American Pluralism And the College Curriculum
Higher Education In a Diverse Democracy

Curricular Recommendations

We recommend that preparation for meaningful citizenship in the united states today be addressed through multiple forms of learning, and, in a variety of educational contexts, across the college experience. Each student’s education should include explorations of the following:

1. Experience, Identity, and Aspiration: The study of ones own particular inherited and constructed traditions, identity communities, and significant questions, in their complexity.
2. United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice: An extended and comparative exploration of diverse peoples in this society, with significant attention to their differing experiences of United States democracy and the pursuits-sometimes successful, sometimes frustrated-of equal opportunity.
3. Experiences in Justice Seeking: Encounters with systemic constraints on the development of human potential in the United States and experiences in community-based efforts to articulate principles of justice, expand opportunity, and redress inequities.
4. Experiences in Multiplicity and Relational Pluralism in Majors, Concentrations, and Programs: Extensive participation in forms of learning that foster sustained exploration of and deliberation about contested issues important in particular communities of inquiry and practice.

Taken together, these complementary forms of learning-personal, societal, participatory, dialogical-constitute a strong curriculum for diversity and democracy. The forms of learning we recommend here take it as a given that students must learn to grapple, in every part of their learning, with multiplicity, ambiguity, and irreducible differences as defining conditions in the contemporary world.

Experience, Identity, and Aspiration

In almost every culture, the most intimate identities a person carries are learned in the home. It is in the natio (the Latin word whence the English word "nation" derives), in one's natal community, often marked and bounded as a sacred space, that humans first gain their sense of relatedness to their deities, to their ancestors, and to their kin. The place of birth is where one is habituated to the tastes and smells of the culture called "home"; it is in the home that the "mother tongue" is learned. What is a boy and what is a girl, what obligations the young owe the old, and how the weak relate to the strong gain their first definition in the home. There, too, the children begin to formulate notions of that to which they themselves may aspire.

The home is often the site and locale where the categories that bind natal communities and constitute them as communities of identity are naturalized and imagined as the general order of things, whether in the United States of America, or in other places around the globe. Children, women and the powerless are habitually told by elders, men and others in power that things are the way they are because they have always been that way.

It is in the movement away from home and its naturalized category, through contact with other universes, with people who are unlike us, that the existence, distinctiveness, and particularities of one's own gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, and class identity are revealed. "What are you?" is the crucial question that jolts one from imagining oneself as the center of the universe and into the recognition that other universes daily define, delimit, and constrain our own. Sociologist Mary Waters (1990) maintains that for the majority of children currently living in the United States of America, this unique interrogation begins primarily at school, through contact with children who are different. This is what first prompts the questions every parent inevitably hears: Who are we? Where did we come from? Why and how are we different?

It is at college, however, that students often learn to devalue their cultures. Universities teach them to forget their particularities and local cultures. New aspirations and hopes may replace those the students brought with them from home. Sometimes that process of erasure is accelerated when the institution not only omits study of their traditions but fails to challenge negative cultural stereotypes and media caricatures.

Education for diversity requires that we encourage, rather than discourage, the exploration of origins and identity as a fundamental subject for college study. Students must learn to understand the metaphorical place of their birth and how that place and the specific identities rooted in it fit into a historically textured matrix of social relations. Their new-found aspirations will be stronger as students are encouraged to consciously mediate between the old and the new in their own lives. We often hear faculty members lament that their students know so little of other peoples. It is equally true that they know too little about themselves and of the communities that helped form them. We see such explorations-and students' dialogues with one another about them-as essential in the quest for wisdom.

In large institutions these explorations will be effectively supported by dedicated curricula, for example, courses or programs on Irish history, African American experience, Chicano history, women's studies, religious studies, and the like. Wherever possible, and in ways appropriate to their missions, universities and colleges should encourage the development of programs that provide a scholarly foundation for the study of diverse traditions and experiences, in their distinctive particularities and their intersections.

