Diversity in the classroom

Studies in Philosophy and Education

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 293-302

  Maitzen, Stephen ^a  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 40349105370     PISSN: 00393746     EISSN: 1573191X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1004946209808     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. For examples of this debate, see (among numerous others) John R. Searle, "The Storm Over the University," New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990;
2. the replies to Searle (and Searle's rejoinder) in '"The Storm Over the University': An Exchange," New York Review of Books, February 14, 1991;
3. and the essays anthologized in The Imperiled Academy, ed. Howard Dickman (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1993).
4. Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A., April 23, 1994.
5. Copyright Cornell University 1993. Available from the Office of Equal Opportunity, Cornell University, 234 Day Hall, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A. 14853-2801.
6. Her public remarks did not actually include mention of these particular stereotypes, but she did mention them to me, in conversation, when I asked her just what kinds of stereotypes she had meant to refer to in her talk.
7. My colleague David Robb suggested to me that instructors should avoid using even a statistically true generalization if it might offend a student misclassified by it. For example, wrongly assuming that a student is heterosexual might offend him, while wrongly assuming his parents are still married might not. I appreciate the suggestion, but I doubt that it offers much guidance to instructors worried about the use of true generalizations in the classroom, since there's really no telling what misclassification a student might find offensive. Potentially any misclassification might offend someone.
8. A referee for this journal asks what might motivate educators and administrators to take different sides in this debate over pedagogy. However, it's not clear to me that the individualist/multiculturalist distinction neatly tracks the educator/administrator distinction: no doubt plenty of educators are multiculturalists and plenty of administrators are individualists; indeed, the Cornell administrator whose views are the centerpiece of this paper appears herself to have sympathies in both directions, which, I'm arguing, accounts for the inconsistency in the pedagogical advice she dispenses. I can't speculate about what motivates administrators in general to take the views they do, principally because administrators surely have diverse views on this issue and others. But I can, I believe, identify a major influence on the views of the particular Cornell administrator whom I mention here: the views of Sheldon Hackney, Chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, expressed in Hackney's "Organizing a National Conversation," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 1994, p. A56. In correspondence with me, the administrator expressed approval of Hackney's likening of the current American "national conversation" to jazz improvisation, "the improvisation of individual performance within a group setting" (ibid.). "Perhaps the metaphor of jazz," she wrote, "can help us to understand what is happening in America and at Cornell."
9. The striking claims of multiculturalist epistemology have been well-documented in, for example, Steven Yates, "Multiculturalism and Epistemology," Public Affairs Quarterly 6 (October 1992), 435-456. What I have called the "now-dominant versions" of multiculturalism Yates calls "strong multiculturalism." He provides evidence that strong multiculturalism is the ascendant, and probably dominant, form of the movement and that it does posit an essential link between knowledge and group membership. For a similar definition of "multiculturalism,"
10. see Diane Ravitch, "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Flures," American Scholar 59 (1990), 337-354; Ravitch uses the term "particularistic multiculturalism" to denote the kind of multiculturalism I discuss here; she uses "pluralistic multiculturalism" to denote a much less radical multiculturalism that, indeed, seems entirely compatible with individualism.
11. A musicologist at Cornell once told me, to my surprise, that Henry Purcell did not write Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary but that Jeremiah Clarke wrote the piece and called it The Prince of Denmark's March.
12. Notice that I say "prompt," not "coerce." While I think that most educators will agree that it can often be appropriate (if not obligatory) for an instructor to prompt a student for an answer or a comment, I doubt if many educators would agree that it is often permissible to coerce a student into responding. (Those educators who do think that coercion is sometimes permissible will, of course, agree with my weaker claim that prompting is sometimes permissible.) I recognize that the line between encouragement and coercion can become blurry; staying on the correct side of that line is yet another difficult but important task facing the classroom educator.
