Speaking With Trunks, Dancing With the “Pink Elephants”

This chapter takes a contrary view of the “meta” aspect of meta-communication (where meta is defined as “behind” or “beneath”) in the online multicultural teacher education classroom, arguing that such communication inhibits learning about (content) and through (pedagogy) sociopolitically-located multicultural teacher education by enabling e-racism, e-classism, and e-sexism to operate in largely covert manners in the distance education context. Accordingly, this chapter contends that digital meta-communication on issues of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and sex/gender needs to be “de-meta-ed” or made explicit in order for the kind of liberatory reflective conversation on these topics to occur that is foundational to the adequate preparation of PK-12 teachers to effectively educate all students.

Teacher as a Foreigner in Critical Multicultural Teacher Education

In this article, I discuss my own experience as a critical multicultural educator who is an Asian American. Using the psychoanalytic ideas of Holding Environment and Countertransference, I use the two questions of where you am from and where are you really from in this article as a way to think through and learn about my own emotional world and its influence on multicultural education teacher education courses that I teach. I conclude that such exploration into my emotional world is helpful and necessary in giving new and different meanings to my emotional experience beyond seeing it as a mere response to students’ questions and understanding their psychical world in which questions like where are you from and where are you really from become the students’ own defense against difference.