Workshop on Diversity in the Classroom

I went to a short workshop today on Diversity in the Classroom by Dr. Dalia Rodriguez in hopes that it would instigate new thoughts about issues with teaching from a multicultural perspective. While I don’t have time to do many of the exercises she suggested investigating personal identity and discussion practices and I don’t want to run in to some of the issues she encountered from the participants regarding asking students to identify themselves publicly, I thought the biggest problem that most participants seemed to encounter, resistance, especially from White students, is a definite concern. In my classroom, I have not had anyone actively resist what I have to share but there seems to be a social consensus that you are obligated to at least appear ambivalent regarding the teacher’s teachings and authority to make those remarks, which is interesting because as I’m still exploring myself I often teach from a place of questioning.
One of the things that my group members in a little activity said was that he found it easier/safer to talk about racism in the past as it’s already disconnected from the individual student. I think that One Crazy Summer is a safe book to teach but hopefully I can extend the issues within into today through this class session on historical fiction and the previous session on multicultural and other ideological issues.
While I don’t want to inquiry too deeply into students’ identifications I think that using one of the activities suggested to think about the positionality of characters they read about in comparison to their own privilege through a privilege walk for the character they read about. I think that the problem with doing a privilege walk for yourself is that part of our cultural teaching is that modesty, even fake modesty, is important and we consequently downplay our own privilege. Additionally, we underestimate the power of our privilege. We don’t have a lot of income in college so we feel poor but we are not poor at all, not only regarding our cultural capital but the luxuries that afford ourselves even in our state of “poverty.”