The Red Bandanna

Abstract

Teachers often think of curriculum as a static set of written content. However, in college level multicultural education (ME) classes, this kind of curriculum rarely provides the student input necessary for authentic transformation. As a result, pre-service teachers lack the ability to understand how their biases and assumptions negatively impact their students. This phenomenon coupled with pre-service teachers' negative associations with terms like “white privilege” and “deficit perspective” beg the question: How can White educators provide positive experiences that result in high levels of cultural competence among White teachers, who make up the workforce majority? With this question in mind, the author set out to create the “red bandanna experiment,” a lived curriculum-as-racialized-text experience in present time that relies on both teacher and student input. Ultimately, the experiment allowed for her own critical engagement with curriculum artifacts and also gave students a positive outlet for engaging with their own biases and assumptions.