Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Notes from a White Professor (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cyndi Kernahan is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, where she is also the assistant dean for teaching and learning in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and writing are focused primarily on teaching and learning, including the teaching of race, inclusive pedagogy, and student success.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
Why Is It So Hard?
Several years ago, I was walking around campus with a good friend, lamenting how difficult the beginning of the semester can be. I was teaching my favorite course: the psychology of prejudice and racism, but many of the students were still in the very early stages of understanding. I was feeling a little frustrated and I told my friend that I was missing the students from the previous semester. The class had gone so well. I felt like we were really getting somewhere by the time it ended. Now, here I was, starting over again. He looked over at me and said, “it seems to me that you have to think of it like this: every semester you are taking a sledgehammer to a brand-new brick wall . . .” No, I thought, my teaching is not like using a sledgehammer! And I certainly do not think of my students as a brick wall. Not at all. But he was certainly right that every semester is a new opportunity. Each one presents us with a chance to chip away at student understanding and to bring our students along into new ways of thinking; seeing problems, questions, texts, and examples in the ways that we do. Whatever your discipline, you have a way of thinking, a set of content knowledge, and a set of skills that you are hoping to impart to your students. You are reaching across the gap, from expert to novice, and hoping that your students will become excited and engaged as they begin to see your area of expertise in new and more complex ways.
If your teaching includes teaching about race and racism, those new ways of seeing take on added layers of emotional and cognitive complexity. Most students, just like everyone else, have pre-existing attitudes and feelings about race. They know what race means to them and they have an understanding of racism informed not only by the larger media, but also by their values, life experiences, and political beliefs. Because of students’ pre-existing attitudes and feelings, teaching about race can be different from teaching about many other topics. Our beliefs and attitudes about race carry emotion and they are tied in to how we see ourselves morally and politically. In short, we have a lot to navigate as instructors. We are adding a scholarly understanding to something that is already personally meaningful and essential to a student’s identity. Adding a new understanding, one that might potentially challenge or change that identity, is not a simple thing. It can threaten how students see themselves and how they fit into their families, their friend groups, and their communities.
Just to raise the stakes even more, we are living in a time of heightened racial tension in the United States overall. Since 2015, the share of Americans who believe that “race relations are generally bad” has outnumbered those believing that “race relations are generally good,” reaching a new high of 72 percent in 2017 (Gallup, 2017). Incidents of racial tension and harassment on college campuses have received widespread attention and instructors have found themselves at the center of race-based controversies as their comments (both on social media and in the classroom) are scrutinized and critiqued. Several instructors have been relieved of their teaching duties and some have lost their positions entirely.
It is in this environment of heightened scrutiny and tension that we walk into our classrooms, hoping to help our students understand race more clearly. However, as we will see in Chapter 1, there are substantial gaps between how we as instructors and experts understand race and the attitudes of many Americans, including our students. To give just one example, as I write this, a controversy has been swirling in the news about the causes of the U.S. Civil War. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has argued publicly that the war was a failure of compromise, resulting because “honorable” people on both sides were unable to reach consensus (Astor, 2017). In the days that have followed this statement, historians and experts of the Civil War have challenged these assertions and pointed to the numerous compromises that were made in the lead up to the war. Furthermore, as historian and writer Jelani Cobb (2017) noted, White supremacy as a motivator for all kinds of policy decisions in American history has been consistently downplayed and denied resulting in an American public that has much less understanding of the role of racism in American history than is shown by the evidence.
In this atmosphere, where expert understanding differs from the public understanding and where those in power perpetuate falsehoods around race, some instructors may find it easier to avoid race as a topic altogether. A few years ago, at one of those “beginning of the semester” faculty parties that crowd the week before classes, a professor of English told me that she was “done” with her Ethnic Film and Literature Course. At the time I was the coordinator of the Ethnic Studies program and I was hoping to get her course back into our offerings. She, however, let me know that there was no way that was going to happen. When I asked her why, she laughed and said it felt “impossible” to her. She talked about the resistance she faced from her mostly White[1] students when she tried to get them to take seriously the themes of racism and discrimination that came up through the films and books the class discussed. She loved these films and books and wanted her students to begin to appreciate them as well, but the emotional toll was just too much. As someone who thought of herself as a caring and compassionate teacher, the discord and rancor were just too jarring and upsetting for her. She wanted a more positive teaching experience.
If you teach about racism, either as the main topic of a course or as a part of the course, you likely know how this instructor was feeling. And she isn’t alone. Many teachers over the years have told me how they simply avoid “that part” of the course, the part regarding race and racism, or how they have “given up” on trying to convince their students (typically mostly White) that racism exists. As a first-year teacher of the psychology of prejudice and racism I found myself facing the same obstacles. I was mystified and shocked. How could they not see racism? Why did they question every piece of information I gave to them? Research supports that this kind of teaching is indeed difficult and that lower teaching evaluations and greater emotional turmoil can result, particularly for instructors of color (Boatright-Horowitz and Soeung, 2009; Sue, Rivera, Watkins, Kim, Kim, and Williams, 2011).
In response to these challenges, some instructors take a different approach. Rather than distancing themselves from race and racism in the classroom, these teachers become confrontational and sometimes even righteous in their work. Jane Elliott, the former 3rd grade teacher from Riceville, IA who created the “blue eyes-brown eyes” exercise and eventually become a nationally known diversity trainer is perhaps the best-known example of this style of teaching. After teaching 3rd graders, Elliott adapted her original methods of teaching children to teaching adults in corporate settings, giving workshops across the country. These workshops typically involved insults and anger directed at those who were arbitrarily (based on eye color and usually White) assigned to the low-power group. The point was to help these White people understand what it feels like to be a person of color, to feel the sting of oppression. Research, however, has shown that this program was largely ineffective in changing racial attitudes and may have created so much stress in the participants that they simply avoided learning more about race after the training (Wilson, 2011). Indeed,...