Fall-2012 semester has moved at a clip.  One particular reason has to do with my major summer project.  Aside from taking a cruise with the family, I was working on a small book.  For a while now, I have been trying to decide how to use my students’ writings that they turn in as part of my course “Interpersonal Relationships and Race.”

     In that course, you see, I push my students to explore, examine, their own interpersonal histories when it comes to social interactions they have had with people who are not members of their racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or sexually-oriented group. In fact, one of the major assignments is for each student to write a description of their most “intense” intergroup interaction with another person. I collect these stories from my students and get their written permission to use the story in some way in my writing.

     At the end of the Spring-2012 semester, that May, I got an idea for writing a small book using some of those stories and thoughts from my students. The idea was to a book to challenge other students at North Carolina State University to face up to and embrace the neo-diversity of our campus. Neo-diversity is the social reality; a time and circumstance when each of us has to interact with people who are not like us in some way.  Today that is unavoidable, but too many Americans freeze up or act out in some ugly way when face with that interaction situation.

    But while taking my “Interpersonal Relationships and Race” course, my students come to terms with the reality of neo-diversity.  Not only do they write about and analyze their past mistakes, they write about how taking the course has changed their understanding of what is going on, and about how they now realize they can no longer just sit around “…waiting on the world to change.”  My students howl that now is the time for all on our campus and for all Americans to accept the neo-diversity of our lives and to make that neo-diversity a productive part of each of our lives.

    That was the idea, and that is what I wrote.  In September-2012, I self published my new book, “Howl of the Wolf: North Carolina State University Students Call Out for Social Change.”  That made this Fall-2012 semester move along at a clip.