Texas State University-San
Marcos’ Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Project, a program designed to
help diversify its faculty teaching methods and course content, has caught the
attention of a university a world away — in South Africa.
Dr. Sandra Mayo,
the director of TSU’s Center for
Multicultural and Gender Studies and an associate professor of theater, is
leading a two-day workshop on the program at Tshwane University of Technology
this month to help the South African institution resolve the academic and
cultural problems created by the country’s apartheid past.
“I am not
expecting [Mayo’s] first visit to make dramatic changes, but I am certain that
her experiences as a director of multiculturalism and theater will be of help
and that it will be a start,” says Dr. Errol Tyobeka, the vice-chancellor at
Tshwane.
Tyobeka met Mayo
last year, when he visited Texas State
as an American Council on Education Fellow, a higher education leadership
development program. It was then that he learned about Mayo’s involvement with
the multiculturalism curriculum, and decided to secure Mayo’s visit to Tshwane.
Launched in
2004, the Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Project emphasizes the
importance of understanding the cultural diversity among students by using new
strategies to help enrich the course content.
The program
promotes learning through different perspectives, like age, gender, race,
religion, socioeconomic status and others, by utilizing a variety of teaching
styles, including lectures and verbal and electronic discussions. The approach
can help students apply their personal backgrounds to the lesson, improving the
experience for themselves, their classmates and the instructor.
