Sunanda K Sanyal
(Published: Arlene Dallalfar et al eds., Transforming Classroom Culture: Inclusive Pedagogical Approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 127-39)
What made me decide to contribute to this volume of essays was a feeling of exclusion, so to speak. While the literature on the scholarship of pedagogy and the NECIT seminars indeed resonate with many of my concerns as a person of foreign origin in American academe, none of the speakers at the local NECIT events or the authors of the literature I surveyed represents my discipline. They come overwhelmingly from English departments, followed by a few historians, sociologists, psychologists, and more rarely, a scientist. So it seems to me that if exploring difference to recognize common grounds is one of the primary concerns of my teaching and scholarship, then it would only be logical to use my apparent otherness among my colleagues in this enterprise as a productive springboard to locate allies. Drawing on the issues of diversity, multiculturalism and racism in the classroom and in the institutional setting, I therefore examine my discipline’s idiosyncrasies that determine its position within academe; its role in an art school setting; its effectiveness as a tool to engage in discussions of social inequities; and my position in the classroom as a male teacher of color representing this discipline. I see this exercise as a form of self-reflection, even a self-critique at times.
The literature on the politics of pedagogy frequently addresses the question of difference, especially the problem of student hostility that professors — those of color, in particular— face when approaching the issue of race and diversity in predominantly white institutions.[1] Some of those encounters echo my own early experience in the American classroom. My first-hand acquaintance with American academe and culture began in the late 1980s, when I came to the United States as a graduate student. During my early years as a teaching assistant, not too infrequently did I face one or more defiant students who clearly had an I-don’t-have-to-take-you-seriously attitude. It didn’t take me long to understand that my alien origin, evident in my demeanor, body language, and accent, was responsible for such a defiant gesture. As a counter-measure, I eventually developed a two-sided classroom persona. One was the polite, humorous I-am-here-to-assist-you side, while the other issued a silent warning: “Don’t try to be smart with me!” I cannot explain how exactly this strategy evolved, but I definitely built “an armor” that Karen Leong mentions when recalling her ordeals in the classroom (Leong 2002, 193). What Leong sees as a necessary protection for a female instructor of color against student resistance, I needed no less as a male teaching assistant of color. This gradually made my interactions with my students much smoother. It was merely a question of my survival with dignity– a task of moving from my marginalized “third-world status” to the center, where I could return their gaze to assert my presence. To this end, I had to appear abrasive at times to specific individuals, who most often got the message.
The occasional difficulty I had in that early phase, however, had entirely to do with cultural difference– my South Asian male presence in the American classroom. But I hardly ever had to face the problem of classroom controversies over course content, a recurrent issue critically discussed in the literature. This, I believe, is due primarily to the peculiarities of my discipline. It seems, therefore, that a quick look at the character and status of my discipline is important, in the context of which I can then discuss aspects of my teaching.
Art History: a marginalized discipline
I believe the dynamics of an art history course involving such static visual media as painting, sculpture, photography and architecture fundamentally differ from that of a course in most other humanistic disciplines on at least two counts. First, despite the undeniable immediacy and concreteness of visual images, the referential function of language, notwithstanding all possible contingencies of textual meaning, is capable of triggering much more sustainable emotional links to reality (never mind the cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words”). The visual arts, on the other hand, have a much stronger legacy of self-referential abstraction, emblematized by slogans like “art for art’s sake”; not to mention a very different kind of market by virtue of the tangible, rather than temporal character of the end product. Second, while all the arts have their own histories, the history of the visual arts is the only one that functions as an independent academic discipline. At least in American institutions, Art History most often stands alone as a department, with no obligatory relation with the Art department, the historical reasons for which are too complex to explore here. But the fact of the matter is, with almost two centuries of institutional presence, the discipline has an extremely influential discourse of its own, the mediating role of which is simply indispensable in any systematic understanding of art.
Thus, a visual representation, I argue, is relatively more embedded in its own discourse and that of its history than, say, literature. In other words, if one is willing to restate the generic observation “art reflects life” (a specific referent for each signifier) as something like “art refracts life” (signifiers with ambiguous referents), then reception of the visual arts in an art history class is less likely to generate controversies. Social and cultural contexts are indeed instrumental in determining the production and consumption of art. But the peculiar trait of art history is that once that art is historicized, social concerns cannot be addressed independently of that history. They can only be approached through issues that are more immediately representational than social. Phrased another way, if representations are refracted images of life, then a discipline that studies those images is at least twice removed from life, since it looks at reality not only through images, but also through texts about those images. This is what I mean by the refracted presence of life in an art history course. Let me illustrate with an example.
