“Red Eyes”: Engaging Emotions in Multicultural Education

Engaging emotions in multicultural education is an important but a relatively neglected issue in teacher education. This essay calls for pedagogical attention to the role of emotions and attempts to analyze how teaching autobiographies and films sheds light on the emotional dynamics of multicultural education. Two films, The Color of Fear, and The Tulsa Lynching of 1921, and two autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Invisible Privilege, are the focus of discussion which highlights students' emotional responses and the teacher's pedagogical considerations. Such analysis reveals a complicated process in which students' learning and personal growth usually do not follow a straight intellectual line but happen along the emotional curve of dealing with guilt, anger, fear, and anxiety to transform their identities as teachers or teachers-to-be. To release the healing power of multicultural education, teacher educators themselves must engage their own emotions.