The excellent teaching idea and resource below is from Tressie McMillan Cottom one of the brightest sociological minds on the Internet. If you’re not already following her on Twitter (@tressiemcphd) you should be, she’s prolific and always thought provoking. And if it isn’t already abundantly clear, I’m a huge fan of hers. This teaching activity was first published on her blog tressiemc.com and she graciously agreed to share it with us.

I mentioned before that I try to push my pedagogy beyond what worked for me as a student.

I am teaching “Class, Status, and Power” this Spring. It is a basic sociology stratification course. This term I will experiment with offering alternatives to The Paper. I am starting with a platform I am most comfortable with: blogging. I know it is not a huge stretch from the essay but I think it is different in important ways. First, it redefines audience for student-writers. Second, students can leverage talents/skills in visual storytelling in ways that they cannot with written essays. Third, in a nod to the reality of the neo-liberal environment I always try to draw explicit connections for students between sociology and applied, marketable skills.

However, you’ll notice that there is still a traditional, much-maligned “term paper” that all students must write. My current position is that diversifying the writing abilities of students is not the same as abolishing one form for another. Writing a clear argument without the benefit of media is still a valuable skill. I believe it engages different types of thinking and reasoning processes that are more valuable, not less, as digital writing ascends in popular culture. I may evolve on that. For now, my typical student at Emory intends to go to graduate or professional school. I do not think we need one more credentialed financial wizard or scientist that cannot tell a clear story using words on a piece of paper. But that is so judgey of me. I own that.

In this blogging assignment I benefited a great deal from work shared online by Brian Croxall, Mark Sample and Jade E. Davis. It seemed only fair that I pay that forward by sharing the current draft of the blogging assignment I have written for my class. I welcome any feedback, especially from you pedagogical superstars that have toyed around with these things for awhile.

Download SOC 214 Critical Analysis Blog Guidelines

If you made a new semester resolution, what would it be?

— Nathan Palmer (@sociologysource) January 8, 2014

I used to love to burn down my classes at the end of every semester and rebuild it anew. As I taught each semester I would see all of the problems, weaknesses, and areas for improvement and I’d convince myself that all my classes sucked and had to be jettisoned and never spoken of again. Looking back I now see this as a form of pedagogical self-flagellation. It’s also a sort of academic Groundhog Day where every semester I am stuck trying to get my legs underneath me.

My new semester’s resolution is to write down all of those problems, weaknesses, and areas for improvement that you can only see in the moment, while you’re teaching. I’ve created what I titled a A.F.I. (Areas for Improvement) file for each of my classes that will serve like a letter to my future self to open once the semester is over. I want to use this space as a place to both document bugs in the class and as a space to dream about how I might dramatically restructure the class.

From here out, instead of a slash and burn approach, I resolve to use my A.F.I. lists to improve my classes in an iterative fashion. Instead of trying to birth the perfect class each semester, I want to develop a 3–5 year plan and evolve my classes as I go. This seems like a much more humane approach to professional development.

I think my mouth was agape. Even if it wasn’t, I was dumbfounded. I need a second to compose myself, so I stalled by asking, “can you repeat the question?”

The student kindly obliged, “What exactly is a social institution?” The question didn’t throw me, but rather the fact that it was two weeks from the end of the semester. “Okay, who can help answer this question. What is a social institution?” I stood there repeating the question like Ferris Bueller’s teacher calling role. No one knew the answer or at least no one felt confident enough in their understanding of the concept to put themselves out there.

I wasn’t dumbfounded at their ignorance, but rather my own. I had been teaching for months, using all of the core terms of sociology, assuming that they all knew what I was talking about. But clearly they didn’t. We worked on it for the rest of the class and I found that most of them understood the concept broadly (e.g. “That’s like the government or education and stuff, right?”). However, none of the students could have given me anything close to a concise definition.

Didn’t You Take Soc 101?

Being that social change is an upper division course with Intro to Sociology as a perquisite, my first impulse was to blame their 101 instructor, but then I realized that for many of these students I was their 101 teacher. My next thought was, I’m not nearly as good of a Intro to Sociology teacher as I had thought; I mean, if students don’t leave my class with this fundamental concept, haven’t I failed them? Slowly I realized the problem wasn’t in how I taught them, but rather how I was thinking about the learning process.

Teachers often suffer from what I call the lecturer’s fallacy which posits, if we talked about it in class they learned it. While I call it the lecturer’s fallacy, it also holds for teachers who do more “guide on the side” activities like student directed learning, classroom assessment techniques, and the like. Basically, it’s the idea that if you showed me you learned it yesterday you should be able to demonstrate mastery over the concept today. But, this is not how learning works.

