Negotiating Diversity and Positionality as International Teaching Assistants of Color

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: CERECG SIG Round Table 6: Positionalities of Color in Academia (Table 4)

Abstract

In this paper, two scholars from India discuss their experience teaching children’s literature in a predominantly white institution and how their engagement with students in the classroom explored questions of race, class, and gender. By using autoethnography, the two scholars borrow from their graduate assistantship teaching experience and analyze the lack of diversity in the curriculum and the burden of introducing students to diverse and transnational children’s literature. In doing so, the graduate assistants explore the ways they navigated their positionality, affective dissemination of culturally relevant pedagogy to create a diversifying curriculum and instructional mode

Authors

• Samrat Sharma, Pennsylvania State University

• Arpita Sarker, University of Iowa