Teaching and Learning in Brave Community: The Influence of Classroom Experiences on College Students' Understanding of Race

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

There is a widely held consensus that college is an optimal time to engage American undergraduates with the challenges and possibilities of the country’s racial diversity. While racial progress is readily apparent in some aspects of our lives, tragic events of police brutality against Black citizens across the nation, as well as sociological evidence (Bobo, Charles, Krysan, Simmons, & Fredrickson, 2012; Reskin, 2012), remind us that we do still have a race problem. Increasingly, racial unrest on college campuses specifically exposes the ways this problem is present in the college lives of students. My dissertation study investigates the experience of undergraduates at a private selective university who chose to enroll in courses on race. I ask: Do classroom experiences in courses on race influence students’ understanding of race--and if so, in what ways? I find that students’ understanding of race is indeed influenced in distinctive ways by certain classroom dynamics. Students’ understanding of race becomes more academically grounded, and students display increased willingness to engage with one another in empathetic ways. I use the phrase brave community to describe such classroom experiences.

Research Design & Methodology
Site : Gable University is a private, highly selective, residential research university in the Northeast. The university offers a variety of majors, concentrations, and courses that address race. Gable’s commitment to racial diversity on its campus and in its curriculum is not borne out in the demographic data concerning faculty or administrative leadership: minority faculty account for less than 10 % of the total faculty, and 90 % of senior-level administrators are white. The undergraduate student population at Gable is roughly 8,000 students. The most recent available data (on enrollment of students who opted to identify their race/ethnicity is as follows: 50% white, 10 % Latino, 15% Asian/Asian American, 5% black. Roughly 20% are international students and a small majority (51%) are women. A majority of students (80%) rely on some form of financial support, and about a fifth of those students receive Pell grants.

Sample Selection: I studied two undergraduate courses at Gable, “Slavery Stories,” taught by a white professor, and “Race and Power,” taught by a black professor. Participation in interviews was voluntary and the sample of interviewees was selected out of those who volunteered: a total of 24 students, or 12 students per course. Students were representative of the racial make-up of the university. Students were interviewed three times over the course of the study: at the start of the course, at the end, and six months later (for interview protocols, see Appendix B). The interviews were put in the context of classroom observations and, in an iterative cycle, also shaped my perspective during class observations. I conducted observations of every course session—each lasting two hours--and recorded detailed footnotes. I observed 14 sessions per course, per semester, for a total of 28 class observations.

Findings
Following the research question, the findings are presented in two parts. Part 1 addresses classroom experience and Part 2 explores students’ understanding of race.

PART I. Teaching and Learning in Brave Community

Academic Grounding
First through modeling by the professor, the classroom is established as a community rooted in academic grounding. Grounding is comprised of both reliance and a prioritization of academic content for discussion and a shared academic culture, focused on academic dialogue and respectful engagement of different perspectives. Grounding describes the function of the academic tenor (content and culture) to provide students with common ground and also solid ground. Often when engaging race we lack both—we are at cross-purposes in terms of our perspectives, we are at odds, and we are in shaky ground in terms of being vulnerable to emotions, such as anger or resentment. Academic grounding does not mean this complexity is not present, it means it is engaged productively.

Becoming Brave
From the solid, common academic grounding, students develop increasing confidence in their ability to really confront difficult topics regarding race. They become willing and able to push themselves—they become brave.
“The word that comes to mind is brave. I think a lot of risks were taken and I was skeptical of that at first. I came in with a critical eye like who’s gonna say the wrong crazy thing? I think through the class we landed on the feeling that there is no wrong thing to say…that’s what I’m most proud of.”

Sustaining Brave Community
I find that both professor and students work to sustain brave community conditions once the class is under way. Data show moments where professors model bravery and/or hold the community to its commitments, mainly through difficult or tense moments in the learning. For students, this sustaining function is done interpersonally and most clearly through the exercise of a kind of resilient empathy towards one another:
“You respect people… You let them say what they wanna say and you take it, in less of an emotional way, in more of a rational way… You wanna try to analyze on that [intellectual] level. It creates a level of comfort where you can misspeak like Kevin misspeaks and I don’t think anybody thinks he’s a racist because he misspoke. Whereas if he said things in a different context it could be more problematic.”

PART II. Understanding of Race

Through the increase in their academic knowledge about race, and drawing from the experience of learning in community, students gain greater belief in their capacity to understand race, and related, they gain a greater sense of their own self-efficacy in regards to racial problems in our society. I use the phrase racial imaginary to name this increased and empowered academic understanding of race:
“My understanding of race I guess forces me, it forces you to assume—I hesitate to say—leadership? Just… I am in a position now, after taking the class, where I can think about things in ways a lot of people aren’t, and… so we can talk about these things [theoretically] and go to a community rally and act like a messenger or translator of these important ideas…[talking about] the nuances and complexities that are so critical…to move away from simple ways we think about [race] on the ground level. I try to translate to language I can like go home and tell my little sister or something.”

Educational Significance of the Findings
This study has important practical and theoretical implications. Faculty who teach courses on race may achieve or further strengthen a sense of the larger, social implication of the work that they do in their classrooms. Administrators may decide to invest as much in creating those classrooms—in terms of class size, pedagogy and content— as they invest in extensive diversity infrastructures (voluntary ethnic affinity student groups, required diversity trainings, and student affairs professionals). The study demonstrates in what ways classroom experiences influence the race thinking of students, a productive addition to research that too often favors a preoccupation with educational outcomes, at the cost of exploring the educational processes that produce said outcomes. This study also disrupts conventional thinking about race learning in college. While some argue that African-American and other Ethnic studies courses exacerbate rather than ameliorate race relations, my analysis so far suggests that, quite to the contrary, as some students feel more academically grounded and critically capable in their race thinking, they are better able to have difficult but productive classroom discussions. The combination of knowledge and self-efficacy around race embedded in racial imaginary is exactly the kind of capacity for democratic life that our citizens need.

Author

• Janine de Novais, Harvard University