I offer an advanced level course called “African-American Artists: Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Movement”. I begin with examples of the grotesque visual stereotypes of African-Americans pervasive in American mass culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the little black sambo, the zip coon, the picaninny, the mammy and the black-faced minstrels. During this segment of the course, especially when I show the incisive documentary “Ethnic Notions”, I watch a noticeable combination of discomfort, disbelief, and disgust both among my white and African-American students. They ask questions and make observations, albeit the white students speaking with caution. But never have I encountered any uncomfortable debates or critiques.
Later, as I show them sculptures by Augusta Savage and paintings by Aaron Douglas or Archibald Motley, Jr. from the 1920s and 30s to explain the significance of the dignified images of the “New Negro” in light of the previous stereotypes and place them in the history of American art, the discussion underscores the role of visual representations in a racial discourse without foregrounding race as such. Or, when I talk about the influence of Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists on the work of Hale Woodruff, Dox Thrash or James Lesesne Wells, the fact that Rivera and his cohort were committed communists hardly ever becomes a point of contention. Politics, while always relevant, remains rather off-centered.
Fondly recalling his literature classes at UMass Boston, Pancho Savery remarks that they were “always an extension of one’s experiences of the real world” (Savery 2001, 210). This, in my view, isn’t quite the case in a course in art history. The question is: am I using art in this class as an illustration of a racial discourse, or am I regarding art as a sign system codified, among other things, by discourses of power and politics of otherness? The former approach will inevitably trivialize the role of visual representations, not to mention that it would force me to wander into uncharted waters in terms of expertise. It is entirely possible that a presentation of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock sparks anti-Arab or anti-semitic sentiments in the classroom, or a discussion of the Danish cartoon controversy in a history of design class offends a Muslim student. But while such an outcome will contradict the claims I am making here, they will also definitely undermine the rationale and purpose of a class in art history.
How do these peculiar traits affect Art History’s position in academe, especially among practicing artists? The discipline has undergone a major shift beginning in the 1970’s, though it was probably the last discipline in the humanistic arena to open itself to that revisionist trend. Its narrow focus on questions of connoisseurship and authenticity (closely tied to museum practice) gave way to the recognition of art as a polyvocal marker of historically specific discourses. Despite this recasting, however, it is still largely marginalized as being especially elitist. Historians consider art historians ill fit in the larger field of history; and because the majority of art historians and critics are not practicing artists, they are often regarded in American art institutions as a species of pedantic parasites divorced from real-life creative struggles, making a living out of other people’s creativities. Simply put, many artists think that it is an enterprise they can do without, a resentment ironically stemming from the fact that the art critic/historian is one of several agents of the art milieu (the curator, the dealer, and the buyer are some of the others) on whom artists have to depend for their own publicity. In summary, it seems that an average art school student has more respect for an historian or anthropologist than an art historian.
Teaching primarily Art History majors at an Art History department is obviously far less problematic, since one begins by implicitly acknowledging —or at least eventually learning to recognize— that real-life issues, as they surface in various courses, are a mediated presence. But serving Art majors, many of whom literally accept the notion that life can be transformed by art, is a different matter altogether. How, then, can I use such a marginalized discipline indicted of pedantry and elitism to make students aware of social issues, especially when most of them are artists in the making? Rather than be confined by Art History’s peripheral status within academe, I have always attempted to push boundaries in my teaching and exploit the idiosyncrasies of the discipline to make it meaningful to students. Let me address that more elaborately, after quickly locating my position within the current trends of the politics of education.
The politics of knowledge brokerage
The new awareness of marginalized voices signaled by the revisionist trends of the 1970s challenged the West’s hegemony over the right to speak on behalf of the formerly colonized. It has produced a generation of scholars from the third world writing their own histories, telling their own stories, a shift that has eventually been reflected in the altered demographics of faculty and students in previously all-white institutions. This new scenario has acknowledged the birthright of an art historian of Chinese origin to specialize in Chinese or Asian art, that of a Nigerian to study African art, and so on.
