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Race in the class: exploring learning and the (re)production of racial meanings in doctoral coursework
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Race in the class: exploring learning and the (re)production of racial meanings in doctoral coursework
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RACE IN THE CLASS: EXPLORING LEARNING AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF RACIAL MEANINGS IN DOCTORAL COURSEWORK by Aireale J. Rodgers A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (URBAN EDUCATION POLICY) August 2022 ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the bold, beautiful, brilliant, Black women who raised me: To my maternal grandmother, Flora Thurmond, our matriarch, whose love and prayers planted seeds that carry forth new generations. Your prayers still save me. To my maternal great aunt, Eva Jackson, who taught me the beauty of a quiet presence – that power, calmness, and still discernment can coexist. To my paternal grandmother, Mary Lee Rodgers, who modeled that Black women deserve to live self-determined lives – we can and should have it all. To my aunt, Ellen Camp, who never missed a chance to remind me of the importance of family – I thank you for your steadfast love. You are my kin. To my mother, Arnitha Thurmond, who taught me the only dreams I couldn’t achieve were the ones I don’t pursue. You are my everything and my always. All glory be to God for my Ancestors, my heritage, my culture. This doctorate is for us. iii Acknowledgements This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself, but that are nonetheless compelling. – Parker J. Palmer (1994, p. 47), Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation Honestly, I have been most excited and scared to write the acknowledgments section of my dissertation. How could I ever put into words the deep gratitude I feel for the many people who have helped mold me into the woman I am becoming? My comments here likely won’t suffice, but I pray that I demonstrate, both through my life and my life’s work, how much everyone’s loving investments in me have affected me. I’ll start as the Saints taught me – first giving honor to God, who is the head of my life. Throughout my life, God has consistently communicated with me in my dreams. I think it is the one time my mind is still enough to receive Their messages. And in the winter of 2015, I had my first dream about graduate school. When I woke up the following day, I thought, “Oh, hell no.” I *barely* completed my bachelor’s degree – it took me eight years with multiple breaks in between to get my degree. When I finally graduated, I felt defeated, damaged, and embarrassed. Most of all, I felt a deep sense of anger at the ways an institution that I had grown to love could do me so much harm. So, when I finally walked across the stage to receive my undergraduate degree, I vowed never to return to academia. Never say never, right? God was relentless. Much to my confusion, I kept having dreams about attending graduate school. But how could someone with a 2.2 GPA undergraduate attend graduate school? For years that number defined me – functioning as my scarlet letter. It caused me to diminish myself, but God’s faithfulness called me higher. God positioned me in places that rearticulated the futures They preordained for me. They put people in my path who felt compelled to advocate iv on my behalf, take a chance on me, and challenge me when my expectations of myself were too small. I witnessed God’s love through the beloved community we cultivated. Through interdependence and ‘mustard seed faith,’ the mountains moved, the internalized uncertainty quieted, and the path was cleared. I could never have imagined the painful experiences of impostorism, isolation, and self-doubt I felt in undergrad were conditioning me for what would become both a unique perspective on and a deep commitment to reimagining higher education teaching and learning for racially minoritized students. God truly does use our pain for Their purpose. Like one of my favorite preachers, Sarah Jakes Roberts, once said, “I want to be filled with Your glory so that I can go out and shake the earth.” This dissertation and my entire research program center on equity and justice because that is Holy. God, the biggest hope for my life is to honor You. May who I become as a scholar, educator, and human in Your world bring You infinite glory. My family has been the undeniable force behind my success and perseverance. My father was tragically killed when I was four years old. I watched my mom at my father’s funeral make a promise to him that she would always take care of me. My mother has gone far beyond that commitment! She sacrificed so much to make sure that I never wanted for anything and that I could build the life of my dreams. My mom has always been my fiercest protector, most loyal confidante, and trusted confidante. Reflecting on my childhood, I now realize that what she was doing was positioning me. My mother tells me that her dream for me was that I would go farther than she could. However, the reality is that wherever I go, she’s coming with me. All good things in my life directly result from my mother’s love and care. Mommy, the way you love me is v redemptive, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to become the woman you raised me to be. I love you more than life itself. Black folk talk a lot about “play” family, those whom we call “auntie” or “cousin” but are not actually related to us by blood. When I think of my Auntie Ellen, my mom’s best friend for more than 60 years, there is nothing “play” about our bond! Auntie Ellen and Uncle Earl have always been there for our family, and they loved and supported me in significant ways throughout my life. Witnessing my Mommy and Auntie Ellen’s relationship evolve over time provided an important model for understanding the power of kinship, sisterhood, and chosen family. Auntie Ellen, I love you so much! Now to my sweet, silly, sassy, smart survivor, Cassandra “Sandy” Knox. Sandy technically is my cousin, but she is the closest thing I have to a sister. Twelve years my senior, I always admired Sandy. And if you’ve had the distinct pleasure to meet her, you know why. My sis is a BOSS. I watched her go to college, become a mother, develop a fulfilling career that she loves, and become a wife, all while being one of the most incredible friends and family members anyone could ever ask for. Sandy has survived many hardships in life, most recently beating Stage 3 breast cancer with dignity and grace. Sandy, your belief in our God and yourself inspires me. Your sisterhood helps me dream bigger, both inside and outside academia. THANK YA! Although I only have a few memories with my father, I have many memories with my paternal family. My mother and beloved Grandma Rodgers worked hard to ensure I knew my kin. I treasure the many memories of trips, hugs, and laughs with the Rodgers family, especially Granny, Auntie Vickie, and my cousin, Kim. Now we get to watch Justin grow up and live the legacy of pride and excellence Granny outlined for us. What a gift it is to be a Rodgers! vi I want to express gratitude to my partner, Candace Griffin. Mi amor, your love carried me through this dissertation’s analysis and writing process. Meeting you has changed my life for the better. I can better articulate what I want and deserve from a partner. You are more than I could have ever imagined, and I thank God for you and Savannah’s presence in my life every day. And most importantly, what do you want to eat? J I love you! Then there are friends who have become family. Ashley, my best friend since 2 nd grade. I’m so glad I bullied you into being my friend! Growing up with you was such a gift. All the Barbies, French fries, and obsessively repetitive watching Scary Movie 2 and Tales from the Hood were fun, but I cherish our conversations the most. The bond we built is unbreakable, and I am so grateful that I get to do life with you as my bestie. To make things even sweeter, we have our little bestie to add to the mix! Michaela, my sweet little peanut, you are the manifestation of everything we prayed for. I am so proud to be your Godmommy and bestie, and I will always be there for you. I love the Adams family! Kevin, Gucci, KP da Postman, Charlay, and so many other names that are not appropriate for me to list in a dissertation, YOUR BEST FRIEND IS A DOCTOR! And according to your logic, that makes you, too, a doctor! So honestly, congratulations to you, Dr. Payne. From our first ‘date’ to a Britney Spears concert in fourth grade, I knew ours was a forever bond! Thank you for all the love, encouragement, and pizza money you’ve given me over the years. You will always be the only man I need. Sharlay loves you, Charlay! Although it was filled with hardships, my time as an undergraduate at Northwestern University was deeply formative. A host of faculty and administrators at NU at the undergraduate and graduate levels supported me in my quest to find myself and my intellectual interests. Special thanks to Mark Hoffman, Susan Johnston Olson, Kenneth Powers, Nsombi vii Ricketts, Pat Mann, Dr. David Figlio, Dr. Nitasha Sharma, and many others who used their influence to support and encourage me. Significantly, the relationships I formed at NU continue to reap goodness in my life. Becoming a member of the “Ooh So Fly” Beta Psi chapter of Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc. changed my life in ways I could have never predicted. As an only child, I always wanted siblings, and I found them through the bonds I made with some people in my chapter. Dra. Judith Landeros and Rev. Dra. Maria Alejandra Salazar (LOL), I am grateful to have been your Chapter Orientation Advisor and soul sister. I am also adding our beloved Jessica Higareda here since she is an honorary Beta Psi sister! We have already lived so much life together, and it has been an honor to go through the highs and lows of life with you two. I know I can always count on you, and I do not take that for granted—unity, love, and respect to you and our beloved Sorors. LOCK UP. Margarita is so proud of us! During my time at NU, I also formed deep friendships with Aldita Gallardo, Tiffany Walden, and Marrion Johnson. These dynamic folks have been shooting with me in the gym from the beginning. Aldita, my Mamurzst, love is not sufficient enough a word to describe our bond. You are truly phenomenal, and I love witnessing you living boldly and abundantly. You are always a phone call away to remind me of my worth, to hype me up, and to ask, “what about meeeeeeeeeee?” I am excited to witness what is next for us because the Big Gurls are taking over! My dearest Tucky, what a life you’re building! I remember when we were both struggling to discern God’s path for us but check us out now! You are the Editor-in-Chief of an award-winning digital media platform that reaches thousands of people by telling the truth about Blackness and Black Chicago. You are doing the work you were created to do on your terms, viii and you always remind me to do the same. I’m so proud of you…even though you’re from the west side (just kidding) …I love you! Marrionettas! You need to tell me, “I told you so.” You recognized my potential all along! Thank you for identifying something in me that I couldn’t comprehend for myself. You are such a loving and loyal friend, and I am grateful to have you in my life. I can’t wait to return to NU with you and Allen Micheal! Let’s start the hiring campaign. #FutureBlackFaculty Returning to NU as a master’s student was such a blessing. I became part of a robust intellectual community that supported, challenged, and built my capacity for critical scholarship. Being trained by Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, along with the mentorship and advisement from Drs. Jeannette Colyvas, Paula Hooper, Eva Lam, Carol Lee, Gina Logan, Jolie Matthews, and Miriam Sherin were foundational to my identity as a learning scientist. I also want to express love and gratitude to Drs. Arturo Cortez, Susan Jurow, Ananda Marin, and Suraj Uttamchandani, who have been critical teachers and thought partners to me as I embarked on doing learning sciences work. Moreover, coming up alongside members of my cohort like Drs. Mari Altshuler and Addie Shrodes and Future Drs. Jeniece Fleming and Arturo Muñoz taught me how important it is to have community in graduate school. I am so proud of us and the contributions we will continue making to our field! While working in graduate housing, I met and formed a sisterhood with Dr. Alicia Foxx, Dr. Shoniqua Roach, and Future Dr. Tiara Fennell. Our group text thread still brings me so much joy. I am proud of the women and scholars we are becoming, and I hope to continue to grow in sisterhood with each of you. As Shoniqua would say, “love you deep!” Rounding out my NU crew is my academic wifey, Dra. Heather McCambly. I met Heather when she was an incoming doctoral student, and over the years, she has become one of ix my most meaningful friendships. I often think to myself, “What would Heather do,” when faced with what feels like a seemingly impossible challenge. I witness in Heather a fighting spirit, relentless love, and commitment to equity and justice that makes the people around her feel like they, too, can change the world. You’re busting open new pathways for scholars coming behind you to do academia differently – in better and more loving ways. I am so proud of you and love you more than words can ever properly capture. Who would have imagined my graduate school journey would bring me to sunny California? I was deadest on staying in Chicago, but USC’s prospective student visit days changed everything. I met incredible folks like Laura Romero and Patrick Patterson (and eventually Alex Hazard!), whose superpower as administrators always manifested in loving experiences with students. I also was introduced to Slaughterhouse (the Black Student Collective in the Ph.D. program). Meeting Dr. Antar Tichavakunda and Dr. Marissiko Wheaton (soon-to-be Greer), who immediately made me feel so loved and safe, made me excited to come to USC. But what really sealed the deal was learning that there would be five other dynamic Black women in my cohort! I was hype! And indeed, the Super Six played a pivotal role in getting me to the finish line. Throughout my time in grad school, my cohort mates, Future Drs. Taylor Enoch- Stevens and Akua Nkansah-Amankra have been right by my side. Taylor, God’s presence radiates through you in ways that make you a haven for many people. Thank you for letting me be my most authentic self, praying for and with me, and constantly reminding me that I am neither too much nor not enough—I am always enough. Akua, my life partner, soul sibling, my bestest friend, you have changed how I show up in relationships. You helped me learn the gift of being vulnerable and letting others care for you. I am so grateful that you are in a context that feeds your mind and soul. Your future is limitless x because you are quite literally the most brilliant person I know. Thank you for loving me in ways that call me in, make me better, and fill me up. Our friendship will never end – I’m here to stay, and there’s nothing you can do about it! I love you SO much! Now on to my riders, teammates, and beloved clown family, Drs. Ashley Stewart and Josh Schuschke. You all are the people who simultaneously hold me down and lift me up. I still do not remember how we got so close, but I am grateful for our bond. Our group FaceTime calls, inside jokes, and