Between Spaces: Meditations on Toni Morrison and Whiteness in the Classroom: Trying Toni Morrison Again

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.”