Anthropology News • November 2006 10 IN FOCUS Class Invisibility Continued from page 9 with Unite Here is part of our edu- cational mission. It shows with our actions instead of just our words that we academics and practicing anthropologists are all in the same boat with those folks, part of the working class and not different from them in terms of our relations with our own political economy. That’s an important lesson to bring home to ourselves and everyone else. It’s not quite in league with the educational efforts of our col- leagues in Oaxaca, but here in the north, every little bit counts. The strength of ethnography is its descriptions of realities. “Well, that’s just a realist narrative.” Buy into that rejoinder, and you’ve become one of those caffeine-fueled gerbils that De Zengotita is talking about. If you’re going to do that, at least be sure you’re getting their wages and not some paltry academic salary. If my kids got annoyed when I bashed their myth, I got infuriated at publishing firms asking them to shell out eighty bucks for bad books, committee or focus-group Teaching About Structural Obstacles to Students Who Overcame Them JOSIAH MCC HEYMAN AUROLYN LUYKX U TEXAS AT EL PASO W e teach at the Uni- versity of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), an urban commuter school serving mostly students from the border region, immi- grants or children of immigrants. Around 60% are working class; many are the first in their family to attend college. Our challenge as educators in this setting is to teach about social inequality in a con- text of institutionalized discrimi- nation glossed as “meritocracy,” to students whose collective margin- alization and individual success are both results of this system. On the one hand, the subject could hardly be more relevant to their lives. Making structural oppres- sion an object of study could rem- edy the disconnect many working- class students feel toward academia, reducing college drop-out rates and helping students develop the more critical, liberatory aspects of their chosen fields, such as teaching. On the other hand, a strongly critical approach seems to deny the signifi- cance of students’ own efforts and accomplishments, and is, frankly, discouraging. There is no simple solution to this dilemma, but exam- ining its main features may help us address it with working-class and other non-traditional students. “Sorted” Students Our work combines anthropology and teacher education courses, which overlap at UTEP. Before we discuss specific examples, some general points are in order. Our students have been “sorted” over many years of schooling; we en- counter a mix of the most persis- tent, the relatively privileged and the luckiest among them. Just being in college is a noteworthy achievement in a state where bare- ly half of Hispanic students gradu- ate from high school. The promise of mobility motivates them; the dominant ideology is, in some ways, a solace to them. The aca- demic failures or leveled aspira- tions of their relatives and peers contrast with their own experienc- es of persistence and accomplish- ment, and they tend to interpret these differences in terms of indi- vidual attributes and opportuni- ties, rather than as manifestations of aggregate inequalities. Structural inequalities are harder to perceive when not manifested in explicit discrimination. One paradox of “majority-minority” cities like El Paso is that Mexican-ness does not carry the stigma that it does else- where in the US. At the same time, the general acceptance of ethnic diversity masks profound inequities of class and immigration status. The historical shift from enforced segre- gation to more complex class-race- gender inequalities along the US- Mexico border means that structural constraints are more probabilistic than absolute, which makes them easier to justify on “meritocratic” terms. Covert structure can be dis- cerned by students, but doing this in an empowering way is challenging. Strong versions of structural deter- minism are not altogether consis- tent with an emphasis on individual or collective agency. viewing themselves as counter- examples to arguments about structural limitations. At the same time, they resisted seeing them- selves as exceptional, due perhaps to modesty reinforced by gen- der socialization. This resistance to self-examination is important, since it allows successful students to cast non-successful students as “exceptional” failures. Prior coursework had taught these young women that “deficit thinking” was frowned upon, and none would admit to believing that race or class determined academic ability. Often, they recognize struc- tural obstacles (poverty, linguistic marginalization, lack of the expect- ed parental supports) but felt that these were trumped by individual drive, relying on facile counter- examples to “disprove” structural effects. They did not acknowledge cases of individual drive or talent succumbing to structural limita- tions, or engage the question of whether persistent achievement gaps should thus be ascribed to class or ethnic differences in “drive and motivation.” In short, they saw “structure” and “agency” as mutually exclusive explanations, rather than as equally valid factors whose articulation must be ana- lyzed and explained. Both “Structure” and “Agency” It was hard to convince students that recognition of structural limi- tations needn’t lead us into despair, any more than a few successful counter-examples should justify a pollyanna-ish view of schooling as completely benign. This latter view may in fact be a “survival strategy” for disadvantaged but academically COMMENTARY books with a little bit of everything for everyone, books that throw up a smoke screen of infinitely variable exotica and don’t help them under- stand their own lives more clearly than when they opened the book. That’s why Suzan Erem and I teamed up to talk to students where they are when we wrote Anthropology Unbound: A Field Guide to the 21st Century. It’ll be out soon. It won’t cost anywhere near eighty bucks. It’s sure not a committee document. And it roots anthropol- ogy in the realities of class. Shouldn’t we do for our students what our professors did for us? Open up the world of ideas and the whole human drama of hope and despair? Bust myths? Explore realities? A cultural anthropologist, Paul Durren- berger is a professor in the anthropology department at Penn State University. He has done fieldwork in Northern Thai- land, Iceland and the US, most recently on unions in the US in collaboration with his wife, Suzan Erem. He has written a number of academic articles and books that report his various findings. The two most recent (both with Suzan) are Class Acts and Anthropology Unbound. He has organized a session on organized la- bor and unions in the global economy for the upcoming AAA meeting in San José. Challenging Dialogue These challenges come into sharp- est focus in an undergraduate teacher education course taught by Aurolyn. In class discussions with an all-female group of pre-service elementary teachers, she presented arguments about schooling’s repro- duction of social inequality and the ethnic and class-based “sorting” that occurs in schools. Drawing students into this dialogue proved more difficult than anticipated. When confronted with the fact that nearly half of Latino youth fail to graduate high school, sev- eral students balked, perceiving such information as depressing and disempowering. Some claimed they “would rather be ignorant” and believe, albeit naively, that all their pupils had an equal chance of success. They tended to embrace an individualist view of success,