Also featured are comments from a roundtable discussion on multicultural teaching, authors’ responses to questions about multicultural teaching, and a chapter on classroom and workshop exercises.

The authors and editors of Multicultural Teaching in the University, recently published by Praeger, Westport, Conn., are looking forward to the book’s first reviews. They hope it eventually will be published in paperback.

Hardbound copies are available at the Undergraduate and Harlan Hatcher Graduate libraries and are for sale at local bookstores at $55 per copy.

“Powerful, very real, very open,” is how Zuniga, program associate in LS&A’s Pilot Program, describes contributors’ accounts of their classroom successes and failures.

She also notes that the contributors represent a wide range of disciplines, from architecture and social work to biology, English and mathematics.

In a chapter describing his course on ethnic identity and intergroup relations, Schoem acknowledges that the influence of racism and intergroup hatred “is deeply and powerfully embedded in our society and is not easily overcome.”

Schoem, LS&A assistant dean for undergraduate education and lecturer in sociology, says that in teaching intergroup relations he has found that students pass through distinct learning stages.

“First they are defensive, claim to hold no prejudices, and look for simplistic ‘answers’ to the questions of intergroup relations. Slowly they become more critical, open and honest, and class discussion becomes more analytic, contested and vigorous,” Schoem writes.

Answers don’t come easily or quickly.

Schoem writes that he tells students they “must take it upon themselves to search for answers or at least directions that society has not provided for them. They must begin to see themselves as active players and policy-makers and leaders, whether on an individual or family or institutional level, and disabuse themselves of any notion that the ‘experts’ know all and understand completely.”

Lewis J. Kleinsmith, professor of biology, notes in his chapter, “Racial Bias in Science Education,” that because natural scientists pride themselves on their objectivity and fairmindedness, the suggestion that they are involved in racial discrimination elicits cries of protest.

Looking for an explanation of why people of color and females historically have been underrepresented in technical and scientific professions, Kleinsmith concluded that science education tends to illustrate a pernicious form of institutional racism referred to as indirect institutionalized discrimination—“organizational practices that have a negative impact on racial minorities even though the community norms underlying these practices are, on their face and in their intent, fair and racially neutral.”

It is not discriminatory intent, but rather a discriminatory outcome, that defines this kind of institutional racism, Kleins-mith says.

Kleinsmith also describes the 1984 launching of the Biology Study Center and the success of the biology software project, which is used by a majority of introductory biology students as a learning resource center.

“The most striking conclusion to emerge from my experiences has been that the racially biased outcomes previously observed in introductory biology could be eliminated by educational changes directed at improving the academic performance of the class as a whole, not just minority students,” Kleinsmith writes.

Lewis, associate professor of social work and a contributor and editor of Multicultural Teaching in the University, says she would recommend the book to faculty attempting to retool, adding “none of us were taught to teach in this fashion. There is new knowledge about teaching being created, disseminated and modified as people gain additional insights from their own experiences.”