family couch naps are my happy place. Your love and encouragement got me through the dissertation phase, and I am a better scholar and human because of our friendship. Also, the fact that we finally got Josh to say he loves us is an even bigger win than this degree! I love you all more than you will ever know, my sweet sissy and dearest Cuhhhhhhhhhh. You two are everything, and I can’t wait to reunite en la noche de la mañana. I also want to express profound gratitude and love to Drs. Eric Felix, Cynthia Villareal, Román Liera, Deborah Southern, Steve Desir, and Jude Paul Dizon, who have made a profound impact on my thinking. In their own ways, these folks have poured into me and helped me develop my confidence as a scholar. You are already doing critical work in higher education, and I cannot wait to celebrate all the future success you will have. I love each of you and am so proud to be in community with you! None of this would be possible without partnership of my research collaborators – the students and faculty who animate my study. Thank you for inviting me into your classroom communities and trusting me to bear witness to the powerful ways you all learned together. I hope my dissertation honors the love and labor each of you bring to your discipline. The wisdom and guidance of my dear committee, whom I love so much, helped me reach the finish line. I could not imagine undergoing this process with anyone other than my fantastic xi advisor, Dr. Julie Posselt. Julie served as an advocate and femtor for me – positioning me early on as knowledgeable, capable, and ready. Her confidence in me helped me to find confidence in myself. Not to mention, her thoughtful and kind engagement with my writing is what helped produce a dissertation that I am proud of. Julie, I’ll say it repeatedly – thank you for taking a chance on me and for leading the Posselt Research Team with love. Dra. Estela Bensimon, La Mera Mera, working with you helped concretize the type of scholar I want to become. Participating in the equity institutes helped ground my thinking in the form of praxis that was pivotal to my identity development as a burgeoning scholar. You have opened so many doors for me to engage more meaningfully in practice and educational design. I am forever grateful to you for being on my team and helping me realize my value as a scholar and learning designer. Dr. Brendesha Tynes, #BlackGirlMagic herself! Being in community with you throughout the years has been such a gift. Thank you for always keeping it real with me about the beauty and hardship of being a Black woman in the academy. You have helped me navigate various challenging situations while empowering me to think creatively and strategically about how I move. Moreover, you are an excellent thought partner. Thank you for engaging my work, pushing my thinking, and encouraging me to articulate my vision for higher education. Embracing my “unique brilliance,” as you might say, has gotten me far. Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, I do not even know where to start. The day I worked up the courage to email you changed the direction of my life. What I thought would be an intimidating conversation was the opposite – I left feeling empowered, confident, and loved. You do that for so many students, speaking us into better versions of ourselves. You help us know ourselves and our ideas the way you see them – pregnant with potential. Through all my doubts, you never xii once questioned whether I’d become Dr. Rodgers. You just helped forge a path for me to get here. It is no doubt that teaching is your superpower, and I thank God that you are one of my greatest teachers. Last but never least, I want to express gratitude to my cloud of witnesses, Flora Thurmond, Eva Jackson, Mary Rodgers, Rosa Bell, Margarita Vizcarra, and all my beloveds who have become ancestors. I feel you with me, and I carry you in my heart forever. xiii Table of Contents Dedication ........................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ xvi List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. xvii Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... xviii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Organization of the Dissertation .......................................................................................... 3 Preface: Eloquent Rage and Abundant Joy: Musing on Life and Death in the Academy ......... 4 Re-Membering Maggie: Consejos de Mi Hermana ............................................................. 6 Heeding Margarita’s Words in My Work ........................................................................... 7 Chapter 1: A Review of Teaching in Postsecondary Education Literature ................................. 11 Operationalizing Teaching and Learning .......................................................................... 12 Role of Teaching in U.S. Higher Education ...................................................................... 13 Research on Faculty Pedagogical Practice ............................................................ 14 Transmission vs. Facilitation ..................................................................... 14 How Faculty Learn to Teach ..................................................................... 16 Doctoral Coursework as a Site of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning ............ 17 Race, Racism, and Racialization in U.S. Higher Education Teaching and Learning ........ 20 Legacy of Diversity in Higher Education .............................................................. 22 The Relationship Between Diversity and Learning ................................... 24 Learning About Race in Classroom Contexts ....................................................... 25 Learning in Ethnic Studies Programs ........................................................ 26 Diversity Course Requirements ................................................................. 29 Labor Acknowledgment for Faculty of Color ........................................... 30 Equity-Mindedness, Consciousness Raising, and Pedagogical Change ........................... 32 Toward Equity-Mindedness in Faculty Practice ................................................... 34 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 36 Chapter 2: “Vygotsky Must Be Racialized”: A Conceptual Framework for Refracting Racial Meanings in Doctoral Coursework ................................................................. 38 Cultural-Historical Activity Theory .................................................................................. 40 Expansive Learning in CHAT ............................................................................... 43 Challenging Race-Evasiveness in CHAT .............................................................. 46 Toward a “Re-Generation” of CHAT .................................................................... 48 Race-Making as an Unstable, Yet Enduring, Historical Project ....................................... 49 Racial Projects in the United States ....................................................................... 50 Racial Meaning-Making as a Sociocultural and Political Learning Process ..................... 52 xiv Chapter 2 (continued) Schools as Vital Sites for Racial Meaning-Making .......................................................... 55 Racialized Legitimacy in Higher Education .......................................................... 57 Towards a Racialized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory ............................................... 59 Chapter 3: Designing to Witness Racial Meaning-Making: Methodology and Research Design ........................................................................................................................ 64 Comparative Case Study ................................................................................................... 64 Case Study Site .................................................................................................................. 66 Sampling Criteria ............................................................................................................... 67 Recruitment ....................................................................................................................... 68 Data Collection Procedures ............................................................................................... 69 Phase 1: Case Selection ......................................................................................... 69 Phase 2: Field Work .............................................................................................. 73 Classroom Observations ............................................................................ 74 Student Focus Groups ................................................................................ 76 Data Analysis ............................................................................................. 78 Analysis of Interview and Focus Group Data ............................... 78 Analysis of Video Sources ............................................................ 80 Phase 3: Retrospective Think-Aloud Interviews ................................................... 84 Analysis of Think-Aloud Interviews ............................................. 86 Trustworthiness ................................................................................................................. 86 Triangulation ......................................................................................................... 86 Peer Review ........................................................................................................... 87 Research Reflexivity and Critical Reflection ........................................................ 88 Ethical Considerations ....................................................................................................... 89 Ontological Totality ............................................................................................... 89 Informed Consent and Anonymity ........................................................................ 91 Navigating Risks ................................................................................................... 91 Limitations ......................................................................................................................... 92 Structure of the Findings Chapters .................................................................................... 94 Chapter 4: Tales of Three Classroom Contexts: Introducing the Cases ........................................ 96 Sociology: “Racialization in Latin America” .................................................................... 97 Course Structure and Pedagogical Design ............................................................ 99 Classroom Community ........................................................................................ 101 Student Perspectives ................................................................................ 103 Political Science: “International Law and Politics” ........................................................ 105 Course Structure and Pedagogical Design .......................................................... 105 Classroom Community ........................................................................................ 109 Learning Sciences: “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” .......................................... 113 Course Structure and Pedagogical Design .......................................................... 114 Classroom Community ........................................................................................ 118 Chapter 5: Refracting Racial Meanings in Classroom Discourse and Interaction: A Microanalysis of Four Focal Events .................................................................... 124 xv Chapter 5 (continued) “We All, Also, Live These Things”: Developing Intersubjectivity and Reflexivity in Sociology .................................................................................................. 127 “I Remember Thinking Someone Could Get Hurt” ............................................ 132 Focus Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis ................................................... 134 “I’m going to be the devil’s advocate”: Arguing the Reality of Racialization in Political Science .......................................................................................................... 136 Focus Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis ................................................... 142 Historicizing the Canon of the Learning Sciences: Reading Power into John Dewey ................................................................................................... 143 Positing the Purpose of Education ....................................................................... 144 Theories of Learning as Theories of Society ....................................................... 146 Focus Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis ................................................... 150 Witnessing Racialization in Video Data: Political and Ethical Imperatives for Design and Analysis ................................................................................................ 152 Video Data in the Learning Sciences .................................................................. 153 Racialization as a Form of Learning ................................................................... 154 Focus Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis ................................................... 160 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 162 Chapter 6: Making Learning a Paradise: Discussion and Conclusion ........................................ 164 Summary of Key Findings ............................................................................................... 167 Comparing Case Insights ................................................................................................. 169 Perceived Salience of Race to the Course ........................................................... 169 Racial Identity of the Faculty Member ................................................................ 171 Study Significance ........................................................................................................... 173 Doctoral Coursework as a Racializing Space ...................................................... 173 Disciplinary World-Building in Doctoral Coursework ....................................... 176 Implications for Future Research .................................................................................... 177 Implications for Practice .................................................................................................. 179 Cultivating Critical Literacies Around Racial Meaning-Making ........................ 179 Continued Opportunities for Equity-minded Learning for Faculty ..................... 181 Challenging the Lure of “Best Practices” ............................................................ 183 Concluding Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 184 References ................................................................................................................................... 187 Appendix A: Department Contact List ........................................................................................ 216 Appendix B: Informational Interview Protocol (Semi-Structured) ............................................. 217 Appendix C: Classroom Observation Protocol ........................................................................... 219 Appendix D: Student Focus Group Interview Protocol (Semi-Structured) ................................. 221 Appendix E: Retrospective Think-Aloud Procedure (Semi-Structured) ..................................... 223 Appendix F: Transcription Conventions According to Atkinson and Heritage (1984) .............. 224 xvi List of Tables Table 3.1 Demographics of Informational Interview Collaborators .......................................... 70 xvii List of Figures Figure P.1 ¡Margarita Presente! ................................................................................................... 10 Figure 1.1 Visualization of Student Socialization in Doctoral Education ................................... 20 Figure 2.1 Vygotsky’s Model of Mediated Action ..................................................................... 41 Figure 2.2 The Structure of a Human Activity System ............................................................... 42 Figure 2.3 R-CHAT Framework Visualization ........................................................................... 62 Figure 3.1 Screenshot Example of Content Log ......................................................................... 81 Figure 3.2 Screenshot Example of Playscript .............................................................................. 83 xviii Abstract Despite being a core context for graduate student learning and socialization, doctoral- level coursework remains undertheorized in higher education literature. Classrooms are important because they operate as sites where students develop enduring frames to support racial meaning-making, or “the interpretation of racial differences” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 10). Scholars have documented how adherence to Eurocentric epistemologies and whitewashed curriculum impoverishes knowledge production and entrenches a hegemonic university. Yet, few scholars have empirically studied how racial meanings are (re)produced through faculty’s use of various racialized tools and artifacts (e.g., syllabi, course curriculum, knowledge from their disciplinary contexts, their own subjectivity) in classroom practice and its implications for learning and socialization in doctoral education. My dissertation is a comparative case study of how faculty and students collectively engage to (re)produce, resist, or reimagine racial meanings in three doctoral-level courses at an R-1, historically white institution: a sociology course on race, racism, and resistance in Latin America, a political science course on international law and politics, and a foundations course in the learning sciences. Using nine interviews with instructors, six interviews and four focus groups with students, and 64 hours of classroom observations across one academic term, this study analyzes the racialized dimensions of faculty-student interactions, pedagogical forms of mediation, and curricular design to uncover how racial meaning-making mediates learning in doctoral education. Across the cases, I uncover a) how race can become salient to classroom interaction in a variety of disciplines and around a variety of formal learning goals, b) how racialization of curriculum is not a question, but a given, and c) how a professor’s actions mediate racial meaning-making. Overall, this project provides a novel perspective to a growing xix literature on teaching and learning in doctoral coursework and graduate student socialization, with a particular commitment to antiracist and equity-minded pedagogical praxis. 1 Introduction The academy is not a paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all of its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. – bell hooks (1994, p. 47), Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom People often describe doctoral education as being marked by a shift from being a consumer to a producer of knowledge. Yet the truth of the matter is that pursuing a PhD demands that students consume a lot of knowledge! In addition to amassing extensive content expertise to carry out an original research project, doctoral students are expected to internalize, master, and perform the legitimated ways of knowing and being in their discipline (Rodgers et al., under review; Shulman, 2008, p. xi). Indeed, socialization, or “how to behave, what to hope for, and what it means to succeed or fail” (Tierney, 1997, p. 4), remains the dominant framework for conceptualizing in doctoral education (e.g., Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Perez et al., 2020; Walker et al., 2008). Scholars have highlighted how various milestones in a doctoral student’s developmental trajectory are constructed to assess their engagement with the valued tools and artifacts that mediate their learning (Lamont, 2009; Posselt, 2020; Rodgers et al., under review; Turner & Thompson, 1993). If doctoral education functions as the “academy’s own means of reproduction” (Shulman, 2008, p. xi), we might ask what is being reproduced and how? One possible answer is racial meanings. Racial meanings are simply the taken-for- granted beliefs and (mis)understandings people have about race. Lawrence (1987) wrote, “[Racism] is part of our common historical experience and, therefore, a part of our culture. It arises from the assumptions we have learned to make about the world, ourselves, and others, as 2 well as from the patterns of our fundamental social activities” (p. 330). These assumptions are deeply tied to our lived experiences, the intersections of our multiple social identities, and ways we make sense of ourselves and our developing identities in the social world. Race is everywhere—including the classroom. Many scholars have forwarded conceptualizations of classrooms as racialized spaces (e.g., Bensimon & Gray, 2020; Ching & Roberts, 2021; Harper & Davis, 2016; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Sleeter, 2011; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998). Whether it be through constructing course syllabi, engaging in classroom discourse, or annotating course readings, racial meaning-making is a persistent object of activity in classroom teaching and learning (Nasir & Hand, 2006). It is also a very common problem space. Few studies have systematically explored how racial meaning is reproduced in classrooms (Leonardo & Manning, 2017), and there are virtually no studies exploring the moment-to-moment unfolding of racial meaning-making in doctoral coursework. Examining processes of racial meaning from a teaching and learning perspective is important because it provides insight into professors’ roles in either reifying racism or creating new pathways to critical race consciousness for their students. This dissertation calls for a renewed and deepened attention to the pedagogical and interpersonal dimensions of the racial meaning-making that happens in and through doctoral coursework. Specifically, I use comparative case study (Yin, 2014) to uncover empirically how race is made ‘real’ in doctoral teaching and learning. The following questions guided my inquiry: 1. What pedagogical forms of mediation do equity-minded faculty use to facilitate racial meaning-making in doctoral courses? How do students respond? 2. What differences in mediation are observed given the perceived salience of race to the course? The race of the faculty member? 3 Organization of the Dissertation My dissertation is divided into six chapters. In the first chapter, I review existing literature on teaching and learning in higher education, synthesizing key discussions and tensions. Throughout this chapter, I weave insights about the purpose, problems, and potential of doctoral coursework in the social sciences. Chapter 2 presents Racialized-Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (R-CHAT), a conceptual framework I developed to study racial meaning- making. By putting critical theories of racialization in conversation with cultural-historical activity theory, I outline how racial meanings are (re)produced, resisted, and reimagined in moment-to-moment joint activity. Chapter 3 details my approach to research design for this multimethod study, including the rationale and limitations of my qualitative case study. Chapters 4 and 5 present empirical findings from my research study. In Chapter 4, I provide the backdrop for the cases by detailing aspect of the course structure, learning objectives, and pedagogical approach leveraged in each of the three cases. Chapter 5 takes readers into the classroom, presenting findings from four focal events that uncover how faculty’s moment-to-moment pedagogical actions, decisions, and strategies give rise to (or, in some cases, obstruct) learning and racial meaning-making. Chapter 6 summarizes key findings and addresses the comparative dimensions of the study. I conclude by sharing lessons for improving teaching and learning in doctoral coursework and implications for future research and practice. Overall, it is my sincerest hope that this artifact, though in progress and imperfect, sparks critical reflection and conversations about how to make learning in doctoral education a practice of freedom. 4 Preface: Eloquent Rage and Abundant Joy: Musings on Life and Death in the Academy CONTENT WARNING—DEATH AND GRIEF Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting— the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing. – bell hooks (1991, p. 1), “Theory as Liberatory Practice” One of the biggest lies people tell about the dissertation is that it demonstrates independence—independent thinking, independent research, and independent writing. In my experience, it has been quite the opposite. The closer I got to the dissertation phase, the deeper I dove into community. Sometimes, that meant forming collective writing groups, swapping course syllabi with homies at other institutions, or thought-partnering with trusted sibling- scholars about how my ideas were evolving. Other times, that meant crying with confidantes as feelings of hopelessness set in about the seemingly ever-widening gap between the academy as it is and the academy as it could be. If you are reading this essay, it means that my God, my ancestors, and my community got me to the finish line. My dissertation, then, is an artifact of interdependence rather than independence. However, working from a place of interdependence goes against much that doctoral students are taught in the academy. Cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter (1992) writes, “it is the task of the established scholarship to rigorously maintain those prescriptions which are crucial to the order’s existence” (p. 27). The academy—through the disciplines—disciplines people, their thoughts, and their actions. For People of Color, this act of disciplining can be violent. Scholars of Color often talk about how “the academy was not made for people like us.” When we consider the genesis and expansion of higher education in the settler state we call the United States of 5 America, this assertion has strong evidentiary claims (Wilder, 2013) and lasting afterlives that still impact people today. The discrimination, devaluation, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization of racially minoritized people in academia remain commonplace—so much so that Scholars of Color have developed concepts like racial battle fatigue (Smith et al., 2007), cultural taxation (Joseph & Hirshfield, 2011), microaggressions (Joseph-Salisbury, 2019), epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2014), and apartheid of knowledge (Bernal & Villalpando, 2002) to describe the many ways the academy causes us harm. We know harm is happening. We know the systems and people who perpetuate harm. We know who is the most vulnerable to harm. And we know what the costs can be—life or death. Still, so many people choose to ignore our pain. In her article “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks (1991) said that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting” (p. 1). In many ways, I came to my dissertation topic for the same reason. On November 16, 2020, I lost a sister to the academy. Margarita Vizcarra 1 was a proud Chicana woman, avid scholar-activist, and passionate educator. She played a significant role in justice-oriented student organizing efforts at UC-Riverside, where she pursued her PhD in education. Margarita will forever be remembered for her deep connections to youth, warrior spirit, joyous laughter, and brilliant mind. She was a true embodiment of the pedagogical possibilities that I seek in my research and attempt to enact and prefigure in every space I enter in higher education. I attended a beautiful symposium at the 2022 American Educational Research Association annual conference where the speakers, a group of Latinx and Indigenous scholars, reflected on the research and writing process (Montes et al., 2022). The presenters emphasized that research is a relational act and encouraged attendees to consider what it might be like to 1 Shoutout to the beautiful community at the University of California, Riverside for curating such a lovely virtual memorial. This artifact keeps our beloved Margarita with us. 6 write with our ancestors. I realized, at that moment, that I had never taken the time to write with Margarita as a beloved ancestor. Margarita and I wrote together pretty frequently when she was alive. She attended a writing group I convened for members of our sorority pursuing PhDs, and we even presented at the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA) annual conference in 2019. I like to believe that we were loving thought-partners to each other, listening to each other, probing each other’s line of argumentation, and affirming the deep consequentiality of our work. Yet, since her death, I learned to compartmentalize my grief and rage. Holding the realities of institutional harm Margarita experienced as a doctoral student made my work feel heavy and almost insurmountable. I asked myself, “How might my dissertation contribute to disrupting the hegemonic academy and its technologies of violence that too often kills the minds-bodies-spirits of my people? What’s the point?” The AERA session reminded me that if anyone had the wisdom to answer this question, it was Margarita. This essay is an attempt to write—or better yet, re-member—with her. Re-Membering Maggie: Consejos de Mi Hermana Margarita, Judith Landeros (another beloved sorority sister of ours), and I started our respective doctoral programs the same year. Each of us experienced the challenges of being a Woman of Color seeking to do critical transformative work in the academy. The three of us talked a lot about what brought us to the academy. In a written reflection Margarita shared with Judith and me, she told us what compelled her to pursue a PhD. She wrote: Mostly I was interested in [finding] people that cared about the human impact of their scholarship. bell hooks said, “language is also a place of struggle,” and I wanted to learn from educators who took this to heart. Perhaps I was searching, just like youth, for a community that cared about me. 7 She came to the academy in search of a community where she could practice what Freire (1970) called “the ontological vocation of becoming more fully human” (p. 56). What she encountered was a very different experience. Three months before Margarita died, she sent a powerful email to the faculty in her program expressing what felt like “blatant