Hearing something once or even learning something in a more hands on way one time, does not mean that mastery has been developed. I learned about red shifting, blue shifting, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in an Astronomy class as an undergrad, but I would fail a test on these subjects today. I’d also struggle to learn new concepts that built upon any or all of these concepts I had previously learned.

Students very well may have learned all of the core concepts from a Intro to Sociology Class, but they may have no idea how to apply those concepts to situations outside of the class they learned it in. If students took 101 with a different teacher than their current courses and if the language the teachers used to describe the concepts were vastly different, students may be unable to transcode lessons learned from intro into the new teacher’s framework. I could go on here, but rather than bluster on, I’ll just suggest (again) that you read more about this issue of learning and many others in How Learning Works by Susan Ambrose et al.

The Solution? 101 for Everyone.

Starting this semester and for the rest of my career, I’ll be spending the first few days of class reviewing and assessing students understanding of core concepts like social institutions, the sociological imagination, culture, socialization, structure & agency, and basic social theory (you can download my 101 review handout here). Some of you are likely thinking, “but aren’t you going to have to cut out important concepts from your upper division classes?” To which I’d say, yes unfortunately I will. However, I hope that by spending time on the foundation of sociology, my students will be able to learn a greater proportion of course specific concepts that remain.

Below is a guest post from Dr. David Mayeda a professor at The University of Auckland and blogger at sites like The Grumpy Sociologists, The Cranky Sociologists, and SociologyInFocus.

Racism can function in a number of capacities. Yes, anyone – including people of color – can hold racial prejudices, meaning holding attitudes that stereotype those from other racialized groups. And anyone – again including people of color – can discriminate along racialized lines, meaning acting behaviorally according to racial prejudices. As an undergraduate student, I was taught in simpler terms that racial discrimination is racial prejudice put into action. So I suppose yes, ethnic minorities can enact reverse racism against Caucasians. But racism’s strength depends on its historical and contemporary context. Let’s listen to comedian Aamer Rahman explain:

Ahhh, I could watch that a thousand times over and still not be tired of it!

The power that racism carries depends on how it is embedded in institutions and whether or not racist actions carry with them institutional support. Hence, even if ethnic minorities have advanced in society and carry power, they still typically lack institutional power, and when racist actions are perpetrated against them, minorities tend to lack the institutional means to defend themselves. As Solorzano and colleagues (2002) argue, “racism is about institutional power and that People of Color in the United States have never possessed this form of power to a significant degree” (p. 24).

Returning to the story at hand, as Dr. Gibney was discussing this very concept in her class, a white male student asked, “Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?” And as Dr. Gibney attempted to respond, another white male student interjected, “Yeah, I don’t get this either. It’s like people are trying to say that white men are always the villains, the bad guys. Why do we have to say this?” Dr. Gibney replied, “if you’re really upset, feel free to go down to legal affairs and file a racial harassment discrimination complaint.” After the white (male) students took Dr. Gibney up on her offer, we can see the institutional aspect of this case come further into play.

In fact, following the students’ complaint it was not the credentialed and employed Dr. Gibney who was supported by her institution. Rather, it was the white students who were institutionally supported by an individual with significant power: Vice President of Academic Affairs Lois Bollman formally reprimand Gibney by stating among other things, “Your actions in [targeting] select students based on their race and gender caused them embarrassment and created a hostile learning environment.”

Despite earning advanced degrees and being accomplished enough to be hired by institutions of higher learning, ethnic minorities must first deal with students (and colleagues) who question their credibility. Dr. Gibney’s experience with students is strikingly similar to this African American faculty member’s account, documented in Patton and Catching’s 2009 article, “‘Teaching while Black’: narratives of African American student affairs faculty”:

As each new cohort enters my classroom, I am prepared to present my credential and prove my credibility. But it doesn’t stop there. The students have to assess my teaching before I receive my ‘pass.’ I can’t tell you the number of times where students, especially older White men in our doctoral program, have challenged my authority in the classroom or took subtle shots at my credibility. (p. 720).

Then, when scholars of color discuss how racism operates systemically in society, they run a greater risk of being challenged by students for their alleged reverse racism. And worse yet (as was clearly the case with Dr. Gibney), those students from the dominant group are more likely to receive institutional support from their university’s management, who unsurprisingly also represent the dominant group.

