Borderlands in the Classroom

Abstract

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS MULTICULTURALISM HAS BEEN A HEATED TOPIC of debate in the mass media, government agencies, and academic conferences, as politicians, pundits, and scholars have come together to argue over the definition of what constitutes America. Less prominent has been a vision of how multiculturalism actually works in the classroom. What follows is a personal narrative of a classroom experience I had teaching a literature course in the spring of 1990. It leads to a series of reflections which branch out in two different, but related, directions. The first direction demonstrates the ways in which a multicultural curriculum has led my students to reassess their sense of self and of society reconstituted as borderlands; the second and more self-reflective direction points to the ways in which my own pedagogical choices and methods contain built-in assumptions about multiculturalism of which I (an African-American feminist) am sometimes, but not always, conscious and which affect my students' reactions to their readings. My hope is that such a personal narrative might provide an opening onto a consideration of certain theoretical issues in multiculturalism that might reveal both some of the strengths and the blind spots of its practitioners. In the spring of 1990, I created and taught a senior seminar, entitled American Women Writers and Modernism, in the University of Maryland's English Department. The class consisted of approximately eighteen white women students. Our point of departure was to rethink the traditional