From a Levinasian perspective, the interaction between two people is an ethical encounter, a face-to-face interaction that calls the subject into question and renders them vulnerable to the ritual of rupture. But what if your embodiment renders you, in the moment of encounter, less than human? How can we bring the imperative of pre-ontological…

This essay explores classroom dynamics when students identify and connect their own painful experiences to structural racism or ethnocentrism exhibited in the Holocaust or parts of Jewish history. The intrusion of this proximal knowledge can be an obstacle to student learning. If engaged by professors, however, I argue that proximal knowledge can…

Adult education scholarship has been racialized through the lens of Eurocentric theory and research. Theoretical paradigms such as Africentrism struggle to gain academic legitimacy as discourses of transformative learning, critical thinking and self-direction--all grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition of the individual pursuit of…

This article is an attempt to reflect on the institutional and disciplinary context of a course on "Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Information Professions" from the perspective of instructors and students. It examines the effectiveness of a course like this as an intervention to the normative landscape of the Library and Information…

This article criticizes the view that, if cultural factors within the black community explain poor educational outcomes for blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow from this. Educational outcomes are the joint, iterated product of schools' responses to students' and parents' culturally conditioned conduct. Schools are…

In this historical study, the author explores the early racial and cultural views of John Dewey. The author argues that, during his years at the University of Chicago, when he wrote the majority of his works on education, Dewey considered American non-White minorities to be biologically equal to Whites but socially deficient. In particular, Dewey…

This paper analyzes whether ethnocentric curricula, defined as courses that focus exclusively on particular racial/ethnic groups, are more prevalent at minority-serving colleges than at mainstream institutions. Using original curricular data for a sample of tribal, Black, Hispanic, and mainstream colleges, the author found that ethnocentric…

This article explores how racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity are addressed in secondary English curriculum policy in Massachusetts, U.S.A. Data are analyzed through theories of the sociology of knowledge and the myth of the United States melting pot. Analysis revealed that curriculum policy privileged Eurocentric literature and the English…

In the spring of 2008, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada released a DVD that was one in a series designed to train literacy teachers in what the Ministry referred to as "high-yield" comprehension strategies. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, this article analyses the picture book…