The idea of the teacher or a leader as a facilitator is a hallmark of adult education. Because the social context is duplicated in the societal microcosm of meetings and classrooms, enacting the facilitation role will reproduce the power structures that privilege some, silence some, and deny the existence of other learners. Race, as a critical positionality around which dynamics are contested becomes one of the sites of struggle in meetings, programs, and classrooms. Nearly all of the adult education research around race has examined dynamics in relation to African-American learners and participants leaving un-interrogated the dominant positionality of whiteness and its effects. The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which the social construct of whiteness played out in two adult education continuing education classes. The theoretical framework derives from critical race theory and, in particular, the recent scholarship on whiteness. As with all other racial categories, whiteness is not a 'natural state' deducible from physical characteristics, but rather is a historical, cultural, and political construction that is a social site of power and privilege. Although whiteness is a social construct that is always context dependent and relational, it nevertheless shapes the lives of people differentially within existing inequalities of power and wealth. The design of the study was a qualitative comparative case study of two continuing education courses taught by the authors of this paper. Each class was taught in the same site, was of the same length (10 weeks), and met one night a week. The study's five data sources included: (1) students' (anonymous) evaluations; (2) teacher observations; (3) student interviews (immediately following the courses' completion each teacher solicited and interviewed the other's students); (4) facilitator interviews; and (5) conversations with similarly situated facilitators. The isolation of the positionality of whiteness as the most major factor affecting the sites studied, holds significance for the power dynamics in the adult education setting because adults, who are more entrenched in their life roles are more likely than are children to be aware of their positionality, its attending privileges and hierarchical status. It follows that adults act out on such entitlements consciously or subconsciously,
Entries containing the full list of the papers from this conference may be found from
TD/TNC 67.61 to TD/TNC 67.64. Entries for individual papers may be found from
TD/TNC 67.65 to
TD/TNC 67.100 and from
TD/TNC 67.501 to TD/TNC 67.541.
