Re: Diversity Issues & Resistant Students

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Fri, 03 Oct 1997 16:12:53 -0400

Melanie -- boy is your college lucky to have you! this is why the rest of
us do support pro-diversity hiring policies in our faculties ... not just
because diversity of viewpoint is intrinsically essential to what
universities are supposed to stand for, and not just because students from
all the different minorities that together constitute the U.S. majority
need role models, but because students who think of themselves as
mainstream and are privileged to forget both their own limitations and the
obstacles their blindness creates for others also need a wake-up call to
others' points of view!

I am more fortunate in some ways; my classes of prospective and working
teachers are already very diverse. My (lower-to-middle) middle class more
privileged students sit side by side with African-, Asian-, Afro-Caribbean,
and Hispanic-American peers, with immigrants from Russia, Haiti, Africa,
the Caribbean islands, Latin America, etc., etc. In one class we started
off the term reading a nice article by Marilyn Cochrane-Smith of Penn:

Cochrane-Smith, M. 1995. Color blindness and basket-making are not the
answers: Confronting the dilemmas of race, culture, and language diversity
in teacher education. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 3, 493-522.

I do cringe just a bit at the opening phrases of her title, but the article
is about her work with new teachers and gives numerous lengthy excerpts
from their writing as they confronted the same issues you are trying to
raise with your students. She foregrounds the difficulties they had
accepting that they might be part of the problem, at least as much as part
of the solution. And how they came to terms with the issues. You might find
it a source of hope, your students might find it a wedge for healthy
self-doubt.

The strategy in that course was to get students to write about their own
educational problems, social limitations and worries, in an
autobiographical mode, but anchored in the themes of the course. To help
them see grounds for similarity and empathy with others.

I always have a few students who need to vent their frustrations that
everyone pays attention to the needs of visible minorities, while their own
struggles with life are not given recognition. Their struggles and
frustrations seem and are very serious to them; they do not know how good
they have it compared to many others. Even when they realize this, they
still need some validation of their own pain. My suspicion is that it is my
most secure and privileged middle-class students who tend to be most
'liberal' and those more marginal in their grasp on middle-class privilege
who most resent the invisibility of their struggles and the attention given
to Others. Maybe there is a lesson here for helping them.

JAY.

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JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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