Ethnic Studies: Teaching and Research Needs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify problems in ethnic studies and to discuss several teaching approaches that we have used in an attempt to meet some of these needs. Some problems of research and teaching in the field of ethnic studies include: 1) lack of awareness of the current social meaning of ethnicity; 2) data deficiencies; 3) lack of sensitivity to problems of scale in spatial analysis; 4) the separation between teaching and research; and 5) limitations imposed by discipline-bounded viewpoints. The research-teaching approaches used in the effort to counter these problems were: 1) migration histories of students' families; 2) studies of ethnic settlement at interregional, intraregional, and intraurban scales; 3) the urban ethnic field trip; and 4) the metropolitan Detroit ethnic mapping project.