Ask Them

Dear Friends,

I initially had in mind a series of interviews with marginalized college students that I would make use of throughout One Classroom at a Time; I ended up using only one. Angelica[1], a first-generation Latinx student attending a predominantly white institution in the Midwest, spoke to me near the end of her fourth year. Her parents, immigrants from Mexico, hadn’t attended college. One of her older siblings had enrolled but dropped out. Her other older sibling hadn’t graduated from high school. Always a good student, Angelica felt the hopes of her family on her as she began her first year.

She planned to major in therapeutic recreation, a professionally minded program that boasts that 95 percent of its graduates have landed a job or a place in graduate school within six months of graduation. But in her first year, in an early class in that program, she was one of the only students of color, and she quickly noticed that the white professor rarely called on her or took her contributions seriously. “I always felt a different tone or a different vibe that I got from her in comparison to the white women in the class. It just made me feel like I could not ask questions—I had to figure stuff out on my own.” She did poorly in the class and began to question both her prospects in therapeutic recreation and in college more generally. Looking back on that first year, Angelica told me that her struggles were rooted in her fear that she didn’t belong at college: “My sense of belonging was zero. I felt like I didn’t really have someone that I could reach out to. My very first semester here I felt very much imposter syndrome. I was struggling with my mental health. I skipped a lot of my classes. I didn’t really want to eat.” Her academics suffered as her anxiety increased. It was only later, when she switched her major to Gender, Women’s and Sexuality studies (GWSS) that she began to feel more confident with her place at the university. A much more diverse major, GWSS had classes that “made me feel safe, made me feel seen, and made me feel like my voice and my thoughts mattered.”

The experience that Angelica went through in her first year is a nearly textbook case of a psychological barrier that many of our marginalized students face at college. Often referred to as “belonging uncertainty,” it might best be thought of as a social variety of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat, one of the most well-supported concepts in con­temporary social psychology, is a kind of cognitive tax: students who suspect they may be negatively stereotyped waste precious mental resources fending off the possibility that they will confirm the stereotype. But students’ knowledge that they might be stereotyped doesn’t just lead to poorer performances on intellectual tasks; it can also lead students to draw conclusions about their place within a college community. As the University of Pittsburgh researcher Kevin Binning and his colleagues write, “stereotypes gain power from their intersubjectivity: People know about stereotypes, and they know that other people know about stereotypes.” This fear—that other people will stereotype me and that therefore I will not belong—often becomes an interpretive key for students with a marginalized identity. A privileged student might see a bad score on a test, for example, as an isolated incident, merely the result of too much socializing and not enough studying. A marginalized student, by contrast, is far more likely to interpret that bad score as a sign that she’s not really cut out for college or for success in a particular discipline. Angelica already knew, before entering college, that few people in her extended family and community had succeeded in getting a degree. She also already knew well the stereotypes around Latinx immigrants and academic achievement in the United States. When she entered college, she looked around her classes and saw a sea of white faces. It didn’t take much, given her starting point, to make a student like Angelica feel like she didn’t belong.

A fascinating study from 2009 showed just how attuned we are to signals that we might not belong and just how much of an effect that can have on marginalized students. Researchers invited Stanford undergraduates to complete a questionnaire “regarding technical jobs and internships” in a classroom in Stanford’s Gates Building, which houses the computer science department. Among the items on the questionnaire were questions about the students’ interest in computer science: their interest in majoring in it, their desire to learn about computer programming, and so on. All students answered the same questions, but half of the students completed the questionnaire in a room filled with items deemed stereotypical of a computer scientist’s office: a Star Trek poster, video game boxes, soda cans, technical magazines, and so on. The other half completed the questionnaire in a classroom with nonstereotypical items: a nature poster, healthy snacks, general-interest magazines. Male and female students who completed the study in the nonstereotypical room were equally likely to express an interest in computer science. But when female students completed the questionnaire in the stereotypical room, their interest dropped sharply. (The men were unaffected by the room’s decorations.) Just being in a room with certain posters on the wall and junk food wrappers on a table was enough to signal to women that they don’t belong in the social world of computer scientists. The important thing here is not the significance of posters and magazines in academic settings; rather the study shows the extent to which women are ready to see signs that they aren’t the kinds of students who major in computer science. Because our marginalized students have a keen awareness of the stereotypes that govern who belongs and who doesn’t, it often doesn’t take very much to trigger their belonging uncertainty—see Angelica’s experience of “a different tone or a different vibe” from her professor.

