Overcoming eurocentrism...

The struggle to overcome eurocentrism in education will be a long one, as eurocentrism is so deeply embedded in the system. However, changes are being made, and there is a growing respect for world authors. This effort to provide more multicultural perspectives in the classroom is wrought with drawbacks, though, as many people will use words like "diversity" and "multicultural" often, but without having an in-depth understanding of what these words mean. They are buzzwords, and they get thrown around a lot. Furthermore, there are some educators who feel that the pressures of having multicultural perspectives in the classroom are too great, and are too daunting. But being less eurocentric does not mean that a teacher has to know about every country and every history in the world, it just means having a more open understanding of the people we interact with, and realizing that there are more books out there than the one's written by dead white guys. As such, if this is a topic with which you relate, a great starting point for change is to talk about this topic with others-both people who agree with you and who disagree with you. Also, if you are interested in reading more World Literature but do not know where to start, I have posted a recommended reading list on this blog, which has some books that I've read and think others would enjoy. Be wary of buzzwords like "diversity," and again, just don't be afraid to talk about these issues with others.

Colorblind language

One common problem with discussions of multiculturalism is the inclination for whites to use colorblind rhetoric. Particularly in efforts to not seem racist, whites will make comments like "I don't see him as black," or "I don't look at you as Hispanic-we're all just people." Other forms of this colorblind language can appear, such as "I never saw you like that" or "everyone is equal, it doesn't matter what skin color you are." These comments are not meant to be racist, and usually are said in efforts to impart respect. However, they backfire immensely. In fact, Houston, in her 2004 essay, "When Black Women Talk with White Women: Why the Dialogues are Difficult," examines the rhetoric of "I never even notice...We're all the same, really-just people" (p. 123). She writes that statements like these "suggest that the speaker regards blackness as something negative, a problem that one "can't help" and, therefore as something that one's white friends should "overlook" (p. 123). Similarly, Houston's research argues that when a white woman says, "We're all the same," what she really means is "I can see how you (a black woman) are like me(a white woman)." Thus, when a white person says "we're all people," what is really being said is "we're all white people," and thus denies the experience of other racial and ethnic groups, and redefines it in the terms of a white person. Thus, it is imperative that we learn to discuss race and ethnicity in our conversations, and not ignore them by using colorblind language. This is an integral step towards having less eurocentric perspectives in the classroom.

The information in this post was found in: Marsha Houston's 2004 article "When Black Women Talk With White Women: Why the Dialogues are Difficult, in the book "Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication" pp. 119-125.

Recommended Reading

Toni Morrison Beloved; Bluest Eye; Sula
Alice Walker The Color Purple
Dorothy Allison Bastard out of Carolina; Cavedweller
Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street
Julia Alvarez Yo; How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accent
Isabel Allende Eva Luna; The House of Spirits
Jamaica Kincaid Lucy; Autobiography of my Mother; Annie John
Michelle Cliff No Telephone to Heaven
Edwidge Danticat The Farming of Bones; Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!
Paule Marshall Praisesong for the Widow
Louise Erdrich Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Marjane Satrapi Persepolis (1 and 2)
Maxine Hong Kingston Woman Warrior
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Mario Vargas Llosa Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Jorge Amado Dona Flor and her Two Husbands
Antonio Skarmeta The Postman
Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things
Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns
Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate
Benson Deng, Alephonsion They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
Deng,Benjamin Ajak

Ntozake Shange For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf

Note: These are books that I have read and would recommend to others. This list is by no means complete, and reflects my own reading preferences.

Student Voices Event 4/21

Come to the Student Voices panel on Tuesday, April 21st from 6-7:30 in Memorial Hall, Room 3235 to discuss multicultural perspectives in the classroom!

This event is sponsored by the COE Diversity Committee, and will be a round table discussion of the importance of multicultural perspectives in education, as well as ways to implement these perspectives.

Please come out and support this great event!