disregard for [students’] life and the efforts that it has taken to survive this long.” Never one to bite her tongue, Margarita expressed grave concerns about a lack of institutional support for historically minoritized students. Despite the institution’s failures, she spoke passionately of the loving community students cultivated and the mutual aid efforts they created. Margarita wrote, “We give life to one another because the institution and those who play to the institution’s wants and needs will never love us in the way we deserve.” Like me, she took interdependence to heart. Inspired by Chicana and Black feminisms, Margarita believed learning should be a liberating experience. In the email she shared with her program faculty, she boldly asserted: Learning spaces do not have to be this sterile and devoid of life. As a department, we’ve had the opportunity to do something different and new. To lead by example. To show kindness, comprehension, love, support, and open up the doors for those [who] have fought so hard to get here. Here, Margarita’s words expressed disappointment in her department and how she believed they failed to rise to the occasion. Yet, she also pointed toward a way forward. Like Margarita, I believe that a teaching praxis that does not speak life into students is deficient and disproportionately kills the minds-bodies-spirits of Students of Color. Heeding Margarita’s Words in My Work Gloria Anzaldúa (1990) powerfully asserts, “If we have been gagged and disempowered by theories, we can also be loosened and empowered by theories” (p. xxvi). This is the aim of the theorizing I do. At the heart of my praxis as a researcher is transforming the organizational 8 culture of postsecondary education to recognize, embrace, and foster more readily the brilliance of Students of Color. I firmly believe that higher education institutions, and the faculty charged with fostering learning within them, have tremendous power, influence, and, most importantly, a responsibility to the students they serve. My identity also informs my decision to study racialization in U.S. higher education teaching and learning as a Black queer woman treading the volatile waters of academe. My experiences navigating racialized classroom dynamics have underscored how racial meaning is constantly (re)produced in pedagogy. Moreover, it reminds me to be attuned to resistance, often made possible by the bravery, wisdom, and labor of People of Color. Members of the Combahee River Collective (1983) asserted that “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work” (p. 268). This same inspiration, a fierce and feminist love-politic (Nash, 2013), keeps me engaged in scholarship on equity-minded teaching praxis in higher education and in deep relationality with Margarita. Traditionally, positionality statements seek to locate the researcher in their research. Reflecting on researcher positionality is the “act of making the invisible decisions and interpretations of the researcher visible in the study” (Hampton et al., 2021, p. 126). Rowe (2014) argues that being critically reflexive about research positionality is vital because “the position adopted by a researcher affects every phase of the research process” (p. 628). In positionality statements, researchers usually reflect on how aspects of their social identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, class, dis/ability, and gender) informed the research process. Indeed, my lived experiences as a Black queer woman, a first-generation college graduate from an economically disenfranchised community, inform my approach to my dissertation research. But for you, dear 9 reader, to truly understand how I came to my dissertation topic and why I take it so seriously, you need to know about Margarita. I know this was likely not the preface you expected, but it is precisely the one I needed to write. Margarita’s life and death are a driving force behind my program of research—a series of explorations about how to design equity-minded and life-affirming postsecondary learning environments. In what she described as her final message to her institution, Margarita expressed material demands of her institution—to support students in having their basic needs met, to cultivate joy in the classroom, to generate a culture of critique and transformation rather than assimilation in the academy. In the same instance, we also bear witness to the type of burnout and suffering that can happen when the inaction of the institution burdens students to take on that labor. Cultivating learning environments—like classrooms and research labs—where students’ curiosities, commitments, and critical literacies are valued and expanded are necessary for academia, not only because these experiences lead to more expansive learning and meaningful conceptual change but also because they can save people’s lives. As you continue reading my dissertation, I hope you will think of Margarita and the lessons she shared. I will conclude with the last line of Margarita’s email—a message that keeps me on task to struggle toward transformation in higher education: “I am on to do the work that I expected the institution to do.” 10 Figure P.1 ¡Margarita Presente! Te llevo en mi corazón para siempre, hermana. [Photo description: Judith Landeros, Aireale J. Rodgers, and Margarita Vizcarra standing together smiling, wearing matching t-shirts that read “Phenomenal Woman” after successfully presenting at the 2019 Critical Race Studies in Education Association conference] 11 Chapter 1: A Review of Teaching in Postsecondary Education Literature Doctoral education is a set of experiences that incorporates training, education, and formation. It is a process led by faculty, and brought to life by students. It is the key experience upon which the future of global education rests. – Lee Shulman (2009, p. xiii), The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century Prolific author bell hooks (2014) asserted that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the university” (p. 12). Indeed, faculty-student interactions and classroom practice are vital aspects of student learning in higher education (Austin, 2002; Cole & Griffin, 2013). Yet, despite being central to the purpose and function of higher education, postsecondary teaching remains understudied in higher education literature (Lattuca & Pollard, 2016; Lueddeke, 2003; Major & Palmer, 2006; Rodgers, 2020). As Seldin (1995) commented, “Until recent years, the widespread institutional bias toward research and scholarship outside the classroom discouraged and rendered pointless efforts to improve teaching” (p. 9). The impacts of a pandemic, coupled with increased calls for racial justice from some and attacks on anything remotely connected to critical race theory from others, reveal the deep cracks in higher education’s pedagogical foundation. The reality is that while faculty are content experts in their area of research, few have the necessary training to be effective teachers (Postareff et al., 2006). Within the context of graduate education, where many doctoral students aspire to go on to become faculty members themselves, the devaluation of pedagogy is particularly problematic. The transformation of higher education and the disciplines relies in large part on how graduate education prepares doctoral students to ask, theorize, understand, and imagine in more expansive ways than generations before. Where is the field in relation to achieving this goal? In this chapter, I present a thorough review of extant literature highlighting approaches, tensions, and 12 possibilities for teaching and learning in higher education. I begin by operationally defining teaching and learning; then I move to explore the role of teaching and learning in U.S. higher education. Next, I discuss the purpose, problems, and possibilities of doctoral coursework as a unique site of postsecondary teaching and learning. Then I outline how postsecondary teaching often (mis)handles conceptualizations of race, racism, and racialization, and its implications for student learning and development. Finally, I conclude by offering up equity-mindedness as a necessary intervention for improving faculty teaching and student learning. Operationalizing Teaching and Learning Although teaching and learning are intimately related, they are distinct constructs that need to be appropriately operationalized. When conceptualizing learning, I leverage sociocultural approaches from the learning sciences that situate learning as a cultural process (Nasir et al., 2006). Rather than conceiving of learning as a purely cognitive and acquisitional endeavor that happens individually and ‘in the head,’ sociocultural theorists of learning take up Vygotsky’s (1980) assertion that the mind exists and develops with others in society (Sfard & McClain, 2002). Learning occurs when “people, ideas, and practices of different communities meet, collide, and merge” (Engeström, 2005, p. 46) over various periods of history. As Neumann (2005) wrote, learning becomes “both the construction of knowledge and [the act of] coming to know” (p. 39). Additionally, I borrow from Espinoza and Vossoughi (2014) who positioned learning as a politicized endeavor that leads to “the cultivation of mind and self” (p. 286). As Vossoughi (2011) proclaimed in her dissertation, “To use cultural-historical language, learning is a socially mediated process of internalizing and appropriating tools” (p. 36; emphasis in original text). Influenced by these teacher-scholars, I operationalize learning as shifts in thinking, rearticulation of concepts, and changes in identity and relations over time. Relatedly, I define 13 teaching as the instructional strategies and the related practices (cognitive, affective, and otherwise) used to foster learning. Sociocultural approaches to the study of teaching and learning remind us that the dominant onto-epistemological signposts that point us toward what is considered ‘good’ teaching and learning themselves are socially constructed—endowed with histories that matter deeply for how we interpret them (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014). This key concept is expanded in the next chapter. Role of Teaching in U.S. Higher Education As we discuss teaching in U.S. higher education, it is important to note that institutional context shapes whether and how teaching matters to various colleges and universities. There are a multitude of different types of higher education institutions (e.g., community colleges, teaching colleges, research universities, Historically White Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions), and the significance of teaching varies depending on which institution type is the focus. As Neumann (2009) asserted, “…what professors are urged to do on the job in a distinctive higher education organization is framed by the organization’s equally distinctive mission” (p. 11). Because my dissertation project traces aspects of teaching and learning in doctoral coursework, I focus this literature review on research-intensive universities, or colleges and universities that place great emphasis on producing research and training researchers, to grasp the role of teaching in this context. In contrast to teaching colleges that take great pride in providing innovative and exemplary instruction to their students, teaching is known to be one small part of a professor’s broader workload at research universities, with research and service activities being more highly prioritized by faculty (Hativa, 1997; O’Meara, 2002; O’Meara et al., 2017). This prioritization is 14 in large part due to institutional structures—such as tenure and promotion criteria, funding opportunities, and professional recognition—that incentivize research over teaching (Kezar, 2005; Maxey & Kezar, 2016). As Rodgers (2020) wrote, “While egregious teaching may be addressed by university administration, good teaching is rarely rewarded in significant ways” (p. 4). Even when teaching is a point of focus in research universities, Posselt (2016) highlighted that the forms of teaching that are valued (i.e., the mentoring of PhD students) often do not take place in university classrooms. Since graduate student apprenticeships build capacity for research productivity, the result of prized teaching in these contexts still privileges research over teaching. Research on Faculty Pedagogical Practice A variety of individual, organizational, and institutional factors are known to influence faculty sensemaking about teaching (Kane et al., 2002; Kember & Gow, 1994; Posselt et al., 2020). For example, disciplinary norms are one of the strongest influences for course planning (Lattuca & Stark, 1994; Stark, 2000). Disciplinary norms drive decisions about what constitutes good teaching in particular contexts. For example, what is considered to be a generative teaching practice in the context of a mathematics class is likely, and necessarily, different from art history, given the particular histories, ideologies, knowledges, and practices that are prized in each disciplinary context. Transmission vs. Facilitation Higher education literature calls attention to two main approaches to university teaching (Pratt, 1988): transmission and facilitation. Transmission is comparable to what Freire (1970) called the banking model of education. In the banking model, the teacher and student hold strict, predefined roles. The teacher acts as the knower, and their responsibility is to impart knowledge into students. Students take on the role of learners—empty receptacles into which teachers dump 15 knowledge. Conversely, a facilitation approach highlights a more dynamic learning process. The teacher acts as a facilitator of learning. Rather than being the sole “knower,” the teacher positions students as co-conspirators in the learning process. They intentionally leverage the prior knowledge of their students to construct opportunities for learning. Literature highlighting transmission and facilitation teaching approaches has discussed the merits of these two approaches in ways that are often constructed oppositionally. Because the transmission approach is known to bring about surface-level learning while the facilitation approach is believed to support deep learning in students (Pratt, 1997; Pratt et al., 2001), many scholars and practitioners alike assume that facilitation is the preferred pedagogical method. However, the notion that faculty must choose between either employing a transmission or facilitation approach to teaching is both pervasive and misleading. Guided by perspectives from the sociocultural tradition of the study of learning, I assert that (a) both transmission AND facilitation are needed for consequential learning to occur (Hall & Jurow, 2015); and (b) no one person is trapped in the mode of being either a transmitter or facilitator of knowledge (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Instead, learning relies on a discursive approach in which cognition and sensemaking are considered social, cultural, and distributed processes (Bang & Medin, 2010; Hutchins, 1995; Nasir et al., 2006; Rogoff, 1994). With regards to my dissertation project, the fundamental assertion that relationality is a core mediator for how learning happens leads me to ask questions like how do opportunities for transmission and facilitation of racial meaning- making occur in classroom practice? How is this labor distributed? Is one mode used more than the other? Why might this be the case? What implications might this have for how racial meaning-making happens in that classroom community? Balancing