While no one can doubt the tremendous benefits of this shift, one cannot ignore its flip-side. An academic culture has gradually emerged in the last few decades, especially in the humanities and social sciences, which presupposes expertise on the basis of race, culture, or other such identities. There is a tacit assumption in seminar rooms, for instance, that a black individual is the most authentic speaker on Africa or the Black Diaspora. What is more, this trend has created a culture of tokenism in the name of diversity. Instead of any serious revaluation of curriculum on a fundamental level with critical attention to diversity, a few faces of different colors are introduced into a still predominantly white faculty and student body and an occasional course about “other cultures” is offered, as if diversity is a politically correct task to be accomplished before one can go back to one’s primary duty of imparting a sort of value-free, colorblind knowledge.
Not only have such feel-good endeavors given political correctness a bad name, but they are also responsible for engendering a new breed of stereotypes. If an Art History department has one historian of Chinese art who is also of Chinese or at least Pacific-Asian origin, and a black individual specializing in African art, they are often referred to as those who do “their stuff”, as if their areas of interest have special agendas. The specializations of their white colleagues in the various sub-fields of Western art, in contrast, appear to be all about that value-free knowledge. I find this trend deeply troubling because despite the revisionist sweep, a white scholar’s right to specialize in any subject was never really given up; only the right of the Other to self-represent was recognized. The obvious result of this is an unseemly integration without equity.
I was uncomfortable at the outset of my career trying to picture myself teaching South Asian art and being neatly categorized as the Other who, understandably, is an “expert in his own stuff”. If postmodern cultural politics has opened up new channels for marginalized voices and encouraged them to transgress borders and celebrate hybridity, then why should a student of African origin studying Renaissance art by choice, or a Chinese scholar researching African cultures be considered the odd person out? I felt the only way I could empower and legitimize my position in the American classroom was by teaching topics that students and colleagues “normally” –in light of my brown body, that is– wouldn’t expect of me. Discussing the problematic question of an instructor’s legitimacy in teaching certain courses, Bonnie TuSmith and Maureen Reddy observe: “The unspoken understanding that ethnically identified courses are best served by a proper race/ethnic match (although whites are often exempt from this requirement)— while non-ethnic courses are best served by white faculty— is itself a statement of institutional racism” (TuSmith and Reddy 2002, 6). I precisely wanted to subvert that assumption. Any frustration at the receiving end for failing to overdetermine me was exactly the outcome I desired. So I specialized in modern and contemporary art in the global arena, primarily that of former colonies. I was particularly interested in contemporary artists from those countries who frequently transgress national, cultural and aesthetic boundaries, offering themselves as hybrids. This not only prepared me to teach and research modern and contemporary western art because of these artists’ obvious connections with it, but it also helped me to expand my knowledge base of various other cultures. As a generalist at AIB, I was expected to teach a medley of courses, except Asian art.
Teaching Art History at an art school
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that my institution is currently in its infancy in addressing difference. Students are overwhelmingly from white middle-class and lower-middle-class families, with a handful of Asian-Americans and fewer African-Americans. There used to be a modest international enrollment, mostly consisting of European and Pacific-Asian students, but that has dwindled since 9/11, at least partly owing to stringent visa regulations. To my knowledge, I am the first full-time faculty of color hired at AIB since the merger, and only a couple of more have been hired since. Simply put, the institution usually acts as if it is “unraced”, meaning that it is often oblivious to its own subject position (Elias and Jones 2002, 10, 12).
While usually confident about their artistic potential, students seeking admission to art schools are often significantly insecure about their academic abilities. For all the postmodern awareness of the discursive relationship between the practice and theory of art, this is the disappointing reality in most American art schools. When I joined AIB in 1999, it was suffering from growing pains in the initial phase of its merger with Lesley. It had a confused curricular and administrative system in transition. Art history courses were offered mainly by adjunct instructors to satisfy credit requirements for studio majors (though now art history is a major), without any effective institutional directives or curricular planning. The academic standard was simply appalling, and most students considered the subject expendable. Most of the existing courses were severely lacking in breadth, depth and variety. Most importantly, they demonstrated very little effort to introduce students to cross-cultural perspectives and the discourse of difference. I therefore decided to design special-topic courses for advanced level students, as I believed that a course based on a specific theme, rather than a movement or an era would not only be more enlightening, but would also generate more interest in the subject. Two such new courses are “The Nude”, and “Art and War”. I have offered the former three times and the latter twice until now.
