Could your kids be learning a fourth ""R"" at school: reading, writing, rithmatic, and race? Race in the Schoolyard takes us to a place most of us seldom get to see in action-our children's classrooms-and reveals the lessons about race that are communicated there, both implicitly and explicitly. The book examines how ideas about race and racial inequality take shape and are passed along from teacher to student and from student to student in the classroom and schoolyard. Amanda E. Lewis spent a year observing classes at three elementary schools-two multiracial urban and one white suburban-where she spent time with school personnel, teachers, parents, and students. While race of course, is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools. Lewis explains how the curriculum, both expressed and hidden, conveys many racial lessons, and the ways schools and school personnel serve as a location and means for interracial interaction, as well as a means of both affirming and challenging previous racial attitudes and understanding. While teachers and other school community members verbally deny the salience of race, she illustrates how it does influence the way they understand the world, interact with each other, and teach children.

Challenging Racism in Higher Education provides conceptual frames for understanding the historic and current state of intergroup relations and institutionalized racial (and other forms of) discrimination in the U.S. society and in our colleges and universities. Subtle and overt forms of privilege and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability are present on almost all campuses, and they seriously damage the potential for all students to learn well and for all faculty and administrators to teach and lead well. This book adopts an organizational level of analysis of these issues, integrating both micro and macro perspectives on organizational functioning and change. It concretizes these issues by presenting the voices and experiences of college students, faculty and administrators, and linking this material to research literature via interpretive analyses of people's experiences. Many examples of concrete and innovative programs are provided in the text that have been undertaken to challenge, ameliorate or reform such discrimination and approach more multicultural and equitable higher educational systems. This book is both analytic and practical in nature, and readers can use the conceptual frames, reports of informants' actual experiences, and examples of change efforts, to guide assessment and action programs on their own campuses.