On Love and Learning: Reflections of a white professor "teaching" black adult students (original) (raw)

Most broadly, this essay is my mission, as a white teacher, to examine my teaching process as a way to understand and improve my work with students, particularly black adult students. Throughout these pages, I show examples of my teaching journal as well as examples of student reading reflections during a semester of teaching Cultural Competency in Human Services to a class of mostly black, African American and Caribbean American adult students, pursuing undergraduate degrees in Human Services.  These excerpts combined with my thinking, questioning, and wondering in response to these examples, I begin a conversation about race, racism, power and privilege, identity and history, topics that are often unspoken or invisible for faculty specifically, but not exclusively, white faculty. Social justice is an ongoing process for both educators and students. Nelson and Witte write that, “critical reflection must be part of any social justice action” (2017, 16). In this example, I s...