The limits of role modeling as a basis for critical multicultural education: the case of Black male teachers in urban schools

Abstract

This article provides a critical analysis of the political significance of role modelling as it relates to envisaging a critical multicultural approach to educational reform. While not rejecting role modelling outright, it calls for a commitment to questioning the limits of common sense understandings that underpin the logic of gender and racial affiliation and homogeneity upon which it is based. The focus is on Black male teachers, given the attention that has been paid to their role in field of boys’ and multicultural education. The article draws on theoretical and intersectional frameworks that raise some epistemological concerns about the logics of racial and gender affiliation that lie at the heart of role modelling discourses. While stressing the limitations of role modelling as a basis for a critical multicultural pedagogic reform project, particularly as it pertains to the role of Black male teachers in the schooling of disadvantaged Black male students, it does not reject the political and transformative potentialities of their embodied presence in urban schools. By drawing on case study narrative accounts of two Black male teachers, the article presents an intersectional analysis that attends to the organizational, intersubjective, representational and experiential dimensions of race, gender and sexuality that are implicated in these men’s everyday understandings of their pedagogical actions and identities in particular urban school contexts in Toronto. While pointing to the limits of role modelling, the cases are employed to draw attention to the crucial significance of the embodied presence of these Black male’ teachers as transformative intellectuals with regards to their self-reflexive articulated activism in the urban school classroom. The article concludes with an exhortation to rejecting the master narratives of racial and gender homogeneity that lie at the heart of a politics of role modeling, but does not reject the political significance of and need for the representation of Black male teachers in urban schools.