From Center to Margins

The Importance of Self-Definition in Research

Edited by Diane S. Pollard & Olga M. Welch
Foreword by Christine E. Sleeter

Subjects: African American Studies
Paperback : 9780791467725, 154 pages, May 2006
Hardcover : 9780791467718, 154 pages, May 2006

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Table of contents

Foreword
Christine E. Sleeter

Introduction. Women Researchers of Color: Have We Come a Long Way
Olga M. Welch and Diane S. Pollard

1. Women of Color and Research: A Historical and Contemporary Context
    Diane S. Pollard

2. Making Intellectual Space: Self-determination and Indigenous Research
    Frances V. Rains 

3. Reflections on the Process of Becoming an Academician
    Barbara Curry

4. Language, Literacy and Culture: Intersections and Implications
    Sonia Nieto 

5. The Outsider within Multicultural Education: Understanding the Field from a Marginalized Viewpoint
    Valerie Ooka Pang

6. Seeing with the Cultural Eye: Different Perspectives of African American Teachers and Researchers
    Jacqueline Jordan Irvine

7. Response to Papers on From Center to Margin: The Importance of Self-definition in Research
    Maxine Greene

8. Making the Familiar Strange: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Erasure: Summarizing the Philosophies of Women Researchers of Color
    Olga M. Welch

Contributors
Index 

Considers perspectives from a diverse group of women educational researchers of color who center their discussion within the margins rather than from the center.

Description

In From Center to Margins, women educational researchers of color, trained in mainstream Euro-American traditions, interpret the experiences of those, including themselves, who are marginalized by these very traditions. Deliberately looking at research from within the margins rather than from the center, the contributors detail how their perspectives influence the way they frame questions for study, develop procedures to investigate them, and devise strategies for answering them. The contributors offer an alternative to the dominant perspective in educational research that uses its power to determine who shall be centered and who, marginalized. This book presents the margins, where women and other people of color reside intellectually, not as deficient areas from which we need to escape, but as legitimate sites where knowledge, useful to wider audiences, has been and will continue to be generated.

Diane S. Pollard is Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She is the coeditor (with Cheryl S. Ajirotutu) of African-Centered Schooling in Theory and Practice. Olga M. Welch is Professor and Dean of the School of Education at Duquesne University and the coauthor (with Carolyn R. Hodges) of Standing Outside on the Inside: Black Adolescents and the Construction of Academic Identity, also published by SUNY Press.