scholarly journals Towards a Safe and Respectful Campus: Perspectives of Multicultural Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsuan-Jen Chen

This paper argues that multicultural education is an essential way of creating a safe and respectful campus. Examined from the perspective of power relations, schools are viewed as a site that helps maintain existing power relations by reinforcing the assimilation ideology. A drawback of this is that only one set of perspectives is valued. As a result, students who are not part of the norm are more likely to be treated unfairly in school. This may impose a negative effect on their learning as school is not a safe environment for them. To create a safe and respectful campus, multicultural education has to be incorporated as it helps students foster multiple perspectives and learn to embrace diversity. This paper first defines multicultural education. Secondly, it illustrates why multicultural issues should be examined in the framework of power relations. Then, it focuses on exploring the assimilation ideology and the role schools play in the process of assimilation. In this section, it analyzes how students are endangered by assimilation, and the case of the Yeh Yong-Zi event in Taiwan is also examined. Finally, it discusses in what ways multicultural education could help establish a safe and respectful campus culture.

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Sannisha K. Dale ◽  
Jessica Henderson Daniel

The Trayvon Martin tragedy (the shooting of a Black male adolescent in a Florida gated community) was covered frequently by media outlets for a few months before the level of coverage gradually became only periodic updates on the status of the case and court proceedings. In response to the coverage, the listserv of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues) became a site for sharing information about the case, resources, comments and recommendations. Inspired by one of the comments regarding the importance of taking action in the form of conversations and dialogues in counseling and psychology training settings and psychotherapy, this article (1) reviews guidelines such as the APA Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists, (2) notes applicable literature on the importance of promoting discussions about multicultural issues in training settings and psychotherapy, (3) describes examples of discussions held in training settings following the tragedy, and (4) lists several recommendations for facilitating conversations about the tragedy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jung-ah Choi ◽  
Jae Hoon Lim

AbstractThis paper is a self-reflective narrative of our teaching experience as two immigrant Asian female professors who teach Multicultural Education. Employing collaborative autoethnography (CAE), the study addresses the issues of authority, positionality, and legitimacy of knowledge claims in critical feminist pedagogy. Two research questions guided our inquiry: 1. How does a teacher’s racial positionality play out in exercising professional knowledge, and conversely, 2. How does seemingly neutral professional knowledge become racialized in the discussions of race? Major findings demonstrate the double-edged contradictions in the body/knowledge nexus manifested in our everyday teaching contexts. On the one hand, the bodily dimension of teacher knowledge is de-racialized because of institutional norms and cultures. On the other hand, there are times professional knowledge becomes racialized through the teacher’s body. Understanding the body/knowledge nexus that invites precarious power dynamics in racial discussions and even blatantly dismisses our professional knowledge, we, as an immigrant faculty of color, find it impossible to create a safe environment for participatory, critical discourse. Acknowledging our triple marginality, we put forth the concept of “pedagogy of fear” (Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157) which squarely disrupts the idea of a safe environment in race dialog and urges teachers to confront their own/their students’ fear and create a space of teaching vulnerably.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly Scrine

A broad sociocultural perspective defines trauma as the result of an event, a series of events, or a set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, with lasting impacts on an individual’s physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Contexts and practices that aim to be “trauma-informed” strive to attend to the complex impacts of trauma, integrating knowledge into policies and practices, and providing a sanctuary from harm. However, there is a body of critical and decolonial scholarship that challenges the ways in which “trauma-informed” practice prioritizes individualized interventions, reinscribes colonial power relations through its conceptualizations of safety, and obscures the role of systemic injustices. Within music therapy trauma scholarship, research has thus far pointed to the affordances of music in ameliorating symptoms of trauma, bypassing unavailable cognitive processes, and working from a strengths-based orientation. In critiquing the tendency of the dominant trauma paradigm to assign vulnerability and reinforce the individual’s responsibility to develop resilience through adversity, this conceptual analysis outlines potential alternatives within music therapy. Drawing on a case example from a research project with young people in school, I elucidate the ways in which music therapy can respond to power relations as they occur within and beyond “trauma-informed” spaces. I highlight two overarching potentials for music therapy within a shifting trauma paradigm: (1) as a site in which to reframe perceived risk by fostering young people’s resistance and building their political agency and (2) in challenging the assumption of “safe spaces” and instead moving toward practices of “structuring safety.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Atun Wardatun

