Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: Teaching Multicultural Education Online

Multicultural Education, Spring 2006 by Limburg, Florina, Clark, Christine

Experiencing the power that writing has to make ideas concrete is also important for students. Delpit (1995) argues that marginalized students need explicit instruction in the codes of power if they are to learn how to challenge those codes effectively. The process of asking students to make their ideas explicit through reflective writing increases their willingness to share the in class discussions (Lemons, in Lea & Helfand, 2004). This is because these ideas are more developed than they likely would be if they were simply shared off the top of their heads; not to mention that marginalized students are less likely to share more casually because of their pre-existing lack of explicit instruction on the codes of power.

Reflective writing, then, offers an escape from this viscious cycle. As more and more students share their reflective writing in class discussion, all students grow in their learning to encounter each other as people and, thus, to shift their frame of reference from an egocentric position to an Other-centered one. In sum, reflective writing helps students to make ideas real, at once identifying and justifying areas of concern they may have in relationship to the curriculum (Delpit, 1995).

O'Brien also describes her use of student journals to deepen student critical consciousness, writing ability, oral expression, and intergroup cohesion (Lea & Helfand, 2004). For example, she has found that white students' journals often describe a process of racial identity formation of which anger, guilt, and powerlessness are a part. When these students share these feelings in class discussions, the journals of students of color subsequently describe a sense of comfort derived from knowing that they are not the only ones who suffer because racism exists. Journals enable O'Brien to plan interventions with her students because they give her insight into what students are experiencing with respect to course content, thus allowing her to more adeptly respond to their learning needs.

When students use reflective journaling to chronicle their process of learning, they are forced into finding points, not only of dissonance but of resonance as well. In this way, reflective writing responds to intergroup conflict and shifts the classroom learning process from written to oral literacy skill development (Hallam, in Lea & Helfand, 2004).

Action Plan

The critical self-reflection in which I have been engaged throughout this course is the first step in my action plan to discover and delineate the ways in which the culture of whiteness informs my work as a teacher. Discovering my own relationship to whiteness was a necessary step in this regard. Without taking off my own cultural blinders, I could not have come to a critical consciousness of how my interactions with students (and their parents) influenced, both positively and negatively, their ability to achieve academically and their desire for educational success.

Delpit (1995) urges teachers to consider the differences between how middle class culture perceives the teacher's authority and how African Americans perceive the authority of the teacher. Recognizing the ways that I, as a teacher, embrace and enact the values of whiteness helps me to understand how I might actually cause undesirable behavior to flow from students of color.