Since the tradition of studying human form from unclothed live models has come down through the centuries as an essential part of art school training, it seems to me one of the most effective themes for introducing students to issues of gender and racial otherness and the politics of gaze, topics they otherwise would find too esoteric. The course examines cases from different periods of Western art history to investigate the image of the naked human body as an idea playing a crucial role in the politics of representation. The basic objective is to demonstrate that the pictured naked body is a cultural sign laden with contradictory meanings, contingent upon its presentation and context, and that there are multiple voices — some of them silenced by others — behind its production and consumption. Students read selected sources covering a variety of topics, ranging from the nineteenth-century views of nude images, objectification of the body of the colonized, to the contemporary artist’s nude self-representation. Like most of my classes, the student population in this one was not even close to being diverse.
The usual format of art history teaching is hardly conducive to interactive pedagogy. Everything from a twenty-foot-long mural to a twenty-inch-tall portrait is standardized by reproduction. Such a role of technological mediation in driving a wedge between the classroom audience and the actual artwork is nowhere as forceful as in an art history class. Further, while students in a literature class can sit in a circle in a well-lit room to discuss texts; the celebrated genre of slide lecture in art history, with its inaccessible lecturer at the podium and the audience facing the projection on the wall in a dimly lit room, automatically imposes a sense of hierarchy and makes free exchanges difficult.
To circumvent these obvious pitfalls, I do not lecture from the podium, but speak, answer questions and provoke discussions while walking around the class. This is not too difficult, since none of my advanced classes has more than 25 students.
Perhaps because the course deals with the sensitive issue of the human body in its most vulnerable state (at least in a society where clothing the body is the norm), discussions spurred by images often seem to challenge Art History’s disciplinary mandates. For instance, female nudity in modern art or contemporary photography can ignite debates, even irate exchanges between certain male and female students when a male student, claiming to “speak his mind”, dismisses the critique of objectification of the female body in a male dominated society as a “feminist fuss”. The discussion of pornography as a tentative cultural construct also occasionally slips into equally charged —if art-historically irrelevant— gendered debates over moral questions concerning pornography. The only time there aren’t any disagreements is when I show photographs of naked African or South Pacific women displayed in nineteenth-century trade fairs. Since hardly any of my students have had even the slightest exposure to such racially charged historic material, the discourse of power and colonial racism that frame those images unequivocally shock them, leaving little room for conflicts of opinions.
Needless to say, the occasional “digressions” from art-historical inquiries present me interesting challenges. While most of the debates and controversies my students engage in are intriguing and instructive, they frequently overlook the discourse of the image of the naked body as a codified sign, and veer off into questions of social consequences of nudity. I agree with Peter Powers that having an “anything goes” approach in student discussions never really serves the purpose of inclusive teaching (Powers 2002, 32). So whenever I find the basic premise of the course overlooked, I step in to bring the point back home. I am committed to making my students aware of the idea that artists are neither social isolates, nor are they social moralists or ethicists who merely use images to make their case. If, for instance, they are to comprehend the historical significance of Edourad Manet’s celebrated paintings “Olympia” or “Luncheon on the Grass” from the 1860s, it is not enough —or even a priority, for that matter— to understand the social outrage those paintings caused in the 1860s, or the double standards of the male chauvinistic Parisian society of that era. It is more important to learn how previous pictures of the nude inform Manet’s work, and how, through radical changes in style, technique, and iconography, the two controversial paintings play a pioneering role in presenting the question of the female nude in art as a complete construct, a product of overlapping power discourses of gender, institution, and class. This will then help students examine the social outrage at those images from an art-historical perspective. Therefore, I have to moderate those debates to make them view social and political concerns obliquely, through the representational lens. My intervention mitigates irate debates and prevents them from regarding the images as incidental to social discourses.
In addition to assigning some writing tasks, I also introduced a week-long class exhibition as the final assignment for this course. The exhibits aren’t meant to be straightforward academic exercises of nude images, but are interpretations of the different ideas and discourses of the nude that the course material covers. Many of them turn out to be innovative appropriations of existing images. Each student has to submit an artist’s statement explaining the rationale for her/his project, which is printed and displayed next to the exhibit. Although this is quite an unusual strategy for an art history course, I have always argued in its favor because I believe it offers a particularly valuable learning experience for practicing artists and makes art history more meaningful to them. The show has indeed been responsible for making the course popular.
