For the past several years as professor of educational psychology and women’s studies, I have struggled with the project of multicultural diversity on multiple levels. My course load has been anchored in educational psychology 322: human development and learning, a core course in the college of education. In addition, I have co-taught a special section of introduction to women’s studies, women of African descent, in the college of arts and sciences. My work is based on a model of reflective practice that places the Self of the Professor, that is to say, the personhood of the Instructor of Record, at one vertex, the Self of the Student at a second, and the Content of the Course at the third. What a students actually learns is represented in the triangle itself and is a product of the dynamic interaction of the vertices. In other words, who I am as a person co-mingles with who the student is. her social location, the color of his skin, her level of cognitive development, his history with both the academic content of multicultural diversity vis-a-vis his lived experiences thereof, and her attitude toward my presence in the classroom will play tremendous roles in learning the academic content of diversity. According to this paradigm, delivery of the content is equally complex. In other words, all of the factors that enter into a student’s ability to understand content are implicated in a professor’s ability to deliver it. This is not a clean mechanistic model of the relationship between teaching and learning; it reflects my personal interest in constructivism, particularly, in how the human spirit responds affectivity to what it knows. This paper is thus an essay on my relation to the material that I teach; it is anchored in my Personhood and inspired by my belief in transformative education.

Because my skin tone and hair texture can, to the unsophisticated Euro-American student, render me invisible as a member of the African American community, I have a unique perspective on the ideas of many of them regarding their place in the subject matter, not to mention the life project, of understanding diversity. In addition, my social location as a transplanted Southern woman of a certain age, the issue of several generations of educated Negroes from Virginia and land-owning Negroes from North Carolina, gave me the anchors of good home training, a significant work ethic and book learning, all of which I rely on daily to keep my balance. I am the product of both the segregated and integrated south, yet the South of my school years was egocentrically monocultural; it was Black. The Negro National Anthem was sung at elementary assemblies, Paul Lawrence Dunbar was on equal footing with Robert Frost, and those most dignified portraits of Mary McLeod Bethune hung in the same halls as Abraham Lincoln. Politically powerful whites were distant in my life since the construct of politics is beyond the mental capacity of any child. My hometown of Durham North Carolina was immortalized in E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie; my concerns were those of a well-loved, kind of cute, child, oblivious to internal criticism of the social holding environment that surrounded me (Quarles, 1987), as well as to the larger world of racism. My concerns were those of a safe youngster: Would I be invited to the next birthday party? Would my toys be comparable to the other kids’? Would I know the answer to the Brownie puzzle? Because my parents were academics and we lived in faculty housing, the segregated college campus was my home and its grassy areas, my playground. Since they were wary of my being out of their sight, I went to their classes, and played quietly while they held office hours. The smell of musty library stacks remains comforting to this day.

Do my students know this? Not at all, and yet I cannot be other than this person. My gender is unambiguous; they assume my race until I identify it. For students of color, my physical appearance can compromise what they perceive as Blackness. In other words, they question if I know the "real deal," having heard in their communities, "So damn light, she think[s] she[s] white." They sense that I am comfortable in the classroom and at ease with controversy. Discussions are open, provided they are based in assigned readings or thoughtful inquiry. The blessings of high energy in the classroom and an explosive sense of humor in the world at large (enhanced by a love of code-switching) combine to make me rather unique as a member of the academy, according to my students and colleagues.

My university is third-tier, attracting students from within about an hour’s radius, most of whom are European American, first generation in college. The majority is from small towns, yet a decent-according-to-population percentage is African American, natives of the city or suburbs of Detroit. A sophisticated few refuse to be confined to either of the above culturally determined categories, calling themselves "mixed" and most often born in far away states. Encouraged by a generous tuition discount, a smattering of adolescent children of faculty members show up, as do a small percentage of students from top-notch school districts. In addition, a fair number of our students are in their middle adulthoods, returning for a teaching credential (a second bachelor’s) or to finish an earlier interrupted education.

