"What's Identity Got to Do With It? Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom"

a discussion with

Paula M. L. Moya

Thursday, October 21, 2004
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: Draft version of "What's Identity Got to Do With It? Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom"

Abstract: Research done in a variety of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities has shown that students and teachers alike bring their identities and experiences with them into the classroom. Identities are highly salient for students' experiences in school; they make the classroom a different place for different students. Against the common sense view that the best way to address this situation is to minimize the effects of identity in the classroom, Moya argues that an effective multi-perspectival, multicultural education will work to mobilize identities in the classroom. Only by recognizing identities as epistemic resources, Moya contends, can teachers draw out the knowledge-generating potential of identities and allow them to contribute positively to the production and transmission of knowledge. After reviewing the pitfalls associated with essentialist and idealist approaches to identity, Moya describes a realist approach to identity that enables teachers to bring their students' experiences into the classroom without either pigeonholing them as "native informants" or allowing them to be unquestioned authorities on a racial group as a whole. She then works through strategies teachers can use to recognize the potential communities of meaning they might have at their disposal in the classroom. Moya concludes by arguing that although mobilizing identities will never be an easy or even a completely safe thing to do, doing so is a necessary part of progessive educators' efforts to educate for a more just and democratic society.

Paula M. L. Moya is the author of Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (California University Press, 2002) and co-editor (with Michael Hames-García) of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (California University Press, 2000). She has published essays on Chicana feminism, feminist theory, and Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural production in journals such as Signs, Nepantla, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Literary History.