While teaching about race, ethnicity, and class from a critical pedagogical standpoint, we might not only encounter student resistance to learning about systems of domination but we should also be aware of the ways in which power, privilege, and exclusion in the larger society may be reproduced in our own classrooms. In this article, we recount how we used freewriting and discussions in an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics in an upper-division seminar on Latinas/os and education. 1 Though a majority of the students in the course were first-generation Latinas, several middle-and upper-middle-class White students tended to participate the most. This dynamic resulted in a situation in which class discussions were steered away from the focus on Latinas/os and unequal educational practices to a perspective that reinforced an ideology of equality and a climate that privileged dominant modes of classroom communication. Since these patterns were precisely the ones the course topics and readings were meant to deconstruct, we turned the gaze onto the classroom as we observed the reproduction of inequality there and used freewriting and discussions to uncover the unequal ways in which students were experiencing the space.Though most studies on classroom interactions have been conducted on children in the K-12 system, a growing number of academics are writing about unequal power dynamics among college and university students. 2 This burgeoning scholar-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.