how to maneuver between transmission and facilitation approaches in pedagogy is hard work; it is something faculty learn 16 over time. But how do faculty become practiced at teaching? I now turn to discuss how faculty learn to teach. How Faculty Learn to Teach Of the minimal extant literature outlining how faculty learn to teach, scholars have outlined three main strategies. In a survey of 115 professors at an elite private research institution, Hativa (1997) found that many university professors come to have beliefs about what constitutes good teaching through “trial-and-error” in their own teaching practice. Scholars have also highlighted that many faculty replicate the teaching they received as students (Oleson & Hora, 2014). To a much lesser extent, faculty also rely on student remarks in teaching evaluations (Hativa, 1997). While some university faculty take advantage of instructional support through participation in professional learning communities and engagement with campus teaching and learning centers (Cox, 2004; Schumann et al., 2013), these services remain relatively underutilized (Brownell & Tanner, 2012). Research has shown that faculty receive very little support to improve their teaching. Faculty report a lack of time, misalignment of institutional values (connected to the idea that research universities do not value teaching), and insufficient resources as the main barriers to changing their teaching practice (Brownell & Tanner, 2012). Moreover, pedagogical training for graduate students who serve as teaching assistants is also scarce (Oleson & Hora, 2014; Tanner & Allen, 2006). Golde (2008) pointed out that “doctoral students are expected to infer from years of observation,” rather than direct and targeted support, “how to be a faculty member” (p. 18). Anderson and Anderson’s (2012) qualitative study exploring the socializing dimensions of graduate student teaching into the professoriate found that doctoral students, especially at research-intensive institutions, struggle to find faculty mentors who can support their 17 development as pedagogues. This dynamic often reinforced a belief that teaching was a lower priority than other aspects of faculty’s profession. Overall, higher education instructors—from graduate students to tenured professors—are simply not receiving pedagogical training. As a result, faculty report feeling unprepared to implement alternative modalities for delivering instruction (Brownell & Tanner, 2012). Feeling underprepared might stifle professors’ ability to engage in teaching as a creative, iterative, and imaginative endeavor. Thus, it is essential that we remember that many instructors of postsecondary education (tenured, tenure-line, contingent, and graduate students alike) should be considered novice teachers. Within this context, there remains a need for more empirical evidence about how faculty learn to teach and develop a teaching identity, and how to design faculty learning opportunities around pedagogy (Kane et al., 2002). Doctoral Coursework as a Site of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning The PhD is considered the pinnacle of education; only about 1% of the population holds the degree. The PhD is fundamentally a research degree, and much of the training doctoral students undergo is designed to prepare them to become researchers. Traditionally, faculty have approached their work with doctoral students from the perspective of preparing them to become the future of the professoriate; doctoral education is a socializing process (Anderson & Anderson, 2012; Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Golde, 2008). Gardner and Mendoza (2010) defined socialization as “the process through which an individual learns to adopt the values, skills, attitudes, norms, and knowledge needed for membership in a given society, group, or organization” (p. 19). Scholars have studied both individual (i.e., people’s understandings and experiences of socialization within their social context) and organizational (i.e., uncover the 18 processes and results of socialization in academic departments and the disciplines) dimensions of the socialization process in doctoral education (Perez, 2016; Perez et al., 2020). In their groundbreaking book The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century, Walker and colleagues (2008) pushed back on the socialization framework to argue that a more generative way to understand (and design) doctoral education is through the lens of scholarly formation. Rather than narrowly centering the focus of analysis of doctoral education to the pursuit of intellectual expertise and content knowledge, a focus on formation in doctoral education encompasses “the scholar’s professional identity in all its dimensions” (Walker et al., 2007, p. 8). Namely, they pointed to students’ expanding opportunities for meaningful scholarly integration into aspects of research, teaching, and service; building a robust intellectual community; and becoming a steward of the discipline as three essential areas of development for doctoral students. Formation often occurs by way of apprenticeship, which is considered “the signature pedagogy of doctoral education” (Golde et al., 2009, p. 54). Rogoff (1995) argued that apprenticeship “focuses on a system of interpersonal involvements and arrangements in which people engage in culturally organized activity in which apprentices become more responsible participants” (p. 143). Through working closely with faculty members, doctoral students become more socialized into the profession. Indeed, faculty-student interaction is “the lynchpin of doctoral education” (Anderson & Anderson, 2012, p. 249), and it has been the topic of investigation in multiple empirical studies for decades (e.g., Astin, 1993; Fountaine, 2012; Grantham et al., 2015; Karpouza & Emvalotis, 2019; Kim & Sax, 2011; Pascarella et al., 1978; Umbach & Wawyrnski, 2005). While some scholars have studied faculty-student interactions in classroom contexts, few empirical studies have focused on doctoral coursework as a consequential site for doctoral student learning and socialization. 19 Students’ time in graduate school usually begins with coursework; students take a core set of courses that are supposed to set them on the path to independent research. Coursework requirements often involve students taking a mix of “core” courses (e.g., required courses that all students in the program take; often considered foundational to the disciplinary field of study), departmental electives, and cognates (e.g., a series of courses that develop students’ emerging research interests but are offered outside of the students’ home department). On average, doctoral students spend about two years in the coursework-taking phase. For many students, the end of coursework usually signifies a transition to independent research. Since most PhD students pursue the degree with the intention of carrying out a research project, coursework can sometimes feel like arrested development. Many faculty even tell their students that “coursework doesn’t matter,” perpetuating the idea that the learning that happens in this context is peripheral to the type of scholarly formation that is privileged in the disciplines. Literature on doctoral education has often described the course-taking phase as preparation for students’ qualifying exams (e.g., Fisher et al., 2019). Certainly, coursework should support students’ capability to conceptualize, design, and carry out empirical research ethically. Yet, coursework does much more than that. It, too, has a socializing effect. In a study of women-identified doctoral students in mathematics, Herzig (2004) mapped students’ path toward legitimate participation in the discipline. As represented in Figure 1.1, she highlighted two main activities: (a) participation in coursework, and (b) participation in research. 20 Figure 1.1 Visualization of Student Socialization in Doctoral Education (Herzig, 2004) Herzig (2004) argued, “doctoral students need to participate and become integrated into two sequential but disjointed communities of practice. Obstacles and enhancers affect their participation and, consequently, their opportunities to become integrated” (p. 182). Despite coursework being an important part of doctoral student learning and development, doctoral education (both in research and practice) undervalues the role of teaching. Teaching in doctoral education often “defaults to indirect instruction” (Khost et al., 2015, p. 20). Instead of engaging in direct and scaffolded interventions to support student learning, some faculty rely on reading and writing as tools as the primary ways to ensure student learning. Next, I outline studies of race, racism, and racialization in postsecondary teaching and learning. Race, Racism, and Racialization in U.S. Higher Education Teaching and Learning The growing corpus of literature exploring teaching in U.S. higher education remains, for the most part, race-evasive. Stemming from Bonilla-Silva’s (2009) notion of colorblind racism, white race-evasion represents “…white people’s various diminutions, denials, evasions, and quite [literal] failures to ‘see’ race in social and historical structurings that defend and buttress 21 white privilege and whiteness” (Jupp et al., 2019, pp. 7-8). Rather than situating legitimated onto-epistemologies, cultural norms, and pedagogical policies and practices as being tied to a broader racial project (Collins, 2003; Smith, 2012), much of the literature on postsecondary teaching and learning elides—or even ignores—how and why race matters to postsecondary teaching and learning. Therefore, I follow the lead of critical scholars who center race, racism, and racialization as central to both the practice and empirical study of university teaching and learning. Certainly, scholars have long cited the need to document and be responsive to the particularities of the racialized experiences of Students of Color in academe (e.g., Anzaldúa & Keating, 2013; Castillo-Garsow, 2012; Collins, 1990; Du Bois, 1960; Duran, 2019; hooks, 2014; Winston, 1971). From experiences of interpersonal racism from peers, hostile campus environments, lack of access to student services support and mentorship, and racist faculty- student interactions, dealing with the fallacy of white supremacy is a common occurrence for many Students of color in higher education (Solórzano et al., 2000). Studies of campus climate call attention to how classrooms become places where Students of Color routinely experience racism (Harper & Davis, 2016; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998). Within university classrooms, racism is often tacitly taught and rationalized via the persistent privileging of a whitestreamed curriculum, the admonishment and erasure of epistemological diversity, and socialization processes that materially reward assimilation into whiteness (Sleeter, 2011). For example, perspectives from Scholars of Color are routinely excluded from course syllabi in favor of what are considered canonical texts, which overwhelmingly feature Western, Eurocentric knowledge produced by white men (Collins, 2003; Patel, 2016). In doctoral education, where socialization into the discipline is a key developmental objective of student 22 learning (Austin, 2002; Baird, 1990; Corcoran & Clark, 1984; Golde, 2000, 2008; Perez, 2016), adherence to disciplinary logics that reinforce certain forms of knowledge is central (Lattuca, 2001). Thus, the systems of knowing that are taught, evaluated, and confer legitimation within many graduate-level classrooms “reflect values that often position whiteness at their center” (Masta, 2021, p. 335). Moreover, most faculty are underprepared to understand their classroom as a racialized space, which hinders their ability to facilitate race-conscious learning. As Haynes (2017) asserted, “…the majority of faculty report that their faculty preparation has not prepared them to address the emotionally and socially charged issues that emerge in the classroom or shape classroom climate” (p. 87). She continued: “faculty need the type of continuing education that promotes advancements in racial consciousness beyond that they received in their faculty training, if at all” (p. 98). To address faculty’s lack of preparation, we must first understand how institutional policies and individual practices coalesce to structure racialization across academe. This section of my literature review provides insight into this question by highlighting dimensions specific to processes of teaching and learning. I argue that understanding the proliferation of diversity discourses provides foundational insight into how racial meaning- making occurs within higher education. Legacy of Diversity in Higher Education Across higher education research and practice, the conversation around race in higher education has largely focused on the issue of access for People of Color to postsecondary education (Bowen & Bok, 2016). Relatedly, higher education scholars have routinely cited the need for increased compositional diversity (i.e., the number or proportion of People of Color in a given institutional context) (Hurtado et al., 1998) within colleges and universities (e.g., Baker et 23 al., 2018; Desir, forthcoming; Jaquette & Salazar, 2018; Posselt et al., 2012). As the racial and ethnic demographics of U.S. postsecondary education continues to shift—becoming less white over time (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2012)—higher education leaders recognized a need to be responsive to this increasingly diverse U.S. context (Marichal, 2009; Warikoo, 2016). Ironically, this perceived ambiguity has contributed to conversations about diversity in admissions becoming even more race-evasive, resulting in negative implications for Black and Latinx applicants to the University of California system (Garces & Cogburn., 2015; Kidder, 2013). Regardless of whether diversity discourses emerge from a well-intentioned place, it is necessary to consider the potential for negative consequences for People of Color. Even beyond the scope of higher education, diversity discourse has become a ubiquitous trope in U.S. American society, but diversity itself remains a nebulous concept. As Bethune and colleagues (2020) argued: This ambiguity is consequential as we know that the definitions of diversity and equity that individuals and organizations adopt can have material impacts on ensuing educational designs as they are pulled from macro-level discourse down to the micro- level of practice. (p. 1) Essentially, practitioners who are working to convert diversity discourse into meaningful and measurable action face a significant challenge. For diversity to have a transformative effect on the cultural practices of postsecondary institutions, higher education leaders must concretize what diversity means, what it requires, and from whom. Despite diversity’s entanglement with neoliberal logics, scholars are more frequently challenging the commodification of diversity in favor of “a conception of diversity as a process toward better learning rather than as an outcome” (Bensimon, 2005; Milem et al., 2005, p. iv). Moreover, the field of higher education espouses a commitment to cultivate “an academy that systematically leverages diversity for student learning and institutional excellence” (Williams et 24 al., 2005, p. 5). Empirical findings from a robust body of literature suggest that diversity has a positive effect on college students’ cognitive complexity and critical thinking skills (Chang et al., 2006; Dey, 1991; Gurin, 1999; Hurtado, 2001; Kim, 1996). In short, diversity