Unsettling Class: Standpoint Pedagogies, Knowledge and Privilege

Abstract

This chapter engages with the challenge of how critical teacher educators can make visible the ways in which schools remain biased in favour of middle-class norms and values. Since many children experience disadvantage due to their social class backgrounds, it is vital for future teachers to develop a class consciousness that will enable them to first understand and critique the practices that sustain class privilege and then this knowledge to adopt more socially just alternatives. The chapter explores the possibilities offered by pedagogies such as biography, critical inquiry and a ‘standpoint’ approach to bring issues of social class to the fore in teacher education. Such pedagogies enable students of teaching to explore their own class biases and provide starting points for them to take up class-conscious positions in their own teaching, based on a deeper knowledge of the ways that the lives of us all are shaped by social class.