Teaching about Race beyond “Race and Ethnicity” courses
Before they can reasonably prompt a discussion about race and ethnicity, TAs and instructors must know how to talk about race and ethnicity in a culturally competent manner. Thisblog post has some helpful starting points for developing this competence. Developing these skills will help TAs and instructors feel more confident in these discussions and help guide their students to enter the discussion without fear or nervousness.
The Delta Program is a great resource for a wide variety of pedagogical issues. Among their four primary goals, the Delta Program seeks to “enhance teaching and learning through embracing diversity”. Delta offers a variety of courses are geared toward all disciplines and, therefore tends to focus on broader issues of inclusion rather than particular issues that arise in classes specifically about race and ethnicity. However, they provide useful insights about incorporating diversity in many different courses.
One major difficulty faced by instructors teaching courses that encounter race peripherally is the daunting task of doing justice to the topic in a very brief amount of class time. The chapter on “Racism and White Privilege” from Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (available as an ebook through the UW Library System) lays out a very useful plan for developing a workshop in four quadrants to discuss 1) language skills for talking about race, 2) a historical and conceptual overview of racism, 3) white privilege, 4) taking action for change. From this layout, a thorough discussion of race could easily be modified to take up 1 or 2 class sessions, as needed.