What you can do: Educators

If you are an educator looking to teach your students from a multicultural perspective, it is important to encourage the racial and ethnic identities of your students. One way of doing this is to support the languages spoken by your students if they are bilingual or fluent in languages other than English.
Another way of implementing multiculturalism in the classroom is to encourage the children, regardless of background, to all feel welcome. This will help all students (not just the "minorities"), but also the white or European American children learn about diversity and respect for others.
Furthermore, do not just teach or discuss topics that are from a European perspective. Add books to the curriculum that are from a Caribbean perspective, a Latin American perspective, an Asian perspective, etc. By offering a wide range of books (as opposed to the usual To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter), students will become more culturally aware, and will begin to see the injustices of white privilege.

What You Can Do

If you feel that eurocentrism should be overcome in the classroom, there are many things you can do. One of the best ways to help fight eurocentrism to simply to talk about it. Talk about diverse issues, tell your teachers or professors that you want to learn about "alternative canons" or "alternative histories." If you are a parent, talk to your child's teacher to express your concerns. The problem with eurocentrism is that it is so ingrained in American society that we often do not even realize it is happening, so an important way of helping to reconstruct the education system is to talk about it, and to instruct others about the benefits of a multicultural approach to education.

Madison Cup Debate

The Madison Cup debate gave me a better understanding of what debate is supposed to look like. I noticed that the debaters from Johns Hopkins used "I believe" and "I think" a lot, which was persuasive in that it made their arguments more personal. However, the second Johns Hopkins debater's speech was too planned, discouraging questions and overall debate. He also came across as rude and seemed to "talk down" to other debaters, which made his and his partner's arguments seem less credible. I also realized that I was paying attention the way the debaters were dressed, which, though facetious, did affect my perceptions of their arguments. The affirmative side was the more personable side, but they did focus too much on the Jeremy Davis case, as this is only one incident. If they had more cases like that one, their arguments would have been more persuasive. However, the negative side tended to irritate me, as they seemed to take themselves just a little too seriously, and though I tried to distance myself from making judgments, I just found myself not wanting to listen to the negative side's arguments any longer. One aspect of the debate that I really liked was that many different arguments were brought up, giving me a broad spectrum to draw from.

Demographics

According a press release from the US Census Bureau, found at http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/012496.html, minorities will be the majority by 2042. Here is what the rest of the article has to say:

"By 2050, the minority population — everyone except for non-Hispanic, single-race whites — is projected to be 235.7 million out of a total U.S. population of 439 million. The nation is projected to reach the 400 million population milestone in 2039."
The non-Hispanic white race population, is decreasing, while the Hispanic population is projected to nearly triple between 2008-2050 period. Its share of the nation’s total population is projected to double, from 15 percent to 30 percent. Thus, nearly one in three U.S. residents would be Hispanic.
The black population is projected to increase from 14 percent of the population in 2008, to 15 percent in 2050.
The Asian population is projected to climb from 5.1 percent to 9.2 percent.
"Among the remaining race groups, American Indians and Alaska Natives are projected to rise from 4.9 million to 8.6 million (or from 1.6 to 2 percent of the total population). The Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population is expected to more than double, from 1.1 million to 2.6 million. The number of people who identify themselves as being of two or more races is projected to more than triple, from 5.2 million to 16.2 million."

Moreover, "in 2050, the nation’s population of children is expected to be 62 percent minority, up from 44 percent today. Thirty-nine percent are projected to be Hispanic (up from 22 percent in 2008), and 38 percent are projected to be single-race, non-Hispanic white (down from 56 percent in 2008). "

Based on these projections, it simply doesn't make sense that we would continue in our traditional eurocentric path of education. This does not mean eliminating European or white literature and history from courses, but rather reframing the focus of education and teaching from multiple perspectives.

To provide some examples of how ingrained eurocentrism is in U.S. education, I want to provide some examples. As an English major with a concentration in world literature, I should be reading literature from all over the world. But:

In my Religion and Literature class, we only read books on Christianity and Judaism.
In my Comparative Literature class, the only books we have read so far this semester are three on the Holocaust.

