Transracialization

Importance to Curriculum Studies

Reconceptualists within the field of curriculum studies recognize the critical links among cultures, language, race, and sexual orientations, for example. Moreover, scholars believe that racial, ethnic, social class background, and sexual orientation are powerful identities shaping the classroom, teaching, and learning experience. Historically, curriculum designed for public education in the United States only included knowledge stemming from a predominately White experience and culture. With a noticeably and fast-growing non-White population in the United States, discussions linking race and education indicate grave implications for the preparation of future teachers who will ultimately have to teach in schools that are increasingly serving students from biracial and multiracial backgrounds.

Literature in education refers to the White experience and culture as mainstream culture. For [Page 903]the curriculum and educational practices to be shaped by knowledge not otherwise accepted, curriculum developers must understand the ways in which the curriculum can address or include issues such as race in curricular design and pedagogical interaction. The curriculum content and process must cross over, fostering new understandings of how the social, political, and cultural contexts shape knowledge taught and what knowledge is ultimately learned. White preservice teachers may experience transracialization through informed discussions of race, ethnicity, and identities, and when they immerse themselves in communities and schools that are predominately families and students of color. The opposite can be true; students and educators of color may also experience transracialization through their own immersion in predominately White institutions or communities. In both situations, individuals observe and take in a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be White, or what it means to be a person of color in a variety of social and political contexts.

Transracialization is a call for blending, perhaps blurring of the almost solid boundaries of racial identities. Transracialization might be a concept that describes going beyond race, removing racial descriptors such as physical attributes, to focusing on behaviors, values, and attitudes that are shared by more than one racial group. Culturally relevant curriculum could be a transracial pedagogical practice (racial identities or knowledge of more than one group are considered in the pedagogical practice). A notion that cross-racial interactions can deepen an individual's understanding of people's experiences whose race is different from their own can be a central concern for educating teachers, for example.

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