Dr. Gibney, however, is not taking this sitting down. She and six colleagues plan to file an anti-discrimination lawsuit against Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Good on them. Still, in order to earn and exercise power and respect, look at all the extra work people of color are burdened with. I do not profess to understand what Dr. Gibney has experienced as an African American female academician, but as a person of color actively supporting Maori and Pacific students in Aotearoa New Zealand, I can relate. Stay strong sistah.

Questions:

1. Explain how institutionalized racism differs from interpersonal racism (racism occurring between two individuals who are of equal power).
2. It is very difficult for many of us to believe that systemic, institutionalized racism can exist since racism is outlawed in most societies. Explain how racism operates institutionally despite being illegal.
3. Read Nathan Palmer’s take on this here. How does this case exemplify white privilege?
4. Dr. Gibney’s struggles are happening within a context of higher education. Identify and describe an example of institutionalized racism in another sector of society.
5. If we already have laws that outlaw racism, how might society work to eradicate institutionalized racism?

“Three white college students file racial discrimination complaint against professor over lesson on structural racism” The Salon headline from yesterday reads like my personal nightmare. In fact, Shannon Gibney’s account of what happened in her classroom reads like what I can only guess is the personal nightmare of any educator who teaches their students to critically think about hegemonic social power.

Gibney, a professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, started a discussion on structural racism in her Intro to Mass Communications class when multiple white students complained, “Why do we have to talk about this in every class?”. Gibney gives her first hand report of what happened next in an interview below:

“You guys are taking it personally. This is not a personal attack. We’re not talking about all white people- you white people in general. We’re talking about whiteness as a system of oppression.” I’ve said almost that exact same thing to my own students. And yet I know that some of my students still do take it personally. I’ve experienced first hand students stubbornly clinging to an individual-centered understanding of the world despite my attempts to open their eyes to the social structures that all individuals operate within.

In fact, as I listened to Gibney I kept thinking, I’ve said the exact same things. I’ve been in situations like that before. Oh my god, that could be me. But… to be honest, it couldn’t.

My White Male Privilege in The Classroom

Do a Google Image search for the words college professor (or just click here) and what do you see. A lot of faces that look a lot like mine. When I walk into the room, I’m willing to bet, no one thinks, “oh god. A white guy, I wonder if he’s qualified. He must have been an Affirmative Action hire.” I’ve written about this before as have others. Regardless of what I do, I am the embodiment of authority. My credibility, authenticity, and trustworthiness are rarely if ever questioned.

When I challenge my students to critically analyze white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. no one says, “well of course you said that because you are…”. No one says I have a political agenda or an axe to grind. In fact, I often get kudos for doing it. I’m seen as a sort of selfless freedom fighter. Because of my social privilege I often am able to walk right by my students resistance, neutralize their rhetorical strategies, and be heard. It’s not because I’m a better teacher (note that some critiques of Gibney have argued she’s a poor teacher). It’s because I’m a cisgender, hetero, able-bodied, middle class, white male[1].

And now lets put some empirical meat on these anecdotal bones. Studies find that people of color are disproportionally tasked with teaching required diversity classes where challenging social privilege is more likely to happen (Alex-Assensoh 2003). A qualitative analysis of students’ comments on student evaluations of instruction found that women, especially women of color, were more likely have their authority questioned and to be seen as biased or affected by their personal politics (Perry et al. 2009; Schueths et al. 2013)[2]. This is just the tip of the empirical iceberg, but it’s clear that, like we’ve always taught our students, an individual’s social location and the social contexts they operate in affect their experiences.

What Can We Do With All of This.

First, David Mayeda on our Facebook page suggests starting a letter writing campaign in support of Gibney and I think that’s a great start. But more than anything else, let’s stop pretending that social privilege ends at the threshold of our classroom. To my fellow faculty of privilege, let us own our privileges, even if we are uncomfortable with them and even if we are attempting to subvert the systems that privilege us. Personally, I’m going to read this story and remember that I am not Shannon Gibney; in fact my experience is probably closer to the three white men who filled the complaint. And then I’m going to work from there.

References:
Alex-Assensoh, Y. 2003. Race in the academy: Moving beyond diversity and toward the incorporation of faculty of color in predominantly white colleges and universities. Journal of Black Studies 34, no. 1: 5–11.

Perry, Gary, Helen Moore, Crystal Edwards, Katherine Acosta and Connie Frey. 2009. “Maintaining Credibility and Authority as an Instructor of Color in Diversity-Education Classrooms: A Qualitative Inquiry.” The Journal of Higher Education 80, no. 1: 80–105.

