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Four theories of teaching are presented based on faculty definitions of teaching: knowledge transfer; shaping students to a predetermined mold; exploratory; and developmental. These theories are related to student attitudes about learning and are offered as a means of resolving misunderstandings among teachers and between teachers and students.

Experiential methods--that is, methods that rely on students' own life experiences and often involve a high degree of self-disclosure--are becoming increasingly common in sociology courses that deal with difficult and controversial subjects such as gender, race, and sexuality. Yet these methods may be inappropriate and unethical, especially when students are expected to revel very personal, even painful, information about themselves. The benefits and risks involved in using such methods are presented in this paper in a dialogue between an instructor and a student.

Most white, middle-class citizens see society from a monocultural perspective, a perspective that assumes, often unconsciously, that persons of all races are in the same cultural system together. This single-system form of seeing the world, is blind to its own cultural specificity. People who see persons of other races monoculturally cannot imagine the reality that those "others" think of themselves not in relation to the majority race but in terms of their own culturally specific identities. This paper presents an "interactive phase theory" with regard to race that is intended to reassess school curricula in terms of heightened levels of consciousness concerning race. In the context of U.S. history courses, five phases are presented: phase one: all-white history; phase two: exceptional minority individuals in U.S. history; phase three: minority issues, or minority groups as problems, anomalies, absences, or victims in U.S. history; phase four: the lives and cultures of people of color everywhere as history; and phase five: history redefined and reconstructed to include all people. (DB)

The premise of this article is that learning, like all other creative acts, will flourish in an atmosphere in which the learner is willing to take risks, and it is the task of the instructor to create such an atmosphere for learning. If we accept this view of learning as risk-taking, we can begin to confront the factors that discourage students from taking risks and build a class environment where learning becomes less of a risk, or where the risk-taking in learning becomes valued instead of dreaded. Both of these directions require that instructors develop a trusting relationship with students. When students trust an instructor, they will believe in the instructor's ability to turn any situation into a learning opportunity; they will expect the instructor to value their efforts; they will be willing to take the chances that lead to learning and to view failures as learning opportunities. What, then, might be the characteristics of an instructor who would support student risk-taking?

In this article, Dwight Boyd focuses on a dilemma that is at the heart of sincere commitments to cultural pluralism. When the moral aspects of cultural diversity are fully appreciated, the "dilemma of diversity" is revealed as the tension point resulting from the acceptance of the fact of "reasonable moral pluralism" conjoined with the perceived need to morally ground prescriptive intentions to promote cultural diversity within a democratic society. After discussing this dilemma, Boyd analyzes three perspectives commonly found in response. He argues that each of these perspectives is inadequate by revealing how it fails to come to grips with one or the other side of the dilemma, despite its surface appeal. He then shows how, in each of these perspectives, this failure functions to conceal and protect dominant points of view within the diversity. He concludes by sketching out a positive direction for successfully addressing the dilemma of diversity hinted at in the successes and failures of each of the three perspectives.