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Teaching and Race: How To Survive, Manage, and Even Encourage Race Talk provides an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of some common student talk about race, its flavor, character, rhetorical, sociological, psychological and educational development sources, and manageable tools for responding to students. The book recommends an accessible two-step, compassionate listening followed by critical challenges, to make the transformative connection between emotion and evidence. The book helps teachers embrace the moments of difficult conversation, confront student denial (as well as their own), and take advantage of the unique opportunity the classroom provides to advance the students' anti-racist identity development. Teaching and Race narrates common, sometimes offensive, language in four student interviews that are tied to strong feelings of confusion, denial, guilt, resistance and more. The student interviews help college teachers name and analyze loaded racial discussion so that they can thoughtfully address it in the classroom, rather than feel their only choices are explosive confrontation, gloss-overs or redirection. The book empowers teachers to shift potentially confrontational race talk to open-minded race dialogues that ultimately defuse the shock, sting, alarm and confusion of race talk by well-intentioned but unpracticed voices. The book creates a compassionate but informed moment for teachers, preparing them to confidently raise a critical challenge to misinformation at the moment it arises, and providing a beginning response for the teacher.
List of contents
Acknowledgments - Introduction - How to Survive, Manage, and Even Encourage Race Talk - Methodology and Literature: How Did We Get to This Place and Time? - Annabell - Roberta - Elaine - Madeline - Next Steps - Index of Authors - Index of Words and Phrases.
About the author
Irene Murphy Lietz holds a B.A. (Marygrove College), M.A. (University of Detroit), and Ph.D. (Union Institute and University). A Professor Emerita of English at Carlow University, Pittsburgh, and long-time teacher of first-year and professional writing, her work focuses on social justice, racism, and gender-based violence.
Summary
Teaching and Race: How To Survive, Manage, and Even Encourage Race Talk provides an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of some common student talk about race and manageable tools for responding to students.
Report
"Teaching and Race: How to Survive, Manage, and Even Encourage Race Talk is an important teaching tool and model of reflection on a teacher's own racial subject position for writing teachers of various levels. It offers college and even high school teachers who are white ways to interrogate whiteness, race, and racism in their classrooms with their students. Lietz' frames much of her insights gleaned from her teaching and the four students she highlights in the book in ways that I find humble, compassionate, and thoughtful. Her discussion throughout is a good model for how white, female teachers can do important race work both from their own subject positions in the classroom as a teacher and through their readings and activities with students. This is the kind of race work we all can do together in the literacy classroom."-Asao B. Inoue, Professor and Associate Dean, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, Arizona State University; Author of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future
