Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives

Reviews / Votes

"Sherry K. Watt has assembled talented "conscious scholar practitioners" to address the growing need to design university policies, programming, and classroom pedagogies that address difference. This book addresses both the theoretical and practical aspects of multicultural teaching. As the preferred term "conscious scholar practitioners" suggests, both aspects are vital for developing multicultural policies and teaching practices.

For those scholars who want to deepen and center difference in their classroom and across their university this book strikes me as incredibly valuable. For departments of theology and religious studies seeking to form stronger links with other departments, staff members, and administrators, this volume can provide a common vocabulary and methodology."

Reflective Teaching (Wabash Center)

"Dr. Watt and her talented cast of authors dissolve dualities between privilege and oppression, person and institution, and defensiveness and empathy to offer liberatory strategies in the spirit of Friere and hooks that offer real hope for realizing higher education's democratic mission. Rooted in the conceptual (like the AAFES Method and Privilege Identity Exploration Model), Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives provides an urgently needed pragmatic map for addressing the stubborn realities confronting college campuses around equity and justice. It is truly an outstanding contribution to the field."

Tracy L. Davis, Ph.D.,Professor and College Student Personnel Program Coordinator, Director, Center for the Study of Masculinities & Men's Development

Educational and Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Illinois University

"'How can I help create a space where people can bring their whole selves?' is just one of the many poignant questions raised and addressed in this comprehensive text. The chapter authors offer guidance on multicultural initiatives that integrate with strategic plans and institution missions, and on how to deal with the politics of intersectional identities and the assessment of multicultural initiatives, often in a toxic campus environment. Within each chapter, they weave examples, experiences, models, and metaphors that nurture readers to design transformative multicultural initiatives; all the time differentiating between 'diversity as good' versus the more complex and honorable 'diversity as value.' This is not just a book one reads, but rather it is a book that demands contemplation and reflection, and ultimately thoughtful action."

Jan Arminio, Director of the Higher Education Program

George Mason University

"If we want to humanize our organizations and promote positive social change, much depends on our capacity to engage each other across lines of difference. In this important book, Dr. Sherry Watt offers a set of healing and life-giving strategies for embracing diversity and moving toward inclusion. The book is a clarion call for campus and community leaders to find the wisdom and courage to help us build a better world."

Parker J. Palmer (author of "Healing the Heart of Democracy," "The Courage to Teach" and "Let Your Life Speak")

"Watt's timely compilation provides an innovative approach toward addressing and embracing multiculturalism on college campuses. Through a balance of theory, personal narratives, research, and action, the book offers implementable ideas for students, scholars, and administrators in higher education. This book is an important read for anyone interested in diversity in higher education. The chapters are is incisive, honest, and compassionate."

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, Associate Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis

University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Sherry Watt and company present an intelligently crafted guidebook that shows how to construct and implement multicultural initiatives that are truly transformative of campus environments and the individuals who populate them that goes well beyond the usual chronicle of multicultural issues and sample programs. Using a comprehensive definition of Difference, and grounded in the time-tested theories of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, Watt reviews her Privilege Identity Exploration Model and the Authentic Action-Oriented Framing for Environment Shifts Method as tools every practitioner needs to learn to use liberally. In teaching us to use these tools, the authors provide useful guiding principles to design transformative multicultural initiatives, offer sample multicultural initiative techniques that produce successful outcomes, and share examples of varying types of tested multicultural initiatives. The book also carefully explores a number of difficult, but critical, challenges at the convergence of inequities of identity, power and, privilege (politics, hostile environments, racism, and difficulty teaching these concepts) that must be addressed before multicultural initiatives can result in meaningful campus organizational change."

Michael J. Cuyjet, Ed.D., Professor Emeritus

University of Louisville

"Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives accelerates and advances the conversation about how to affect the paradigm shifts necessary for sustainable equity and inclusion of difference across U.S. colleges and universities. Using Freire's framework of 'education as the practice of freedom', further explicated by bell hooks, Sherry Watt has brought together an impressive array of conscious scholar practitioners whose critical reflections and research reports lead readers on a journey toward fundamental organizational change in higher education. This is truly a phenomenal text."

Dafina-Lazarus Stewart, Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs

Bowling Green State University

"Unlike many other works on multicultural initiatives within the higher education setting that are only theoretical, Watt and her contributors include many strategies with real possibilities for change; they also anticipate the roadblocks that often strangle much needed change in the area of diversity.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most about thus book are the multitude of perspectives under one cover. Watt includes the voices of those that approach diversity efforts theoretically - for example, those that use Critical Race Theory - but also includes voices from the National Science Foundation - where diversity is a significant challenge and has such vital importance but is far from theoretical. Likewise, Watt presents the perspectives of student affairs professionals as well as those teaching - helping readers to understand how diversity manifests - and more importantly - could manifest within a multitude of settings.

Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives is a book for many audiences and has the potential - if the strategies are adopted - to make meaningful change in our colleges and universities."

Marybeth Gasman, Professor

University of Pennsylvania