Abstract
In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially José Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work.
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Notes
This phrasing, and the title of this article, are inspired by Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children (2006).
As I argue below, this does not necessarily excuse students for any moral, political, or epistemic fault they may incur through distancing.
Miranda Fricker, whose work on epistemic injustice intersects with the epistemology of ignorance literature, calls this condition “testimonial injustice” (2007).
Medina does not believe that this misrecognition is universally or exclusively associated with socially privileged subjects, and he is careful not to attribute an automatic epistemic lucidity to oppressed subjects (2013, pp. 30, 40–5, 74, 191).
None of the researchers cited here claim or imply that distancing is only done by white students. But where they frame their analyses in Black-white binaries, they miss opportunities to address the distancing of non-white students. Moreover, they underemphasize the contextual and intersectional nature of privilege and epistemic impairment. Finally, they risk developing pedagogies that focus almost exclusively on challenging the ignorance of white students, with little to say about teaching students of color.
I thank Stephen Bloch-Schulman for emphasizing this point.
Medina’s remarks on meta-ignorance are especially apt for powerfully socializing contexts like academic departments and teacher training: “Meta-blindness protects first-order forms of blindness, which become recalcitrant and resistant to change and improvement because the recognition that there is anything that requires change or improvement is systemically blocked” (pp. 149–150).
I draw on theories of epistemic responsibility that view epistemic agents as embedded in social relations characterized by difference, in order to explore context-specific epistemological obligations to others. Here, Code (1987) and Fricker (2007) are foundational, while Bevan (2011) is a more direct predecessor to parts of my argument. Important work on epistemic responsibility has also been framed in universalistic, deontological terms (e.g., Steup 1988; Nottelman 2007; Booth 2012; Elgin 2013; McHugh 2013), but this is less relevant for the present essay.
The field of virtue epistemology is diverse. I draw on virtue responsibilism, which conceives epistemic virtues as actively exercised traits of persons, analogous to moral virtues, for which individuals can be held responsible (Code 1987; Montmarquet 1993). Most relevant to my arguments are efforts to connect virtue epistemology to educational practices, such Bevan (2011), Battaly (2013), and Baehr (2013).
“The epistemic virtues are dispositions if not governing choice, at least affecting the will. They are dispositions to put forth appropriate effort. They are not dispositions to choose a belief. In short, they are active frames of mind, not unthinking habits” (Bevan 2011, p. 262).
However, as we know from Aristotle, virtues can become vices when practiced to excess, so reflective moderation is necessary here. I thank Jean Keller and her undergraduate students for pointing this out.
More generally, Cahill and Bloch-Schulman (2012) emphasize that encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning—and in particular, for practicing good epistemic habits—facilitates deep learning and self-authorship (pp. 56–57).
Students give more credence and less resistance to teachers whose embodied comportment corresponds to their expectations of intellectual authority (Miller and Chamberlin 2000; Puchner and Roseboro 2011). In the U.S., this typically means white, male, presumed cisgendered and heterosexual, native English speakers, like myself. I hope the strategies discussed here will be helpful for other teachers, but I acknowledge that classroom practices are differently effective for different teachers and students.
I thank the anonymous reviewer who urged me to incorporate the issue of meta-ignorance in this article.
On the epistemic and pedagogical value of diversity more generally, see Robertson (2013).
This is a classic problem of virtue development. See for instance Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics Book I. 3–4 (1999, pp. 2–4).
There are many situations, especially in philosophy classes, when logical argument or public reason requires setting aside particular perspectives in favor of abstraction. In my classes, I help students determine for themselves when and why generalized “public reasons” are more appropriate than appeals to particular perspectives, and I help them use both kinds of reflection to deepen their thinking.
I thank Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Jeff Edmonds, Jean Keller, and José Medina for pressing me to think further in these directions.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to expand the material in this paragraph.
Shannon Sullivan’s analysis of “white trash” emphasizes how ‘respectable’ whites dissociate from lower-class, ‘disrespectable’ whites in ways that disadvantage the latter while enabling socio-economically privileged whites to distance themselves from racism (Sullivan 2014, pp. 23–58). See also Schroer (2007).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to foremost thank my students at Duke University, Warren Wilson College, and Vanderbilt University for teaching me daily and provoking me to take up this research and writing. I also thank Jennifer Ansley, Nolan Bennett, Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Jeff Edmonds, Seth Farber, Nora Hanagan, Jean Keller, José Medina, and Edward Piñuelas for their very helpful comments, as well as participants at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers 2014 Meeting, the Elon Philosophy Department Pedagogy Lunches, and the Duke Political Theory Workshop.
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Whitt, M.S. Other People’s Problems: Student Distancing, Epistemic Responsibility, and Injustice. Stud Philos Educ 35, 427–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9484-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9484-1