University Studies
                       

  Diversity

 Social Responsibility

 Quantitative Reasoning

 Critical Reading

 Writing

 Science

 Oral Communication

 Visual Communication

 Student Basics
 Orientation

 Technology Competencies

                       

 Portland State University

Jack C. Straton

Associate Professor, University Studies & Physics

Jack's other Web projects:

Selected Publications

Racial Intervention Story Exchange

Women in American Cosmology

25 Hour Diversity Curriculum:

Take an Allegorical Tour, by traveling through a painting by Mimi Liu and Sarawan Varagoon

or jump to a topic of interest:

The context for these course modules on diversity is a team-taught, multidisciplinary, year-long course that constitutes the first year general education program at Portland State University. One over-arching goal of each of the two courses I have used this sequence in, Values in Conflict and Embracing Einstein's Universe, is to help students become conscious participants in their own value systems and to enhance their awareness of social and community responsibility.

We set the stage for this sequence early in the year by helping our students to become comfortable talking about their lives to each other in a setting that promotes safety, respect, and confidentiality for what is said. We have found that "wasting" five to fifteen minutes per class period on this has an enormous payoff later on. This may be as nonthreatening as sharing "news," but often moves to the place where students talk openly about the real struggles in their lives. In the Values course I would often ask students to "check-in" with the emotional junk they are bringing to class so that the rest of us will know the context of statements they make that seem jarring. At other times, I will ask a question like, "If you were to be reincarnated and a non-human animal, what would it be and why?" In the Einstein course, we often share snippets from freewrites we do at the beginning of class.

We also prepare them for discussing hot topics by providing them with a 12-page Communication Guidelines handout I have developed. Early on students are challenged to examine how they know what they know. The historian on our Einstein team, Barbara Traver, comes into class dressed as a 14th century scholar and proceeds to explain the nature of the heavens, as described by Aristotle and refined by Ptolemy, motion of matter and vapors on the earth, and the constituents of the human body, such as sang and choler, the relative balance of which lead to sanguine and melancholic personalities. Our students find it impossible to refute her assertions, they "just know" that they are right and she is wrong. The next day we show a scene from Monty Python's The Holy Grail in which villagers assert to a knight that a woman (played by Helen Mirren) is a witch, and the knight takes them through a "logical" process to determine that if she weighs the same amount as a duck, she is a witch. They then freewrite on the general issue of how they know what they know.

Values students begin the focused diversity sequence with a written inquiry into their own cultural history, whose main goal is to wean pink-skinned students from the idea that they are "Vanilla Americans." Einstein students, who are seniors at Westview High School, have made this kind of inquiry the year before. They focus on international anti-Semitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Both courses focus heavily on race as the model for exploring the consequences of interpersonal and institutional "isms," but gender or disability issues would serve as well. However, some exploration of another oppression is helpful so that students can see how the net of oppressions are mutually supportive (e.g., the same people seem to always come out on top). We therefore spend a few days on gender early in the sequence. (In the Values course we also look at oppressive patterns in student-teacher-school dynamics through reading Paulo Friere. ) They read

• Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers", a gender-based short story that reveals how our prejudices put limits on what we can perceive; and

• Jamaica Kincaid's poem "Girl," a description of her socialization though her mother's comments. We have the students write their own poems on this theme and in this style.

We next shine the light on institutional misbehavior, as exemplified historically by U.S. imperialism. Students view

• Queen Liliau Kalani, a video documenting the U.S.-backed overthrow of the constitutional government of Hawaii; and read

• Haunani-Kay Trask's essay "From a Native Daughter," criticizing academics who have passed judgment on Hawaiian culture without ever learning the Hawaiian language;

The key reading for moving students beyond surface thinking (comprehension -> reaction -> judgment or denial) to understanding that the perspectives we bring to an exploration of history are part of the history that we discover is

• a paper by Jane Tompkins entitled "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History." ;

Part of the value in a diversity sequence is giving students an appreciation for a culture other than the dominant one. We show them either

• Double Happiness, a movie written and directed by Mina Shum that explores the bicultural challenges faced by a young woman growing up in a traditional Chinese family in Vancouver, B.C., or Smoke Signals, focusing on the lives of two young Native American Indian men from the Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho.

