Abstract
This chapter describes a transdisciplinary approach to preparing future educators for teaching multicultural literatures within diverse classrooms. The project combined an English course with an education course to deepen student awareness and understanding of multiculturalism while also encouraging student engagement and support of diverse communities and schools in our area. Over the course of the project, in-class student learning was enhanced through team teaching, intercultural assignments, a field trip, and a capstone project where students applied what they learned through creating lesson plans for use in their future classrooms. The learning community focused on dialogic application; the instruction and activities of the course were developed to suggest models students may later adapt in their own classrooms. The chapter demonstrates the efficacy of the approach and concludes with remarks on the utility of the learning community by a former student who currently teaches high school English.
TopStudent Resistance To Diversity And Inclusive Initiatives
Exploring and deconstructing the dominance of privileged perspectives often found in the classrooms at PWIs necessitates new pedagogical approaches, especially in teacher education. As Garrett and Segall (2013) indicated:
. . . grappling with difficult knowledge means that pedagogy used in teacher education to engage students with issues of race might require more complex approaches, ones that do not simply see teacher educators as providers of missing information to awaken teacher candidates from their ignorant slumbers (p. 301).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Post-Racial: The belief that the U.S. has resolved the historical, political, social, and cultural issues of bias, race, and racism.
Social Justice Education: An educational framework that critically examines power, privilege, and oppression to empower teachers and students to understand and act on historical, social, political, and racial inequities.
Learning Community: A high impact practice that utilizes two or more interconnected classes to teach a themed concept across disciplines to the same cohort of students.
Intersectionality: The manner in which one’s different interconnected identities may affect power, privilege, and oppression on both an institutional and personal level.
Resistance: A conscious or subconscious decision to refuse, disengage, trivialize, or ignore discussions of race and racism.
Liberal Multiculturalism: A form of multiculturalism that espouses tolerance of other races and ethnicities rather than critical engagement with fraught histories of racism and oppression.
Color Blindness: The claim that a person does not see “color” as a means of denying socially-constructed racial/ethnic categories.
Equity: In multiethnic pedagogical studies, the practice of recognizing the different circumstances each person/student experiences and designing opportunities to address these different backgrounds in order to support all students in achieving an equal outcome.