In smaller institutions, explorations of experience and identity can be undertaken as part of courses with more general titles: a core course on the American Experience in which each student develops and shares an ethnic autobiography; a general first year writing course in which each student is encouraged to do a family narrative; or a humanities course in which all students research and write studies of their individual families' evolving sense of place and connection. One institution with many immigrant students offers a world studies unit on "Journeys," with each student required to study the meaning of cultural encounter and translation and to write a paper about "journeys" in their families' collective memory.

Another primarily white institution begins its diversity studies by exploring the concept of homogeneity and then challenging students' perceptions of homogeneity through studies of economic, cultural, and religious differences in middle America.

Experience, Identity, and Aspiration: Guiding Principles

Whatever the specific curricular strategy, the important point is that every student be encouraged to discover his or her identity as a distinctive construction of multiple strands of experience and memory.

We do not assume that ethnic studies are for "minority" students, women’s studies for women students, and so forth. Nor do we assume that most students are formed in unitary traditions. Rather, we believe that what has often been a tacit curriculum in United States higher education-the exploration of self, values, meanings, and commitments-ought to become a publicly acknowledged and accredited dimension in every student’s education and in the shared discourse of students and faculty in educational communities.

Similarly, we believe that institutions must recognize that liberal education should not seek to sever students from their original connections. Education should indeed be transformative. But the transformations reconstruct and redirect personal and cultural meanings students bring with them from their communities of origin. It is not a victory when students abandon their Aparochial" origins if old ties are not rewoven into new fabrics of meaning and significance. Cultural connections are critical dimensions in the experience of liberal learning. They should not be suppressed or denied as the price of admission to the society of well-educated persons. Neither, however, should they be necessarily foregrounded in the first year college experience; institutions should provide flexibility so that students may take up this exploration of self and cultural connection as their own readiness inclines them.

United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice

We live in a culturally diverse society whose peoples do not know one another’s cultures and do not know how to learn from one another’s traditions. We live in a democracy whose peoples rarely engage either democracy’s core principles or one another’s different and disparate struggles for justice within the framework of United States democracy. The academy has an opportunity to address both these weaknesses in ways that fulfill its obligation to refract and critically engage the larger society.

We recommend that every college and university require as part of its general education program at least one comparative and relational course in United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice. Because they serve an important civic function and because so many college students take only a year or two toward their degrees, these courses should be offered in the first two years of college or university study. Some institutions may develop a single required course; others may follow the path of establishing criteria and approving a range of courses that meet the criteria.

United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice: Guiding Principles

Courses in United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice should present multiple and comparative narratives of participation in United States society. Such courses should deal comparatively and historically with race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, and other sources of inclusion and exclusion important in this country’s history. The central assignments students undertake in such courses should make it impossible to avoid the multiplicity of United States societal experience.

Courses in United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice should also include analysis of United States democratic aspirations and values, engage diverse strands in the history of democratic pluralism, and recognize multivalent understandings of both the meanings and the effects of this country’s democratic ideals. Students should have substantial opportunities to explore the pluralism inherent in the term "pursuits" of justice in United States history and contemporary society.

These courses should also encourage extended and collaborative dialogue about the past, present, and future of United States democratic aspirations; cultivate awareness of the enriching aspects of cultural diversity; foster respect for the integrity of other peoples’ life experiences; and develop understanding of the multiple vocabularies with which students’ neighbors and fellow citizens interpret their lives.

It is especially important that such courses be both comparative and relational. Comparisons open students to multiple experiences of United States society; relational studies provide ways of deliberately connecting one’s own perspectives with those of other peoples. Engagement, relation, connection are central pedagogical strategies for courses that prepare students for a deliberative democracy.

