Elavie Ndura

Excavating Whiteness: How White Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race follows a group of sixteen teachers, fourteen White, one African American, and one Native American teacher as they participated in a university summer course centered on examining the role of race in education. The voices and experiences of the teachers powerfully demonstrate their various views and stages of racial identity development. The teachers’ interactions illustrate the difficulties they encountered, how they engaged with each other, and how and why they retreated from learning opportunities due their past, their relationships within previous learning communities, and within the newly created learning community of the course. Excavating Whiteness follows the story of a group of teachers working together to understand why race matters in their lives as educators. Their individual journeys through the course are representative of the myriad of ways White teachers respond to race and can provide others with insights into the nuanced ways race and identity are bound by personal history, experiences, and beliefs.

When the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States occurred—causing that nation to wage wars of revenge in Afghanistan and Iraq—the people of Burundi were recovering from nearly forty years of violence, genocide and civil wars that had killed nearly one million and produced another million refugees. Here in this small East African nation, one of the four poorest nations on earth, however, was a desire for reconciliation—not revenge—and it still runs deep today. The University of Ngozi in northern Burundi was created in 1999 and is now dedicated to peace, reconciliation and sustainable development. People in this region tell remarkable stories of tragedy and recovery amid these horrors. Their stories can inspire others to preserve their humanity and resist the urge to continue the violence, focusing instead on forgiveness, reconciliation and a better way forward. This volume presents case study analysis while pointing to the promise of a new kind of education that is committed to sustainable peace and development. The lessons here for the rest of the world are deep and inspiring.

When the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States occurred—causing that nation to wage wars of revenge in Afghanistan and Iraq—the people of Burundi were recovering from nearly forty years of violence, genocide and civil wars that had killed nearly one million and produced another million refugees. Here in this small East African nation, one of the four poorest nations on earth, however, was a desire for reconciliation—not revenge—and it still runs deep today. The University of Ngozi in northern Burundi was created in 1999 and is now dedicated to peace, reconciliation and sustainable development. People in this region tell remarkable stories of tragedy and recovery amid these horrors. Their stories can inspire others to preserve their humanity and resist the urge to continue the violence, focusing instead on forgiveness, reconciliation and a better way forward. This volume presents case study analysis while pointing to the promise of a new kind of education that is committed to sustainable peace and development. The lessons here for the rest of the world are deep and inspiring.