Teaching diverse students

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Fall 2001 by Green, Janice S

Achieving Against the Odds: How Academics Become Teachers of Diverse Students, Esther KingstonMann and Tim Sieber, Eds., Temple University Press, 2001, $19.95

If you've attended a higher education conference or even a campus faculty meeting lately, you know that diversity and effective teaching are hot topics. How do we achieve diversity in the student body in light of recent court decisions weakening Affirmative Action in college admissions? How do we develop curricula to help students understand and appreciate cultural, social, economic and political differences? How can we promote, sustain and reward effective teaching? And how do we do it all despite persistent budget cutbacks?

Interestingly, while these two topics-diversity and pedagogy-are directly related, they are typically considered separately. In Achieving Against the Odds, professors Esther Kingston-Mann and Tim Sieber along with nine of their colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Boston, explain why a diverse classroom demands a particularly creative approach to teaching and how each contributor found the techniques and attitudes that enabled their students to learn. Each essay is a tale of struggle, introspection and risk-taking. And each is a success story.

Notably, the authors' historically underfunded home campus serves an unusually diverse population. In 1998, fully half of the UMass Boston entering class were students of color, and 60 percent of all undergraduates on the urban campus were the first in their families to attend college, according to Kingston-Mann and Sieber. With an average age of 29, many UMass Boston students work and have family responsibilities. They represent a spectrum of cultures and economic levels. For many of them, English is a second or third language, not yet adequately learned.

The challenge for UMass Boston then is to offer quality, low-cost education to a highly diverse student body for whom a college degree represents a giant step up the social and economic ladder. Faculty members have taken impressive steps to meet this challenge.

The contributors to this collection-themselves diverse in race, ethnicity and sexual orientation-teach humanities and social sciences ranging from gender studies to international relations and religion. But they share three common experiences. They all began teaching at UMass Boston as they had been taught-through lecture, discussion and testing of course content. They all felt frustration and disappointment as this pedagogy failed in their classrooms. And they all spent countless hours analyzing the problem, considering solutions, experimenting in the classroom and ultimately taking part in faculty development seminars at the UMass Boston Center for the Improvement of Teaching.

Founded in 1983 with a Ford Foundation grant, the center encourages faculty to adopt teaching concepts and strategies that engage and motivate students for whom academia, especially liberal arts study, is not only bewildering, but also seemingly totally removed from personal experience-even pointless.

The contributors to Achieving Against the Odds, regardless of their individual discipline or curricular focus, arrive at a common understanding of the educational needs of their students and ways to address them.

Kingston-Mann, a historian, sought "a pedagogy that was more informed by understanding of inclusion and exclusion." Her Modern World History course, for example, examined England's Industrial Revolution through the eyes of a Chartist worker, a factory owner and an educator-differences the students well understood. Sieber, an associate professor of anthropology, discovered the importance of establishdiscovered the importance of establishing connections between course content and the particularity of his students' lives and backgrounds. Students in his Childhood in America course wrote perceptively of their own experiences with racism, prejudice and abuse.

English Professor Vivian Zamel, who directs the English as a Second Language (ESL) Program, came to see teaching and learning as "a work in progress" and went from seeking the "right answer" to eliciting personal responses to information and ideas. In her composition classes, she asks ESL students to respond to writings by Studs Terkel, Rosa Parks, Amy Tan and Richard Rodriguez.

Castellano Turner, a psychologist, compares the dynamics of race relations in the United States to those of a black professor seeking to promote understanding in the classroom while encountering resentment from both blacks and whites.

There is no magical route to success in the diverse classroom. But there are useful techniques. Several of the contributors found an effective tool in undergraduate journals in which students responded to readings in personal, judgmental ways. Some stressed the need to lead students to make informed judgments and decisions rather than accepting those of authority figures. All concluded that understanding is best achieved when faculty relate content to students' personal and cultural experiences.