seems to be good for learning. The Relationship Between Diversity and Learning Interactional diversity (i.e., learning that is promoted through informal cross-group interactions) has often been used to foster increased critical consciousness about race and racism, and scholars have argued that it is a viable mechanism for supporting learning. Research has posited that interactional diversity is an important factor in promoting learning and critical consciousness in higher education (e.g., Holley, 2013; Hurtado et al., 1999). Antonio and colleagues’ (2004) quantitative study of the effects of integrative complexity in Black and white students found that “the presence of a Black collaborator in a group of White participants generally led to greater perceived novelty of the collaborator and…the presence of a minority opinion stimulates greater [integrative complexity] a finding consistent with social psychological theories of minority influence” (p. 509). In short, white folks benefit more than People of Color from interactional diversity. Although interactional diversity has been lauded as being good for learning, it is clear that we need to ask, “good for whom? And in what ways?” For interactional diversity to evolve from interest convergence towards truly facilitating learning equitably for all participants, higher education practitioners must (a) resist tokenizing the knowledge and lived experiences of People of Color; and (b) honor and center the learning needs of People of Color when designing and facilitating opportunities for interactional diversity. As Rodgers (under review) posited, “There is a critical need to recognize—and structure learning experiences to manage—the intrinsic burden placed on People of Color to become the 25 curriculum and enable learning for white people” (p. 28). These are important considerations that are transferrable for improving pedagogy in curricular learning environments across disciplines. Learning About Race in Classroom Contexts To put it simply, it is meaningful for faculty to embrace mindsets and practices that center racial equity. Research has suggested that faculty who push themselves and their students to unlearn racism can have important positive effects on classroom environments and student learning (Astin, 1993; Hurtado, 1996; Villalpando, 1994). The reverse is also true; faculty who resist or ignore issues of race and racial equity also have meaningful effects on students, particularly Students of Color. For example, studies of campus climate have called attention to the importance of classrooms as contexts where Students of Color experience the violence of racialization (Harper & Davis, 2016; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998). As Harper and Davis (2016) wrote, “it is…essential that professors recognize how they, often unknowingly and inadvertently, say and do racist things to Students of Color in the classroom” (p. 31). Students’ lives and well-being are literally at stake. Harper and Davis’s perspective illuminates why it is essential to study racialization within classroom contexts. Teaching about race is important for students. Mayhew et al. (2005) conducted a study surveying over 500 students on how they decided whether their universities were making good on their espoused commitment to diversity. They found that students, particularly Students of Color, reported that faculty deciding whether to integrate perspectives from People of Color into the curriculum was an important signal for how seriously the university takes its commitment to diversity and their Students of Color. Additionally, the subjective nature of university teaching as well as expectations for tenure, promotion, and academic freedom leave pedagogical decisions in the hands of individual 26 faculty members (Lattuca & Stark, 1994). Thus, the decision of whether to take up equity- mindedness in one’s pedagogical practice is often an individual prerogative. This autonomy constitutes what Ball (2018) described as a discretionary space. In discretionary spaces, “teachers’ everyday practice is filled with their own judgments, habits of action, and decisions that remain out of reach of external control” (Ball, 2022, para. 16). Moreover, given that many faculty are socialized into disciplinary cultures that are themselves race-evasive (Posselt, 2020) and many scholars are not taught to conceptualize their disciplines and the knowledge produced by them as racialized (Rodgers et al., under review), it is no surprise that the pedagogical practices that many faculty employ are also race-evasive and “culturally neutral” (Quaye & Harper, 2007, p. 36). The race-conscious interventions that happen in higher education, including classroom practice, are often niche or tokenizing. This could be faculty designating one week of the semester as “the race week” or certain disciplines being characterized as the place to do “that diversity stuff” (Patton, 2016; Posselt, 2020). Either way, it is notable that curricular changes that incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or race-consciousness perspectives take place in pockets of university practice instead of being reverberating changes that occur across departments or schools (Collins, 2003). This ‘othering’ and fragmenting of critical race perspectives is one way that the broader project of racial equity is devalued and tokenized within academe. Two important examples are Ethnic Studies programs and diversity course requirements. Learning in Ethnic Studies Programs Ethnic Studies programs are an important context where students learn about race, racism, and racialization in postsecondary curricular settings. The field of Ethnic Studies is 27 intricately linked to historical movements towards self-determination, cultural affirmation, and reclamation in academe. Sleeter (2011) contended that “racial and ethnic minorities are added consistently in a ‘contributions’ fashion to the predominantly Euro-American narrative of textbooks. Scholarship by and about African Americans, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asian Americans continues not to be used to frame academic content” (p. 2). Scholars perceived Ethnic Studies as a move toward dismantling a whitestreamed, Eurocentric curriculum that resulted in the epistemic erasure of the history of People of Color from what is taught in the classroom. Many subfields within Ethnic Studies (e.g., Black Studies, Chicanx and Latinx Studies, Native American Studies, and Asian American Studies programs) were born alongside political unrest of broader assertions for civil rights in the national context (Hu-Dehart, 1993). Many of these programs across the United States map their genesis to the visionary leadership and activism of Students of Color and faculty co-conspirators, who banded together in the 1960s to establish these curricular learning environments as places of refuge from an otherwise violent and isolating university culture (Takeda, 2001). While Ethnic Studies programs and scholars remain essential to universities’ ability to support and educate students about race and racism, the field remains under-resourced and undervalued (Sleeter, 2011). Many Ethnic Studies programs remain at a program level rather than a departmental level in postsecondary institutions, which means the programs are often underfunded and do not receive the appropriate teaching allocations. Scholars interested in tenure-track positions in these programs often must juggle dual-appointments with another department 1 or accept nontenure-track roles in their program. All of this contributes to talent 1 For example, a faculty may have a primary appointment in History and a secondary appointment in an African American Studies program. 28 attrition and disserves Students of Color and the broader university that could learn from their innovative critical pedagogies to enact more widespread institutional change. Despite structural threats to marginalize and undermine the field, ethnic studies remain integral to how students learn about race and, relatedly, racism and racialization on university campuses. Research has demonstrated the importance of the “precious knowledge” (Delgado, 2012, p. 1513) produced from ethnic studies in the university experiences of Students of Color and the development of their critical consciousness (Sleeter, 2011). It is a matter of fact that many Students of Color flock to ethnic studies as a much-needed refuge from the epistemic violence they experience in their home departments. As I consider my own lived experience studying education policy as an undergraduate at a Historically White-Serving institution, the knowledge I received from Ethnic Studies courses helped me to contextualize deficit-oriented truth claims about Black and Brown students as part of a broader racial/racist project. The university has much to learn from ethnic studies about what it means to design meaningful teaching and learning experiences across all fields and disciplines. Still, what happens in Ethnic Studies classrooms, or even the classrooms of faculty who may not be situated within Ethnic Studies departments but are committed to enacting that political project, is special. Make no mistake, my argument that other disciplines and fields can and should learn from ethnic studies is not an argument for wholesale appropriation. Nor is it rooted in an assertion that situates ethnic studies as having ‘best practices’ that others should adopt. As you may recall, I align myself with sociocultural traditions within the learning sciences that operationalize learning not as a process of acquisition, but as a process of becoming (Rogoff, 1994). From this perspective, learning from ethnic studies means that other fields and disciplines consider and adopt the political and ethical commitments that are prioritized within ethnic 29 studies. Then, they ask themselves, “what does this mean for what my field or discipline can now become?” Diversity Course Requirements Many scholars have forwarded an assertion that implementing diversity course requirements are an important and effective mechanism of systematic change toward equity and critical consciousness raising in postsecondary education (e.g., Chang, 2002; Levine, 1996; Nelson Laird, 2005; Nelson Laird et al., 2005). Although the structure varies by institution, “diversity course mandates typically range from requiring a designated course that specifically targets race and ethnicity to offering a wide range of approved courses that fulfill the diversity requirement” (Chang, 2002, p. 22). Even some doctoral programs are implementing curricular changes, largely in response to the 2020 uprisings following the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As you will read in Chapter Four, one of the doctoral courses I observe is the result of a new programmatic requirement that all students in the department take at least one course on race and racialization before graduating. Put simply, programmatic shifts regarding curriculum are on the rise, and diversity-related courses are often part of these shifts. While this change in general education can be considered wide-reaching in that it will reach many enrolled students, it still requires the designation of some courses as “diversity” courses while others are not. In a quantitative study exploring what constitutes a diversity course, Nelson Laird (2011) poignantly problematized the arbitrary parameters that lead a course to be designated as a diversity course. He wrote, “I quickly realized…that diversity could be included into each aspect of a course and, consequently, nearly every course was—or could become—a diversity course to some degree” (p. 583). Aligned with Nelson Laird’s assertion and the political and ethical imperatives I mentioned earlier, I contend that a more transformational approach 30 would challenge all faculty to identify, translate, and prioritize engaging with the relevant racial equity implications to students enrolled in their courses. Doing so would require that faculty consider the social, cultural, historical, ethical, and political dimensions of their fields and the specific courses that they teach, and then design their courses to provide scaffolded opportunities for students to grapple with extant tensions. Instead of assigning the labor of centering the histories, cultures, societal forces, and power dynamics associated with race and racism to only certain courses, I imagine a future where these aspects are considered essential to all teaching and learning in postsecondary education, regardless of the course, disciplinary context, or faculty member. Otherwise, racial equity remains relegated to the work of some people rather than becoming part of the institutional identity. As I will highlight in Chapter 2, this has particularly negative implications for the division of labor of racial equity work in universities—both inside and outside of formal classroom contexts. I now turn to discuss the beautiful burden Faculty of Color play in this work. Labor Acknowledgment for Faculty of Color Who currently carries out DEI-related and antiracist pedagogical work in postsecondary institutions? Who should be doing this work? To this point, many of these activities are the direct result of the disproportionate labor and love of Faculty of Color. In a study of 134 colleges across the country, Umbach (2006) found a positive correlation between the number of Faculty of Color at an institution and student learning. Moreover, these important contributions occur while Faculty of Color are subjected to racism or misogynoir 2 . Despite Faculty of Color reporting an appreciation for teaching (Turner & Myers, 2000), they reported experiences of being ‘presumed incompetent,’ unfairly compared to white peers, disrespectfully challenged by 2 Misogynoir is a term that describes oppression experienced by Black womxn on the basis of their race and gender (Bailey & Trudy, 2018). 31 students, and having to acutely manage their emotions (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Harley, 2008; Harlow, 2003; Stanley, 2006; Turner et al., 1999). Racial justice work is often uncompensated and not rewarded in tenure and promotion, so Faculty of Color largely do this as a personal commitment to bringing about the type of university they hope to build for their students. As has been articulated in a variety of national reports in recent years, there exists a need for mechanisms that position DEI work as central to academe’s incentive structure (e.g., NASEM, 2018, 2019, 2020). Given all we know about how DEI work has been co-opted to attenuate transformative change in favor of the status quo in higher education, I argue that a framework for diversity is necessary but insufficient for the type of change we seek. Instead, we need an explicitly critical race approach and must ensure there is an appropriate infrastructure to support learning and sustainable change. Like it or not, diversity discourse continuously informs the stance from which the academy approaches race and what we do about racial inequity. Besides, how can we, as an institution, seriously contend with the material implications of racial inequity when we continue to treat conversations about race and racism as taboo? We must not only ask if our campuses are racially diverse, but also how are we leveraging racial diversity toward equity and justice for our nondominant students? How must we change our mindsets, policies, and practices to provide more equitable, just, and affirming learning experiences for our students? In the next section, I argue that equity-mindedness is an important tool to leverage as we consider how to best build curricular learning environments that provide opportunities for students to develop knowledge about racial (in)equity. I provide an overview of equity-mindedness and its specific relevance to studying racial meaning-making in teaching and learning. 