Identity and Pedagogy in Higher Education: International Comparisons

The focus on Whiteness as a subject of inquiry and analysis in its own right has recently become a popular theme within academic understandings of identity and Otherness. However, such research has primarily focused on the United States, this book aims to examine specifically, the social construction and maintenance of Whiteness within tertiary educational settings in Australia and the UK. By focussing on higher education, the book will specifically explore the relationship of students’ experiences of identity within the educational context which has often been neglected. Although different in terms of historical and other contexts, Australia, like the UK has a complex relationship and understanding of ‘race’. There is little research which takes a comparative perspective in focusing on understandings of Whiteness and its meanings in different cultural environments. This book will examine such understandings by focusing on degree students’ understandings of both Whiteness and Blackness. Leonardo (2002:31) argues that Whiteness is a racial discourse, whereas the category ‘white people’ represents a socially constructed identity. To understand Whiteness, however there is also a need to understand concepts of Blackness and Otherness. Bonnett has indicated that Whiteness has developed into a taken-for-granted experience structured upon a varying set of supremacist assumptions (sometimes cultural, sometimes biological, sometimes moral, sometimes all three). Non-White identities, by contrast, have been denied the privileges of normativity, and are marked within the West as marginal and inferior (1997: 188).