When Ignoring Difference Fails: Using Critical Professional Praxis

This article offers the concept of critical professional praxis as a framework for naming and addressing difference-neutral practices in education (an approach that does not consider the effects of power and privilege associated with social differences in teachers' beliefs, ideas, and actions). Critical professional praxis is using both formal and informal theoretical lenses to illuminate power-laden social differences in the decision-making practices and behaviors of institutional agents and educators in an effort to eliminate inequity. The article shares examples from two educators' experiences of instances they perceived as difference-neutral, focusing on racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other forms of oppression on a college campus. It concludes that if more people are to succeed and thrive in higher education, teachers must understand their work as embedded within sociocultural and sociopolitical systems in which power is always informing and mediating individual and collective practices. Difference-neutral lenses leave holes in their ability to actually support their students', as well as their own learning and development. The article calls upon educators to engage in critical professional praxis in order to support learning and development of all and engage in more humanistic, rather than dehumanizing, practices.