32 Equity-Mindedness, Consciousness Raising, and Pedagogical Change Scholars committed to enacting critical pedagogy frequently cite the need for educators to combat deficit-mindedness (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Kincheloe, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Montgomery, 2013). Marchesani and Adams (1992) posited that …faculty need to assess [their] comfort and skills in various cross-cultural situations, take responsibility for obtaining knowledge about the cultural backgrounds of [their] students, and become more aware of the impact of their socialization and learned beliefs on our interactions with students whose social and cultural background differ from their own. (p. 13) However, accepting Marchesani and Adams’s invitation requires that higher education practitioners be committed to critical reflection and shift their mindsets away from dominant paradigms that place blame on Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian students for what are failures of the system (Bensimon, 2004, 2005, 2007). How educators think about the causes and consequences of inequities is critical. Additionally, faculty practice is a vital area for transformation in postsecondary settings. Castillo-Montoya (2017) posited that “…developing students’ habits of mind is not only an educational endeavor, but also an equity endeavor breaking patterns of educational privilege whereby only the elite are provided a rigorous education” (p. 590). Ching (2018) described higher education practitioners’ proclivity to position issues of racial in/equity as outside of their locus of control as a “learning problem” (p. 388). Equity-mindedness is important because compositional diversity is necessary but insufficient for widespread institutional change. In an ethnographic study of the pedagogical practices of two sociology professors at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Castillo-Montoya (2019) found that [T]he mere presence of diverse students…did not create the opportunity to learn about diverse others; rather, it was the professors’ encouragement, and the students’ willingness to draw on their relevant lived experiences and social identities to participate in subject- matter driven discussions in the classroom. (p. 216) 33 Having diversity is not the same as knowing how to ethically, responsibly, and intentionally leverage it. Thus, having opportunities to observe empirically and learn with and from equity- minded faculty who are practiced at cultivating space for diverse perspectives in classroom contexts is essential if we are to move the work of equity and justice forward in higher education. Additionally, research has shown that people develop strong and enduring racial frames to mediate and legitimate sensemaking processes, behaviors, and assumptions about the social world (Pollock, 2004). Dowd and Bensimon (2015) pointed to one such example of a racial frame—higher education’s “historical amnesia” (Taylor, 2009, p. 7) towards racism. They highlight that this amnesia feeds a propensity for higher education practitioners to engage in “muddled conversations about race and equity” rather than implementing meaningful mechanisms toward accountability and change (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015, p. xxiii). Given the racist, settler colonialist, heteropatriarchal history of U.S. higher education (Wilder, 2013), there is a clear need to equip faculty with the tools needed to create new pathways to critical consciousness and pedagogical knowledge for themselves and their students. Critical consciousness is central to adopting an equity-minded and anti-racist frame because it requires a recognition of extant systems of power and a deep understanding of the social, political, and economic exploitation these systems reproduce (Freire, 1970). Overall, there is much that practitioners seeking to become race-conscious—or simply to develop their pedagogical knowledge—must unlearn. As Tuitt et al. (2018) wrote, “much of what was learned about teaching (in the respective disciplines) has to be unlearned so that all educators are capable of nurturing Black brilliance” (p. 2). This is true also for Black, Indigenous, and other Students of Color students more broadly. 34 Towards Equity-Mindedness in Faculty Practice To facilitate environments that can nurture the brilliance of Black, Indigenous, and other Students of Color, Dr. Estela Bensimon and colleagues at the Center for Urban Education (CUE) embraced a model of agent transformation that moves them toward equity-mindedness. According to their website, CUE defined equity-mindedness as “the perspective or mode of thinking exhibited by practitioners who call attention to patterns of inequity in student outcomes” (CUE, 2022) She, along with co-authors Tia Brown McNair and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, also described equity as “a means of corrective justice for the educational debt owed to the descendants of enslaved people and other minoritized populations willfully excluded from higher education” (McNair et al., 2020, p. 20). Equity-minded practitioners, then, take personal and institutional responsibility for the success of their students and routinely reassess their own practices. It also requires that practitioners be race-conscious and aware of the social and historical context of exclusionary practices in U.S. American higher education. CUE’s commitment to designing opportunities for expansive learning sets their work apart within higher education. Learning becomes expansive through “a collective process of creating and acquiring something that is not yet there”—it is a speculative and visionary stance where one brings a desired future to fruition in the present (Engeström & Sannino, 2020, p. 6). In other words, CUE argues that supporting higher education practitioners’ understandings about the relational nature of the macro and micro produces lasting conceptual change and eventually equity-minded practice. CUE does this through the careful design of learning tools that help practitioners notice and assess differently, reflect on their practice, and adopt new practices. CUE’s equity scorecard is a wonderful example of this process. The Equity Scorecard is “a theory-based strategy consisting of tools, activities, and processes to assist campuses in 35 embedding equity into their structures, policies, and practices” (Felix et al., 2015, p. 25). By using the Equity Scorecard, practitioners learn how to engage more intentionally in quantitative and qualitative inquiry about potential racial equity gaps in student experiences and outcomes and then strategize on how to shift their practice in ways that eradicate those gaps. Understanding how equity-minded faculty design and implement pedagogy and foster equitable social relations among students can teach us how to facilitate shifts in sensemaking about racial meaning across the field of higher education. In a qualitative study of white- identified faculty’s racial consciousness and pedagogy, Haynes (2017) found that faculty with commitments to equity-mindedness …used their faculty behaviors to expose students to how they could be complicit in the perpetuation of racism and other forms of oppression. Furthermore, these participants were also able to demonstrate for their students how developing racial consciousness contributes to a mastery of professional competence in their respective disciplines/ industries. (p. 960) Faculty continue to strive toward equity-mindedness and race-consciousness in their teaching praxis. Yet processes of racial meaning-making, and its sometimes-racist manifestations, are often so tacit that they remain elusive and taken-for-granted. As this literature review has highlighted, there is a need for more empirical explorations of the actual pedagogical moves that equity-minded faculty employ and how those forms of mediation open opportunities for expansive learning. Vossoughi et al. (2013) reminded us that “Equity lies in the how of teaching and learning” (p. 1). Thus, situating teaching as the practice of facilitating learning as a process of becoming is central to all equity aims in education. As Giroux (1992) wrote: What is at stake here is not simply the issue of bad teaching, but the broader refusal to take seriously the categories of meaning, experience, and voice that students use to make sense of themselves and the world around them. (p. 95) 36 It is a process of transforming the fundamentals of teaching for learning that changes lives. Bauman and colleagues (2005) posited, in paraphrasing educational theorist John Dewey, that “to form relevant and effective ideals, we must first be acquainted with and take notice of actual conditions; otherwise, our ideals become vacuous or else filled with Utopian content” (p. 12). This begs the question: What are the “actual conditions” of racial meaning-making in graduate education classroom learning? What theoretical traditions open space for us to make meaning of what we notice? What methodologies are most suitable for “taking notice” of them? How might this new knowledge be leveraged to forward the ideal of equity-minded and race-conscious university teaching? What possibilities do generative approaches to racial meaning-making open for the futures of graduate education and the disciplines? These are key questions with which the field of higher education must grapple as we continue to strive to embody equity-minded and race-conscious praxis. These are, also, of critical concern to my dissertation project. Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I highlighted the affordances and limitations of the extant literature on teaching and learning within higher education. While teaching is becoming more well studied within the field of higher education, more attention should be paid to the racialized aspects of university teaching and the contours of teaching in graduate education. I also argued that by situating DEI and, by extension, race work as co-curricular in nature, university leaders undermine the need to intentionally facilitate learning about race in formal classroom contexts. Furthermore, this relegation of DEI work maintains the perspective that equity initiatives are niche and siloed, rather than integrative and far-reaching. Lastly, I presented equity-mindedness as a necessary tool to support faculty in reimagining how they take accountability for their students’ well-being and learning. 37 Notably, I point to a need for more scholarship analyzing how students learn about race in postsecondary classrooms. Relatedly, I raise the urgency of understanding the tools and artifacts that faculty use to mediate learning about race (either implicitly or explicitly) for their students. These empirical projects require being attuned to the dynamic and discursive dimensions of how racialization (or racial meaning-making) unfolds in the messiness of classroom teaching and learning—a vital focus of my dissertation study. In the next chapter, I argue that insights from the learning sciences, namely cultural- historical activity theory (CHAT), offer an expansive theoretical and a multilayered analytical approach that provides good framing to answer the questions above. I also put CHAT in conversation with critical theories of racialization (e.g., Omi & Winant, 1994; Robinson, 2000; Saha, 2018) and the concept of racialized legitimacy (Rodgers et al., under review) to elaborate a cohesive conceptual framework for studying racial meaning-making in doctoral coursework. 38 Chapter 2: “Vygotsky Must Be Racialized”: A Conceptual Framework for Refracting Racial Meanings in Doctoral Coursework Classrooms are essential sites of racial meaning-making. Through subject matter and interactions, classrooms are environments in which students, individually and collectively, learn what race and their own racial identities mean in ways that align with racism, antiracism, or race- evasiveness. These processes of racial meaning-making are routine and mundane. Take, for example, the seemingly straightforward process of constructing course syllabi. Scholars often observe racialized patterns in who is included or excluded on syllabi and whose intellectual contributions are valued within academia. Jules and Scherrer (2021) posed a series of questions highlighting this conundrum: Do Black authors have to earn their spot in syllabi, or do White authors? Whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge has been systematically marginalized? Do the scholars and ideas in syllabi reproduce a received canon or represent Black viewpoints on the topics? How many White authors are included? How many Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) authors? (pp. 166-167) Racism is often tacitly taught and rationalized in postsecondary classrooms via the persistent privileging of a Eurocentric curriculum, the admonishment and erasure of epistemological diversity, and socialization processes that materially reward assimilation into whiteness (e.g., Bell, 2019; Bernal & Villalpando, 2002; Scheurich & Young, 1997). Thus, understanding racialization, which I define as the discursive (re)production of racial meanings, as a cultural process opens possibilities to recognize how racial meanings are (re)produced and proliferated in everyday practice. In other words, if racial meaning-making in the class(room) often reifies racism, we need better ways to understand how racial meaning-making unfolds and how these meanings mediate learning. Given that racial meanings are themselves social constructions, faculty can (re)design classroom learning to better support students’ understandings of race. 39 Following Leonardo and Manning’s (2017) bold provocation that “Vygotsky must be racialized” (p. 20), I argue that a race-evasive analysis of joint activity is an incomplete analysis because racialization is central to learning. Inspired by a lineage of critical learning scientists 1 who have worked to emphasize the racialized dimensions of joint activity, I use this chapter to introduce a framework that I call Racialized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (R-CHAT) as a correction to CHAT’s standard approaches to studying joint learning activity. Notably, I situate racial meaning-making as a sociocultural learning process. Articulating a framework of racialization through the lens of learning theory opens the possibility of understanding that racial meanings are marked by macro-level discourses and ideologies about race that are (re)produced in meso-level contexts through micro-level interactions. The organization of the chapter is as follows: I begin with a discussion of the central elements of CHAT, expansive learning, and tool mediation, extending the call for race- consciousness in the study of joint activity. If CHAT is to be racialized, we need a racial theory to animate it. Therefore, I highlight aspects of Omi and Winant’s (2015) conceptualization of racial projects and Saha’s (2018) articulation of the production of race in the cultural industries to contextualize the history of race-making in the United States. Then I use the concept of racialized legitimacy (Rodgers et al., under review) to emphasize the routines, patterns, and practices that structure racialization in the context of doctoral education. Finally, I conclude with a detailed description of R-CHAT—tracing its affordances for the study of racialization in doctoral-level coursework and its implication for doctoral student learning and socialization. 