CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Cultural Studies (Alone) Won’t Do It: Strategic Reform of Academic Departments in the University1
Tác giả
Shepard S.
Năm xuất bản
2004
Source title
Freirean Pedagogy, Praxis, and Possibilities: Projects for the New Mlllennium
Số trích dẫn
0
DOI
10.4324/9780203009550-15
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
As we prepare to enter the new millennium, we ask ourselves if multicultural and countercultural thinking is penetrating the great American university’s canon of necessary truths and ideas, or if the Anglo-centric legacy has actually regrouped and solidified its position. Are the marginalized, the oppressed, the people of color, and all those with progressive insights on truth and beauty reconstructing the concept of a “liberal” education, or a “degree-worthy” education, or are the voices along the margins being brushed aside still? Although what I call “multicultural programming”-for want of a more precise term- proliferates in colleges and universities all over the country, I suggest here that this has not meant that white power reality in higher education is being dismantled or even remodeled by the rainbow coalition. I think what has happened is that white power at college has learned how to deal with multicultural activism, its intellectuals, its noise makers. Multiculturalism 2 has made it onto the campus, which counts for something, but has not found a home inside those buildings where the ivy grows thick on the walls; the registrars and the advisors and the deans don’t sweat it; and the president and the trustees don’t even see it. The university has ghettoized its multiculturalists, and this is manifested in a two-track educational system-one track consisting of “the core” material, which emerges in and is sustained through “required” courses, and the other track, the “alternative” (multicultural) material, which, like what is taught in cosmology or flight attendant school, is meaningful for a few, but not required of and representing little of significance to anybody else. I don’t mean to belittle the books, ideas, or personnel associated with multicultural education as measured against “traditional” education-especially since my sentiments and loyalties are there among the multiculturalists; nor am I belittling cosmology. I am distressed that after a quarter century of cultural studies programming on many campuses, we continue to find that the experiences, creations, and contributions of and about folks of color are treated by those in power as something one can choose to study or choose to ignore without doing injury to one’s education; and material that encroaches on or is threatening to white power reality remains among the electives rather than the requirements. It is inconceivable that someone would suggest that the contributions of Homer, Shakespeare, Roosevelt, Descartes, or Freud were optional, not terribly critical components of undergraduate education. Yet the texts of artists and intellectuals of color, those American or those from cultures around the world, continue to be treated as add-ons to what really matters, rather than as irreplaceable pieces of what higher learning ought to be in the twenty-first century. And it is getting worse, I suggest, because the activist scholars who might make a difference in the traditional departments are continuously migrating into the scholarly ghettos that we think of as cultural programs. 3. © 2000 by Stanley F.Steiner.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
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Nơi xuất bản
Taylor and Francis
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus