Learning by Doing: Enforcing Racialized Hierarchy Through Group Work

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Problematizing Classroom Dialogue, Student Writing, and Discussion

Abstract

Well-resourced public schools in high-income areas, selected by elite parents as protection against downward social mobility, are understudied. These schools are incubators for the next generation of leaders for the global economy. They’re also places where ideas about race, intelligence, power, legitimacy and community play out in dynamic and challenging ways. Research can expose how schooling contributes to the persistence of racialized inequality in society through the inculcation and reinforcement of racialized hierarchies in daily classroom practice. This paper presents a micro-analysis of the enforcement of racialized hierarchy among a racially diverse group of students in one 8th grade social studies classroom as it learned about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Author

• Amanda I. Frye Leinhos, Stanford University