P691G – Graduate Student Professional Development Seminar

Week 9 – Thinking about some potentially challenging situations arising from the salience of some aspects of the students’ identity

Objectives

• Explain how various aspects of students’ identity may manifest through interactions in the classroom.
• Develop plans for dealing with such situations.

Activites

• An exercise exploring how race is socially constructed. I give pictures of people whose racial identity is intentionally ambiguous and I have students classify them, just based on the pictures. The varied answers are illuminating. This is particularly relevant given our large number of international students.
• Whiteboard work – Two real life cases exploring situations where student identity is salient. All groups do the same cases