Multiracial Womanist Perspectives on Curriculum

• In Event: Womanist Curriculum Perspectives and Possibilities

Abstract

Sonia Janis is one half Polish, one quarter Russian, and one-quarter Japanese. She was born, raised, and educated in public schools in the suburbs of Chicago, and then abruptly transitioned to public schools located in north Alabama when she was an adolescent. She explores her mixed race experience of childhood, adolescence, college years, teaching and administration positions, pursuing curriculum studies, and working as a pre-service teacher educator in a predominantly White institution. She explores the spaces in-between race and place from her perspective as an educator who is multiracial and/or hapa according to the latest race-based verbiage. She searches for language to portray the experience of people of mixed race such as herself and come across a long list of words and labels. She finds that most of these words, whether they are verbs, nouns, or adjectives, have negative connotations. She uses “multiracial,” “biracial,” and “mixed race” interchangeably throughout her writing.

Sonia explores multiracial womanist perspectives on curriculum studies by drawing upon various forms of “misceg-narrations” (Salgado, 2004) which include autobiography, biography, memoir, counter narrative, anthology, and poetry. Sonia illuminates that narrative inquiry into the daily lives of multiracial individuals remains a strikingly significant way to portray the complexities of these individuals’ experiences. Salgado (2004) coined the term, “misceg-narrations,” to tell complex and contested life stories of a mixed race person.

Sonia invites the audience to see that even within the multicultural, multilingual and multiracial milieu, historically marginalized individuals and communities continue to experience oppression in forms that are strikingly similar to those of the past. These oppressions and subjugations are also changing and taking on new forms. Sometimes the forms are subtle, while others are blatant. These oppressions cross time and space. Womanism seeks to be inclusive, integrative and empowering to all racial, ethnic and cultural groups. Sonia illustrates that multiracial womanist perspectives influence the ways we understand increasingly diverse schools, neighborhoods, and communities that are no longer embodied entirely by individuals holding steadfastly to a mono-racial identity. Rather, schools, neighborhoods and communities include individuals who embody and identify with two or more races. Such understandings of these multiracial experiences may influence how we make practical and policy ramifications that are inclusive of the perspectives of individuals, families, and communities that are multicultural and multiracial.

Both “mixed/multi-race studies” and womanism are included and excluded from present understandings of curriculum. The work within “mixed race (or multiracial) studies” “is the scholarship and research addressing the personal, social, and political implications of an individual coming from more than one racial group” (Shih & Sanchez, 2009, p. 2). Anzaldua’s (with Moraga, 1981 & with Keating, 2002) critical works by and for women of color illustrate some of the significant ideologies that frame multiracial womanist ways of knowing and being in the world. What could be uncovered and understood through multiracial womanist perspectives has far-reaching implications for students, teachers, parents, leaders, policy makers, and educational workers.

Author

• Sonia E. Janis, University of Georgia