We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools (Multicultural Education Series)

Required for a class. Very preachy and judgmental although author says repeatedly he is not attacking any color.

I found this to be preachy and repetitive, with a distracting overuse of a highly stylized and unnecessary dance metaphor throughout. If it hadn't been required reading for a class, I would never have finished it and would have missed the last two chapters, where the useful information lay.

I work in ministry, not education per see, and have found this book to be an essential primer! This is both recommended and required reading for those I work with and among. Gary R. Howard gives a well-documented underpinning to the role of what he calls the transformationalist leader. Another book covering similar themes is Richard Twiss's, "One Church, Many Tribes."

This book brings up a lot of issues that a white educator will have in the classroom. Rather than give a condescending lesson on "what to do and not to do," Howard tells the reader of his own experiences in the classroom with an interesting narrative that discusses his strengths and weaknesses in hopes that other educators will learn from him.One thing that needs to be noted is that Howard experienced race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. Thus, his perspective at times reflects this, which at times can be an antiquated view, but it is important to know the perspectives and struggles of our predecessors.This book is a short read, and can be used in a personal reading setting, or even as a group reading book with discussion. The subject alone provides opportunities for much needed discussion to take place, and this book is an excellent text to accompany if not start such discussions.

It is a book that helps you to think and reflect on your reactions towards non-white students and their families. The author restates his opinion many times throughout the book, too much! Because he points out the privileges of being white so frequently it becomes difficult to find value in this book. When you look for it, you can find valuable take aways that will help you as a teacher when working with students and their families whose life situations are different then yours.

I know that Gary Howard is white. But his book is still a racist tract that completely demonizes whites. Howard says that whites are inherently racist, no matter what stage of his idiotic "racial identity development" path they are at, and that such a fate is unavoidable. When he stuck to an analysis of the past and presented ideas for how to improve, or basically Chapters 3, 4, and 7 his book was actually decent and presented some interesting ideas. But his Chapters 1, 5, 6 and 8 were despicable pieces in which he extrapolates from an incredibly unusual personal experience to generalize a reality about Whites that I would say does not exist except within his own mind. Not that racism and what he terms "white dominance" are not real, but his book does not do a great job of illuminating anything new in regards to them and strays a little too far into pseudo-psychology and BS to poison the rest of the book.There are better books and essays out there about how to deal with multi-cultural diversity in your classroom. I would recommend works by Lisa Delpit (Teaching Other Peoples' Children & Acquisition of Literate Discourse) and Patrick Finn (Literacy with an Attitude) for how to address the issue without the frankly bigoted tone of the Howard book.

An excellent book for parents, teachers, and researchers.

thank you