| Abstract: | A wide range of emotional experiences, including anxiety, relief, guilt, and anger, are often expressed either implicitly or explicitly by instructors and students in graduate courses focused on diversity and psychotherapy. This article addresses the ways in which teaching on race and ethnicity can lay the groundwork for critical learning, impasses, and enactments. Contributions of psychodynamic perspectives to multicultural education are thought to be particularly relevant to psychologists, because they involve a study of individual and group dynamics as reflective of larger social structures and sociocultural histories. Findings from multicultural research and psychodynamic perspectives related to affective processes involved in multicultural learning will be explored. The author discusses specific experiences of teaching diversity courses to graduate students in psychology with the purpose of illustrating resistance to talking openly about one’s feelings about diversity within a group setting, and the difficulty experienced by students and instructors to tolerate undiscovered and/or unprocessed material related to diversity. These vignettes involve an examination of subjectivity of race and ethnicity and its influence on the interactions between fellow students and instructors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
