| QUICK CLICKS: |
Table of Contents |
|
Creating the Interactive, Diverse ClassroomStudents will benefit from discussing and learning about diversity issues so long as their professors create a safe, cooperative, and challenging atmosphere in the classroom. In their recent book on today's college students, When Hope and Fear Collide, Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton report that "multiculturalism is a painful subject on campuses today. Students don't want to discuss it." Students would rather talk about their sex lives than race relations. They fear being seen as "racist," "sexist," or "homophobic." As one student puts it: "Every time we'd start to talk about diversity stuff, the prof would start lecturing." This is not a pretty picture, hardly good for learning. But there is hope. Students report that they appreciate diversity, recognize its importance, and want to form relationships and even friendships across racial, ethnic, class, and gender barriers. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has several studies, available on the Web at www.aacu-edu.org, showing how diversity can work to benefit student attitudes and academic development. To benefit from diversity education, these studies have shown, our students need help to get past their fears. As bell hooks, the contemporary African-American feminist poet and theorist suggests, diversity education is more than a student affairs issue. It is an issue that directly involves classroom teaching and learning practices. Today, as both the content of our disciplines and the forms of our pedagogy change, more and more teachers are exploring strategies for bringing intellectually and emotionally rich multicultural materials to their diverse classrooms. But curricular changes alone, without changes in pedagogical practice, do not guarantee a genuine intercultural education. This can happen only when we make our classrooms safe, cooperative, interactive, and lively places that guarantee authentic intercultural exchanges. This means creating classrooms with a high degree of peer interaction and mutual respect, as well as opportunities for reflection and writing, small group discussions and projects, and other forms of active learning about things that matter, as the tips that follow outline. Course Design In designing your course, consider what is at the center and at the margins of the course. How would student perspectives and learning change if you reversed them? What, for example, would your social work, literature, business management, educational foundations, developmental psychology, European history, music and art, or even calculus course look like if you put the experience of African-American women in the middle? Or Mexican-American migrant workers? Or Navajo teenagers? Or Indian subcontinent newcomers? Imagine teaching your course not in the United States but in another culture. Other than language, how would the course have to change? For starters, wed have to know more about that culture, wouldn't we? Then, wed want to know how to connect the major principles and intellectual constructs of our course with the learners from that culture. We are discovering that effective course design begins not with the content of the discipline but with the nature of the particular learners in that course. The first step in course design then is to find out who our increasingly diverse students are. Pedagogical Strategies Although we will not all agree about our interpretations of the African-American experience, we agree that the only "political correctness" appropriate to this course is the search for truth and the commitment to encounter and engage the course goals, the texts, and each other with openness, honesty, and mutual respect. We've had many lively and even heated discussions, but only once or twice have I needed to remind students of the guideline. Just holding it up and pointing at it, without saying a word, has been enough to prompt excited students to modify their behavior. Get the emotional issues out early. Students come to diversity courses and topics with many fears. Its important to anticipate the hot button issues: affirmative action, perceived separatism, sexuality and race, sexual orientation, religion, inter-ethnic rivalries, or fear of using the wrong group labels. Get these concerns into classroom conversations right away. One way to accomplish this is to have students do introductions on how they define themselves. Another is to start with a reading (Baldwin's Fire Next Time, for example) that raises the vital issues, and use small groups or pairs and writing to launch a large-group discussion. Use the strategy: think, write, pair, share. Use student stories. Stories have enormous power to connect the diversity of student experiences and ways of knowing with the major goals of the course. Stories affirm diverse student voices. Have students tell a story about their name, which puts on the table student-desired labels and raises all kinds of diversity issues (the mother's missing maiden name, for example, and the growing reality of blended and racially mixed families). Or have students on the first day of class (in pairs or small groups first) tell a story about a racial, gender, or ethnic moment that had a powerful impact on them. Or have them tell a story about a moment when they felt they mattered, or felt marginal. In debriefing the stories, focus on common themes, patterns, and issues. Use powerful, evocative quotations and visuals. These quotations focus students on a single image or paragraph that, if well chosen, lend themselves to different interpretations. I have found the most successful quotes in multicultural autobiographies, such as the graduation scene from Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings or Richard Rodriquez's Hunger of Memory, and also from American Indian ethnographies (the last paragraph of Charles Eastman's Ohiyesa, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, as well as from James Baldwin, bell hooks, W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, and Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Photographs (civil rights movement scenes, for example), cartoons, and paintings all have enormous power to move students and get them discussing important issues. Teach with good texts and give students small group tasks. By "good texts," I mean readings that are written well, loaded with multiple meanings, evoke the key issues, and speak to student lives. The very reading that precipitates a heated argument can also be the refuge to return to for making meaning out of the experience. Groups work. Levine and Cureton point out that racial and other diversity barriers are broken down most easily where students have a common goal to accomplish. |
| Post your comments on our "Thriving in Academe" discussion board. |
|
