A Transformational Journey: Exploring our multicultural identities through self-study

Abstract

This article reports a self-study of multicultural identities in a public high school ethnic studies class and a university multicultural education course in Hawai‘i, a unique multicultural setting in which no ethnic group is in the majority. Participants are the two authors and 117 of their high school and university students. Three important findings emerged from constant comparison analysis of students’ and authors’ personal multicultural narratives, reflections, and coursework. First, a personal-constructivist-collaborative approach to self-study in an intellectually safe classroom environment provides both students and teachers with a context for challenging their socially constructed assumptions about race, culture, and ethnicity and supports the unpacking of previously held stereotypes and biases. Second, the students' narratives are transformational teaching texts. The formal and informal sharing of personal stories helps students and teachers to be more thoughtful about the complexity of identities, develop new understandings of their own and others' multicultural identities, and gain a critical consciousness about the connection between self-understanding and prejudice reduction. Third, self-study is a multicultural pedagogy that promotes social perspective taking, tolerance, and understanding of diversity through personal transformation. The article concludes by encouraging multicultural educators to transform traditional classroom pedagogies so that the journey to understand other people begins with the self.

Keywords:

• self-study pedagogy
• multicultural identity
• multicultural education
• self-knowledge
• personal transformation
• prejudice reduction