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- Title
Pedagogy of a Radical Multiculturalism.
- Authors
Clem, Billy
- Abstract
This article addresses the politics of curricular changes at a small community college. The author describes the process of getting his proposed course in multiethnic literature adopted by the curriculum committee. One of the committee's telling objections was that the course reading material did not reflect the culture of the students at the college. The assumption is that course subject matter should reflect the specific racial/cultural make-up of the student population. According to the rhetoric of college administrators, the major goal of the community college is to represent the community. It follows that a global/transnational multicultural course in such a place can serve two purposes: first, it can help minoritized students and de-colonized white students to find some validation, support, and/or insight through a critical engagement with assigned texts; and second, it can help all students to understand literary art as one of many critical explorations providing insight about a world that distributes power unequally and then produces language to cover up its intentions and power-plays. Certainly, many of the students at the college have little interest in a multicultural literature course. Certain pieces of literature can work to repulse the negative energies of contemporary mass media and its racism and heterosexism as well as its poisonous insistence on creating antagonisms that have no basis in reality.
- Subjects
MULTICULTURALISM; CURRICULUM; MULTICULTURAL education; COMMUNITY colleges; STUDENTS; COLLEGE administrators; RACE awareness; RACISM
- Publication
MELUS, 2005, Vol 30, Issue 2, p123
- ISSN
0163-755X
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1093/melus/30.2.123