The other course, “Art and War”, had previously been designed and taught by a colleague. After I completely remodeled it, however, it resembles the earlier version only in its title. Since the subject of warfare is no less charged than that of the naked human body, making this theme relevant as an art history course is equally challenging, especially with the country currently involved in two major conflicts. So I make two points very clear to my students at the outset. First, like the “Nude”, this course deals with images of war, and considers the politics and controversies surrounding those conflicts only insofar as they are relevant to those images. Second, the class is not simply about images of war, but images and war, meaning that many images may not actually represent war, but are tied to it indirectly.
Like the other course, this one also examines selected case studies, with an emphasis on the twentieth century through the current era. Students are first introduced to the power of images in propaganda efforts through such iconic eighteenth-century paintings as Benjamin West’s “Death of General Wolfe” and Fredrick Church’s “The Banner of Dawn”, so that they can apply some of that logic to critically evaluate the infinitely more complex visual culture of twentieth-century warfare. Unlike the “Nude”, this course makes use of a number of documentary films, such as Leni Reifenstahl’s controversial “Triumph of the Will”, which at the same time has been highly rated as a film and harshly criticized for its alleged valorization of the Nazi convention of 1934. It presents the interesting dilemma of the historical notoriety of a specific subject injecting a discomfort into one’s appreciation of a work of art. On the other hand, a film like “Resisting Paradise” by Barbara Hammer shows Henri Matisse painting flowers, nudes and landscapes during the Nazi occupation of France, when his own daughter was arrested for being involved in the underground resistance efforts. It raises the thorny question of the artist’s role during war. Students speak their minds in the journal they keep throughout the semester and engage in debates in online discussions. One of the other provocative topics is the war memorial, and the changes in its philosophy, structure, and impact through centuries of warfare. A documentary on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial demonstrates to them the intensely politicized character of such monuments. I also take advantage of the history of Boston. One assignment is to research one of the many local war memorials.
In this course, I try to equip my students with the awareness and critical tools necessary to deconstruct the visual culture of war. There is perhaps no other democracy where the notion of the “war hero”, or that of “serving the country” permeates the mass psyche as much as in American culture. It has an almost religious status in this society. But while I understand the historical reasons behind it, I don’t raise the question directly or preach my political views in this class. Instead, I discuss the demise of the myth of the war hero through images related to World War I, and obliquely address the issue when showing photographs of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. As the course progresses into more and more current conflicts, more and more images that are not generally labeled as “art” and are controversial for political, rather than representational issues, become crucial. Media coverage of current conflicts and informal photos, such as those leaking out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, are notable examples. I maintain an especially dispassionate tone in such contexts, emphasizing instead the psychologies behind the making of such images and their impacts on public perspectives and tastes. The last time I offered this course, I had a male student in the class who had just returned from his service in Iraq. What is more, he had been stationed at Abu Ghraib a few months before the controversial incidents. I consciously avoided putting him under the spotlight, not only because I didn’t know how he would feel about that, but more importantly, I didn’t think his combat expertise or any other experience from there had much relevance for the course. Though he occasionally volunteered information about Iraq and the army in general, it was quite clear that he, too, was cautious not to draw attention to himself.
Through the years, my two-sided classroom persona that I discuss in the beginning of this essay has distilled down to a moderate image of authority and a strong classroom presence. Without silencing reasonable voices, I do let my classes know that I am in charge and reserve the right to intervene in debates, but that I am also eager to maintain respectful relationships. As a woman of color facing the question of power in the classroom, Rajini Srikanth astutely notes: “The teacher’s willingness to negotiate must never be seen as a gesture of capitulation; rather, it must be seen to proceed from a position of strength and security…” (Srikanth 2002, 147). This is precisely my message to my students. Teaching is indeed, as Karen Leong remarks, “a performance on multiple levels” (Leong 2002, 194). I think my “performance” subverts and confuses any monolithic assumptions my students might have about me. It displaces my brownness with a chameleon-like appearance, or perhaps a collage, in which the South Asian “I” remains, at best, a part of a whole. The fact that I teach topics that my students probably don’t expect me to offer, I believe, provides a unique learning experience for them in an institution with minimal diversity. Several students have candidly admitted to me over the years that I am the first non-white person with whom they came in close contact. As a matter of fact, when meeting new students in the beginning of a semester, I still occasionally find one or two uneasy looks, which, as my experience tells me, are most likely caused by my presence in a predominantly white classroom. Those individuals either become comfortable with me in a week or two, or simply drop out. It is possible that while some of my students overdetermine me as an authoritative South Asian male, my balanced view of the gender discourse in a class like the “Nude” challenges such a stereotype.