One of the most compelling issues in teacher education is the quality of students we draw, especially in the early and middle childhood curriculum areas. Because everyone has been taught, they come to us having been on the receiving end, wanting to return to their psychological home places, often to their old elementary schools. My colleagues and I often wish for a better student body, a more intellectually minded and socially conscious bunch who will embrace the intertextuality of the teaching/learning paradigm and become committed to transforming schools into just institutions. Instead we often get adolescents with barely adequate grade point averages who will need to grow by intellectual leaps and bounds to teach well. Many come to us because they perceive that children know less than adults; they will therefore be safe. Others just "love kids," as they say; these women will feel emotionally satisfied, giving and getting lots of hugs. We as teacher educators worry how they will respond to children’s discovery of the governing principles of the physical universe in ways that encourage inquiry. In other words, we appreciate the mind of the child with its infinite capacity for understanding; we wonder if they will. Human development and learning, often a favorite course of early and middle childhood educators-to-be, is more or less tolerated by students in the secondary curriculum. The legendary mode of operation of European-American males is a casual slump across the back of a chair in the back of the room, baseball cap pulled down as low on the forehead as possible. Their body language reads, "Minimal contact, please" at least, or "Don’t even bother!" at worst. They are there because the course is required, will (in their minds) "learn the content," ace the tests, and get on with the business of their major classes. Their vision of teaching/learning is the delivery of information. This is the population that I am paid to teach, to facilitate their understanding of both Educational Psychology and Women’s Studies, particularly as these two subject areas relate to the relationship between what is taught and what is learned regarding diversity.

The notion of cognition in adolescence has evolved from Piaget’s (1972) description of formal thinking to sophisticated analyses of adolescent brain activity and the role of neurotransmitters in adolescent decision making. One of my favorite course pack pieces is Joan Newman’s (1985) well-titled article, "Adolescents: why they can be so obnoxious." This text, which expressed the state of the art which was comprehensible to the community of educators twenty-five years ago, describes the transition between concrete and formal thinking as responsible for the irresponsible behavior of teens. Our older students, most of whom are parents, readily relate to this article. It seems as if the transition to what Robert Kegan (1982) refers to as a different way of knowing, a fourth level of consciousness (Kegan,1994), that way of knowing upon which we college professors base our art and craft, takes longer to develop than was previously believed.

The unwarranted assumption made by many academics is that most of our students are formal thinkers. To apply the thinking of Robert Sternberg to social issues, this means that they are capable of:

1. recognizing [social] problems;
2. defining [social] problems more clearly;
3. making decisions on issues that have personal meaning;
4. handling [social] problems with no single right answer;
5. obtaining information [relevant to social issues];
6. working, sharing information and thinking collaboratively; and
7. developing long-term approaches to long-term problems.

Furthermore, we adults as teachers and parents expect adolescents to distinguish between: denotation and connotation, data and inference, instance and generalization, and example and definition (Kegan, 1994).

Susan Harter’s (1999) research is more specifically focused on the developmental knowledge of self upon which we also base our teaching assumptions. She writes of the ability in late adolescence "to construct higher order abstractions. that represent contradictions . . .and subsume apparent inconsistencies under more generalized abstractions…Moreover, older adolescents are more likely to normalize potential contradictions [in the self across contexts.]" (p. 86). This would assume that a college student would be able to discern when some presentations of aspects of the self would have an advantage over others. She goes on to note that without a supportive social environment in which to hone the newly developed cognitions, conflicts will arise. Similarly, Santrock (2001) tells adolescents in his text written about them for them, that they can: identify inner motivations; acknowledge internal emotional conflict; be, to some extent, psychologically self-reflective; and have some capacity for insight and productive self-consciousness.

All of the aforementioned lists in some ways rely on the Eriksonian notion of identity consolidation: the late adolescent should have enough understanding of self to present coherence of personhood and thought. We assume that they will bring this quality of personhood into the classroom. In addition, there should, according to Carol Gilligan and her colleagues (1988), have already been an epistemological crisis in which earlier foundations of understanding will have been reorganized and intimate relationships will have made their mark on the self.

