Unlearning Deficit Ideology and the Scornful Gaze: Thoughts on Authenticating the Class Discourse in Education

Paul C. Gorski Founder, EdChange Assistant Professor, Integrative Studies George Mason University http://www.EdChange.org gorski@EdChange.org December 2010

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It is popular in the education milieu today to talk about the dangers of assuming a deficit perspective, approaching students based upon our perceptions of their weaknesses rather than their strengths. Such a perspective deteriorates expectations for students and weakens educators’ abilities to recognize giftedness in its various forms (Ford & Grantham, 2003). The most devastating brand of this sort of deficit thinking emerges when we mistake difference—particularly difference from ourselves— for deficit. If one concentrates best while sitting still it may be difficult to imagine that somebody else—a student or colleague, perhaps—concentrates more effectively while pacing or tapping a pencil. Similarly, if one always has lived among people who speak a certain language variation, such as what people commonly refer to as “standard English,” she or he might mistake somebody’s use of a different variation, such as the Appalachian variety spoken by my grandmother, as an indication of intellectual inferiority or, worse, deviance (Collins, 1988). Over the past ten or so years a critical discourse challenging the deficit perspective has emerged among educators. Some insist that “every student is gifted and talented.” Others urge us to “find the gift in every child”; to “focus on student strengths.” Unfortunately, like many discourses in the education milieu, the one surrounding the deficit perspective occurs largely outside of what Nieto and Bode (2008) call the sociopolitical context of schooling, “the unexamined ideologies and myths that shape