Response #7

Akintunde, O. (2006). Diversity.Com: Teaching an Online Course on White Racism and Multiculturalism. Multicultural Perspectives, 8(2), 35-45. Retrieved from ERIC database.

            This article discussed issues pertaining to a multicultural education course and online learning.  This piece highlights the main concepts and premises of multiculturalism, which include (but are not limited to) respect for and sensitivity to diversity; integrating multicultural content into curriculum; and identifying and correcting White ethnocentric biases in content and methods of instruction.  The latter half of the article includes sample work and online discussion board postings from the author’s own course (the author is a university professor).  The author uses the term “epistemological racism” (36) to refer to how curriculum, instruction and educational research are, generally speaking, informed by narratives and perspectives that are racially biased or Eurocentric.  More importantly, the author emphasizes constructive student dialogue about issues of racial justice as fundamental to the goals of multicultural education.  The article illustrates how the design of the online course allowed for such dialogue, which in turn helped students achieve those important attitude and values transformations that are apart of multicultural education.  On one hand, the author concedes, the teacher faces the challenges of overseeing an online course, including frequent checking of email and high student expectations for prompt feedback.  With respect to multiculturalism, I found this passage to be quite insightful: “In a course that deals with race, class, and gender where outcomes are not quantified and correct answers are not a ‘given’ and students are expected to make tremendous shifts in attitudes, paradigms, as well as intellectual and political positions, the challenges and demands on the online professor are increased exponentially” (44).  Nevertheless, such shifts in attitudes, values and intellectual positions occurred in this online class.  The nature of the online course lent itself to the type of dialogue that is necessary for the successful teaching of multiculturalism. 

            Upon reading this article, it reminded me of a course that I took from James Banks on multicultural education and curriculum as an undergraduate at UW.  It was an eye-opening experience and especially memorable because of the profound, thoughtful discussions that we engaged in; I both witnessed and personally made some of those “tremendous shifts” of which the author speaks about in the article.  Multiculturalism is something that informs my approach to studying history and, consequently, my educational philosophy.  At first, I felt hesitancy about the effectiveness of a distance learning course on multicultural education; based on my personal experience, I found it difficult to imagine the types of conversations for which multicultural education calls occurring in an online setting.  But the sample postings included in the article sounded just like the kind of reflective discussions which occurred in the course that I took on-site at the U.  The author cites how some critics of the Internet see it as perpetuating inequality and white privilege which, on some level, I can see.  However, the author identifies the irony of how this technology, which some consider an oppressive tool, actually functions as a tool of liberation when we use it to broaden our perspectives.  Ultimately, I like this statement from the author when it comes to multicultural education and technology/the Internet: “Let’s not kill the messenger, let’s change the message (44).”  I will remember to ask how technology might lend itself to the sorts of meaningful conversations that I want to encourage in my future social studies classes.