Experiences in Justice Seeking

The study of United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice will help students learn about the worth and tremendous vitality of the diverse peoples of our land, and, in many cases, the structural impediments to the realization of their democratic aspirations. In our judgment, an essential ingredient of an education for democracy involves, as it did for the Founding Fathers, an encounter-successful or unsuccessful-with the systemic constraints on the full flowering of the human potential. Without this encounter, the study of United States history and society will remain theoretical, cerebral, abstract, and uninvolved.

We call these encounters with systemic constraints "experiences in the pursuits of justice." The inclusion of these pursuits in our curricular recommendations is intended to immerse the student in the experience of justice seeking, of leveling the playing field. Such experiences, in their very conception, would involve students in working with communities and locales where the promises of democracy have been most denied or half-heartedly implemented.

These experiences in justice seeking, it should be emphasized, overlap with but are intended to be quite different from traditional (though still too rare) opportunities for service to the community. While community-service opportunities might focus on providing needed care or on bridging theory and practice, these justice-seeking internships focus more directly on making democracy work for those groups for whom it has worked comparatively poorly. Essential for us is only the immersion of the student in the efforts-sometimes successful, sometimes frustrated, sometimes short-term, sometimes long-term-in pursuit of equal opportunity.

Different institutions and different communities, of course, will define the pursuit of justice differently. This curricular recommendation encourages, therefore, a mutually respectful dialogue between (on the one hand) college or departmental authorities and (on the other) community leadership in defining a mutually attractive agenda.

What are some examples of the kind of experience we are recommending? The list which follows is meant to suggest the range of such experiences; but we stress again that each locale must evolve its own list:

• assisting teachers in underfunded or poorly equipped high schools with mathematics or basic science instruction for at-risk students;
• working to understand and to change patterns of residential discrimination with community residents, public housing authorities, local banks, and urban planners;
• working as volunteers or interns with politically focused organizations like United We Stand, the Rainbow Coalition, the Southern Coalition for Economic and Social Justice;
• interning with local community service agencies, tribal agencies, or local banks, or with community outreach departments of large urban corporations on long-range economic-development plans;
• teaching in local prisons to assist inmates in obtaining their high-school equivalency degrees or in learning computer skills or a foreign language;
• assisting in voter registration drives;
• creating and organizing the long-term staffing of child-care facilities for parents who are just returning to school or to the work force; and
• developing and presenting a community history of justice seeking for use in local libraries.

Experiences in Justice Seeking: Guiding Principles

Innovations such as this run the risk of being perceived as marginal add-ons to the central business of a college education. For the sake of reinforcing our commitment to the importance of such experiences, we offer these guiding principles to those who may be charged with creating such initiatives:

• Throughout this report we have been emphasizing the importance of educating our students to the values and practice of democracy. These experiences in justice seeking are intended to be an experiential introduction to the ways in which democracy works or fails to work, for the sake of making our students more effective contributors to the realization of democratic values.
• While there is some value in virtually any involvement with the practical or daily concerns of the local community, our judgment is that the experiences most educative and illuminating for our students are those which immerse them in the justice-seeking aspirations of the groups especially ill-served by the current configurations of economic and social opportunity.
• To enable the students to be useful participants in the community’s effort, the institution or department must integrate the preparation and supervision of the student’s participation into the curriculum and into the workload of the faculty.
• Lest the experience be fragmented, the institution or the department must integrate opportunities for reflection, discussion, and feedback into the effort. This reflection might take many forms, for example, bi-weekly seminars on progress or lack thereof, a senior-level integrative paper which relates disciplinary theory to practice, a presentation to the city council, etc.
• It is essential that each college work collaboratively from the start with local groups (official or disenfranchised) in defining a mutually attractive agenda. There ought not to be the slightest hint of the college’s or the department’s imposing an agenda or a favored solution upon the community. The experience of working with a highly diverse group of people, perhaps from different cultures from the students, in the forging of a common agenda, is in our judgment an essential component of the liberal education appropriate to multicultural democracy.

