BROAD THEMES: RACE

Our task as educators of an increasingly multicultural student body is to learn to identify our own assumptions and biases. We need to observe ourselves as we work with students of races and ethnic origins other than our own to see what assumptions we are making about their needs and potential. We need to look for clues to our own biases, to check to see if we are dealing with some students differently from others.

Questions we might ask ourselves are:

• Do I expect minority students to need extra help?
• Do I imagine that Latinos or blacks will express their opinions in non-academic language?
• Do I expect that Asian students will do better than most other students?
• Am I afraid of students whose background differs markedly from my own?
• Do I respond to a white student's voice as if it had more intellectual weight?
• Do I assume that white students will be insensitive, arrogant, and condescending toward persons of color?
• Do I assume that African Americans or Latinos or other students of color are all alike?

In every case, it will be important to get to know students as individuals rather than as representatives of an ethnic or gender group. Recognizing and acknowledging race and racial dynamics

At the same time that we want to see students as individuals, we need to recognize the presence of race and racial dynamics in our classrooms.

Teachers frequently fail to recognize racial dynamics and how they play out in the classroom, and to identify racism when it occurs for several reasons. These include:

1. discomfort with their own racism,
2. inability to identify it,
3. denial of its presence,
4. rationalization of racist behavior,
5. fear of loss of control, and
6. fear of risk of being identified as belonging to one or another political camp, with all the implications of that for their professional image, particularly in the political climate of the early 1990s.

Preparation.

The following suggestions are designed to enable teachers to prepare for the multicultural classroom.

• Know oneself in relation to race issues.
• Become aware of how one generally stereotypes groups other than one's own and how stereotyping of different groups affects the responses one gives to them.
• Anticipate sensitive areas in the subject matter being taught.
• Explore different perspectives as the subject is introduced.
• Ask students to review the syllabus at the beginning of the semester and identify areas of concern that they may need to address during office hours or in some other way.
• Develop rules of thumb for how to deal with inappropriate behavior in a classroom.
• Make sure the class understands the rules or norms of the classroom.
• Take time out to explore with the class the issues that people are wrestling with in terms of race relations.
• Invite students to express their reactions to what is going on in the classroom.