Understanding Curriculum as Racial Text

Representations of Identity and Difference in Education

Edited by Louis A. Castenell Jr. & William F. Pinar

Subjects: Philosophy Of Education
Series: SUNY series, Feminist Theory in Education
Paperback : 9780791416624, 322 pages, September 1993
Hardcover : 9780791416617, 322 pages, September 1993

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Table of contents

Preface

1. Introduction
Louis A. Castenell Jr. and Willian F. Pinar

PART 1: RACE AND REPRESENTATIONS OF IDENTITY

An Opening: Identity and Curriculum Politics

2. Canonical Sins
Peter M. Taubman

Race and Representation

3. Love in the Margins: Notes toward a Curriculum of Marginality in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's Beloved
Susan Huddleston Edgerton

4. Photographic Images of Blacks in Sexuality Texts
Mariamne H. Whatley

5. 'Til Death Do Us Part: AIDS, Race, and Representation
Brenda G. Hatfield

Gender, Race, Class

6. It's in Our Hands: Breaking the Silence on Gender in African American Studies
Patricia Hill Collins

7. Black Women Heroes: Here's Reality Where's the Fiction?
Jewelle Gomez

8. Working-Class Women's Ways of Knowing: Effects of Gender, Race, and Class
Wendy Luttrell

9. Racism and the Limits of Radical Feminism
Lindsay Murphy and Jonathan Livingstone

PART 2: CURRICULUM POLITICS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

Cultural Pluralism and Ethnicity

10. Responding to Cultural Diversity in Our Schools
Roger L. Collins

11. Toward an Understanding of African American Ethnicity
Alma H. Young

Multiculturalism

12. Multicultural Approaches to Racial Inequality in the United States
Cameron McCarthy

A Critical, Emancipatory Curriculum of Difference

13. The Politics of Race, History, and Curriculum
Joe L. Kincheloe

14. Toward Emancipation in Citizenship Education: The Case of African American Cultural Knowledge
Beverly M. Gordon

Conclusion: Toward a Nonsynchronous Identity

15. Separate Identities, Separate Lives: Diversity in the Curriculum
Peter M. Taubman

Coontributors

Name Index

Subject Index

Description

This book examines issues of identity and difference, both theoretically and as represented in curriculum materials. Here debates over the cultural character of the curriculum are characterized as debates over the American national identity. The editors argue that historically, cultural conservatives have failed to appreciate that the United States is, in a fundamental and central way, an African and African-American place. European Americans are, in a cultural sense, also black, and the failure to teach sequestered suburban (usually Caucasian) students about their (cultural) African and African-American heritage perpetuates their delusion regarding their deeper identities. A curriculum which reflects the non-synchronous identity of Americans is sketched in the last section. Such a curriculum involves not only the inclusion of African and African-American content, but interracial intellectual marriage as well.

Contributors to this book include Peter Taubman, Susan Edgerton, Beverly Gordon, Alma Young, Wendy Luttrell, Cameron McCarthy, Patricia Collins, Roger Collins, Brenda Hatfield, Marianne H. Whatley, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

Louis A. Castenell, Jr. is Dean of the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati. William F. Pinar is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education at Louisiana State University.