Chapter 4: Collaborative Autoethnography: The Method is the Message

In the summer of 2007, I (Trenia), taught for the first time, Diversity in Schools and Society, a required course at my university for the Bachelor of Arts in Education (which included a K–8 teaching credential). I had a total of 48 students in the class: 47 female students and 1 male. In the course of the semester, the students noted that in addition to virtually no gender diversity, there was also no racial or ethnic diversity in the class. Without these “obvious” diversities (which they based almost solely on skin color, first language, and country of origin) to work from, identifying cultural diversity was a bit more of a challenge for them. In fact, it required more work (i.e., thinking) than most of them were willing to do, as evidenced by their course performances. Perhaps it was because it was a 6-week long summer class or perhaps it was because I looked too much like them to convince them of the importance of “thinking about” diversity. Maybe they had a point. For years I have been teaching students in my Elementary Social Studies Teaching Methods classes to avoid “multicultural” children’s literature if it was written by White female authors. I would tell them that these books were “inauthentic.” However, if they were inauthentic in their presentations of characters and stories, then I, as an instructor in a Diversity class, must also be. I too was an outsider trying to tell the stories of “others.”