Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Diversity, and Collaboration in the Graduate Classroom

• In Event: Teaching Culture in Public Speaking

Abstract

Preparing to teach a graduate course for the first time is a daunting task. Many things went through my mind as I searched for a way to both share my passions of diversity and pedagogy with my future students. For this panel I will discuss how I am creating a course that culminates in an examination of diversity education in the field of communication and with my students will conduct a replication of the previously published work, “it is not my responsibility to teach culture!” White graduate teaching assistants negotiating identity and pedagogy, by Jackson, et. al. (2007). In this course we will reflect on the public identities we both preform consciously and unconsciously as teachers of core courses in communication, and on how the performance of these identities may affect the speaker’s credibility and pedagogical choices. This meta course will then serve to equip future educators in communication with the tools they need to comfortably discuss issues of our socially constructed differences and cultural identity without hesitation wherever their careers take them, be it academia or corporate.

Author

• Tammy Jeffries, Western Kentucky U