Ignoring Diversity
On the other hand, for your race to be underrepresented in your daily experience with others in the most meaningful of ways (e.g., while spending up to one third of your day in an educational institution surrounded by authority figures who do not look like you) is one powerful way for you to be underserved by your schooling experience.
On the curricular front, I would argue that schools’ odd, even irrational adherence to all things canonized is also an example of underserving an increasingly diverse student body. Perhaps if schools permitted their teachers to teach something other than the “required classics” from the “canon,” we might begin to scratch the surface of what it would look like to foster a culturally in-sync learning environment. A curriculum which reflects the realities of a racially and culturally diverse student body is perhaps more likely to create an environment with the potential to appeal to a more diversified teaching force.
The failure to incorporate curricular materials that, as McIntosh puts it, “testify to the existence” of racial diversity is to underserve and ignore our increasingly diverse student bodies. Perhaps if, as institutions of education, we gave some attention to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has famously coined “the danger of a single story,” we might begin to unravel the reasons why our teaching force has not kept up with the student populations we are tasked with educating for a better world.
The quest for more teachers of color involves a lot more than asking schools, programs of teacher education, and teachers to uncover personal biases. Becoming aware of your own personal biases requires, also, becoming aware of how and why school served you well. An examination of your relationship with your educational experiences, however long gone, might reveal unspoken insights into who schools invite back to become teachers, and who they continue to cast aside.
Christina Berchini is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. An East Coast native, she flew the coop and earned her Ph.D. in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education with an emphasis in English education from Michigan State University. Her areas of interest and specialization are secondary English education/English teacher education, critical race studies, critical pedagogy, social justice, and issues in urban education.
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