Multiplicity and Relational Pluralism in Majors, Concentrations, and Programs

Gerald Graff (1992) has popularized the exhortation "teach the conflicts." We expand and broaden that recommendation to encompass teaching students how to engage conflictual difference or, more precisely, how to participate in collective deliberations about issues where different participants do not agree and are not likely ever to reach unitary understanding. Optimally, such explorations will involve students in experience-based as well as classroom learning and in opportunities to learn from, as well as contribute to, communities of practice related to their central interests. Necessarily, these explorations must involve students in situations where different cultural expectations, competing principles, and different perceptions of the good come into play.

Developing capacities for relational pluralism might fruitfully culminate in an interdisciplinary advanced course in which students discover the potential complementarities, as well as the disjunctures, among different ways of framing and exploring a topic. But teaching the arts of learning through difference is not the work of a single course and certainly not the work of a single course taken late in a course of study. Rather, the capacities basic to relational pluralism are effectively nurtured across a set of extended studies, through a curriculum in which students have multiple opportunities to work in disparate kinds of groups, to explore topics from multiple points of view, to experience others’ strongly felt convictions, to take multiple perspectives and convictions into account in forming their own interpretations, and to acknowledge honestly and dialogically the points and positions at which others will take significant exception to their own observations, interpretations, judgments, and conclusions.

The arts and capacities important to relational pluralism may be introduced in the studies we recommend on experience, identity, and aspiration and on United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice. But students will develop competence in these arts only if major programs build on the introductions provided through general education, fostering the practices of relational pluralism in ways appropriate to their subjects and significant to students who choose to study in specific fields.

The differences students engage in their major studies may be cultural; they may be perspectival or experiential; they may be discipline- or context-related. They may, where possible, include issues of justice and reciprocal obligation. Students can encounter multiplicity and difference through projects, through technology-based dialogues, through linked courses that juxtapose differing approaches to a common topic.

The important thing is that programs and departments involve students in extensive opportunities to practice deliberative discourse on subjects about which they care intensely. All graduates in all programs must learn to listen to others’ experiences and challenges, explore multiple ways of knowing and forming knowledge, and open themselves to experiences of modifying their own understandings based on what they have learned from others’ contributions.

Students’ encounters with diversity through major programs-acknowledging complexity and multiplicity, exploring the dimensions of difference, taking multiplicity into full account in their own constructions-further the deliberative practice of United States pluralism. Students learn to listen to one another in order to understand more completely. Equally important, through their immersion in topics where no single perspective can be adequate to the complexity of the issue, students discover both the limitations of any particular framework and, by extension, their inescapable dependence on difference as a source of greater understanding.

Core Courses on United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice

American Commitments recommends the establishment of core courses on United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice, through which students become knowledgeable about the struggles toward equality and full participation in which many groups within our country have been and are engaged. Most of the courses described here are graduation requirements for students at these institutions.

Example A: A critical examination of diversity is central to the general education program at LeMoyne-Owen College. Social sciences and humanities classes directly target issues of cultural pluralism and unequal power within both the American and the global context. The six-hour social science sequence "Power and Society" and "Uses and Abuses of Power" explore issues of pluralism and diversity in America and abroad. This includes an examination of racial, ethnic, gender, and class differences, seen largely through the prisms of justice and the distribution of power. The first course emphasizes social and economic disparities, the second cultural and psychological elements. Students in this historically black college also take another six-hour sequence, "African American Heritage," that surveys history from the African background to the present, with particular attention placed on the interaction of the Africans with other cultural groups they encounter, including Europeans and European Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans.

Example B: As part of a substantial core curriculum program, students at Temple University are required to take one course in American Culture and another in Studies on Race. The aim of the American culture component is to provide students with fundamental, systematic information about the evolution of such ideas as equality of opportunity, "classlessness," social mobility, tolerance, individualism, equality under the law, the United States as a "nation of immigrants," and the United States as a society that welcomes all peoples. Students can compare courses emphasizing those themes with those in Studies on Race, which engage them in a critical examination of knowledge about the existence of racism cross-culturally, historically, and in the United States today. This examination of the effects of racism on individuals and societies helps prepare students to live in a multiracial, multicultural world.

