Faculty Highlight: Nina Asher Studies Multicultural Education

Jerry Willis, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research

There are many paths to knowledge and understanding in educational research and scholarship. Most are characterized by particular research methods and/or by a focus on a particular content area such as mathematics, art, fitness, or reading. Still others emphasize a level (elementary, secondary, higher education). Professor Nina Asher did not follow any of those paths. Her scholarship is, in fact, hard to categorize.

For example, Teachers College Record recently published her paper At the Interstices: Engaging Postcolonial and Feminist Perspectives for a Multicultural Education Pedagogy in the South. In that paper Asher (2005) used the language of postcolonial theory and research as a metaphor to urge scholars to decolonize the pedagogy of multicultural education. Specifically, she argued that the process of critical self-reflective interrogation allows for an engagement with differences across cultures and enables all students—including White students—to “begin understanding themselves and their stories in relation to—instead of outside of—multicultural education discourse” (Asher, 2005, pp. 1101-1102).

As an alternative, she proposed focusing on the interstices, those in-between or hybrid spaces that are at the intersections of cultures and contexts. The data Asher uses in her article come from a variety of sources, from history to her own reflections and experiences (including her childhood in India, her undergraduate work in Bombay, and her experiences as a teacher educator in the United States) to the narratives of her students.

While the paper has broad implications for education, especially multicultural education, she applies her ideas to the South and especially to the interstices of all students—including White students and those of color—in the Southern context.

This paper is one of many by Asher that emphasize the relationship between students of different cultures and education systems as well as cultures at large. She also has a penchant for provocative titles such as Made in the (multicultural) USA: Unpacking tensions of race, culture, gender, and sexuality in education; At the intersections: A postcolonalist woman of color considers Western feminism; and Queering multicultural teacher education in the Deep South.

Copies of her Teachers College Record paper are available at the front desk of the Dean’s Office.