Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: Teaching Multicultural Education Online

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

Third, students write a culminating essay on two of the texts (Kincheloe and Delpit) in which they review the text, discuss what they feel are its most salient themes, compare and contrast the author's perspectives on these themes to those of at least three other theorists who are well-known in the same subject area, and then discuss how what they have learned from reading and discussing it with classmates will inform their own teaching.

On the third text (Lea and Helfand), they write a final examination paper. In this paper they are to: (1) give an overview of the book; (2) select three main ideas from the book and discuss them in relationship to their own educational experiences as well as with regard to how different contributors to the book have engaged them; (3) link these ideas with ideas from the Kincheloe and Delpit texts; and (4) develop a concrete plan of action for meaningfully implementing these ideas in their own classrooms.

Finally, students complete a community agency site visit and assessment. Here, students must identify a community-based private non-profit organization that provides some type of social justice service to the community that hosts it, visit the site to learn about how it provides that service, conduct a brief review of the literature relating to service provision in this area, assess the efficacy of the agency's service provision, and then connect what they have learned to their roles as classroom teachers. All of these activities are written up in a fourth and final culminating essay.

One of the advantages in teaching this course online has to do with individual participation in group discussion of the reading. In the online classroom there is virtually an unlimited amount of classroom time, most of which is asynchronous so students do not have to compete for "airtime" like they would during a three-hour seminar class. So while individual participation is still limited by raced, gendered, and classed power dynamics, it is enhanced by asynchronicity.

Further, because the act of participation is done through writing, superfluous discourse is virtually eliminated. Not only are interruptions of, or distraction from, a speaker null and void, the content of all discussion is either directly related to a student's own thoughts on the readings, or her or his reaction to a classmate's thoughts on them.

This leads to another advantage in teaching multicultural education online: there is much less student dependence or reliance on the professor for initiating or managing class discussion. Thus, the online classroom is, by design, much more student-centered, allowing the professor to "give up the notion of teaching as mastery and become a facilitator of learning" in the truest Freirian sense much more easily (Freire, 1980).

This does not mean that online students do not need regular assurances that the professor is still involved in the discussion and not completely absent-on the contrary, they do. I convey my involvement first, obviously, by devising the discussion questions and establishing the structure that students will employ to discuss them. I also give several examples of the kind of participation I expect-length, style, substance, and so forth, by putting example posts in the discussion board arena at the onset of the course. I give copious weekly feedback to the class as a whole about their discussion-what they did well, what they need to do more work on, important themes that they developed; and, I tease out problematics, dialectics, contradictions, etc., in their interface for them to talk further about in the next week's class discussion.