Ethnic Studies Course Research Articles

Critical Race Theory Meets the NYPD: An Assessment of Anti-Racist Pedagogy for Police in New York City

This research describes and assesses Critical Race Theory (CRT) pedagogy in a higher education ethnic studies course for police officers. CRT pedagogy aims to help students overcome “color-blind” thinking, which minimizes awareness of racism, by raising their critical understanding of racism and framing it as a pervasive and institutionalized reality that everyone has a responsibility to change. Using the Color Blind Racial Awareness (COBRA) Scale, critical awareness in three cluster areas, white privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racism, is measured among those completing the ethnic studies course and a comparison group of officers completing a different college course for police. Conclusions reflect on the impact of the course on students’ awareness of racism, the correlation of identity and awareness of racism, the hypothetical impact of such awareness in policing and possibilities for future research.

Information Literacy “Learning” via Online Tutorials: A Collaboration Between Subject Specialist and Instructional Design Librarian

As the American higher education paradigm shifts from a traditional classroom instruction model to a distributed learning model, academic libraries must update library instruction methods to allow for more flexible delivery of content. Distance students particularly need instructional content that can be accessed anywhere, at any time. This article seeks to explore one approach to creating a flexible online learning environment by studying the design and implementation of online research tutorials for two sections of an Introduction to American Ethnic Studies course at Kansas State University.

Latina/o Undergraduate Students Mentoring Latina/o Elementary Students: A Borderlands Analysis of Shifting Identities and First-Year Experiences

This article examines the experiences of first-year Latina/o undergraduates at a predominantly white institution. Through a borderlands analysis, the authors explore how these students describe their experiences participating in an ethnic studies course and mentoring Latina/o elementary schoolchildren. The authors find that these experiences served as sitios y lenguas (decolonizing spaces and discourses; Pérez, 1998)in which the undergraduate students were able to reflect on the ongoing transformation of their social and political identities, revealing the complex and fluid latinidades(Latina/o identities; Latina Feminist Group, 2001) that exist among the Latina/o university students. This article explores the physical and metaphorical borders (Anzaldúa, 1987) the undergraduates occupy, navigate, and challenge while they work simultaneously as mentors in a mostly Latina/o setting and as college students on a mostly white campus.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Environmental Justice

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Environmental Justice

Building a pre‐Code video collection

PurposeThis paper aims to focus on a group of films that were made during a little‐known period of Hollywood filmmaking known as the “pre‐Code” era. It seeks to provide an overview, historical background, and a general discussion about censorship and the cinema.Design/methodology/approachThis research examines key actors, directors, and films that exemplify the characteristics of “pre‐Code”. The criteria for inclusion set by this study take into account not only their subject matter, but their availability on home video.FindingsThis comprehensive bibliography includes information on some of the actors who appeared in these films as well as summaries of select films. Commercial web sites that distribute and sell pre‐Code films are also presented. Key actors, directors, films, and companies that were involved in the production of pre‐Code films are identified and discussed. General reference works about film are highlighted as well as web sites, blogs, and other online resources that provide reviews and detailed discussions of pre‐Code Hollywood films.Originality/valueThe article offers guidelines for building a pre‐Code video collection and discusses why its subject matter is of interest to academia, especially in regard to women's and ethnic studies courses.

Review: The Art of Critical Pedagogy by Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell

