race and racism that challenges the continuance of racializing social groups for differential and unequal treatment. Antiracism also explicitly names the issues of race and social difference as issues of power and equity.
However, for antiracist education to achieve the change that it claims to work towards it should not stop at naming. Itshould look to explicitly taking race, social difference, power and equity and identify various instances of these issues - in the classroom curriculum.Itshould not hesitate to get all involved in suggesting how these various intersecting issues could begin to be worked with in an effort to reverse the existing oppressions. Getting those involved to provide ways of dealing with existing oppressions is necessary if those involved are to effect any change in their own lives. There is no one way to address existing oppressions and each location must engage in providing
suggestions for overcoming their own existing oppressions. If this begins in a classroom and specifically in a biology classroom where positions of power in the classroom at the curricular and interpersonal levels are identified, and what allows for those positions to be maintained are
analysed, then the process will also provide possibilities for how the existing power positions may be turned in upon themselves in classroom efforts towards social justice from curricular and interpersonal perspectives.
Such engagements within the biology classroom can lead to change, if so desired, within the
biology classroom, the school and the wider community as individuals live out their lives guided by tenets of social justice. Such engagements will be painful - giving up power and associated
privileges will not be easily relinquished or rescinded. Strategies that will allow for sustained efforts towards social justice will also need to developed. The means to such efforts and the efforts
themselves must come from those directly involved in establishing social justice through and for themselves. Those in positions of privilege and power engaging in such efforts, such as the biology teacher with the biology curriculum and related school processes, will begin to see views of
themselves as oppressors. In wanting to reverse the oppressor identity both the oppressor and the oppressed must be involved and willing to relinquish positions of powerful and powerless. Only then can they begin to constructively engage in overcoming the existing oppressions around race, gender, class, language, religion etc. The continued focus on only the oppressed in the biology classroom, how the oppression derives and only the oppressed's involvement in overcoming the existing oppression/s towards social justice will not achieve social justice because of the exclusion of the equally critical component in any and all forms of social oppression viz. the oppressor. Any
success towards achieving social justice must then by necessity include both the oppressed and the oppressor.
A critical theory ofrace for McLaren and Fischman (1998) leads to both a theoretical and a political dead end when race is used as an isolated analytical category. For this reason they favour an
antiracist approach. This antiracist education approach is influenced by a revolutionary
multiculturalism. A revolutionary multiculturalism for Mclaren and Fischman (1998) is a counter- hegemonic strategy that assists in the unleaming of racist practices and allows for the development of revolutionary agency capable of contesting dominant arrangements. The envisaged antiracist education as a part of a revolutionary multiculturalism will then also address ways in which global economic restructuring helps to embed racist and patriarchal practices in the politics and practices of everyday life. Itwill also unmask the ways in which race, class and gender arrangements are mutually constitutive of the capitalist social order.
Subsequent theorisations by Mclaren and Farahmandpur (2001) have led to the development of a revolutionary working-class pedagogy. Tenets of this pedagogy, that foregrounds class, can be used to strengthen the critical race/antiracist pedagogy. With a revolutionary working-class pedagogy language and discourses practiced within classroom settings, such as the biology classroom, are also recognised as being ideologically tainted with the values, beliefs and interests of the socially
dominant hegemonic groups so as to conceal the asymmetricallskewed relations of power. This then makes it important to encourage critical dialogues among teachers and students. The central purpose of such dialogues would be to raise consciousness among students about existing discriminations and oppressions linked to race, gender, class, language, religion etc. Once consciousness has been raised students can be helped to recognize how their subjectivities and social identities are
configured in ways that are structurally advantageous to the status quo - even through subject disciplines such as biology/Life Sciences.
For them through a revolutionary working class pedagogy the struggle over the production of meaning would enable marginalized groups to name and then perhaps take the initial steps to transform the sources of their oppression and exploitation. This pedagogy also stresses the
importance of acquiring a critical literacy through which reflection, analysis and critical judgements could be made in relation to social, economic and political issues. In this way subordinate groups, are invited to (re)present through classroom interaction and dialogue, their lived reality in relation to objective social structures that shape their lives. Students and teachers are also challenged to
analyse the various meanings underlying their commonsense concepts by drawing on their everyday understandings. Itprovides the space for teachers, as agents of change, acting as revolutionary intellectuals to critically examine concepts such as freedom and democracy within a transnational capitalism. The classroom space thus becomes a political arena for legitimising the lived
experiences of the oppressed social classes without assuming that these experiences are transparent or devoid of racism, sexism or any other discriminatory 'ism'. This pedagogy also demands active participation by teachers and students in the developing of a critical consciousness.Itis this that makes this a Freireaen approach in that it argues that revolutionary consciousness is a political act of knowing, an active intervention against the barriers that prevent students from achieving their role as agents of history.
Revolutionary biology educators will need to identify alternative subject positions or
counternarratives and countermemories that could be made available to students to contest existing regimes of representation and social practice; they need to identify also historical determinations of domination and oppression as part of the struggle to develop concrete practices of
counterrepresentation. These teachers must become theoreticians of their own teaching practice since this is central to the process of raising the political consciousness of students.
The aim ofa revolutionary working class pedagogy for McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001) is to make students critically maladaptive to globalisation so that they can become agents of change in the struggles against the various discriminatory practices. Such a pedagogy can then become a critical tool for transforming existing social conditions. However, it will only be effective if there is a commitment to a meta-narrative of social justice both within the classroom and outside of it in the school and in the wider community.