Going Inward

The focus of this valuable anthology is exciting and long overdue. These compelling and courageous autobiographical stories offer useful insights and understandings, inviting readers into a state of self-reflection while also strengthening their ability to teach effectively across cultural lines. Highly recommended. (Ann Todd Jealous, Co-author/Co-editor of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief About Racism) The writers of these personal accounts tug at the intricate threads of their cultural backgrounds, gently pulling them through into the light of their own educational practices to see what can be found there. And what they find is that in coming to know the presence of their cultural roots in their teaching, they see themselves and students through a new lens. (Linda K. Shadiow, Author of What Our Stories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty) In this important and scrupulously edited book, Alicia Fedelina Chavez and Susan Diana Longerbeam, along with their contributors - drawn from multiple disciplines - argue passionately and thoughtfully for the centrality of putting a strengths-based approach into our teaching in today's multicultural and multi-ethnic classrooms. The path they advocate is one that eschews performance, skillful lecturing, and disembodied teaching but rather honors the teacher bringing into the learning context her/his whole self - culture, identity, ideals, and assumptions - and encouraging the students to do the same. Introspection is critical to this approach for it can help the teacher or students `discover the depth of culture, its beauty and origin, and the roots of [one's] previously unearthed strengths, failings, and biases.' This persuasive anthology will be of interest to those involved in education at all levels, especially in higher education; it is an essential book for those involved in working with student teachers. Embracing the message of Going Inward could well transform teaching. (Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education, Dartmouth College; Co-editor of Growing Up Muslim: Muslim College Students in America Tell Their Life Stories; First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories; Balancing Two Worlds: Asian American College Students Tell Their Life Stories; Mi Voz, Mi Vida: Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories; Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories; Souls Looking Back: Life Stories of Growing up Black; and Crossing Customs: International Students Write on U.S. College Life and Culture) Going Inward should be essential reading for anyone genuinely interested in the humane aspects of teaching in the university classroom. Regardless of field of study or instruction, this collection provides the theoretical and rhetorical framework for a discussion of a new, introspective pedagogy. Encouraging instructors to turn inward, to consider the individual lived experiences and cultural backgrounds from which they spring, to inform how they teach and how they are perceived by those they teach, the essays in this collection provide examples of how to embrace and explore, rather than avoid and deny, the individual lived lives of university professors and the students they stand before. This collection is a call for a new kind of teaching, one that is informed by introspection and that encourages instructors and students alike to embrace the individual, complex, yet informing and essential, cultural, historical, and personal backgrounds from which they come. This collection is not only important for individual college or university instructors, it should also be the beginning of a conversation that can encourage a more introspective