Multicultural Faculty Fellows
Major Multicultural Texts Used in our Inquiry
Affirming Diversity (2008)
Sentipensante: Sensing and Thinking Pedagogy (2009)
"Culture is not destiny"
"What we keep coming back to is the ethic of care"
These sentiments, among others, arose from discussions that developed out of our focus on Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (Nieto & Bode, 2008). It became our foundation for important and challenging conversations, including how we define multicultural education. Nieto & Bode (2008) provided our group with seven characteristics:
- Multicultural education is antiracist
- Multicultural education is basic education
- Multicultural education is important for all students
- Multicultural education is pervasive
- Multicultural education is education for social justice
- Multicultural education is a process
- Multicultural education is critical pedagogy (p.44)
Issues arose in the literature that led to critical conversations about our local context, bringing the challenges and possibilities of faith, race, language and class based conversations to the forefront.
After engaging in several conversations about the roles of multicultural educators within universities, we began to contemplate our next steps through literature. Dr. Pat Fabiano introduced us to Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation (Rendón, 2009). Reverberating many of the discussions we were having about the role of social justice and how to develop multicultural personhood as faculty members, honoring all of our multiple identities, we agreed to delve deeper into the possiblities of pedagogy which truly humanizes. We are currently grappling with what Rendón describes as the pedagogical vision "based on wholeness and consonance, respecting the harmonious rhythm between the outer experience of intellectualism and the rational analysis and the inner dimension of insight, emotion, and awareness" (2009, p. 2)