Faculty-only settings allow honest anti-racist discussion that student presence suppresses.

Evidence

There must be training sites where teachers have the opportunity to express those concerns while also learning to create ways to approach the multicultural classroom and curriculum. When I first went to Oberlin College, I was disturbed by what I felt was a lack of understanding on the apart of many professors as to what the multicultural classroom might be like. Chandra Mohanty, my colleague in Women’s Studies, shared these concerns. Though we were both untenured, our strong belief that the Oberlin cam pus was not fully facing the issue of changing curriculum and teaching practices in ways that were progressive and promoting of inclusion led us to consider how we might intervene in this process. We proceeded from the standpoint that the vast majority of Oberlin professors, who are overwhelmingly white, were basically well-meaning, concerned about the quality of education students receive on our campus, and therefore likely to be supportive of any effort at education for critical consciousness. Together, we decided to have a group of seminars focusing on transformative pedagogy that would be open to all professors. Initially, students were also welcome, but we found that their presence inhibited honest discussion. On the first night, for example, several white professors made comments that could be viewed as horribly racist and the students left the group to share what was said around the college. Since our in tent was to educate for critical consciousness, we did not want the seminar setting to be a space where anyone would feel attacked or their reputation as a teacher sullied. We did, however, want it to be a space for constructive confrontation and critical interrogation. To ensure that this could hap pen, we had to exclude students. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 81

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is excluding students from faculty anti-racist training ever justifiable within the author’s own participatory ethos? This tension between safety for teachers and transparency for students merits chasing.
• XREF: Performativity and audience effects in discussion parallel the reader’s interests in trust and safe spaces; also echoes ‘small acts’ theme about who gets protected in change processes. — connects to: Even unifying antiracist categories impose their own internal silences.; People voice political opinions privately but suppress them in group settings.; Homogeneous campus settings hide avoidance behavior while exposing stated beliefs — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims: Psychometric…, 115 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• People voice political opinions privately but suppress them in group settings. #corroborates (0.86)
• Apparent classroom neutrality can feel unsafe to students of color #complicates (0.78) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 86
• Even unifying antiracist categories impose their own internal silences. #complicates (0.75)
• University professors are highly conformist and suppress views conflicting with their academy’s beliefs #corroborates (0.74) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 129
• Homogeneous campus settings hide avoidance behavior while exposing stated beliefs #qualifies (0.72) — Sherman A. Lee, Chelsea A. Reid, Stephen D. Short, Jeffrey A. Gibbons, Ruth Yeh, and Matthew L. Campbell, Fear of Muslims, 115