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Diversifying Curriculum

A list of resources for faculty, managed by the President's Council on Diversity and Inclusion (PCDI)

This guide is intended to provide some guidance and recommendations for how to think about a more inclusive curriculum. It is a living resource, created by faculty, for faculty: the contents are not exhaustive nor are they complete.  We will add to the guide on a regular basis.

 

Faculty Recommended Reading

How to Be an Antiracist - Ebook

Kendi, a National Book Award winning historian (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America), developed this text as a manual for defining and unpacking fundamentally important terms: “racism” and “antiracism” in particular, and how there is genuinely no middle ground. He uses his own personal history and lived experience, the history of his parents, and other contemporary examples of racism and antiracism in action. It absolutely lives up to its “How To” title, as it serves as a clear, concise, and vital lesson. This may be one of the most important books available right now.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Racism Without Racists- Ebook

This reader includes a series of essays, each addressing a common myth about race-ethnicity and racism such as, “If Only He Hadn’t Worn the Hoodie:” Race, Selective Perception, and Stereotype Maintenance, and “If People Stopped Talking About Race, It Wouldn’t Be a Problem Anymore”: Silencing the Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Both editors and most/all of the essay authors are social scientists of color.
I use this reader as a supplement to the main text in my Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course, but it is also a great resource for faculty looking for empirically grounded, research-based information to counter students’ misperceptions about race. The essays cover a wide range of issues such as the myth of meritocracy, racialized school mascots, race and college admissions, affirmative action in the job market, and more.
Readers will expand their understand of core topics in the study of race-ethnicity and racism at both the macro/structural and micro/interpersonal levels, as well as becoming skilled at countering common misconceptions with high-quality facts.


Recommended by Professor Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman

White Fragility- Ebook

Recommended by Professor Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman

Electric Arches- Ebook

A collection of poetry, visual art, and prose about lived experiences and what Ewing calls “desire-based thinking” about racial equity, justice, socioeconomic transformation, speculative history, and education. This collection is significantly valuable to educators for its fundamentals: how the old canon is flawed and incomplete, how writing can a pathway toward asserting power, and how stories need not be told in traditional forms. It also presents histories, like the Great Chicago Fire and the Revolutionary movements of the 60’s and 70’s, in a new way, and its central emphasis on surviving in a racist society makes it an eminently valuable collection for educators teaching in a racially diverse environment.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Whose Story Is This?- Ebook

This collection of essays focuses itself on singular narrative consistencies in traditional U.S. culture, and how those narratives need to be adjusted, reworked, or dismantled. Solnit examines and deconstructs the concept of “rugged individualism,” explores capitalism as a cause for violent misogyny, and unpacks issues as current as the Christine Blasey-Ford testimony. For educators, these essays can be valuable for curriculum development and for student readings.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Stamped from the Beginning

Kendi does broad historical work in this text about the history of segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist thought in American history, since before its founding. Although it centers itself around five primary actors in American history in order to organize its investigation (Thomas Jefferson, Cotton Mather, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis), the text is a massive collection of material that provides historical examples and makes tangible some of the most abstract concepts. Overall, it’s a robust but focused social, intellectual, and cultural history of America.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Forced Founders

A more comprehensive look at the American Revolution than the traditional narratives, this book focuses on grassroots efforts by enslaved Virginians, Indians, and Tobacco farmers as a cause for the colonial aristocracy (Jefferson, Washington, et al) to advocate for rebellion against the British Empire. This is a good text for educators who might be seeking to explain movement politics to students, the power of the grassroots, and how history is rarely (almost never) about singular “heroes.”

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Beverly Daniel Tatum is an educator, higher education administrator and clinical psychologist who specializes in racial identity development, with emphasis on children of color in predominately white communities. I use this text in my Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course to teach students about theories of racial identity development and it is especially well-received by students in Elementary and Secondary Education programs.
Readers new to the concept of racial identity will especially appreciate the chapters on Racial Identity Development (stages) and White Racial Identity Development. This is especially important for those working with or raising children, but also serves as a tool for anyone who seeks to develop insight into their own complex relationship to race.
Tatum’s work is also addressed in widely available interviews and Ted Talk videos. I highly recommend the “Chocolate Milk” video (https://youtu.be/l_TFaS3KW6s) for anyone looking to develop their ability to speak with young children about race in a way that empowers people of color and the developing self- esteem of the child, while not diminishing the truth about systemic inequality.

Recommended by Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman

Bananeras- Ebook

A narrative history recounting significant moments of Latin American women workers organizing themselves and gaining control over their unions, workplaces, and lives. Dana Frank provides two important points of context for contemporary educators here: a detailed analysis of gender discrimination in Latin America, and a broader history of the often devastating economic impact of U.S. neoliberal trade policy within Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Getting Real about Race

This reader includes a series of essays, each addressing a common myth about race-ethnicity and racism such as, “If Only He Hadn’t Worn the Hoodie:” Race, Selective Perception, and Stereotype Maintenance, and “If People Stopped Talking About Race, It Wouldn’t Be a Problem Anymore”: Silencing the Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Both editors and most/all of the essay authors are social scientists of color.
I use this reader as a supplement to the main text in my Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course, but it is also a great resource for faculty looking for empirically grounded, research-based information to counter students’ misperceptions about race. The essays cover a wide range of issues such as the myth of meritocracy, racialized school mascots, race and college admissions, affirmative action in the job market, and more.
Readers will expand their understand of core topics in the study of race-ethnicity and racism at both the macro/structural and micro/interpersonal levels, as well as becoming skilled at countering common misconceptions with high-quality facts.
Recommended by Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman

A Slaveholders' Union

This book explores slavery as not just a minor feature of the American constitutional system, but as an essential part of its foundation. It explains, through historical and political analysis, why slavery as an institution persisted for so long in the United States after its abolition elsewhere across the world, and consequently why racism persists on an institutional level. This book is, in a sense, an audit of the U.S. Constitution, and is highly valuable for educators in exploring how modern systems in the United States still serve to benefit only a portion of the population.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Orientalism- Ebook

This is probably the single most important books for many history students, and one of the most influential works of history produced since it was first published in 1978. Orientalism concerns itself narrowly with western representations of the Arab-Islamic world, which in too many cases remain myopic, and broadly with how western scholarship approaches non-western societies. Its best use for educators is in Said’s definition of Orientalism as a “discourse by the Powerful about the Power-less,” which offers us a useful tool to rethink how we approach certain subjects, decolonize our classrooms, and develop a more equitable curriculum.

Recommended by Professor Jared Gilpatrick

Multicultural Pedagogy

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