Schueths, April M., Tanya Gladney, Devan A. Crawford, Katherine L. Bass, and Helen A. Moore. 2013. “Passionate Pedagogy and Emotional Labor: Students’ Responses to Learning Diversity from Diverse Instructors.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no. 10: 1259–1276

My Town’s Lowly Movie Theater

“Oh my god, aren’t you freezing?” asks a young woman standing next to me in line for a movie. The movie theater is Statesboro, GA is so small the box office is between the two entrance doors. I turn toward her and see she is dressed like Randy from A Christmas Story (you know, “I can’t put my arms down!”). “No, it’s like 60 degrees.” I reply politely with a bemused look on my face. Bouncing on the balls of her feet to generate warmth, she says with bemusement equal to mine, “Okay? But it’s November and I’m freezing!”

Sitting in the movie theater, it occurred to me; this is the most approachable illustration of relative deprivation that I can think of. When it hits 60 degrees in the spring damn near every student on campus has flip flops and shorts on, but when the thermometer drops to 60 degrees in the fall it’s not uncommon to see people dressed for a blizzard. It’s the same 60 degrees, the only thing that changes is your relative assessment of how cold/warm it was just a few days ago.

Ultimately, this is a simple illustration of relativity, but from here it’s not a giant pedagogical leap to relative deprivation.

“Breakfast for boobs!” I heard a young woman in a bright pink shirt yell as I walked across campus last week. “Bagels for boobies!” her compatriot shouted. The glittery sign on their table advertised “$5 bagel boobz with pink strawberry cream cheese”. I was torn. Part of me was proud of the students for being activists, but another part of me was deeply troubled by the exuberant, cheery, and strangely sexualized way they were framing breast cancer.

But let’s be clear this “Bagels for boobs” fundraiser is not out of the norm of breast cancer awareness campaigns. There are countless T-shirts with pithy sexualized slogans such as “Save the Tatas”, “Save a Life Grope Your Wife”, and Boobies Rock!“ just to name a few. If there was a ever an opportunity to ”see the familiar as strange" and find the sociology hiding just below the surface, I think this is it.

Questions to Ask Your Students

I think we owe it to our students to question in our classes breast cancer awareness campaigns like these. Isn’t it down right bizarre that we sexualize a disease that kills thousands of women[1] each year? Is it really okay to objectify women in the service of raising money and awareness for said disease?

And while we are at it, do we really still need to be raising awareness? Can you think of any two things that Americans are more aware of than breasts and cancer? I know enough of the the history of breast cancer to know that there was a time when we didn’t publicly talk about it and we shamed women with breast cancer into silence, but this has largely changed because of breast cancer movements and activists. Raising awareness of an issue is the first step. It is what nascent movements are preoccupied with. Hasn’t the breast cancer movement graduated out of this phase? If you answer yes, then why do campaigns like these dedicate so much time, energy, and money toward raising awareness?

I ask my students these questions, not to demonize anyone, but rather to invite them to critically think about social movements, patriarchy, and the objectification of women’s bodies. Many of my students, friends, and family members care deeply about breast cancer and are passionate about supporting women with breast cancer and working to find a cure. And it’s precisely because they are so passionate that I think they would welcome a discussion about the effectiveness of the movement. If you care about these issues, as I do, then we should want to maximize the amount of impact our actions have on the issue.

Excellent Resources

There are loads of great resources that you can use to prime your students for a critical analysis of breast cancer awareness campaigns. First and foremost is the book and film Pink Ribbons, Inc.

In addition Sociological Images has two posts that I think students can really sink their teeth into:

• Pinkwashing: Ethical Problems With Cause-Based Marketing
• Pink Makes Women Take Breast Cancer Less Seriously, Not More"

“How come black people can say the N-word, but white people can’t?” That’s a question teachers of race get a lot and comedian W. Kamau Bell has a great answer, “You can say anything you want, but you have to live with the consequences of your words.” While Bell is talking about the N-word, his wisdom could be applied to any discussion of privilege/oppression or really any highly controversial topic.

Intent vs. Impact

There seems to be genuine distress and/or hurt on my students faces when they say, “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant at all!” For the most part, students who say something that deeply offends portions of the classroom seem surprised by the impact of their words. It’s as if I’m watching the student reach down, wrap their hands around their ankle, open wide and stick their foot in their mouth only to be dumbfounded as to how it got their in the first place.

