Race in the College Classroom

by Bonnie Tusmith (Editor), Maureen T Reddy (Editor)

Winner of the 2003 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Awards
Winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award

Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race?

Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.     

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of essays by a variety of writers, so of course mileage varies. The final section, which focused on transformative practices and practical adjustments in the classroom, was probably the most compelling. Though I read this in 2017 and the collection was published 15 years earlier, the concerns and angles of attack remain compelling and appropriate (with the possible exception of an essay about the "colorblind cyberclass" which felt a little damaged by the onward flow of technological progress (or "progress")).

Definitely worthwhile if you're a college professor or even high school teacher. These issues are important, getting more important, and one hopes that anyone who thought they'd just sort of sort themselves out and we'd wander into utopia, well, these last 7 violent and racist months of ours have put dreams like that to the sword. It's going to take work to take down all this white supremacy. So let's get to work.

[Jes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fairly useful/interesting, though there so many contributors (representing so many different disciplines) that it sometimes felt a bit scattered. I think I was hoping for something that had more concrete resources for teachers (activity ideas, discussion prompts, freewriting topics, reading lists, etc.).