Race in the College Classroom

by Bonnie TuSmith, Maureen T Reddy

Overview

Winner of the 2003 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Awards
Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race?

Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.     

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813531090
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	08/07/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

BONNIE TUSMITH is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures and other scholarly works on literature and multiethnic pedagogy.

MAUREEN T. REDDY is a professor of English and women's studies at Rhode Island College. She is the author of several books, including Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture (Rutgers University Press) and Everyday Acts Against Racism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Race in the College Classroom
Part 1 Authority and (Il)Legitimacy
1. Two Voices From the Front Lines: A Conversation About Race in the Classroom
2. Teaching In Florida: the End of Affirmative Action and the Politics of Race
3. A Ghost in the Collaborative Machine: the White Male Teacher in the Multicultural Classroom
4. Decentering Whiteness: Resisting Racism in the Women's Studies Classroom
5. Smashing the Rules of Racial Standing
When the Political Is Personal: Life on the Multiethnic Margins
6. The Entanglements of Teaching Nappy Hair
7. Beyond Bull Conner: Teaching Slavery in Alabama
8. Fear and the Professorial Center
Part 2 Rewards and Punishments
9. Out on a Limb: Race and the Evaluation of Frontline Teaching
10. Whiteness on a White Canvas: Teaching Race in a Predominantly White University
11. Gift Wrapped or Paper Bagged?: Packaging Race for the Classroom
12. The Question of Comfort: The Impact of Race on/in the College Classroom
13. Far More Than Frybread: The Tender Issue of Race in Teaching Literature
14. Menaced by Resistance: the Blackteacher in the Mainly White School/Classroom
15. Strategies for Surviving Race in the Classroom
16. Traps, Pitfalls, and Obstacles: Challenges to Confronting Racism in Academia
Part 3 Transformative Practices
17. Confronting the "Screaming Baboon": Notes on Race. Literature, and Pedagogy
18. Centering the Margins: A Chicana in the English Classroom
19. Race, Discomfort and Love in a University Classroom
20. Moonwalking Technoshamans and the Shifting Margin: Decentering the Colonial Classroom
21. The Colorblind Cyberclass: Myth and Fact
22. Skinwalking and Color Linecrossing: Teaching Writing Against Racism
23. Racing Into the Academy: Pedagogy and Black Faculty
24. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Teaching the Biology of Human Variation and the Social Construction of Race
Conclusion: Teaching to Make a Difference
Selected References
Contributors