The majority of higher education faculty value diversity in the classroom; however, the majority of faculty also report making no or few changes in their classroom practices to deal with diversity issues. Faculty are in a position to facilitate classroom diversity in such a way that pedagogically avoids, supports, or challenges students' learning about race and dealing with overt or covert racial conflict. Some faculty take on this challenge vigorously, while others approach it with considerable anxiety about their own knowledge or skills and students' emotional reactions. This article explores some of the ways faculty address student conflict amid and around racial diversity in the classroom. Interviews with 66 faculty of different races and ethnicities, genders, and disciplines led to analyses of the various approaches they enacted and dilemmas they experienced in the face of such racial conflict. They include a range of decisions, such as: to avoid conflict through attempts to control the classroom environment; to minimize such conflict; to divert or distract students' attention from conflict; to react to the conflict in a way that attempts to incorporate tensions for further learning; and to proactively design course activities to normalize and surface conflict in ways that enhance students learning about race and racial interactions. Examples and analysis of different ways of dealing with classroom racial diversity and conflict as well as the need for interventions to improve faculty members' ability to deal with such situations are offered.

Community service learning offers students the opportunity to cross socially constructed and epistemological borders of power and privilege, allowing them to come into contact with groups of people who are different from themselves and to learn in different ways. Peer facilitators, undergraduate student instructional leaders who guide others through these encounters, often experience especially powerful border crossing experiences, both by virtue of their service site supervision and their seminar leadership roles. Using their own writings and interviews, we explore some of these peer facilitators' border crossing experiences in a community service learning course at a large midwestern research university. We focus on how peer facilitators encounter various issues as they guide discussion of the experiences students have at community service sites in reflective seminars. The findings suggest that such border crossing experiences can encourage peer facilitators to reflect on their own social group identity and position within the larger social structures of privilege and oppression, and on their own learning styles and engagement in the higher educational environment.

No abstract