern and how that operation is continually shifting.

The section "In Whose Voices?" centers on ways that conservative movements are successfully organizing around issues close to marginalized communities. It begins with Buras's historical exploration of E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge movement--a curriculum for K-8th grades that provides a guideline for what children in the United States need to know about history, language arts, math, science, and musical and visual arts. This chapter poses a question that underlies the whole section: when the words and claims of the traditionally subaltern come from the mouths of those with power are these voices still subaltern? Even though, as Burns writes, a curriculum purports to forward multicultural educational goals, a lack of a critical or historical reading of events might mean that that same curriculum undermines a truly multicultural education (p. 65). Buras describes a sixth grade history text that creates a positive main narrative about immigration by including only the voices of European immigrants. The true struggles lived by immigrants are relegated to a minor or background narrative and used only to forward the main narrative of "success and consensus in the United States" (p. 67). In the essay that follows, Apple presents conservative religious fundamentalist mothers who home school their children as "the new oppressed." Apple shows how "secular" schools are perceived as undermining religious fundamentalist values, creating a sense of oppression from mainstream society that provides a rationale for the home schooling movement. In the final chapter in this section, "Can the Subaltern Act? African American Involvement in Educational Voucher Plans," Thomas Perdroni further complicates the notion of subalternity by showing how conservative educational movements have co-opted the language and desires of a traditionally marginalized group to push their own agenda (even as marginalized groups push back with their different agendas). Without understanding the desires of, particularly, working class African American families, the pro-voucher educational movement would have no place to root. With Perdroni's critical read of the school voucher movement, we understand that alliances with neoliberal and neoconservative groups who wanted to push public education to the right helped less powerful groups of parents resist a school system that wasn't meeting the needs of their children. Each group used each other's resources to push their agendas forward.

The second section of the book, "National Contexts," focuses on the complexities of subaltern communities. The leading chapter, Glenabah Martinez's "In My History Classes They Always Turn Things Around the Opposite Way: Indigenous Youth Opposition to Cultural Domination in an Urban High School," explores the historical contexts between distinctly raced groups--Hispanic or Nueva Mexicanos and Indigenous Peoples--and how this history sets the stage for learning for Indigenous students. Using student voices to highlight the experiences of cultural oppression and exclusion felt in required courses, Martinez emphasizes how Indigenous students resist the outright colonization celebrated--through, in one case, the building of a monument celebrating the Spanish conquering of Indigenous people in the town--in the larger culture. By signing up for an elective Native American studies class, students are able to rethink and reread indigenous history in a way that does not present the taking of land from Indigenous people as a normalized and accepted backdrop. In the next chapter, Dolores Bernal does a gender analysis of the 1968 Los Angeles School Blowouts, when over ten thousand students walked out of mostly Chicano East Los Angeles schools to protest unequal education. She suggests that by looking closely at the leadership of an important grassroots movement an alternative history is told. Kevin Kumashiro, in "Distraction, Fear, and Assimilation: Race, Sexuality, and Education Reform Post-9/11," challenges educators to examine how deeply we are willing to explore issues of oppression. He posits that "education communities are often willing to address only certain problems in only certain ways" (p. 170). This allows educators to address, for example, issues of homophobia on the surface, but not to examine how heterosexism creates the space for that homophobia. He suggests a shift from a position that merely protects minority students from oppression to a position that questions and challenges normalized expressions of identity. In a chapter critiquing the hierarchy of the academy's tenure system, Stanley Aronowitz calls for a broader definition of the subaltern--one that includes the "absence of social and political freedom" (p. 192). Aronowitz situates part time, adjunct, and non-tenure track faculty members as subaltern because they are doing the majority of teaching for large research institutions but have little to no job stability, voice in decision making, or support to do the research that would help them move into tenure track positions. By redefining the subaltern, Aronowitz exposes how me ever smaller minority of tenure track faculty who maintain a non-subaltern status in education eliminates the concept and goal of education for democratic freedom.

The final section of the book, "International Contexts," centers on the idea of learning from transnational subalternity. The authors point to the idea that the subaltern is everywhere, and that American subaltern movements could grow from an examination of their transnational counterparts, and indeed, incorporate themselves into a more transnational movement. It begins with Jyh-Jya Chen's "Struggling for Recognition: The State, Oppositional Movements, and Curricular Change." By exploring identity formation and political struggles in Taiwan, Chen asks us to examine how and in what contexts oppositional movements are created so that we might understand more deeply educational transformation. In perhaps the most hopeful chapter in the entire collection, "Creating Real Alternatives to Neoliberal Policies in Education: The Citizen School Project," Luis Armando Gandin describes a project in Porto Alegre, Brazil that uses community driven needs to create a culturally relevant school where dropout rates have decreased and engagement with curriculum has increased dramatically over the course of more than a decade. In Buras and Motter's chapter, "Toward a Subaltern Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism," the authors ask educators to question a multicultural agenda that does not take into account transnational inequalities. And in the concluding chapter, Apple and Buras provide questions that help readers speak back to official, non-subaltern knowledge.

The chapters in this volume that I found the most challenging--particular those not in an American context--pointed me toward my own need to become more cognizant of an unfamiliar subaltern and to my own privileging of a particular American understanding of the oppressed. Likewise, this volume helps me to rethink how and why the right is more successful at motivating voters and activists. By examining ways that conservatives use the language and needs of traditionally subaltern groups--talking a culturally relevant talk in ways that privileged groups on the left have not--radical teachers can rethink how we teach our students to use and examine language and question accepted terminology. By beginning conversations with our students about how and why particular groups are situated in subaltern ways by the media, by the powerful, and by the government, we can help to reshape national and international perceptions of who the subaltern are, and how the subaltern can and should be heard.

WORKS CITED

Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg's (Ed.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

REVIEWED BY JILL M. HERMANN-WILMARTH