This article draws on an ethnographic research that focuses on the cultural practice of female-paid matrimonial funding, ampa co’i ndai (ACN), among semi-urban Bimanese Muslims of Eastern Indonesia. The practice takes place when the bride, with the help of her parents and female relatives, pays her marriage payment (co’i, including mahr). It is used only when the prospective groom is a government employee, for it is assumed as a social status raiser. During the declaration of marriage, the payment is announced to have come from the groom. This article uses the practice as a site to examine the particularity of practising Islamic laws in everyday life of eastern Indonesian Muslims. The narratives of nineteen Muslim women who have been involved in ACN reveal what its functions as an equalising mechanism, through which gendered power-relations is minimised while perpetuating traditional position of wives and husbands as a complementary couple within their family as well as before society. I argue that  ACN has been seen as a modified understanding of kafā’a in fiqh which means “equality” to “complementarity.” However, this local understanding of kafā’a is a testament to the complexities of gender power relations.[Artikel ini adalah penelitian etnografi tentang praktik AMPA co’i ndai (ACN) di kalangan masyarakat semi-urban muslim Bima di kawasan timur Indonesia. Budaya ini dilaksanakan dengan cara pengantin perempuan, dengan bantuan orang tua dan saudara perempuannya, menyediakan biaya pernikahan (co’i dan mahar). Tradisi ini dipraktikkan hanya ketika calon pengantin pria adalah pegawai negeri, yang diasumsikan memiliki status sosial yang lebih. Namun, saat resepsi pernikahan, deiumumkan bahwa biaya-biaya berasal dari pengantin pria. Narasi kehidupan dari sembilan belas perempuan yang terlibat mengungkapkan fungsi ACN sebagai mekanisme penyetaraan gender dengan meminimalkan relasi kuasa serta nmendudukkan pasangan untuk saling melengkapi dalam keluarga maupun masyarakat. Praktik ACN dapat dilihat sebagai bentuk lokal pemahaman konsep kafā’a, yang berarti “kesetaraan” untuk “melengkapi”. Namun, pemahaman lokal kafā’a ini merupakan bukti kompleksitas relasi kuasa dalam masalah gender.]


2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Asher

The author discusses the challenges of educating teachers to engage, rather than deny or repress, differences that emerge at the dynamic, context-specific intersections of race, culture, gender, and sexuality. Although multicultural education discourse is well established, stereotypic representations and repressive silences persist in the sphere of practice. Interweaving postcolonial and feminist theories with reflections emerging from her multicultural teacher education practice, the author highlights tensions of doing multicultural work. She discusses how silencing forces operate even in seemingly “open” micro and macro contexts. To illustrate these arguments, the author engages two areas that have received limited attention in multicultural discourse itself: representations of Asian Americans and differences of sexuality. She recommends that the multicultural teacher education classroom serve as a site for modeling critical, self-reflexive engagement with difference and democratic participation, even as she acknowledges the limits of individual efforts in the process of educational and social change.


1999 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lalita Acharya ◽  
M Brock Fenton

The defensive behaviour of moths around street lights was examined at a site where bats feed heavily on moths. The lights had a negative effect on moth defensive behaviour, but a combination of observational techniques (recording the outcome of naturally occurring bat-moth interactions) and experimental techniques (deafening moths by puncturing the tympanal organs) indicated that ultrasound-detecting ears still afforded the moths some protection from bat predation. On average, bats captured 69% of the moths they attacked. Moths that exhibited evasive behaviour were caught significantly less often than those that did not (52 vs. 2%). Moths whose tympanic organs had been punctured were significantly easier to catch (requiring fewer attempts) than moths with intact ears, reflecting the fact that significantly more of the eared than the deafened moths showed evasive behaviour (48 vs. 0%). Overall, the number of captures of deafened moths was higher, though not significantly, than the number of captures of eared moths.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Enikő Bollobás

