Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: Teaching Multicultural Education Online

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

Additionally, I give individual grades on student performance in class discussion each week. Students who desire individual feedback to explain the rationale for their grades may request it. It is only after hashing out the many complex dimensions of the course readings in these class discussions that students sit down to write their individual papers summarizing their learnings on each text.

Having taught online multicultural education courses for National University for the last two years, I have come to believe that student learning outcomes in these courses are at least as positive as those garnered in the ground instructional context. Here I am referring to outcomes pertaining to the development of comfort with, and skill for, cross-group relationship building, knowledge-building, and conflict negotiation, as well as outcomes related to the development of advanced critical thinking skills, nuanced understanding of multicultural curricular and pedagogical processes, and predisposition toward lifelong engagement in collective social action for equity and justice.

The next section of this article serves as a testament to the quality of student learning outcomes deriving from online multicultural education coursework.

Acknowledging and Resisting Whiteness in the Classroom2

Introduction

I-the first author of this article-am Chinese Filipino, but I have never felt particularly impugned or rewarded by my skin color. Yet, in working in a community where diversity is multifaceted, I do still need to consider how I interact with people from a very broad array of social identity configurations.

In recognizing that human genius hails from all corners of the world and everywhere in between, it is clearly a fallacy to create a dualism in which white is right and everything else is deficient. Thus, it is necessary to come to grips with white identity development as an ongoing process for all people, be they white or not. We must engage in continually reflective learning to identify how whiteness is present in each and every one of us and, as a result, whether we have the potential to harm especially racial "Others" even when-like me-"we" are also "the other."

Author Toni Morrison (2000) describes this manifestation in African Americans as "images of whiteness in the black imagination" against which African Americans measure each other. Central in the theory of white racial identity development is the contention that white privilege is largely invisible to those who enjoy it, but readily discernable to those who do not (Lea & Helfand, 2004).

I have not found this to be entirely true. Images of whiteness in my imagination have only recently come to my full consciousness. And it is in discovering my own relationship to whiteness that I have begun to learn how to balance my interactions with diverse students against an egalitarian ideal.

Overview

Lea and Helfand (2004) jointly edited the book Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom with the aim of exposing how "whiteness" operates within the mainstream classroom. Authors of color as well as white authors contributed to the body of chapters in it. The overall purpose of this book is to enable teachers to propose instructional methods that mitigate, if not completely eradicate, the structural omnipresence of whiteness as normative in the educational sphere.