How to Manage, Facilitate,

and Teach about Culturally

Sensitive Issues

Organized by Morag BurkePresented by Juan Rios, Courtney King, Derina Samuel, and Rebecca Oreto

Courtney King

Fighting for Radical Tolerance in a Feminist Classroom

Hello!

I am Courtney King

Associate Faculty at College of the Redwoods Eureka, CA

M.A. TESOL Central Michigan UniversityM.A. English Literature Washington State University

Radical Tolerance

Hear a student’s prejudicedcomment.

Instead of reacting

negatively, ask why.

Invite the rest of the class to offer

alternatives.

A commitment to acceptance that overlooks your own political leanings. A vision of all students as whole and already knowledgeable when they arrive in your classroom.

Culture CirclesGive students time to talk about the issues that are actually affecting them. No prayer rooms on campus? No place to breastfeed? Racism from townies? This

is where you as a teacher (and an advocate) find out about these issues.

Friere (1970)

Dialogic PedagogyAsk questions. Dig deeper. Get students to challenge what they take for

granted. With care.

Wong (2000)

Exit TicketsGive your students the opportunity to privately tell you if and when they are made to feel uncomfortable in your class (either by you or by a classmate). Do it often and students will open up more about how they really feel and what they need from you. This also shows

students that they are respected.

What would you do?

We are going to explore four scenarios. Work with the people around you to evaluate one of the scenarios in the handout. How could this

situation be approached with radical tolerance? Have you faced such a situation in the past? What did you do?

Scene #1

Before the semester starts, you’re flipping through your textbooks to select units that best meet your course objectives. You come across a

unit about euthanasia that would be perfect for teaching bias and perspective. You know, however, that in your super diverse classroom a few of the students will be adamantly opposed to euthanasia for moral or religious reasons. One of the articles agrees with this view, but the

other does not.

Scene #2

You’re having a class discussion about getting ready for school in the mornings. One student says “Only girls take a long time to get ready because they wear makeup and want to look good.” A female student

shifts in her chair, obviously uncomfortable.

Scene #3

In a low-level grammar class, you are teaching pronouns. The example sentence is “The doctor goes to work.” The image in the text is of a female doctor, so you use the pronoun “she”. Several of the male

students laugh and say “No, he! It’s a Doctor!”

Scene #4

You are designing surveys for a class project. One of the students asks why the survey you gave as an example has “prefer not to say” as a

choice for gender. You explain that this is to include those students who do not identify as male or female, or who do not feel like that label

matches them. The student laughs and many other students in class giggle along. “We don’t have that in my country,” one student says, “In

my country a man is proud to be a man.”