Hughes, Sherick A.

Dr. Sherick A. Hughes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foundations of Education at the University of Toledo. He earned his MPA and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on socio-historical, socio-cultural, and multiethnic education in urban and rural school communities. Dr. Hughes has particular research interests in the relationships between schools, families, and the communities that produce them.

What We Still Don't Know About Teaching Race

2005 0-7734-5928-6
The sections of this book and chapters therein are intended to offer an additional lens for an anti-oppressive pedagogy of race. It is organized to present this lens with clarity through (a) a stepwise approach to educating our students on the topic of race, (b) enhancing our potential and our students’ possibilities for transcending ‘race’s’ barriers, and (c) engaging in the challenging role of writing (‘I’ as scholar) and against ourselves (‘I’ as scholar with flaws in teaching about race). It taps the expertise of thoughtful, critical, and reflexive scholars from Education and several related disciplines to address (a) how ‘race’ is socially constructed in teaching and learning settings, rendering it either sustainable and substitutable, or deconstructed and re-appropriated; and (b) strategies for minimizing any detrimental influences of race-related actions or inaction on the quality of teaching and learning … living. This book intends to critique traditional race-related praxis and to offer competing ideas for praxis that challenge our taken-for-granted knowledge about race. Thick, rich narratives, strong syntheses, and analyses stemming from multiple methods within the book hold potential to broaden possibilities of educators teaching about race; heighten students’ understanding of social contexts of teaching/schooling; and deepen empathy of anyone else on the fringes of engaging a commitment to (a) teach diverse others, (b) re-teach diverse others about the chaos surrounding race, and (c) teach diverse others to be self-critical of othering by re-appropriating race as a dangerous concept driven largely by social history of ideology; biological determinism; political imposition and exclusion; performance expectations; and schooling. Similar to Dr. Fred Riggs of the University of Hawaii, the term ‘race’ is written in quotation marks in each section heading to remind us to be personally suspect of the term, while also remembering that it is part of an international critical dialogue.