Research has established that marginalized students experience belonging uncertainty more than their more privileged peers and that it is a substantial contributor to their academic underperformance. Students who feel they belong within a class have been shown to be more motivated to do well in that class, to value more highly the work they do in the class, and to be more likely to perceive their instructor as warm and open. Students who feel they belong within an institution tend to be more motivated, engaged, and self-confident and are less likely to consider dropping out. Studies have demonstrated increased belonging uncertainty in Black students, students of color more broadly, women (particularly in STEM fields), first-generation students, students with disabilities, ESL students, and trans and gender-nonconforming students.

How do we combat stereotype threat and belonging uncertainty so that all of our students have a better chance of success? Scholars have demonstrated a number of strategies that have worked to take away these barriers. Here I want to highlight just one: broadening our students’ working selves.

The concept of “working selves” is the idea that, within any given context, each of us typically only brings a portion of our selves to bear. When a sprinter is lining up for a big race, for example, she is probably not thinking about her relationships with friends or her political commitments. Those may be vitally important aspects of her self, but they are not relevant to the task at hand. Whatever else she is, when race time rolls around, the sprinter is a sprinter.

Something similar—if perhaps not quite so extreme—happens to all of us in the many contexts we encounter. With friends at a picnic, I am my “friend self.” With my kids at the dinner table, I am my “parent self.” And if I sit down to take a big exam, I am my “student self.” These various selves aren’t completely distinct from each other; I am me wherever I go. But I bring various parts of myself to bear depending on the context. Gregory Walton and others have posited that the broader a working self you can bring to any given context, the more protected you’ll be against any given threat. If you have a too-narrow conception of your working self for a task, you are overly susceptible to threats that may arise to that working self. Marginalized students in this country are particularly at risk to stereotypes about academic performance—if we can broaden these students’ working selves within the context of the classroom, we can help reduce the power of stereotype threat and belonging uncertainty.

I suggest a great number of ways to encourage students to bring more of their selves into the classroom in One Classroom at a Time; here I want to focus on something that I suspect is among the most important teaching moves I make. At the beginning of every semester, before I meet the students (usually the day before our first class meeting), I send out a survey. I use Google Forms, but the particular technology doesn’t matter. As long as you find a way to ask questions of your students that’s easy for them to access and respond to, anything can work. I start with basic questions: their name, what they like to be called, their preferred pronouns. I ask them what challenges they’re currently facing or anticipate facing during the semester and give them some examples: housing, mental health, family drama, and so on. I also ask what kinds of responsibilities they have apart from our class. And I ask how many hours per week they think they’ll be able to devote to coursework (reminding them, of course, of the university policy of expecting six hours of work outside of class for a three-credit-hour course). I also ask them a number of questions about what they hope to get out of the class, and how they think it might be useful to them afterwards. Their answers to these questions are useful to me as I begin to get to know my students, telling me crucial information about their lives and what I can expect them to be able to do during the semester ahead. But the survey is even more useful as a signal to students. 

Regardless of the information it brings back, the survey itself is a piece of information, providing a crucial first impression to students about a professor, and a course, that they know nothing about save their preconceived notions about professors and courses. The first thing my students learn about me is that I want to learn more about them, and that I think that learning more about them is essential to my teaching the course. Right off the bat, I’m signaling to students that I’m interested in who they are, what they bring to the course, what they want to get out of it, and what they worry may hold them back from succeeding. We have a surprisingly large amount of power over how students see us and our courses, but we really only have a slim window of time to exercise that power. The pre-semester survey is a powerful way to encourage students to begin with an understanding that this will be a course where they are welcome to—are, in fact encouraged to—bring their whole selves with them.

An important effect of asking these questions is that they demonstrate that we don’t assume we know the answers. We don’t know ahead of time why students are taking the class, what they want to achieve by studying the subject, what led them to our classrooms, and where they hope their trajectory will lead them afterward. The curiosity represented by such a survey begins to let students know that they won’t be stereotyped in this classroom. They will get a chance to show who they are, in full.

When stigmatized students see themselves within our classrooms only as what’s reflected in their academic performance, they are most likely to pay the cognitive tax that comes with awareness of being stereotyped. If we can, instead, create an environment in which students feel like they can be themselves—their whole selves or something closer to it—maybe they won’t have to pay that tax, or not as much of it.

Even though the book won’t officially be published until August 12, some people who pre-ordered have already received their copies—it’s been so great to see it out in the wild. You, too, can see One Classroom at a Time up close and personal, just by making a few clicks right over here.

[1] Not her real name.