Considering the Educationally Marginalized: A Quiz as Social Justice?

Social Justice in Education

My views on the significance of reading quizzes for the educationally marginalized is based on three tenets of Cochran-Smith’s (2010) views on social justice in education. Social justice through pedagogy is an awareness, which can often be uncomfortable for both teacher and learner. This important pedagogical (dis)comfort reflects the first tenet of social justice in education, which acknowledges the need to deal with the tensions that emerge with students when they wrestle with the complexities of the realities and contradictions of justice, while addressing them head-on in classrooms and real-world application. Aligned with Cochran-Smith’s (2010) second tenet, equity in learning opportunities, the quiz is one part of the learning process that attempts to challenge school and societal inequities through a pedagogy based in the understanding of the importance of learning experiences that ensure equitable outcomes of being not just informed or knowledgeable, but also empowered. Finally, giving quizzes to my students to ensure they read reflects Cochran-Smith’s third tenet of social justice in education, respect for social groups. This calls for not only acknowledging all social, racial, and cultural identities and their communities, but also ensuring that my role as educator demonstrates respect for their intellectual abilities and educational and professional potential.

A Quiz Because of Them

Teaching from a social justice in education framework recognizes the importance of naming the educationally marginalized because student histories are not the same. Similar to Freire’s naming of the oppressed and oppressor (1970/1993) and African Americans in the Black Lives Matter movement, naming brings awareness to peoples or groups (Degele, 2023) so that their experiences are not diluted with other experiences. Naming ensures that their histories and experiences are not ignored, forgotten, or lost. Teaching by recognizing is a reminder that there may be (and often are) students from the margins within the college classroom. This involves knowing how their learning experiences and practices may be or have been disrupted by complicated lives, and to design pedagogy based on these realities. One of these realities is that college students generally do not read their assigned textbooks for a number of reasons that contribute to lack of preparation for their courses (Starcher & Proffitt, 2011). This includes distraction by today’s technologies and electronic connectedness (Delello et al., 2016), procrastination, lack of interest in reading material, and students’ knowing that they will not be assessed on the reading material when they arrive to class (Lei et al., 2010; Tropman, 2014). Faculty also may not emphasize the importance of the reading or guide the students on the role of the reading and its content before class and how it will be used (Brost & Bradley, 2006), which brings students to question its value. Combined with the time pressures, not seeing reading as a “valuable encounter” in the learning process, and more as a frustrating chore, may force students to push aside reading before class (Kimberley & Thursby, 2020). Students often tend to be overwhelmed with other time commitments (Berry et al., 2010) and the logistics of life. Like many students coming from the margins of life or school who are pursuing higher education, most of my students work one or more jobs to sustain their livelihoods or contribute to family finances. Some are single parents. Most are first-generation college students, still learning how to navigate their postsecondary education. These dynamics all contribute to the reality that my students, like other college students, may not read before they come to class until they understand the role it plays for them personally, academically, and professionally, in the short- and long term.

The quiz to get students to read is a concrete and explicit space that fills the student need for an accountability infrastructure that helps to arrange their academic priorities so they can compete in a culture of unearned privilege by those in power. The quiz serves as one of many gatekeeping points (Delpit, 1995) in historically marginalized students’ learning experiences constructed to parallel the educational rigor that the more privileged have had access to and experienced. Using a quiz to promote the act of reading acknowledges this as a necessity. For the point I’m making here, taking a quiz and the value of this process in and of itself is not the target skill—and neither is the actual format or type of quiz (although the process of taking a quiz and quiz type are other distinct explorations of learning and student engagement, which is not discussed here; Bjork et al., 2015). It is the pedagogical act of giving the quiz that is of significance, and then what students do in response to knowing there will be a quiz. Giving a quiz that prompts students to read before they take it signals to them the need to engage toward one of many learning processes and tasks that function as gatekeepers. Reading is one gatekeeper, then the quiz, then class discussion based on the student having read, and so on. But reading is the most important practice that will prepare students for the other, subsequent gatekeeping practices and learning tasks. And a quiz can ensure that they do it (Tropman, 2014). Because, as Delpit (1995) argued, “pretending that gatekeeping points don’t exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them” (p. 39). When historically marginalized students who are now at the university are not expected to perform and produce at these particular gatekeeping points in the academic learning and development process, it not only disregards their ability and potential, but also does not equip them to compete in a culture of power and in a society of the racially and socioeconomically privileged. They will continue to be academically and educationally marginalized by not being required to pass through the gatekeeping points of reading and then quizzed.

This fixed structure—the reading quiz—in my course may also contribute to the student’s emotional and cognitive preparation for this part of their schooling schedule. A quiz that demands that the students read is direct and explicit. It is a real and established expectation for students that is part of the course that they need to do outside of class as part of the learning process and practice. The results of the survey I gave my students reflect what Tropman (2014) found in the survey of her own students—knowing that they will be quizzed on the reading motivated them to do the reading, even in the midst of a busy or chaotic schedule of other academic obligations. The certainty of the quiz may help in reducing uncertainties, which we know as educators in this postpandemic era is very much needed. The students simply knowing the quiz will be there reduces the need to decide whether they will read or not for class. Research shows that because “making many decisions leaves the person in a depleted state and hence less likely to exert self-control effectively” (Vohs et al., 2008, p. 897), the reality of the quiz as one determinant of their academic performance can facilitate better self-regulation. Reading and, I would argue, reading within an accountability infrastructure, is one of many “skills” that, as Delpit (1995) argued, the privileged tend to possess and use to their advantage. It is not just the act of reading, but reading for or toward something. If my students desire to do well on the quiz and in the course, they have no choice but to engage in this academic act and the accompanying practices that will position them to do so.

Conclusion

I give a quiz to ensure that my students read—because when they do not read, they unwittingly leave a part of their education unexplored by keeping their identities from interacting with the text (Kalua, 2012; Mann, 2000; Margono-Slamet, 2020; Rosenblatt, 1995). A quiz to get students to read within my pedagogy is based on the understanding that the act of “reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a form of writing it or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work” (Freire, 1983, p. 10; emphasis in original). Not reading keeps my students from becoming their education (Maguire et al., 2020). And they end up just doing their education. For our students from the margins, reading is not just the consumption and regurgitation of information and facts; reading is, for them and by them, the intersection of ideas with their unique lived histories and the potential for real transformation that privileged students may not, cannot, or will not experience or understand because of how and where they have been positioned in schools and society. And because so many college students come from the margins of schooling, not reading keeps them from being a part of a narrative of ideas and possibilities and inserting themselves within that narrative. When my students read, and the quiz forces them to immerse themselves in those ideas and content, quizzes play a more profound role in their learning. It is not just reading. Giving quizzes to get students to read, then, is a choice in pedagogy that we can all make for our students—especially for those coming from the margins—that may move them toward something that will be that much more significant in their learning and becoming in their higher education.