Women's Fiction: Jane Eyre by Bronte, The Bell Jar by Plath, The Awakening by Kate Chopin. We did read, however: Quicksand by Larson, and Shange's For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf (African American lit); The Autobiography of my Mother by Kincaid (Caribbean lit); Kingston's The Woman Warrior (Asian American lit), and Persepolis by Satrapi (Iranian lit). This does show an attempt to diversify the curriculum, and that is appreciated. However, where on this syllabus is literature from Latin American writers? Some examples of authors to be considered are Allende, Cisneros, and Alvarez. But again, Latin American voices are continually silenced and/or forgotten, which is particularly disconcerting considering the changing demographics of the U.S. and the growing number of Latinos/as.

I have been forced to take an Early British lit class and an Early American lit class- these are requirements for every English major. One course in alternative canons is required, but the overwhelming majority of literature chosen is from the eurocentric perspective.

Defining of Terms

Zarefsky in his keynote address on Definitions argues that "the ways in which we define our terms affects the way we think, talk, and act about the realities for which they stand" (4). Thus, in order to clarify my argument against eurocentrism in education, I would like to define the term.

Eurocentrism: being centered on Europe or Europeans. Most courses in grade schools and high schools are taught from eurocentric perspectives, especially history and literature courses. For example, most books read in high schools are written by dead white male authors.

Eurocentrism makes it particularly difficult for non-European American (non-white) students to identify with what they are learning in school, and fails to provide these students with a voice. This is a major problem in U.S. education today.

Alternative Canons

I found an interesting article on canons in education:

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=2&hid=6&sid=55bc6ac2-b036-4b8c-af0a-5562c3533111%40sessionmgr2

This article by Amin Alhassan questions how some questions are made central in education, particularly in field of communication studies, while others are placed in the margins. Though focusing on schools in Canada, I believe that the arguments still apply to U.S. education. Alhassan argues that though there has been an increase in alternative canons courses, they are always offered as electives, not as required courses: "The unstated assumption is that feminism, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory are optional to the field, rather than integral, or are offered only intermittently. This raises the question, then, of what gets valorized as part of the core curriculum of communication and culture studies, and what gets reduced to a niche option" (pg 104). Therefore, these classes are still seen as de-central, as less important than eurocentric ideologies, and thus the relations of power are sustained.

Power relations

Zarefsky, in the article, "Argumentation in the Tradition of Speech Communication Studies" that "Power enables those who hold it to impose a partial perspective as if it were holistic," which he calls "hegemony." These partial perspectives become so normalized in society that they seem obvious, commonsensical, even natural. They become ideologies. In the U.S., we have a European understanding of history, because European Americans maintain the power. Through our education system, the hegemonic ideals that European knowledge is the only knowledge is repeated and recreated over and over again. For instance, all teachers are expected to have a knowledge of European histories. English teachers are expected to know all of the European writers, the canonical literature. However, they are not expected to know any other writers from any other area of the world (excepting the token piece of African, Asian or Caribbean literature often found on syllabi). Yet my professor for Latin American literature, for example, is expected to know not only Latin American literature, but American and European as well. And while classes in Latin American literature are offered at JMU, one would be hard pressed to find a book by a Latin American author on any other syllabi, as I know from my experiences as an English major. For some reason, this area of the world is unimportant. Perhaps by teaching alternative canons, hegemony is threatened. Therefore, U.S. education is overwhelmingly eurocentric as a means to uphold the power of white European Americans in the United States.

Overview

Education in the United States is so eurocentric that many people do not even realize it. Classes in high school are offered in European history; the alternative is world history, as if that one continent offers more important lessons than the rest of the planet combined. At JMU, I am an English major with a concentration in world lit. This means that I am supposed to read literature from all over the world. Yet there has been a continual trend in my classes to offer books by an Asian author, an African author, a Caribbean author, a Middle Eastern author...hardly ever are there novels by Latin American authors. How can this be world literature? I've spoken about this to my professors, who have told me that there "just isn't time." So even in classes where we are supposed to learn about non-European perspectives, the understanding of "comparative literature" or "alternative canons" is still extremely questionable and problematic. Furthermore, by placing so much emphasis on European history and European ideals, the education system is creating the belief that European perspectives are best, and I feel that this cultivates intolerance and feelings of superiority towards non-Europeans. Therefore, this blog will be dedicated to looking for ways to fix eurocentrism in education and to developing ways to demonstrate the importance of this issue.