Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

Teaching Strategies

The following strategies will allow students to easily access the complex information that we will be tackling in class.

Direct Instruction

Before we begin, I provide 1.) a short overview of race and racial formation in Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, and 2.) a short introduction to colorblindness, indigenous studies and ethnic studies. This is necessary because my students will not be familiar with any of these things that are necessary for them to have a chance to understand the complexity of the topics we will be tackling in class. Students will need a great deal of scaffolding with the target language in order to grasp these very difficult concepts. This can be done in person or on a Zoom call with students. The strategies below are essential for this to happen.

Dialectical Journal

Students in my language classes will have an interactive notebook. An interactive notebook can be used for in-person classes and distance learning/virtual classes. In the appendix there are resources on how to create an interactive notebook online.

These notebooks will be required and there will be a section for a dialectical journal. In dialectical journals, students write responses to specific parts of a text, perhaps a line or phrase or even a short passage. These entries allow students to “dialogue” with novels, to question, to challenge, to analyze, to make connections. The journals serve another purpose by allowing students who are normally hesitant to jump into the fray that can characterize lively discussions to have something ready to discuss or to use in response to a classmate’s comments.

Class Discussions: Whole Class, Socratic Seminar, Fish Bowl

I was the student that always talked in high school and always made my opinion be heard. I loved when teachers has discussions in class. I know that many of my students are not excited about having discussions or even hearing their name be called in front of the class. In the language classroom I have learned that it is important to learn to express their ideas verbally and written. Boggs reiterates that it is important for educators to get away from the “command and control” model and allow students create a new model that allows “for the human and social need of young people to be creators of knowledge and social change.”¹² Class discussions allow for students to be the leaders in the classroom with a little push from the teacher. Class discussions allow for students to get them thinking and talking about difficult concepts like race and racial formation in a meaningful way. To ease students into graded, formal discussions, we begin with an informal whole class discussion with me as the discussion leader. I pose questions and ask follow up questions that require more specific, detailed responses than the general, unsupported ones that students are accustomed to providing. I provide students with a list of phrases in the target language to use during discussion.  At first they are uncomfortable with the introductory phrases; however, they come to appreciate them and find them useful for framing comments in thoughtful ways. They especially come in handy when we transition to Socratic seminars and fishbowl discussions.

These class discussions are designed to be an open space where heritage students can feel free to have open discussions about hard topics. In my experience, students of color do not participate as much as their white counterparts. The conversation is then taken over by white students in some instances and if the teacher does not do anything to keep the conversation balanced it leads to colorblindness practices. In order to assure this does not happen, we must be hyper vigilant of this. Pelak advocates for instructors to be critically self-reflective and to use sociology classrooms as sites of decolonization. ¹³  Decolonizing our classrooms is just one way that instructors can make students comfortable in sharing their ideas with their classmates. Navarro believes that “students of Colour benefit from instruction that is grounded in young people’s cultural orientations and classrooms that feel like home.”¹⁴ If we can bring this type of environment into the classroom, students of color will be successful in these discussions.

The Socratic seminar is an exercise in endurance. Because students are required to remain in the discussion circle for the duration of the period (on a regular day a minimum 45 minutes and on a block day 85 minutes), students must come to class ready to discuss the topic, generally based on a reading or a movie. Their homework the night before is to generate at least five questions for the discussion. These must be open-ended questions that move discussion. Having these questions ready is especially useful for the first few times they participate in Socratic seminars. Since students are generally uncomfortable with silence, the questions give them something to fill the void in discussion that is inevitable, especially during their first forays into this kind of discussion. The discussions will be in the target language. The journals allow them to ground their comments, questions, and observations in the text or movie. As they gain more experience with the seminar, the conversation becomes more organic. They learn to sustain the conversation with questions that are authentic to what is being discussed at that moment. They learn to move more fluidly from one topic to another, and to draw connections between them. It is an amazing thing to see students speaking organically in the target language—when it works.

The fishbowl discussion begins with 10-12 students in a circle. As in the Socratic seminar, they bring their questions and journals. However, rather than remain in the discussion circle for the duration of the period, students may only leave when they are “tapped out” by another student not currently in the circle but who wants to enter the discussion, where they must remain until they are tapped out and replaced by a classmate. Students must be in the circle at least once in order to get a grade for the day. Students become better listeners because they must be able to join the discussion with as little disruption to the discussion as possible.

All three types of class discussion require students to become adept at putting their thoughts in order quickly and articulating them clearly, and when someone does not understand, to find different ways to say them. And they learn to do this using academic language.