Joy and the "smart kids": Competing ways of being and believing

Through a sharing of personal experience, this article aims to draw attention to the language of schooling - a language, both simple and sophisticated, that many schools, as institutions, devise to communicate with insiders and outsiders. The author argues that there is a mismatch between assumed best practices embedded in this language and the challenging demands of cultural, community-based pedagogies. Institutional discourses, while appearing neutral, simultaneously cling to explicit and implicit colorblind discourses. Such discourses allow the institution of schooling, and the individual teacher, to evade critical examination, thereby sustaining a complex landscape in which consumers (students, parents, and stakeholders) engage producers (teachers, administrators) in stances relative to the expectations that each has of the other. FREE author podcast