13. One commentator quotes an unnamed University of Pennsylvania administrator to the following effect: multiculturalists see the word "individual" as "a 'RED FLAG' phrase today, which is considered by many to be RACIST. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately [privilege] the 'individuals' belonging to the largest or dominant group." Alan Charles Kors, "Bad Faith: The Politicization of the University In Loco Parentis," in The Imperiled Academy, 153-180; 175. (See also Yates, "Multiculturalism and Epistemology.")
14. A referee for this journal wonders "what contributes to the shaping of the administrator's definition of 'multiculturalism' and why it differs from [the] educator's definition." Again, however, I'm not at all sure that administrators and educators characteristically differ over the definition of "multiculturalism" or that administrators in general favor multiculturalism while educators in general favor individualism (see note 6). The definition of "multiculturalism" I'm using here (see note 7) is, I take it, quite recognizable, maybe even canonical; it is also a definition favored, it seems, by some writers who describe themselves as "multiculturalists" (see note 16).
15. In response to my claim about the two incompatible strands in her pedagogical advice, the Assistant Director of Equal Opportunity insisted that "Many teachers have figured... out already" how to implement that advice.
16. Clear endorsements of this individualist theme can be found in Yates, "Multiculturalism and Epistemology," Ravitch, "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures," and John R. Searle, "The Mission of the University: Intellectual Discovery or Social Transformation?" Academic Questions 1 (1993-1994), 80-85. I should emphasize that my task in this paper is not to endorse any version of multiculturalism or of individualism; instead, my task is to highlight the tensions between these two basic positions and to suggest how an incoherent pedagogy can arise from trying to accommodate them both in the classroom.
17. On this admittedly traditional view, the university has no mission to teach the performance or execution of the arts: painting, sculpture, film-making, music composition and performance, dance, composition of poetry, creative writing, etc. Instead, the university leaves training in these practical and technical skills to music conservatories, art institutes, film schools, writers' workshops, dance academies, and so on; it concentrates instead on discovering and disseminating propositional knowledge about these crafts: art history and theory, musicology, prosody, the anthropology of dance, etc. Despite its controversial assimilation of academic knowledge to propositional knowledge, this view rests on a philosophically self-consistent foundation, unlike some other views of the academy.
18. My informal survey of a handful of other American institutions of higher learning confirms that the four crucial Affirmative Action categories are persons of color, women, disabled persons, and veterans. In Canada, as my investigation of the regulations at Dalhousie University indicates, the crucial categories in hiring and admissions are slightly different: visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples, women, and disabled persons. But the individualist would ask the same pedagogical question about the four categories that are salient in Canadian hiring and admissions: "Why these four?"
19. Yates, "Multiculturalism and Epistemology," cites the writings of prominent multiculturalists and postmodernists in support of this claim. I'll list just a couple of the examples he quotes, referring the reader to his article for the full source-citations: "Class, race, and gender necessarily structure the individual's understanding of reality and hence inform all knowledge claims" (Mary E. Hawkesworth). "[A] Human population's ethnocentrism is rooted in its social knowledge base; and social knowledge cannot be emptied of or divorced from ethnocentrism.... Claims to the contrary point out that certain types of knowledge - empirical science, for example - are objective and value-free; but this is to reify knowledge and separate it from human existence.... Not all people 'know' in the same way.... Cognitive styles which appear to be universal in society (science for example) are really the cognitive styles of the ruling classes and the elite members of dominant groups" (John H. Stanfield).
20. I recognize that any position concerning "the mission of the academy" will be contentious. For one thing, not everyone has had a chance to help shape the mission of the academy: the poor and the powerless, many of whom are represented in the four categories singled out for Affirmative Action recruitment, have, historically, been denied a voice in shaping the academy. I do not mean to endorse here any particular view of the academy's true mission; instead, I mean to point out the conflict between a multiculturalist conception of the mission of the academy and an individualist conception, especially an individualist conception driven by the conviction that the academy should restrict itself to the discovery and dissemination of propositional knowledge (see note 14 and accompanying text).