Throughout the course, there have been a number of assignments that have resonated with me and made an impact on my journey of multicultural learning and social justice. First off, I thought that the racial academic autobiography was a great exercise. I had never really considered aspects of racial diversity (or lack thereof) in my education before. I think that whiteness was all that I really knew growing up, so it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me. It wasn’t until this exercise forced me to really step back and examine my experiences that I realized I had little to no racial diversity within students, faculty, or staff at almost all levels of my education. This really showed me why I needed to pay more attention to these issues.
The theories group assignments were also very impactful for me in this course. After learning about the theories, it was great to get some practice actually applying the theories to real life scenarios and responding to them at individual, group, and institutional levels. The only criticism that I had about the assignments is that I think they became somewhat repetitive doing them 4 times. I felt that many of the scenarios were very similar and could have been responded to in very similar ways. I think that doing the exercise once or twice would have been enough.
Lastly, the current issue paper assignment really resonated with me. As I mentioned above, I didn’t realize the lack of black faculty members in my academic career until I was actually forced to take a step back and look at it. Because of that, I decided to research the retention of black faculty in higher education. This was really eye opening for me. I discovered how underrepresented black faculty is, how they are mistreated, as well as what barriers are set up against them in higher education.