Example C: The purpose of the State University of New York-Buffalo’s course "American Pluralism and the Search for Equality" is to examine the multicultural, multiethnic nature of American society from the viewpoints of both men and women and of people of diverse ethnicities, social classes, and religious creeds. Its strategies include two major elements. First, it aims at providing students with increased self-awareness of what it means in our culture to be a person of their own gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as an understanding of how these categories affect those who are different from themselves. For example, one instructor uses full-length autobiographies from a variety of writers, finding that reading such works helps students to think better about implications for their own identities. Second, the students are to become more intellectually aware of the causes and effects of structured inequalities and prejudicial exclusion in the United States and of processes leading to a more equitable society.

Example D: "Racial and Ethnic Minorities," devised by a University of Massachusetts-Amherst instructor visiting Wesleyan University, introduces a critical sociological approach to understanding race and ethnicity in the United States, examining how colonialism and immigration have differentially shaped various groups’ access to power as part of an explanation of why racism remains an enduring social problem. A study of impediments to the notion of the United States as a "mecca for diversity" includes exploring the interlocking influences of race, class, and gender, and how these intersections manifest themselves in the economy, education, the family, arts, the law, and other key United States institutions. Throughout the course special attention is paid to how people create strategies for constructive social change.

Experience, Identity, and Aspiration: Course Descriptions

Most institutions offer dozens of ways that students can explore the complexities of their societal history and identity. Here is a sampling of possibilities from institutions that have been leaders in establishing diversity in the curriculum.

Example A: At the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, in the course "Writing about Cultural Communities, Ethnicity, and Imposed -ategories," students use StorySpace, a hypertext writing tool, to explore and understand the role of cultural background, ethnicity, stereotypes, and other constructed categories by examining their own cultural, ethnic, and historical backgrounds, assessing their own world views, and defining their own cultural agendas. Students write daily, producing a variety of short and medium-length writings, in addition to three substantial hypertext documents. The seminar fulfills the Introductory Composition requirement as well as the Race or Ethnicity requirement.

Example B: In "Cross-Cultural Awareness," offered by the Department of Social Welfare at the University of California-Los Angeles, students explore their own cultural background, including race and ethnicity, to understand better the foundation and roots of their values and how they influence behavior in social and professional interactions. The first assignment consists of the development of a personal cultural autobiography. Students also learn how to practice an ethnographic interview and to develop a cultural lens through which to view a variety of sociological phenomena.

Example C: At the University of Massachusetts-Boston, the Anthropology and American Studies Departments co-sponsor a course entitled "Childhood in America," the main purpose of which is to deconstruct, historically and socioculturally, United States notions of children and childhood both across historical time and across sociocultural groups. A course in which the pedagogy is as carefully thought through as the syllabus, it encourages the student to analyze his or her own childhood and family history in the light of the issues and questions the course raises about American childhoods and American culture. Student essays often discuss new realizations of ignorance about differences, racism, exploitation, or family difficulties. The instructor reports that Amany white studentsYconfess they had been ignorant of the struggles of people of color and other minorities, or are ashamed of what the society has allowed," and "many straight studentsYexpress shame and regret over their homophobia."

Example D: Four instructors team-teach Seattle Central Community College’s "Speaking for Ourselves: Cross-Cultural Visions and Connections." The program uses the disciplines of art, art history, sociology, history, literature, and writing to create a multicultural discourse and vision through which cross-cultural presentations and perceptions of self are examined. How do people define and present themselves? What histories have been created or denied to reflect these social relationships? Questions such as these are brought to bear on experiences of American Indians, West Africans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans in the United States. The aim is to build self-knowledge and respect for multicultural voices.

Example E: Occidental College requires a substantial commitment (half of the course load in the fall of the freshman year; one course in the spring; eight more courses before the end of the junior year) to its Cultural Studies Program which, taken as a whole, engages students in a wide variety of cultures, experiences, and issues. In the first year, students can select from a range of cultural studies colloquia. "Women of Color in the United States" relies on a reconstruction of knowledge that moves away from the conceptualization of women of color as "other," taking these women’s vast and varied experiences as an essential resource and focus for study. Gender, race, and socioeconomic class are presented as central theoretical constructs and as conditions of experience that affect all people. In a colloquium centered on the city of Los Angeles, the city’s myths and realities are explored, along with the ways in which they reflect the larger issues of United States culture. A student’s interest in science is contextualized in "Technology and Culture," which surveys the relationship between technology and other aspects of culture in four regions of the globe from the early middle ages until the beginning of the modern era. The course especially considers adaptation to the environment, political economy, world view, religion, and aesthetic sensibilities, beginning and ending with considerations of the problems and prospects of Southern California today. "The Great Migrations" looks at different patterns of migration, emigration, and immigration throughout the world, again focusing on, among other areas, the West Coast population, especially Chicanos and Asian Americans. Through these experiences, students learn to locate themselves and to understand those of differing heritage.

Combinations of Recommendations 1 and 2: Course Descriptions

Especially effective, the American Commitments Panel believes, are courses that combine the grounding of students in their own backgrounds with education in struggles toward justice. These examples suggest two approaches to that goal.

Example A: In the Cultural Foundations segment of the general education curriculum at Saint Edward’s University, students taking "The American Experience" first locate themselves as specifically as possible in the many streams of American culture through the writing of their family history. In order to understand the origin and evolution of the values, myths, ideals, and realities that comprise American culture and the multiplicity of influences that have shaped it over time, students are involved in replicating as closely as possible the actual experiences of the "incoming" groups that have shaped and been shaped by the American experience. Another course, "American Dilemmas," continues the theme of social pluralism and consideration of political and social ideals as it explores the problems and issues our society faces in the present. Students are encouraged to address the meaning of individual and public responsibility and to come to grips with conflicting values in defining problems and their solutions.

Example B: Fairleigh Dickinson University has established a core of four courses for undergraduates that examines Western perspectives, exploring a host of issues that, in the past, were seldom explored in traditional Western civilization courses. Readings for "Perspectives on the Individual" reflect the recognition that the issue of multicultural perspectives can be adequately addressed only when voices from cultures throughout the world and considerations of gender and race are included. "The American Experience" moves from a reading of such texts of the American tradition as the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and King’s "I Have A Dream" speech to the asking of essential questions: Who are "all men"? What is the basis of individual rights? Are we a religious people? What is the American dream and who is included in it? In the third course, "Cross-Cultural Perspectives," the focus is an exploration of the patterns of the traditional cultures of Nigeria, Mexico, India, and China, and the ways in which Western ideas relate to them. Finally, in "Global Issues," social problems such as AIDS, nuclear warfare, and environmental pollution are addressed in ways that go beyond the limits of any one culture or society.

Experiences in Justice Seeking: Course Descriptions

While many institutions encourage community service, it is less common to integrate service learning into the curriculum. These institutions have established courses that serve as useful models.

Example A: Pitzer College’s social responsibility requirement stipulates that students complete a semester of social service community work through a course internship, an independent study, or a non-credit community service assignment. The intent is to provide students with the experience of working with and on behalf of others and to encourage reflection upon the ethical implications of their actions. For example, in the course titled "Social Responsibility and Community," students participate as observers, mentors, and teacher aides in two local multiethnic school districts. From the course has emerged a project through which Pitzer students assist high school teachers and administrators in addressing incidents of interethnic conflict in their schools and developing multicultural and conflict resolution programs. The course "Violence in Intimate Relationships" involves students in working as interns in a shelter or other appropriate agency that serves battered women or abused children.

Example B: In the Hobart and William Smith Colleges course "Politics, Community, and Service," students focus on the meaning of citizenship in an intercultural society. They are required to engage in ten hours of community work at sites approved by the instructor and community partners, and directly related to issues raised in the course. There are extensive readings in the areas of social difference, inequality, social justice, and democratic citizenship. Students keep a journal outlining their reaction to the assigned authors as well as a chronicle of their field experiences and community involvement.

Example C: Rutgers University’s Civic Education and Community Service Program offers a number of courses integrating community service and classroom work in a variety of fields. "Performing Artists" includes work in the schools, such as after-school drama and dance programs. Experience in the community informs and is informed by the academic segment of the course, evoking questions concerning the role of the performing artist in a democratic society, and social responsibility in the arts. "HIV and Society," offered in conjunction with a biology course, provides a forum to apply that course work in the exploration of questions of public health, policy options and consequences, community awareness as related to issues surrounding HIV, and social responsibilities to others. Students also take part in HIV-related community services.

Multiplicity and Relational Pluralism
In Majors, Concentrations, Programs: Examples

In this final category we call not only for individual course work, but also for an infusion, across the curriculum, of knowledge and skills in negotiating diversity. Even those institutions most deeply involved with diversity issues would not yet claim that all their curricular and co-curricular programs are completely transformed to take into account the multiplicity of persons and perspectives that comprise them. We look here at initiatives that move in the direction of infusion and at strategies that seem to promise real progress. It is helpful to make a clear distinction between adding content on diversity topics to the curriculum and deliberately cultivating skills in negotiating differences that cannot or should not be assimilated.

I. Engaging Difference: Course work

Example A: Clustering courses is a useful way of extending the intellectual engagement with diversity over a broader spectrum than can be accomplished with a single course, as well as providing a more integrated learning experience. A course cluster developed at the State University of New York-Potsdam illustrates the way linked courses can help students work through multiple points of view. Three instructors created the cluster, called "Becoming American," drawing on courses from politics, English, and anthropology. Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America serves as the centerpiece around which the texts for the three courses are grouped. Instructors report that this approach helps students apply their learning across courses with greater facility. The politics course, "United States Pluralism and the Pursuits of Justice," examines how United States government policy has affected people of color and identified some of the cultural values inherent in American law. "Women in American Indian Cultures," the anthropology component, looks at the impact of government policy on the lives of American Indian women and how the narrative about them was framed by anthropologists. Meanwhile, through the literature course, "Dragons, Ghosts, and China Dolls," students gain a knowledge of the canon of Chinese American women’s literature and consider questions of Chinese American female identity through the intersections of gender, race, class, and ethnicity.

Example B: An introductory course in the English department at the University of Chicago engages students in contested issues within the field through exposure to the department’s diverse perspectives and methods. Each section of the course is taught by an instructor in the required course for majors, "Methodologies and Issues of Literary Study." The several sections are taught concurrently so that the classes may come together periodically for shared meetings on topics related to the assigned texts. These meetings provide a forum for students to experience intraprofessional differences, as well as the differences between professional and student viewpoints. Gerald Graff, one of the course instructors, notes that, "if introduced properly, the faculty perspectives can create a context for studying the primary literature rather than crowding it out, and students can acquire a map of the department and, by extension, of the field."

Example C: At Loyola University in Chicago, the department of communications requires all majors to take an introductory course which examines communication practices in light of the social, historical, and political contexts which have shaped them. Students explore the relationships between communication practices and questions of social power, knowledge, world view, aesthetics, and action. Additionally, the department offers a social justice concentration. Among the required courses is an internship or directed study, in which service, academic study, and structured reflection are deliberately linked; sample sites include Urban League, Philippine Workers Alliance, Coalition for Homeless, and PTAs. An introductory course, "Social Justice and Communication," explores ways that communication can serve social justice by assisting those concerned with poverty and inequality.

II. Engaging Difference: Co-Curricular Strategies

Hobart and William Smith Colleges are actively working with diversity issues at the co-curricular level. They have instituted a Community Service House for students committed to performing five hours of service per week. The house coordinates efforts between school and community, and sponsors dialogue groups among students where they learn the skills of articulation, mediation, conflict resolution, and positive action around issues of interculturalism and pluralism.

THE AMERICAN COMMITMENTS NATIONAL PANEL

PROJECT STAFF

Acknowledgments

The Association of American Colleges and Universities extends warm thanks to the Ford Foundation which provided grant support that enabled AAC&U to launch the American Commitments initiative and the work of the National Panel. We are especially grateful to Edgar Beckham, program officer in education and culture at the Ford Foundation, whose vision and commitment have helped hundreds of colleges and universities develop productive ways to educate students for the diversities and possibilities of the world they inherit. We also extend our thanks to Alison Bernstein, director of education and culture at the Ford Foundation, for her continuing confidence in AAC&U’s work on equity and diversity. In addition, we thank the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which has also supported the American Commitments initiative.

Thanks are due as well to Paula Brownlee, president of AAC&U, for her support of this initiative and for constructive readings of the Panel reports.

Members of the Panel owe great thanks to Maureen McNulty, who as special assistant to the Panel contributed editorial skill, bibliographical zeal, and organizational support to the work of the Panel. While Maureen McNulty was on maternity leave, Charlotte Hogsett ably served as editor-advisor to the project.

The curriculum recommendations presented in this report were developed by members of the National Panel. Troy Duster, RamÊn GutiÌrrez, Patrick Hill, Harry Kitano, Caryn McTighe Musil, Elizabeth Minnich, and Carol Schneider provided draft language for the recommendations. Carol Schneider, as scribe for the Panel, wrote the report.

In developing this report, the Panel benefited substantially from American Commitments’ concurrent responsibility for a Curriculum and Faculty Development project on American pluralism in the curriculum involving ninety-three colleges and universities-twenty-two "resource institutions," and seventy-one "planning institutions." Panel member Caryn McTighe Musil and AAC&U senior fellow Gwen Dungy, who lead this major curriculum change initiative, helpfully connected it to the Panel’s work.

Panel members and participants in the American Commitments Curriculum and Faculty Development project identified campus courses and programs that illustrate the recommendations. Maureen McNulty and Charlotte Hogsett elicited campus descriptions and wrote the examples. Kathleen Connelly, Kevin Hovland, Debra Humphreys, and Suzanne Hyers, all AAC&U staff members working on the American Commitments initiative, made very helpful contributions to the work of the Panel and of the Curriculum and Faculty Development project.

Drafts of this report were discussed with academic administrators and faculty members at AAC&U’s 1995 annual meeting in Washington, D.C., and at two NEH-supported institutes at Williams College for participants in the Curriculum and Faculty Development project in August 1994 and July 1995. The report was also discussed with participants at the October 1994 fourth annual meeting of the Ford Foundation Campus Diversity Initiative in Tucson, at the October 1994 annual meeting of the Association for General and Liberal Studies in Savannah, at a March 1995 national conference on Teaching Cultural Encounters as General Education cosponsored by St. Lawrence University and AAC&U in New Orleans, and at an April 1995 national conference on Community, Difference, and Civic Engagement cosponsored by Grand Valley State University, the Kettering Foundation, and AAC&U in Chicago. We extend thanks to all who took part in these discussions and especially to participants who made written suggestions for strengthening the report.

Finally, we acknowledge the commitment, competence, and support of AAC&U’s communications department, which prepared this report for publication. Joann Stevens, vice president for communications, helped develop the format for the reports and worked on the selection of cover photographs. Cindy Olson brought creativity, skill, and wonderful patience in creating the design for a report that remained in dialogue almost to the moment of publication. Thanks also to Amy Wajda and Heather Collins for their proofreading and copyediting.