How to Manage, Facilitate, and Teach About Culturally Sensitive Issues

An Exercise in Radical Tolerance

Scene Response

Before the semester starts, youre ipping 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
1 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.

Youre having a class discussion about getting ready for

school in the mornings. One student says Only girls
2 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.

In a low-level grammar class, you are teaching

pronouns. The example sentence is The doctor goes
3 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! Its a Doctor!

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.
4 You explain that it 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 dont have
that in my country, one student says, In my country a
man is proud to be a man.

Courtney King ILGBTF, ITA, ICIS

[Link] Intersection Panel
[Link]@[Link] T OL 2017


How to Manage, Facilitate, and Teach About Culturally Sensitive Issues

How else can we practice radical tolerance?

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Suggested Reading

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Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Quarterly, 33(3), 566-573.

Bohmer, S. K.. (1989). Resistance to Generalizations in the Classroom. Feminist Morgan, B. & Vandrick, S. (2009) Imagining a peace curriculum: What second-

Teacher, 4(2/3), 5356. language education brings to the table. Peace & Change. 34(4) p. 510-532.

Bondestam, F. (2011). Resisting the discourse on resistance: Theorizing experiences from Saleem, F. & Zubair, S. (2013). (Under)representing women in curricula: A content

an action research project on feminist pedagogy in different learning cultures in Sweden. analysis of Urdu and English te books at the primary level in Pakistan. Pakistan Journal of

Feminist Teacher, 21(2), 139-152. Womens Studies. 20(1) pp. 57-71.

Crookes, G. V. (2013). Critical ELT in action: Foundations, promises, praxis. Routledge. Schenke (1996). Feminist theory and the L classroom n just a Social Issue:

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Press. Warren (1989). Rewriting the ture: The feminist challenge to the malestream curriculum. The

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Publishing Group Limited. Teachers College Press.

Golden, C. (1985). The radicalization of a teacher. The Feminist Teacher Anthology: Willett, J., & Jeann , M. (1993). Resistance to taking a critical stance. T OL Quarterly, 477-495.

Pedagogies and Classroom Stategies. Ed. Cohee, G. E. New York: Teachers College Press. Wolfe, P. (2000). Gender and language in four secondary, L classrooms. Equity & Excellence in

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regimes of truth. New York: Routledge. Wong, S. (2006). Dialogic Approaches to T OL: Where the Gingko Tree Grows. New York: Routledge.

Grey, M. (2009). Ethnographers of difference in a critical EAP community-becoming. Yepez, M. E. (1994). An observation of gender-speci c teacher behavior in the L classroom. Sex

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 121-133. Roles, 30(1-2), 121-133

Courtney King ILGBTF, ITA, ICIS

[Link] Intersection Panel
[Link]@[Link] T OL 2017