The Art of Critical Pedagogy by Jeffrey M. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-8204-7415-1. Many recognize the need for critical praxis to bridge “theory” and “practice” for social change, but few can explain what this actually entails. As standardized curricula and testing continue to crush the spirits of countless students and educators, however, The Art of Critical Pedagogy describes step by step how to navigate the current educational landscape and empower marginalized students by putting critical pedagogical theory into action. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell engage with students in participatory action research, embodying “theory as liberatory practice” (hooks, 1994) while responding to Freire’s (1997) appeal for reflective journaling on the pedagogical process. Accessibility of Theory and Application to Action Offering digestible theory without lofty jargon while simultaneously illustrating direct application of such theory to educational practice, this book proves accessible to practitioners and researchers and to novice and veteran teachers alike. From the very first chapter, the authors deconstruct current issues in urban education using theories to wipe clean, rather than smudge, the political and economic lenses necessary to see how some schools are designed to fail. They make clear connections between school realities and concepts such as “deficit model” thinking (Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, 1991; Valencia & Solorzano, 1997), “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 2000), socioeconomics (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Anyon, 1981), “academic apartheid” (Akom, 2003), structural determinism and hegemonic practices (Gramsci, 1971), critical praxis against “banking education” (Freire, 1970), and more. Similarly, chapter 2, “Contemporary Developers of Critical Pedagogy,” not only offers one of the best overviews of critical pedagogy available, but also highlights both the “rock star” and “underground” educator-activists who have powerfully shaped the discipline. While some critics believe that critical pedagogy is weakened by its diverse philosophers’ discursive disagreements, this book successfully illustrates how such diversity provides a stronger framework for educational change. Each subsequent chapter grounds teacher practice in educational theory as Duncan-Andrade and Morrell describe their applications of critical pedagogy to five different high school learning environments: an English classroom, a women’s basketball team, a college access program for students of color, a teenage summer research seminar, and an ethnic studies course. For example, in the English classroom, the authors used Freire’s (1970) theories against banking education, Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development, and Smitherman’s

Ethnic‐Related Curricula and Intergroup Attitudes in College: Movement Toward and Away From the In‐Group1

Using a 5‐year longitudinal study, we investigated the long‐term effects of courses with ethnic studies content and courses with Latino or Black professors on university students' intergroup attitudes. We found that these curricular variables significantly affected the intergroup attitudes of students beyond pre‐existing differences in attitudes and beyond other curriculum variables. As expected, we found differences between ethnic groups: White students showed movement toward other groups as a result of these curricular factors, whereas Latino and African American students showed both increased tolerance toward other groups and movement toward the in‐group. The results are discussed in terms of group status differences between the dominant White majority and the stigmatized Latino and Black minority groups.

In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building (review)

In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building, by Sucheng Chan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 248 pp. Hardcover, $55.00; paper, $25.00. ISBN 0252030095. Since the 1990s, university and college campuses across the United States have witnessed a surge in the growth of Asian American Studies Programs (Monaghan, 1999; Sengupta, 1999). The field of Asian American Studies (AAS) has come a long way since its birth from the 1968 San Francisco State and 1969 University of California-Berkeley student strikes that demanded more diverse perspectives in the university curriculum. Despite growing pains over its past 35-plus years, AAS has become institutionalized in the academy. A few scholars have examined the history of AAS and its development (Chang, 1999; Endo & Wei, 1988; Espiritu, 1992; Wei, 1993). Additionally, essays in edited volumes have analyzed the theoretical and institutional challenges to developing this field that balances academic, community, and political missions (Butler, 2001; Nakanishi & Nishida, 1995; Okihiro, Hune, Hansen, & Liu, 1988). Sucheng Chan, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies and Global Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field of AAS, offers an important contribution to this sparse literature with her collection of writings, In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building (2005). In this anthology, Chan showcases a rich collection of primary documents--essays she wrote between 1974 and 2003 (some published, some unpublished) as she labored in the field of AAS as a teacher, scholar, and administrator at UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-Santa Barbara. These writings speak volumes to the field's development at different historical moments. Chan's critical appraisal of the institutionalization of AAS reveals important insights for anyone interested in building AAS and understanding its history, current challenges, and future directions. This work covers three areas: conducting research, teaching, and program building. Part 1 (Justifying Our Existence) includes Chan's work identifying primary research sources, establishing an academic association, creating a scholarly book series on Asian Americans, and developing an undergraduate degree in AAS. Chan embraces the importance of research, but she does so with a clear awareness of the academy's limited definitions of scholarship and mindful of the Asian American movement's community roots. Faculty who spend unseen (and unrewarded) hours of labor building AAS programs and who value their community connections often cannot prioritize the research that is so central to the tenure process. These scholars often also engage in interdisciplinary work that is more difficult to assess and might be charged with being biased for researching their own communities. Part 2 (The Politics of Teaching) focuses on pedagogy, where Chan shares her experience teaching verbal and composition skills to limited English proficient (LEP) students. Debunking stereotypes, she reminds readers that LEP students at the University of California are bright (having met stringent UC admissions standards) and stresses the importance of creating comfortable classrooms that facilitate LEP student learning. Included in this section is her essay On the Ethnic Studies Requirement (1989), which details with great acumen the challenges of teaching ethnic studies courses when the majority of students are non-Asian American and who might resent having to take an ethnic studies course. Part 3 (Empowering Ourselves) details the various power levels in the university that can be used to advance Asian American issues. While she acknowledges that some earlier critics have charged these writings as being too accommodating, Chan clearly outlines her strategy to change the institution from within, and she advises readers to be selective about the battles they wage. …

Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Golden Gate

It has been barely thirty years since the inception of ethnic studies programs at San Francisco State University in 1968 and Berkeley in 1969, yet movements that seek to dismantle the liberationist energies of the 1960s--whether in the form of reinstating traditional curricula or reversing civil rights policies--are well underway. In California, the passage of Proposition 209 repealed the use of racial quotas in college admissions, resulting in an immediate and drastic reduction in the freshmen enrollment of African American and Hispanic American students at California's major universities. Ward Connerly, who spearheaded the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, has recently suggested sitting in on ethnic studies courses at Berkeley to determine whether they indeed promote racial and ethnic awareness or in fact foment radical separatism among students. (1) Ironically, Connerly's neoconservative meliorism ignores the brief history of ethnic studies programs, which emerged from the anti-war protest to challenge traditional constructions of American history that elided the contributions of ethnic minorities. This reaction against ethnic studies coincides with the emergence of the newest thing in lit crit/cultural studies: whiteness studies. Whiteness studies purports to denaturalize whiteness by incorporating a constructivist perspective and unmasking the ideological parameters of whiteness: to make visible an invisible norm. The best studies within the genre, such as David Roediger's, suggest how the working class in the nineteenth century constructed itself as white in relation to a racial other, emphasizing the constitutive reliance of the mainstream on the marginal. In this view, the whitening of an ethnicized working class occurs through a master-slave dialectic sustained politically by working-class resistance to pro-abolition alliances and through cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy. (See Roediger, Wages; Lott, Love; and Ignatiev.) Paradoxically, various genealogies locate the inception of whiteness studies in the very period when challenges to a normative whiteness coalesced: second-wave feminism assumed an arguably self-conscious turn when women of color questioned its white, middle-class perspective (see Frankenberg, White Women 2-3); and, to some extent, the advent of whiteness studies can be attributed to ethnic studies traditionally conceived, which distinguishes the experiences of those ethnic groups subject to racialization, emphasizing the power differentials that obtain among diverse ethnicities in a nation of ethnics. It must be stressed, however, that the cultural nationalist ethos of ethnic studies was very much a response to the racialization--and racist treatment--of ethnic groups based on phenotype. But the prominence of whiteness studies at this historical conjuncture raises as many questions as it answers because in some forms it is disturbingly indistinguishable from mainstream studies and can be readily accommodated to a rubric that, by virtue of reclaiming the margin, recenters whiteness as the primary object of study, along with an attendant realignment of institutional power and resources. (2) But whether we identify its emergence in second-wave feminism's self-conscious swerve, or as a reaction formation to exclusionary ethnic programs, whiteness studies becomes a defence of the status quo when it loses its critical self-consciousness, whether conjoined with feminist, queer, or postcolonial discourses. An analysis of whiteness, however, converges in salutary ways with these very discourses--specifically in the context of paradigms of masquerade, mimicry, and the butch-femme couple--in the work of David Henry Hwang, to which I now turn. Celebrated since its premiere on February 10, 1988 at the National Theatre in Washington D.C., David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly has been a cynosure for cultural debate on race and sexuality; less well known is Hwang's 1994 screenplay Golden Gate, dismissed in most accounts as a commercial and critical failure. …

COURSES AND INSTRUCTION AFFECTING CRITICAL THINKING

This study investigated how different types ofcourses and instructional techniques affect students'self-reported growth in critical thinking. Data aredrawn from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's 1989 Follow-Up Survey of 24,837students who had first entered college as freshmen in1985. Results revealed that taking writing courses,interdisciplinary courses, history courses, sciencecourses, women's studies courses, math courses, foreignlanguage courses, ethnic studies courses, and enrollingin an honors program are each positively associated withselfreported growth in critical thinking. Moreover, self-reported growth in criticalthinking is positively related to having a papercritiqued by an instructor, conducting an independentresearch project, working on a group project, giving aclass presentation, and taking essay exams, butnegatively related to taking multiple-choice exams.Overall findings, however, suggest that the impact ofclassroom experiences on students' abilities to think critically is far weaker than one might expector hope.

