204. Teaching Students to Analyze Power Dynamics: Race & Nation

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In this episode, we’re continuing a mini-series that looks at how to support students to critically analyze power dynamics, specifically looking at how they relate to race, racialization, and nation. 

We explore Iris Young's critical framework, Five Faces of Oppression, and other strategies and tips to bring this important conversation and understanding to your classroom. 

Why? 

Students today need to be equipped with the skills to critically analyze power dynamics. These conversations, though, can be challenging to work through. Educators may benefit from taking a systematic approach to these topics in their classrooms.

By understanding frameworks like Iris Young's Five Faces of Oppression, educators can provide students with the tools to challenge societal structures and empower marginalized voices.

What?

Educators can use the same four steps discussed in episode 203 to analyze power dynamics related to race, racialization, and nation:

Step 1: Select a theory or framework that works for your context. 

Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression is a useful one for this topic. The five faces are:  

• Exploitation: Using people’s labor to make money without paying them fairly. 
• Marginalization: Society decides that it can’t or won’t use groups of people, even for labor. 
• Powerlessness: Groups of people are actively removed and kept away from the power to make decisions. 
• Culture of imperialism: Where the culture of the dominant group is treated as normal and expects everyone else to communicate, think, and value the same. 
• Violence: Physical attacks on people or property, which is intended to harm or humiliate. 

Step 2: Simplify the language of the framework for accessibility. 

Ensure all students can engage with the material regardless of their language proficiency. With the Five Faces framework, you may: 

• Simplify the language for English language learners or young students (i.e., replacing “powerlessness” with “take away power” or “exploitation” with “use as tools”). 
• Combine “culture of imperialism” and “marginalization” under a category of exclusion or being othered. 

Step 3: Apply the framework to engaging and high-interest media. 

This allows students to practice critical analysis in a relatable context. You may show a short news clip, talk about a movie or TV show, or bring in a viral social media trend to analyze these concepts. 

Step 4: Integrate the framework with course content, such as historical sources or novels, to deepen understanding and application. 

For example, NYU has a culturally responsive curriculum scorecard, which you can use to analyze different content. Some metrics to look at include:

• Diverse and accurate representation without stereotyping or tokenism. 
• The inversion of traditional power dynamics—look for stories of people who have been traditionally marginalized by groups in power. 

Step 5: Bring in other resources and tools to your curriculum. For example, the Stanford History Education Groups (SHEG) outlines historical thinking skills such as sourcing and contextualization. Both skills help students better analyze and understand historical sources. Further, Facing History has great lessons around stereotypes that help students grapple with and counter stereotypes. 


Final Tip

Frame the analysis of power dynamics with an understanding of intersectionality. It will vary based on language and age levels, but you want to ensure we’re not just looking at one thing while ignoring other aspects of identity. There’s nuance in the intersection, and it’s important to this conversation at all grade levels. 

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Critical Analysis Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 204 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

Quotes: 

• 8:26 “We don’t want to stop at identifying oppression, but move towards envisioning a better future and actively countering stereotypes.”
• 13:13 “Contextualization—yes. What else is happening at the time? Maybe there was a lot of oppression happening at the time, this was common. However, it’s not the only narrative.”

15:45 “Part of that is building up students’ understanding of historical and current facts, providing them with lots of access to counter-narratives.”

​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below: