“It’s All in the Family”: BIPOC Professors, Critical Interpersonal Family Communication (CIFC), and Students’ Personal Histories in the Diversity Classroom

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we, as three female BIPOC (one Black/African American full professor, one Black/African American doctoral student, and one Japanese doctoral candidate) with different realities and backgrounds, will use our intersectional identities to recall our experiences teaching courses related to race, ethnicity, and culture at various predominantly white institutions (PWIs) that have been simultaneously rewarding and challenging. For the purposes of this chapter, we will use critical interpersonal family communication (CIFC) to demonstrate how familial socialization around diversity and race can be a significant barrier to these classes. Our students are products of their families, who can hold racist, prejudiced, and biased ideologies that eventually express themselves in the classroom and in their interactions with us. They enter our classrooms with certain ideologies, beliefs, and attitudes about racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that sometimes emerge as hindrances to their own learning, that of their classmates, and our classroom management efforts. Their behaviors and resistance can threaten all efforts toward a liberatory, well-rounded education. In response, we develop strategies and practices fostering classroom respectability and acknowledge intersectional identities and promoting liberation through education as per Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Through this essay, we hope to inspire scholarship on CIFC that explores the influence familial structures have on the ability of BIPOC such as ourselves to teach diversity-related courses.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Pedagogy Charting New Futurities

First Page

226

Last Page

243

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