Student Disposition Towards Discussing Race in the Classroom

Discussions of race in the classroom have always been fraught. How do we broach such sensitive topics? How do we create an environment in which students feel both safe and comfortable discussing race on both a personal level and at a systemic scale? How does a student’s race factor into the conversation? And how does the instructor’s race factor in as well, or in conjunction with a student’s racial identity? As a Latina educator of color, I designed a research study which examined the impact my own race and ethnicity held in the classroom, and additionally how intersecting factors such as class and gender contribute to classroom dynamics. In this study, students were given surveys which gauged their interest and comfort level in discussing race and their own racial identities. Reflections based on readings in the class, which tackle race dynamics within the Black Lives Matter movement and border crossings, were utilized to examine students’ engagement with discussing race and their willingness to engage with their own racial identities as an audience. This study focused on three students of different racial backgrounds– a self-identified male white student, a self-identified male student of color that is not Latinx, and a self-identified female Latina student of color. This study examined the impact a student’s race and ethnicity had on their level of comfort and engagement with discussing race and ethnicity in the classroom, and furthermore, how having a nonwhite Latina professor affected these students’ engagements specifically

Program Profile 8: Chapman University: Bridging the Gap with Action Research

In the English Department at Chapman, all graduate students are eligible to apply for positions as GTAs after they have completed a graduate seminar in teaching composition. Those who are offered and accept GTA positions take a second graduate seminar, composition pedagogy and research practicum, simultaneously with their first semester of teaching. In order to encourage GTAs to develop identities as teacher-scholars, GTAs develop IRB-approved action research projects (Buyserie; Hawkes; Hudson et al.; Souleles) as their major work in this second seminar. These action research projects allow GTAs to research a question they have about the teaching of composition, using their own students as the sources of their data. Thus, they are learning how (their own) teacher-knowledge can be a source of expertise in the fields of pedagogy and composition, and the action research project becomes a central component of and bridge between their teaching (their identities as teachers, since they initiate, shape, and undertake the research as the instructor of their first-year composition class) and their scholarship (their identities as students, since they are learning how to undertake an action research project and are completing it as a graduate student assignment). Many GTAs have gone on to use their action research projects as the basis for MA theses and conference papers.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_books/1039/thumbnail.jp

We Sink Beneath the Sand

We Sink Beneath the Sand is a memoir that explores the desire for control in the face of abandonment. A few days before the narrator’s eleventh birthday, her older brother, then a sixteen-year-old boy, walks out of the front door of their home and never returns. For over a decade, the family doesn’t discuss the brother’s absence, save for off-handed comments about his current state of drug addiction and homelessness. Now a young adult, the narrator begins her search for what happened to her estranged brother and starts asking her mother for the truth. In a series of conversations with her mother, she discovers the true circumstances around his departure and his extended disappearance, and along the way she discovers more about her mother and father’s past and must reckon with how the trauma of their pasts affects them still, and how she too finds herself sinking beneath the weight of the past and the present