It’d be too naïve to assume, however, that my teaching strategies make my racial and cultural difference completely invisible to students. Consider, for example, the following instance —an uncommon occurrence, though, in my student evaluations— where a lingering perception of difference leads to failed communication. This is a comment I received from the “Nude” in 2003: “Sunanda is wonderfully energetic teacher, whose strength is keeping his students interested in what he is saying. Talking to him outside of class seems like bit of a hard thing to do, but I suspect this is part of the way he was trained, where the teachers did not associate with the students.” It is interesting that this individual gave me an overall 5 (excellent) on a 1-5 scale. S/he was apparently fond of me as her/his instructor, but struggled to locate a possible reason for what s/he thought was my occasional abrasiveness. And this s/he found in my (early) educational background in the south Asian milieu, where students and teachers indeed hardly associate. This person, therefore, totally overlooked the significant part of my American education and essentialized me by referring to my racial background. While a part of me, then, clearly appears as an Other in this student’s mind, s/he felt quite comfortable with the rest of me that demonstrated expertise in teaching (I wonder how s/he would have explained a similar miscommunication with any of my American colleagues).
I suspect that it’s primarily the nature of the discipline I teach that makes it so difficult for me to gauge student perceptions of me with greater clarity. Had I taught Literature, History, or Sociology, the likelihood of controversies on various issues related to the course content would have been high. In such a scenario, I would have had an opportunity to test how much my race or gender intervened in my students’ perceptions of my views or academic expertise, and building the “armor” of authority in the classroom would be a much more arduous task for me. On the other hand, it seems that teaching what I teach also has its advantages. It is precisely because contentious social and political questions are mediated by the peculiar traits of the visual arts and the thoroughly artificial character of the discipline, I have an opportunity to make students aware of vital issues without much unwarranted disruption. After all, I don’t believe the gender, political or cross-cultural awareness students acquire from the “Nude” or “Art and War” is much different from what they would get from a course in History, Literature, or Political Science that cover the same topics. Making Art majors interested in theoretical matters and convincing them to see such issues as relevant to their work as practicing artists is a challenging task, with its dark, hopeless moments. But I have also learned that courses sufficiently critical in content and structure can meet that challenge effectively. The thematic, non-conventional, hybrid courses I offer would probably have come under unfavorable scrutiny in a conventional Art History department. So in that regard, I find an art school milieu a much more productive arena, for its tolerance for experimentation and for the freedom it grants me to design new courses and use non-conventional teaching methods, such as an exhibition in an art history class. As my teaching continuously evolves in an academic environment that is challenging and supportive at the same time, I see myself as someone committed to making sense from the margin.
Notes:
[1] See: Kingston-Mann, Esther & Tim Sieber eds. 2001. Achieving against the Odds: How Academics become Teachers of Diversity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Also see; TuSmith, Bonnie & Maureen T. Reddy eds. 2002. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
References:
Leong, Karen J. 2002. Strategies for Surviving Race in the Classroom. TuSmith, Bonnie & Maureen T. Reddy eds. 2002. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Savery, Pancho. “Odd Man Out” 2001. Kingston-Mann, Esther & Tim Sieber eds. 2001. Achieving against the Odds: How Academics become Teachers of Diversity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 204-14.
Elias, Karen & Judith C. Jones 2002. Two Voices from the Front Lines: A Conversation about Race in the Classroom. Race in the College Classroom.
Powers, Peter Kerry 2002. A Ghost in the Collaborative Machine: The White Male Teacher in the Multicultural Classroom. Race in the College Classroom.
Srikanth, Rajini 2002. Gift Wrapped or Paper Bagged?: Packaging race for the Classroom. Race in the College Classroom.
Leong, Karen J. 2002. Strategies for Surviving Race in the Classroom. Race in the College Classroom.
