Teaching Race: Unpacking Gender, Race and Class Narratives

• In Event: Roundtable: Teaching about Crime & Justice

Abstract

Race is a key social force structuring the criminal legal system. This paper investigates how faculty teaching in criminal justice and criminology programs account for race in their teaching practices. We interviewed 35 faculty members who teach in various institutions to understand how their graduate school experience shaped their teaching of race. This paper focuses on members of a group we classify as critical scholars. Critical scholars utilize critical theoretical frameworks in their research and teaching. They are cognizant of their positionality in the classroom and work to create safe spaces for classroom discussions. Using the narrative habitus as an analytic framework to investigate how personal experiences of race interact with institutional knowledge imposed through graduate education, we compare three men and three women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds who use a critical theoretical approach to race in the criminal legal system. We find that for faculty of color, their experiences with race shape their graduate school experiences and eventually, their teaching practices. The white faculty members remember race through the lens of material learned in graduate instruction and research. These findings point to the need for recognition of how intersectional identities shape interactions with graduate school curricula.

Authors

• Deirdre Caputo-Levine, Idaho State University

• Vanessa Lynn, Marist University