What influences community college ethnic studies course offerings?

AbstractWhy do ethnic studies courses exist? To what extent are they offered? Do ethnic studies course offerings vary with institutional characteristics?

Transitions: An Interactive Reading, Writing, and Grammar Text

PART I: DESCRIPTIVE PARAGRAPHS 1: Writing about a Treasured Possession 2: Writing about a Special Place PART II: EXPOSITORY PARAGRAPHS 3: Writing about a Favorite Activity or Hobby 4: Writing about a Custom 5: Writing about Choosing a Field of Study 6: Writing about a Family or Cultural Value PART III: WRITING ESSAYS 7: Writing about a Decision 8: Writing about the Value of an Ethnic Studies Course 9: Writing about Overcoming the Odds 10: Writing about the Way Males and Females Are Raised 11: Writing about Arranged Marriages.

The Japanese American Experience

Slim, well-researched, and readable, this is not only a social history of an ethnic community but a gateway into the ancient psyche of the Japanese. The San Francisco Review of Books... straightforward... informative... Contemporary SociologyThe Japanese American Experience... will be used with profit by professors and students in sociology and ethnic studies courses, for it is the best general text on Japanese Americans currently in print. The Journal of American History... a succinct and insightful account of the community's early struggle for survival in a racist society... American Historical ReviewThis concise history of three generations of Japanese Americans focuses on their collective response to the challenges of discrimination and to the strikingly different historical circumstances each generation has faced.

Beyond Multicultural Illiteracy

One of the most hotly contested issues on America's college campuses today is the preservation of Western civilization in the minds of students via the infusion of the literature and history of Ancient Greece and Rome and western Europe. As two best-selling books, Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, 1987) and The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom, 1987) contend, America's youth are out of touch with this cultural heritage. Both Hirsch and Bloom raise this point without acknowledging the decidedly ethnocentric view of traditional Western civilization. Their works sparked a heated debate in 1988 on the campus of Stanford University which resulted in that university's faculty senate approving a Culture and Values core curriculum that included works from non-White and female authors. The controversy was further heightened when then-Secretary of Education William Bennett traveled to Stanford to denounce this curriculum decision himself. The Western civilization controversy at Stanford is emblematic of the wars being waged throughout the country on several fronts. For example, a group calling itself the National Association of Scholars carried a full-page advertisement in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 8, 1989, p. A-23) which urged no retreat from the sacred canon; yet, using recent results of history and literature tests from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Ravitch and Finn (1987) underscore how little of the classical Eurocentric canon America's 17year-olds actually know. The state of California's history/social science curriculum framework (whose principal author was Ravitch) was lauded as an excellent example of the grand narrative of history to which all students should have access (Alexander & Crabtree, 1988), while a New York State Department of Education report calling for a Curriculum of Inclusion was denounced by defenders of the Eurocentric canon for bowing to the of Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities (Leo, 1989). Purportedly, all this fighting over the curriculum is a reaction to the fragmented, cafeteria-style curriculum that emerged during the 1960s as a result of civil rights, antiwar, and women's rights advocates' demands for a more relevant and representative education. The conservative argument alleges that these special interests groups, with their ethnic studies and women's studies course requirements, have pulled the curriculum in so many directions that for two decades American students somehow

The Co-opting of Ethnic Studies in the American University: A Critical View

The birth of ethnic studies in the American university was accompanied by the politics and pedagogy of rage, pride, and mistrust for the then prevailing curricular academic structures and its tradition-bound, academically conservative gatekeepers. The campus take-overs, student demands, and confrontations were a common expression of the times, and concomitantly these were also shapers of the changing times. The presence or absence of ethnic minority faculty and students in our universities was and continues to be one of many indices by which we measure the willingness of this society to live up to its responsibility and promise to guarantee expanding educational opportunity for all. The creation of ethnic studies programs as a legitimate academic course of study in the university was one key part of that long range objective. Many universities now boast of departments and programs in Afro-American Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, and other ethnic studies entities. Today's student can leaf through the semester's schedule of courses and choose from a wide array of ethnic studies offerings and think only of whether or not it fits into his/her program. Even traditional academic departments, formerly resolute in their refusal to include ethnic studies courses in their curriculum, now cross-list, and in many instances generate their own version of ethnic studies courses in direct competition with existing ethnic studies programs.