Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: Strategies for Comparative Multicultural Courses
Dennis J. Downey and Ramon S. Torrecilha
Teaching Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 237-247

Naliyah Kaya

I chose this article because I want to look at ways of sociologically addressing race. The article caught my eye because it said we should not address race in a “group a week” format, which made me curious as to what they meant by that term. The article talks about the growing requirement of multicultural studies in undergraduate education and how such courses are best approached. The article criticizes the often utilized format of studying one racial, ethnic, cultural, gender group per week stating that there is no way to address the complexities and comparisons of such groups thoroughly in such a limited amount of time. The authors state that students often end up with a superficial understanding of such groups and walk away thinking they understand such groups yet may actually have gained more misconceptions and stereotypes. For example, the authors discuss that there were only three weeks to discuss the lived experience of all Asian Americans; by the time they were discussing Vietnamese Americans they only had a half hour and thus presented on one part of Vietnamese culture which is very distinct and had to do with astrology, as a result many students walked away viewing all Vietnamese Americans as overly exotic and mystical.
Instead of trying to cram the history and culture of many groups into a short amount of time or selecting only a few groups to spend significant amounts of the course discussing the authors suggest a concept oriented approach. The concept oriented approach means studying what race, ethnicity, culture, racism, ethnocentrism etc. are and mean. By studying the concepts in-depth students gain the tools necessary for critically assessing, comparing, and understanding the history, culture, and lived experience of groups different from themselves. The authors encourage students to look at the histories of groups who differ from themselves, but spend the course teaching and discussing the concepts. The authors then give a brief overview of what a sample syllabus might look like when utilizing their approach and suggest adding a one credit additional course in which students watch specific films which look at the history and lived experience of various groups and then have discussions. They advocate this approach because of the increase in audio and visual stimulation present in current times. How one approaches teaching multicultural courses depends very much on the amount of allotted time as stressed by the authors who discuss which textbooks might be used dependent on if you have a quarter versus semester system or want time to assign various additional readings versus relying more on one book. If possible, on a semester system I think it would be nice to combine the two ideas of concept teaching with films by focusing on the concepts for the first half of the semester and then watching films and discussing how the concepts apply for the second half of the course.
The authors make a very valid point that often in multicultural courses only a select few groups are chosen to be studied and even the groups chosen are often presented only superficially. It is not even realistic to think the history, culture, and lived experience of one group can be critically understood and assessed in one course. The alternative of concept teaching is a very valid argument. In fact it is difficult to understand how we can expect students to critically understand and assess anything if we do not give them the tools (understanding of concepts) necessary to grapple with the complexities of race, ethnicity, and culture in America; we could never expect someone to understand a language if we did not give them the definitions of words.
The idea of concept teaching can definitely be applied to other courses such as women’s studies; instead of focusing only on a few groups of women and their experiences, concepts such as femininity, sexism, and the glass ceiling can be examined which can by applied across the board to understanding the lived experience of women with an encouragement for students to study the histories of specific groups. Perhaps students can each be encouraged to pick a specific group within the course (for multicultural course pick a specific racial, ethnic, cultural group or person) and do a presentation on that person or group at the end of the semester.