Teaching Undergraduate Family Diversity Courses.

This paper offers perspectives on teaching an undergraduate family diversity course. These perspectives include the preparation of the teacher, not only as a scholar, but as a fallible human and as a person who is challenged to live a life in which diversity is central. Fundamental to teaching about family diversity is to teach students how to take the perspective of "the other" and how to understand the systemic context in which diverse families have functioned in the past and now function. Teaching about family diversity benefits from a scholarly literature on "whiteness" which focuses on the ways that white people may tune out, ignore, or deny both their own unearned skin privilege and the ways that they benefit from and rely on a system of inequality in which people of color are disadvantaged. Teaching about family diversity requires a pedagogy in which many voices speak. Included in that pedagogy are teaching methods that create many opportunities for students to express and develop their own perspectives, cross-cultural comparison, an instructor who works at knowing all students as individuals, and the use of readings and videos that voice the realities of diverse people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]