Informed by feminist theory on the one hand and thematic and rhetorical criticism on the other, this article examines the components of discourse in two books by Péter Esterházy that share an emphatic attention to sexuality. The author interprets Esterházy’s discourse of sex as grounded in the figure of the double entendre, with a different function in each work. In Kis magyar pornográfia [‘A Little Hungarian Pornography’], vulgar corporeality and communist politics are shown as commensurate; both have a double meaning, with sex and politics referring both to themselves and to each other. In using one discourse as a cover for another, Esterházy continues the Central European Witz [‘joke’] tradition, giving a particular twist to it by making the transference of meaning two-directional, thereby assigning double meanings to sex and politics alike. In Egy nő [‘She Loves Me’], Esterházy attaches a double meaning to sex in a different manner; here sex is not a cover for something else but is shown to be reduced to itself, with a double meaning attached to its internal power relations. Sex is presented as a power game, in which man is repulsed by women yet is hopelessly attracted to them. Moreover, sex acts as the only tellable story taking the place of the untellable story of love. In this piece of postmodern fiction, the multiple perspectives bring about an interpretational uncertainty on the part of the reader as to whether sexist discourse is legitimized or subverted, and whether this legitimization and/or subversion is carried out by the narrator and/or by the implied author.


Author(s):  
Ann Dorothy Potts ◽  
Cheri Foster Triplett ◽  
Dana Gregory Rose

The purpose of the research was to examine a 5-year graduate elementary education program which holds the possibility of providing an “infused approach” leading to a transformative understanding of multicultural education. Through close evaluation we sought to understand the various learning experiences faculty members implemented to enhance pre-service teachers' understandings of how to teach in diverse contexts. The experiences include community-based experiences, school-based experiences, aesthetic experiences, and storytelling. In addition, we highlight frustrations, barriers, and tensions that teacher educators encountered over time as they participated in discussions and experiences related to multicultural education with pre-service teachers. With this knowledge we can address multicultural issues and enhance and transform pre-service teacher education.


2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (476) ◽  
pp. 432-451
Author(s):  
Miriam Driessen

Abstract The Chinese-run construction sites that have emerged across the Ethiopian landscape over the past two decades have given rise to a pidgin—a contact language that facilitates communication between Chinese managers and the Ethiopian labourers under their direction. By unravelling the nature of this pidgin, including its lexicon, syntax, and semantics, this article discusses the power dynamics in Ethiopian–Chinese encounters through the lens of language. A prototypical contact language at first blush, the pidgin spoken on Chinese road projects in Ethiopia is different from pidgins that emerged in colonial Africa. Its structure and use reveal that power relations between Chinese management and Ethiopian rank and file are less asymmetrical than often portrayed. As a site of contestation as much as collaboration, pidgin has in fact become one of the domains in which power is negotiated. By hijacking words and manipulating their meanings, Ethiopian workers play with pidgin in an attempt to confront expatriate management and challenge the sociopolitical asymmetries that the growing Chinese presence in their country has brought forth.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 584-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Bazzi

Abstract This study attempts to show the role of translation in giving meaning to conflicts whether by reproducing the dominant political beliefs of a particular media society or by resisting counter-ideologies that come from foreign sources of information. It utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis as an effective method for the analysis of power relations behind news reporting. The research uses a corpus from international media and their equivalent texts into Arabic between 2013 and 2017. The data covers events on conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, each article reporting issues about conflict and its impact on arenas of struggle. Through this case study of transediting, I will explore how textual analysis can unravel power relations and hegemonic orders of discourse. The study shows that translation is a site of conflict and has much to say about reasons for conflict and the complex relationship between language and power. The proposed tools of analysis in this study are based on functional language analysis and will show how language structuring, in particular transitivity analysis, articulates the logic created by the media outlet regarding reasons for conflict. The case study concludes that different media structure the current wars in the Middle East in different chains of causal dependence that can impact the reading positions of the readers.


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