Confronting Race in the Composition Classroom

Teachers can confront the hegemony of whiteness with a variety of pedagogical styles including feminist pedagogy, writing with students, personal identification, self-grading, and technology integration. The students may also have some say in choosing assignments and projects. We can never do away with hegemony but we can confront it with “transformational pedagogy.” I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” What does all this mean for education? One implication has to do with subject matter, with curriculum. Students must be enabled, at whatever stages they find themselves to be, to encounter curriculum as possibility. Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning The issues of race and ethnicity are present in all that we do and say especially in an academic setting and in our individual classrooms as students and teachers. Research into the borderland areas of whiteness theory (Otherness, overt racism, etc.) is important to all scholars when we attempt to communicate to a broad spectrum of students and instructors. We must know what bias or position we inhabit in order to reach all of our students, not just the ones tha