Then we move from the fascinating and intriguing facet of diversity awareness (learning about other cultures) into the anther key facet, which may be described as discovering and taking some responsibility for the ways in which dominant American culture has dealt oppressively with ethnic groups over time.

The center of this educational piece is the movie, The Color of Fear, in which eight men of various ethnicities talk about their own experiences of race relations. In order to head off feelings of guilt, we spend a prior day talking about where guilt comes from and what its role is: reinforcing "White privilege" by shifting the attention from the oppressed person back onto the privileged person. Tess Wiseheart former Director of the Portland Women's Crisis Line says that displays of guilty feelings translate as "I'm going to feel so crummy about my privilege that you are going to take care of me." Cherie Brown, Executive Director of the National Coalition Building Institute, says that "Guilt is the glue that holds prejudice in place." We also provide concrete models for students to use to intervene across racial lines when they are witness inappropriate behavior.

After seeing The Color of Fear, we spend the next session processing on an emotional level, via Paul Kivel's Stand-up Exercise for Whites, which puts us in touch with the way "whites" are affected by white racism and with the palpable reality of its prevalence. The next day or two we talk extensively about the content of the movie, re-exposing students to a significant subset of a transcript. Readings to accompany these discussions include

• Ronald Takaki, "A Different Mirror", and

• Michael Omi and Howard Winant, " Racial Formation", which shows that the idea of "race" is a cultural rather than a biological reality; (The Values course also reads Aurora Levins Morales and Langston Hughes. )

One of the most difficult issues to parse in this area is affirmative action. My approach is to turn this into an analysis of institutionalized class structures, to see who holds the power over how many jobs are available. Many students come away from this realizing they have been misplacing their rage.

Much of the sequence to this point focuses on providing a service to European-American students in helping them to crack open their attitudes on race, become conscious participants in their reactions, and ultimately begin to put their attitudes (back) together in a fresh way. Of course, this also provides a service to students of color in that it validates some of their experiences and ultimately lessens the amount of work they have to do to create and maintain friendships with European-American students. But on the other hand, so much attention paid to European-American responses to race is just another form of normalizing the white experience as the only one worth focusing on. I am in the process of developing modules to bring the attention of the full class to the ways in which students of color can emotionally cope with the onslaught of the what Lauren Nile calls the "Daily Indignities," the relentless episodes of mistreatment that they are subjected to by shop-keepers, police, airline agents, and others in the commercial sphere.. A key piece of that is showing the scene in the woods in Toni Morrison's

• Beloved, in which Baby Suggs preaches about loving the dark hands that "whites" despise.

This all leads up to a deeply experiential week in which students are placed into roles in another society Lisbeth Lipari researched, that is struggling with religious and linguistic oppression. The true identity of the country is withheld and renamed "Tribus." Some of those students who have normally found themselves on the bottom of our society's hierarchy get first-hand experience of what it is like to hold power over a despised group. Some students who normally are on the top tiers of our society likewise find value in temporarily experiencing the loss of that power. Not every student has the opportunity to jump that fence, but those who find themselves in familiar positions learn from the reactions of those who have ventured onto unfirm ground.

Sometimes late in the sequence, our Peer Mentors begin to hear a few students using the phrase "white bashing." This is the clue that reactive "hot-buttons" are being triggered and we need to explicitly deal with those.

Finally, we move into the part of the diversity sequence where the students put all their cognitive and emotional learning together to show the teachers what they have learned. Our thinking on how best to craft a culminating experience has varied over the years, and currently we ask students to review their notes, freewrite thoughtfully, thoroughly and emotionally about everything, and copy and turn in the parts they would like us to read and react to. Their ultimate task is to revisit these issues again in 2 or 5 years and email us with an update.

The Values course moves from this into a discussion of Environmental Racism. The Einstein course moves into General Relativity. This is a good example of just finding a place for a discussion of diversity in a course whose theme does not automatically bring such a discussion to mind. The students ultimately say that this was an integral part of the overall course.

Diversity sequences by other faculty:

 Jenks

Related essays:

 Guilt
 Indirection
 PC or SC
 Privilege