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In this article, Kevin K. Kumashiro draws on his experience as a teacher, teacher educator, and education researcher to analyze how anti-oppressive educators may operate in ways that challenge some forms of oppression yet unintentionally comply with others. Drawing on Butler's work, which views oppression in society as being characterized by harmful repetitions of certain privileged knowledge and practices, the author examines how theories of anti-oppressive education can help educators learn, teach, and supervise student teachers, and conduct educational research in ways that work against such harmful repetitions. Kumashiro describes incidents in which his students sought knowledge that confirmed what they already knew, and when he as the teacher unintentionally missed opportunities to resist this repetition and guide his students through an emotional crisis. Using the framework of repetition, Kumashiro challenges anti-oppressive activists and educators to disrupt some of their own unconscious commonsense discourses that serve as barriers to social change.
Recently, education researchers have articulated many theories about and provided many illustrations of ways that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression play out in schools (Apple, 1995; Delpit, 1995; Kenway & Willis, 1998; Lipkin, 2000). Their varying conceptualizations of the nature and dynamics of oppression have suggested to educators a range of approaches to challenging and changing oppression in schools (for a summary of these approaches, see Kumashiro, 2000b). By critiquing what has become accepted by many in society as conventional wisdom, or common sense, in classrooms, teacher-education programs, and research communities, and by offering alternatives that explicitly aim to work against the ways that oppression is already playing out in schools and society, such anti-oppressive efforts in research and practice do much to change the status quo of education.
However, in my experience, these efforts to challenge oppression are not free of contradictions. Anti-oppressive approaches to teaching and researching operate in ways that challenge some forms of oppression while complying with others (Kumashiro, 2001). This complicity is not always intentional or visible. Students, educators, and researchers, including those committed to social justice, often want certain forms of social change but resist others, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not (Kumashiro, 1999, 2000a). One reason that a desire for social change can coincide with a resistance to social change is that some educational...