Transcending Racial Boundaries Through Caring: The Autoethnography of an African American Professor and Latina/o Students

• In Event: 42.056 - Teacher Identities: How Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation Inform Pedagogy and the Sense of Belongingness

Abstract

The purpose of this autoethnography is to uncover the ways in which caring, as Nel Noddings explains it, is key to crossing cultural and linguistic boundaries between professors and their students. It is equally important that professors whom share cultural and linguistic norms to also exhibit care in order to enhance their pedagogy. This author’s work took place when she was a first-year African American female professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Author

• Jacqueline B. Koonce, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley