December 2, 2011

The Diversity in Action seminar series ended for the semester Friday with a panel on multiculturalism in United States university classrooms.

Assistant professor Srirupa Prasad discussed her own experiences teaching American students about multicultural topics.

The seminar was focused on Prasad’s experiences in the classroom at MU teaching about multicultural issues and how her students responded to the issues themselves as well as to her as an authority figure on the topics.

Prasad focused on two courses she has taught at MU: Gender in India and Women and Health in America. She said these courses required her to ask students to “radically reevaluate their world views.”

“In classrooms in academic curriculum, many times what we end up doing is reproducing and reiterating some of the dominant ideologies,” Prasad said.

Prasad said dominant ideologies may be an idea that a certain culture has about the way things are.

In the context of her discussion, she used the phrase in reference to the idea that Americans believe that all students have equal opportunities to be educated and get good jobs. She says this is not necessarily the case.

“Students come from all kinds of backgrounds,” Prasad said. “To begin with, students are not really on the same kind of platform that they will be able to reach the same kind of goal that educational institutions want their students to reach.”

Prior to teaching at MU, Prasad worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of medical history and bioethics.

She said she had an easy time having authority about a topic she called the “burden of belonging.”

“The burden of belonging is a situation in which particular members of a particular community are almost taken as representatives of those communities,” Prasad said.

She gave the example of herself, an Indian woman, having the authority to speak about Indian women in society and contrasted her experience in Gender in India with her experiences in her Women and Health in America course.

“I have had a very different set of experiences while teaching this course,” she said. “While my authority in the gender in India course was much more clearly given to me because I am an Indian woman, in this context when I was talking about the U.S., Europe and ‘the third world,’ I felt that sometimes my students had a hard time talking about the issues I was talking about.”

The Diversity in Action seminars will continue next semester. The next panel will take place Feb. 8.

“There are really not any answers, they are more my experiences and the way I am trying to develop and formulate my reaction through my experiences of teaching these courses,” Prasad said.

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