It is the understanding of professors that college students will have consolidated the new-found, early adolescent ability to think about thought, to think in possibilities. We work on the assumption that they will be able to manipulate concepts both inductively and deductively, will ponder and create hypothesis, manipulate symbols without the aid of concrete devices, that they will be able to process information logically much as a computer does and reach conclusions based on an analysis of any understandable debate. In spite of statistics that indicates only 17 – 67% of college students operate on this level, we prepare lesson plans convinced that with solid factual information, in constructivist classrooms, our students will experience transformative BFOs (blinding flashes of the obvious), know more and therefore behave more intelligently. We rely on their metacognitive abilities to examine their own lives (Kuhn, 2000) and schedule office hours to counsel sophomoric philosophers who will morph into a cynical relativists (Perry, 1970) in the course of their time with us. We anticipate at least a few therapeutic sessions (Tharp, 1999) and are dismayed when those most in need of a transformative experience don’t have it.

As a teacher for thirty years, I have worked with undergraduate and graduate students long enough to have an intuitive feeling of their receptivity for multicultural diversity. In addition, I have traveled to many states working as a consultant to in-service teachers on both the spirit and the law of performance assessment. This is a process which holds enormous possibilities for understanding the minds of children of color and simultaneously demonstrates practitioners’ alarming misunderstandings about the relationship between teaching and learning. Though the effects of inequality and disenfranchisement on the human psyche are common sense upon reflection, most students of education in my classes, as well as their counterparts in the field, don’t get it. According to Kegan (1994), this is a problem of level of consciousness. An understanding of diversity requires a degree of comprehension of which many of the teachers-in-training (and in practice) lack. Therefore transformative education may not be cognitively possible for many college students and elementary school teachers according to Kegan’s thinking. And this may be part of the explanation.

I do, however, lay the groundwork. In my classes in educational psychology, I choose course pack material that includes research in the phenomenological tradition and literature that also mirrors children’s lived worlds. Toni Cade Bambara’s "The Lesson" (1972) and Valerie Polakow’s Lives on the Edge (1993) are favorites. My aim is to present the content of educational psychology – motivation, teaching/learning relationships, cognition, intelligence – in a narrative way that keeps students awake and interested. I strive in my teaching for a constructivist demonstration designed to raise issues of children of color as center, rather than margin; these then have the potential to become less associated with personality and more with social construction..

I approach diversity from a here-and-now (rather than historical) perspective and teach the model of reflective practice. In addition I tell students (and ask them to please note!) that this is the model from which I work. In educational psychology, I begin with Polakow’s (1993) narratives of poor Black and White children in the public schools of Michigan. These problem children are presented from the perspective of their lived worlds, and my students can examine teachers’ reactions to poverty objectively without necessarily having to define their entry point into the text. That is to say, they can distance themselves from the topic without having to examine their personal response to it. European American males appreciate this. Over the course of the term, I continue to present development from the perspective of those who are developing, inviting students to compare their own ideas at various points in the educational continuum with those presented in the readings. My hope is that they will come to understand how cognitive development and experience influence understanding. For example, Deborah Eisenberg’s "Mermaids"(1998) portrays the loss of innocence that accompanies the transition from concrete to formal thinking from the perspective of a European American female. This story and can be compared to Bambara’s "The Lesson" (1972) which is narrated by an African American girl in the same stage of development. In addition, I present excerpts from the video "Stand By Me." All describe the experience of coming to know differently, or as Kegan would say, the evolution (1982, 1994) from second to third order consciousness, which involves a shift in subject-object relationships. At this point in the terms I review this concept as a Piagetian notion of how we know differently at different stages in development, using the example of changes in perspective of size between pre-schoolers and adolescents.

My hope is that I am setting the stage for students’ own examination of a different way of understanding and what it means in their personal constructions of diversity. This objective lens prepares them for a discussion of racism which features readings such as Vivian Paley’s text, White Teacher (1989). Since I am not a White teacher, I point out that I cannot be a subject in this discussion, yet my hope is that Paley as subject and they as object are beginning to share more common characteristics. (For students of color, this text is a refreshing look at the ways in which race can be understood on a personal level because in their worlds, it has been analogous to the elephant in the alcoholic family: everyone knows it’s there, yet better not to mention its presence even though it begins to take over.) By that time in the term, I have integrated the learning part of the human development and learning class, and am ready to tackle the integration of the construction of knowledge in late adolescence and adulthood, which is where they must enter.

Needless to say, the course in women’s studies that focuses on women of African descent delves into the psyches of daughters of the Diaspora, exploring ways in which the peculiar institution, our recovery notwithstanding, created a matchless brilliancy and vibrancy. Because of ambiguities in the way the course schedule is printed, most of the students who sign up for the women’s studies class do not realize that its focus is different from the regular introductory course. There is no way that I can convey in print the looks on most of the White faces when they realize their mistake. "I didn’t know this was for Black students," was one remark that I remember with particular poignancy. This class, by the way, has often been all white! On the other hand, students of color (recruited many times) are delighted, feeling certain that their collective historical consciousness will be recognized. Some, however, are dumbfounded when they realize that the study of "us" will require not only our lived experiences, but academic rigor as well. Again, this is who I attempt to teach.

Here is where the dynamic interaction of who is teaching and what she is teaching interact. My White colleagues can host heated discussions on the positions of Peggy McIntosh (1986) and Frances Kendall (1999), that all Whites, even those who have eked out college tuition by working two jobs and raised children while being homemakers, are sociologically gifted with unearned privilege. While I may require reading in the area, my position is that I cannot effectively teach this aspect of diversity because the effects of White privilege cannot be taught to a White adolescent mind from a person of color.

To quote Derrick Bell (1992), "No matter their experience or expertise, blacks’ statements involving race are deemed ‘special pleading’ and thus not entitled to serious consideration" (p. 111). He goes on to point out the more fallacious corollary: "that blacks, unlike whites, cannot be objective on racial issues and will favor their own no matter what" (p. 113). Whites then become the subject of their own objectification. Thus the teaching/learning of racism vis-à-vis multicultural diversity transcends Kegan’s (1994) analysis of dealing with difference and asks a near impossible task for those of us who are not White. Our track record with European American males is dismal.

This subject-object reversal has affected Black students as well. I have struggled with several of them, (mis)educated in mostly White school districts who insist on the virtue of color-blindness. They have an equally difficult time grasping concepts such as the myth of meritocracy, unearned white privilege and institutionalized racism. These students are victims of the sanitization of American History, and have lost a sense, at least on the cognitive level, of their historical consciousness. They are schooled more for success on high-stakes tests than educated for higher order thinking; their journey into the consolidation of formal thinking is arduous indeed. Its resolution, on the other hand, is magnificent to witness.

Teaching multicultural diversity, first of all, on this day, in the places of my employment, is not concerned with the study habits of Asian students, the respect with which young American Indian students face their teachers, or the meaning of touch in hispana lingua communities. Its focus is on transforming the thinking of generations of students to deal with our own and each others’ ways of making meaning, on the impact of the invisibility of brown and black people in the canon (Morrison, 1992), and on our academic striving for objective knowledge (Gergen, 1994). Teaching means realizing that identification with an ethnic group – and one’s social location within that group – affects the professor-student relationship and thus the way a student receives whatever we are trying to give in our classrooms. How one delivers the content of diversity comes from a particular way of knowing that is an amalgam of experience, a particular level of consciousness and hard work. Our belief in the transformative nature of the content and our excitement over this way of knowing can be contagious if we live it. Teaching multicultural diversity has to be a head and heart connection and involves a deeply personal examination of our own selves.

For my White colleagues, reflective practice means an examination of the way they approach students of color, which may reveal their personal understanding of multiculturalism, or lack thereof. This reflection could help them understand why students of color complain that they can’t learn from learned (in the academic sense) White colleagues. Furthermore, my colleagues’ willingness to master and to offer as center (rather than as margin) the thinking of scholars and artists of color, along with a renewed understanding of what it means to profess in the academy, particularly if they are professing to students of color, speaks volumes regarding their understanding of multicultural diversity. This self- knowledge of course impacts the way that European American students will come to understand material. They, too, are aware of not only what, but how, one teaches.

For my colleagues of color, even teaching in this reflective manner means that the content of diversity may be covered, but it will not be transformative for White students. The subject matter will collide with their inabilities to think in the manner we anticipate (Kegan, 1994) when we prepare, and with our personhood. The students themselves may not be able to articulate this, yet this sentiment will be revealed in course evaluations (Banks, 2001). For students of color, our own skin tone, may interfere with their reception of our gospel even though we are African American. We may speak truth, but it may remain unheard because of the ways that the social construction of race has been historicized. In conclusion, students’ abilities to understand diversity demands a different level of consciousness that may be as much limbic as cerebral.

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