Bell’s retort to the “N-word question” makes me laugh because he is hitting on something that is so painfully obvious and simultaneously something that we[1] often want to pretend isn’t true. Our words and actions sometimes have an impact that we did not intend when we said those words or took those actions. This “intent vs. impact” idea is something that students struggle with, but it’s also a prerequisite for classroom discussions that are open, honest, and safe. It’s something I teach when we set our class expectations for discussions and reiterate throughout the semester.[2]

Monday 9:00am.

STUDENT: Don’t kill me but I missed the test last Friday.
ME: What happened?
STUDENT: I had a family emergency.
ME: Huh. Why did you wait two days to contact me?
STUDENT: I had a lot on my mind.
ME: Let’s think about this like a symbolic interactionist. How do you think I am going to interpret the fact you waited two days to contact me.
STUDENT: Uh… How should I… Um…

I’m usually able to keep my cool no matter what my student throw at me, but this situation (which happens 10–15 times a semester[1]) makes my blood boil. I feel so disrespected; like I am here to serve them when ever it’s convenient for them. My time doesn’t matter. I’m not doing anything else with my life. Frequently when this conversation takes place, the student has this entitled tone- this presumptuous demeanor. I’d love to tell you that I can handle any situation with grace and ease, but this one is my Achilles’ heel.

Then it dawned on me, situations like this happen precisely because students don’t have a developed sociological imagination. In Keith Roberts keynote address at the ASA Pre-Conference Workshop on Teaching and Learning, argued passionately that to learn sociology is to learn to perspective take. That is, to develop your sociological imagination you must first be cognizant of others, then be able to imagine how they experience from the world from their eyes, and finally be able to use the scientific method to tease out your bias (as much as that’s possible). If you’ve taught sociology for any amount of time, then you know that developing the skill of perspective taking can be really hard for students. Put simply, for the most part students are bad at perspective taking[2].

When students miss our test and then don’t think to contact me immediately are being inconsiderate. That is, they are not considering how their actions will make me feel. They have not considered how their inaction will look from my perspective. Given that they fail to employ the skill I am primarily focused on teaching, I can forgive their transgression. I can reframe it as a sign that they have much to learn instead of a sign of willful disrespect. Then I can let it go.

It all started with such a simple question. “What are the rules parents follow when they pick a name for their child,” I asked a sea of students with my hands on my hips at the front of the movie theater I teach my Soc 101 class in. “Start by writing down your thoughts and in a moment we’ll share them with each other.” When most of the class was pens down, I asked them to discuss in pairs the rules they’d written down.

“Okay, so tell me what you think parents think about when naming their kiddos.” Hands snapped into the air. I pointed at a young woman with curly brown hair and nodded to give her the floor. “I think parents want names that sound employable.” My eyebrows raised and my jaw dropped and in a I’m-playing-dumb-voice I asked, “what ever do you mean?” Students laughed. Students writhed in their seats. “Some names are more employable than others? If that’s true, then give me some examples of ‘employable sounding names’,” I said using air quotes. A choir of voices shot out answers rapid fire.

“Michael,
Peter,
Chris,
Bob,
John,
Gary,
Tony,
Nathan,
Tom,
Adam,
Paul,
Steve,
Jason,
Nick”

Hands in the air I cut them off, “Hold on a second. I’m seeing a couple of trends in this list. First, not a darn one of them is a traditionally female name. You know women work too, right?” They laugh seeing the smile on my face. “But what else do all of these names have in common?” Before I could even finish the question, a young man near the front row shouted, “They’re white people names!”

“So if employable names all sound like ‘white people names’, then what does this tell us? Put another way, a conflict theorist would ask ‘who benefits from this’, so tell me who benefits from this?” From here you can teach students just about any sociological concept you want: social privilege, internalized racism, the dominant culture, symbolic violence, non-material culture, patriarchy, the glass ceiling/escalator, symbolic interaction, how personal decisions are affected by social forces, labeling theory, institutional discrimination, hegemony, and on and on. It’s a swiss army knife of an activity.

Instead of asking my students this simple question, I could have shown them the research on name discrimination in hiring by Bertrand and Mullainthan (2004)[1]. I could have told them that this was a real issue, but instead they told me it was issue. The list of names they generated revealed to them something about themselves that they might have been unaware of. I could have told them that, as we all do, they personally struggled with racism and sexism, but instead their actions confessed this publicly.

In English 101 the saying is “show, don’t tell,” and in Pedagogy 101 the saying is, “the one doing the work is the one doing the learning.” This activity works on both levels.

References:

Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainthan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination” The American Economic Review 94(4):991–1013.