Tufts Faculty of Color Working Group: Home

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

She offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing. In the process she develops a pedagogy that encompasses wholeness, multiculturalism, and contemplative practice, that helps students transcend limiting views about themselves; fosters high expectations, and helps students to become social change agents.

This book, the author shares her philosophy of the classroom, offering ideas about teaching that fundamentally rethink democratic participation. She writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. She advocates the process of teaching students to think critically and raises many concerns central to the field of critical pedagogy, linking them to feminist thought. In the process, these essays face squarely the problems of teachers who do not want to teach, of students who do not want to learn, of racism and sexism in the classroom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for the author, the teacher's most important goal

Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom-not merely reform-teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist.

In this work, the author, a social psychologist, addresses one of the most perplexing social issues of our time: the trend of minority underperformance in higher education. With strong evidence showing that the problem involves more than weaker skills, he explores other explanations. Here he presents an insider's look at his research and details his groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity, findings that will deeply alter the way we think about ourselves, our abilities, and our relationships with each other. Through dramatic personal stories, he shares the researcher's experience of peering beneath the surface of our ordinary social lives to reveal what it is like to be stereotyped based on our gender, age, race, class, or any of the ways by which we culturally classify one another.

The academy may claim to seek and value diversity in its professoriate, but reports from faculty of color around the country make clear that departments and administrators discriminate in ways that range from unintentional to malignant. Stories abound of scholars--despite impressive records of publication, excellent teaching evaluations, and exemplary service to their universities--struggling on the tenure track. These stories, however, are rarely shared for public consumption. Written/Unwritten reveals that faculty of color often face two sets of rules when applying for reappointment, tenure, and promotion: those made explicit in handbooks and faculty orientations or determined by union contracts and those that operate beneath the surface. It is this second, unwritten set of rules that disproportionally affects faculty who are hired to "diversify" academic departments and then expected to meet ever-shifting requirements set by tenured colleagues and administrators.

Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in college teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practical--the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice. Kevin Gannon asks that the contemporary university's manifold problems be approached as opportunities for critical engagement, arguing that, when done effectively, teaching is by definition emancipatory and hopeful.

Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty examines the challenges faced by diverse faculty members in colleges and universities. Highlighting the experiences of faculty of color--including African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Indigenous populations--in higher education across a range of institutional types, chapter authors employ an autoethnographic approach to the telling of their stories.

Dr. Malika Grayson offers an account of surviving and thriving as a doctoral candidate in STEM. Written for those who have never seen themselves represented in their chosen career, Hooded provides practical survival strategies, mental health tips, and ideas for creating community and leaving a lasting legacy. With this essential resource, you won't feel quite as alone--and you might even become your own unexpected hero.

Black Woman's Guide represents a timeless source of strategies to help you advance in academia. Navigating the academy as a professor offers an opportunity to build a prestigious full- or part-time career as you transform the knowledge and attitudes of today's students. The Guide will allow you to: Gain knowledge to help you plan and build your career in the academy. Develop techniques to strengthen your classroom performance and navigate the culture of academia. Learn how the university you choose impacts your faculty experience. Successfully complete a competitive application for a faculty position at the school of your choice. Expand or extend your professional career to include teaching in the academy.

Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy go beyond standard professional resources to serve up practical advice for black faculty intent on playing--and winning--the tenure game. Addressing head-on how power and the thorny politics of race converge in the academy, The Black Academic's Guide is full of invaluable tips and hard-earned wisdom. It is an essential handbook that will help black faculty survive and thrive in academia without losing their voices, or their integrity.

Queer People of Color in Higher Education (QPOC) is a comprehensive work discussing the lived experiences of queer people of color on college campuses. This book will create conversations and provide resources to best support students, faculty, and staff of color who are people of color and identify as LGBTQ.

This book brings together five of today's leading scholars concerned with the condition of males of color in higher education - LeManuel Bitsóí, Edmund T. Gordon, Shaun Harper, Victor Sáenz and Robert Teranishi, who collaborated closely through of a series of conversations convened by the College Board to diagnose the common factors impeding the success of under-represented males and to identify the particular barriers and cultural issues pertaining to the racial and ethnic groups they examine.

Centered on the narratives from ethnically and racially diverse scholars of color with experience studying and working in predominantly White institutions in the United States, this volume offers critical reflection on common assumptions, policies, and practices which limit or preclude racial diversity and inclusion in various types of educational contexts and settings. Scholars at different stages of their careers and from varied sociocultural backgrounds offer powerful critiques of contemporary experiences of disproportionality, mis/labelling, and exploitation, among others.

Combining an overview of current research literature and 23 engaging narratives, Faculty of Color invites deeper dialogue on the experiences of faculty of color teaching in predominantly white institutions. By raising issues for commentary and investigation, the book challenges its readers to adopt effective strategies for the recruitment and retention of faculty of color in higher education. 

The 14 new essays in this collection, from under-represented faculty who teach at predominantly white colleges and universities, discuss both the tenure and promotion experiences of faculty of color and are not racial, ethnic, gender, cultural or discipline specific. The book is thus not only for aspiring graduate students of color and faculty of color desirous of outside mentoring but also for administrators interested in the professional development and dilemmas of faculty of color.