1 I am deeply indebted to Drs. Megan Bang, Angela Booker, Kris Gutiérrez, Carol Lee, Ananda Marin, Maxine McKinney de Royston, Na’Ilah Nasir, and Shirin Vossoughi, among others, for their mentorship, intellectual stewardship, and exemplars of critical possibilities within the learning sciences. 40 Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), along with other sociocultural theories stemming from the groundbreaking work of Lev Vygotsky, challenge the Cartesian modes of thinking that fractures human subjectivity from the empirically capturable realities of human development. Vygotsky (1980) posited that it is “through others we become ourselves” (p. 170). Therefore, Vygotskian sociocultural theories break away from cognitivist learning ontologies that conceive of learning as an individualized psychological endeavor. Instead, sociocultural theory recognizes human learning and development (and therefore cognition) as a necessarily social practice—due to people interacting with each other and the various resources in their environments toward goal-oriented action (Lee, 2011; Vygotsky, 1980). CHAT takes up this approach by privileging culture’s and history’s roles in human learning and development. Central to CHAT is tool mediation, or how people appropriate and manipulate tools and artifacts to meet their learning and developmental goal (Vygotsky, 1980). In its simplest form, Vygotsky’s theory of mediated action has three main components: the subject (the agentic individual or group participating in goal-oriented action), mediating tools and artifacts, and the object (the focus of the desired action). The logic is that people will use the tools and artifacts at their disposal to achieve action toward a particular object to achieve an outcome. Ultimately, people’s engagement with tools and artifacts comprises cultural practice. Refer to Figure 2.1 below for a visual representation of this phenomenon. 41 Figure 2.1 Vygotsky’s Model of Mediated Action (A) Vygotsky’s model of mediated act and (B) its common reformulation Alexei Leontiev, a Russian psychologist and student of Vygotsky, expanded Vygotsky’s notion of mediated action to focus on activity. Whereas action refers to an individual’s goal (e.g., what a person aims to achieve), activity denotes motive (e.g., the meaning behind what a person wants to achieve). Like Vygotsky, Leontiev drew from Marxist conceptualizations of social practice to theorize activity. Influenced by Karl Marx, Leontiev forwarded the notion that production is central to human activity and what it means to act in self-determined and self- realizing ways. Thus, the practice of people working collaboratively to create and deploy tools to produce our social world across history is what creates and sustains culture (Rogoff, 2003). We can think of activity as “joint” to accentuate the social and distributed nature of cognition and activity (Rogoff, 2003). In 1987, Yrjö Engeström popularized Leontiev’s activity theory by introducing the concept of a collective activity system. Activity systems are the dynamic sociocultural contexts within which joint activity occurs over various points in time. Engeström used Leontiev’s work to build on Vygotsky’s model of mediated action, which showed the relationship between subjects, mediating artifacts, and objects, by introducing new dimensions of joint activity: (a) rules (e.g., the norms of engagement in activity systems); (b) community (e.g., social contexts 42 or groups pertinent to the activity system); and (c) division of labor (e.g., how labor is distributed within activity systems). CHAT, thus, expands the focus of analysis such that “the individual could no longer be understood without his or her cultural means; and the society could no longer be understood without the agency of individuals who use and produce artifacts” (Engeström, 1999, p. 399). Engeström distinguished between the object or motive of joint activity and the actual outcome. CHAT calls our attention to how individuals participate in a collective system to forward the ‘object of activity’ with the help of tools and artifacts. These elements are graphically constituted as the foundation of the mediational triangle (refer to Figure 2.2 below). Figure 2.2 The Structure of a Human Activity System (Engeström, 2001, p. 135) Cultural-historical theorists emphasize the dialectical, co-constitutive nature of the relationships among components of the activity system (Suchman, 2000). Analytically, a focus on activity systems allows for the interrogation of the social organization of various cultural communities. In this way, CHAT provides a systematic way to make sense of the multiple cognitive frames, schemas, and scripts that are otherwise rendered tacit or mundane when studying learning at an individualized level. Setting the activity system (in my case, the 43 university classroom) as the unit of analysis in CHAT enables researchers to amplify and empirically uncover the relational aspects of learning. In this way, CHAT is uniquely positioned to provide an interpretive framework for understanding the moment-to-moment unfolding of meaning-making in classroom contexts, making it particularly useful for my dissertation study. Culture is informed by history, just as history is informed by culture. Considerations of cultural history, ontogeny (i.e., individual development over the lifespan), and microgenesis (moment-to-moment development) are all taken together to form a cultural-historical perspective (Cole, 1998). The study of culture in CHAT is taken up as an iterative phenomenon that is constructed (and re-constructed) through people’s participation in practices over time (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Lee, 2002; Nasir & Hand, 2006). Analytically, many CHAT scholars consider temporality as more than just a snapshot in time. Instead, attention to the multiple scales of historical time constitutes an integral backdrop that both animates and shapes human learning and development (Cole, 1998). Therefore, activity systems are imbued with historical memory that influences whether and how future activity occurs over time (Cole & Engeström, 1993; Roth & Lee, 2007). Notably, this can make activity systems seem particularly recalcitrant to change. Still, there remain opportunities for learning to transform cultural practice in the unfolding of joint activity—to become expansive. I now turn to discuss this phenomenon. Expansive Learning in CHAT CHAT is a critical theory—reflective of the social and political context in which Vygotsky conceptualized human learning and development. Heavily influenced by Marxist thought, Vygotsky was concerned with how social production reproduced power dynamics that maintained the status quo (Moll, 2013). Learning, as he conceived it, was about more than internalizing content. It constituted the development of a person’s intersubjectivity—how they 44 come to know themselves and the world (Matusov, 1996). Thus, activity theory, as an offshoot of sociocultural theory, stands “in opposition to positivist, non-dialectical thinking” (Rajala, personal communication, 2019) and instead works towards understanding how to reorganize joint activity to produce meaningful social change (Roth, 2004; Stetsenko, 2020). CHAT scholars explicitly focus on the notions of “transformative agency and willful action” toward more expansive forms of learning (Engeström & Sannino, 2020, p. 2). Expansive learning is a speculative and visionary stance where one brings a desired future to fruition in the present. “In expansive learning,” Paavola and Hakkarainen (2005) argued, “the aim is to transcend the given context and create new ones” (p. 545). Rather than perceiving subjects (i.e., the individuals who are engaging in activity) as passive, CHAT scholars understand that subjects are active and agentic—capable of moving toward creating new possibilities for the shared work in their systems (Stetsenko, 2005, 2021). Learning becomes expansive through “a collective process of creating and acquiring something that is not yet there” (Engeström & Sannino, 2020, p. 6). Individuals can collaborate to change the material conditions of their reality to bring about new possibilities for expansive forms of existing and knowing. Yet, the coordination of joint activity (i.e., collaboration) is a complex endeavor primarily because activity systems are multivoiced (Engeström, 2001). In other words, because activity systems are composed of people with different subjectivities, lived experiences, and positions of power and authority, there is never a singular object, motive, or perspective in activity systems. Individuals and groups routinely negotiate the object of joint activity (Engeström, 2001). Multiple education scholars have highlighted the vital role of multivoicedness of joint activity in learning and development. For example, Gutiérrez (2008) and colleagues’ (1999) theorization of the Third Space demonstrates how historically marginalized students push back against their 45 teachers’ hegemonic literacy pedagogies to create hybrid learning environments. In third spaces, “vertical and horizontal forms of learning” create opportunities for students to “draw on the full range of linguistic, intellectual, and cultural tools within one’s repertoires of practice” (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 611). Additionally, Lee’s (2001) framework of cultural modeling and Moll and colleagues’ (1992) Funds of Knowledge highlight the tensions and negotiations that arise between activity systems to arrive at a new shared object. These tensions often manifest as contradictions, which are essential to change in CHAT. Drawing on the work of Il’enkov (1977), Roth (2004) described contradictions as “dilemmas, disturbances, discoordination” that exist within activity systems (p. 5). CHAT’s use of the term ‘contradiction’ is yet another nod to the work of Karl Marx. In Marxist dialectical materialism, contradictions occur “when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process, or an event” (Harvey, 2014, p. 1). As these opposing forces within social systems remain in conflict, contestation, or negotiation, crises manifest underlying contradictions in ways that can lead to social change. Marx (1935) wrote, “what constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides, their conflict, and their fusion into a new category” (p. 108). Although Marx theorized contradictions to imagine a world beyond capitalist domination and the ideological and material separation between the proletariat and the bourgeoise, contradictions are also considered the engines of change within activity systems (Roth, 2004). Beatty and Feldman (2012) explained that activity systems are rife with contradictions. They wrote, “every activity system has a deep, fundamental dichotomy or dialogical tension manifest in every component of the system” (p. 292). When subjects are confronted with a contradiction in an activity system, this creates a critical disturbance wherein subjects can either adapt their thinking and practices to address the 46 contradiction or internalize it as part of their cultural community’s ongoing practice (Roth, 2004; Winogrand, 1996). In this way, contradictions allow individuals to break out of conflicting motives and change their circumstances through the agentic and adaptive use of tools and artifacts in joint activity (Engeström, 2001). As Gutiérrez and Arzubiaga (2012) argued, “the relations among and contradictions that exist between activity systems are central to the analysis of human activity” (p. 205). Given CHAT scholars’ propensity to understand more deeply how people innovatively engage in problem solving and create new ways to engage in joint activity, studying contradictions as sites of possibility and potential portals into new ways of living and being together can be particularly generative. Challenging Race-Evasiveness in CHAT As I have demonstrated, CHAT provides a powerful conceptual lens for uncovering practices and strategies to identify contradictions in a “multilayered network of interconnected systems” while moving toward transformative, equity-minded praxis (Engeström, 1999, p. 36). However, neither mainstream applications of Marxism nor CHAT have adequately dealt with racism—one of the fundamental contradictions in higher education and society—and how racialized logics (vis-à-vis racialization) constrain the possibility of transformation within activity systems. This is problematic because, as Leonardo & Manning (2017) argued, “In the U.S.…the powerful, if not dominant, social relation of race becomes the center of gravity for analyzing educational interactions” (p. 16). Few studies have explicitly named racialization’s role in how activity gets carried out within activity systems. In fact, some veteran critical scholars in the learning sciences have intentionally moved away from centering narrow constructions of race in their work. For example, Lee (2002) skeptically questioned the utility of race “as a cultural identifier” in the study of learning and human development (p. 283), arguing 47 that race is too narrow a unit of analysis to capture the vast complexity in cultural membership. She argued that, methodologically, studying race as a static construct can predispose researchers to identify sameness rather than differences. Instead, we should understand race as a political construct that has become cultural. Thus, scholars should focus on the cultural practices and ideologies that are tied to racial meanings rather than assuming a universality about race. In short, CHAT scholars should consider how processes of racial meaning-making (instead of race) influence joint activity. An important affordance of CHAT is its focus on culture as a locally salient, participation-oriented, socially (re)produced process (Cole, 1998). Yet, rather than embracing the nuance that can come from studying racial meaning-making as a cultural process, many CHAT scholars evade race in their analyses and do not adequately consider how social categories like race shape identity formation and engagement in repertoires of cultural practice (Esmonde et al., 2012). Leonardo and Manning (2017) said it best: “neo-Vygotskians in CHAT have taken up notions of culture, but have not reconciled Vygotsky’s theories with a robust theory of race” (pp. 16-17) or racialization. Instead, CHAT scholars are called to articulate a theory that is a resource for transforming the world rather than serving to further subjecting, as does traditional psychology, students of all sorts of backgrounds (women, Aboriginals, African-Americans, working class poor, unemployed) to the epistemology of predominantly White, male, middle-class ethos. (Roth et al., 2009, p. 136) As I will demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter, pairing CHAT with critical theories of racialization can reveal significant contradictions in classroom teaching that make way for transforming learning and development. 48 Toward a “Re-Generation” of CHAT Cole (1998), a prominent CHAT scholar, wrote, “The writings of early cultural-historical theorists must be supplemented and revised if we are to have ready-to-hand tools with which to think about the issue of educating for diversity” (p. 303). Critical learning sciences scholars have taken up the charge of regenerating CHAT in ways that are more readily responsive to its transformative potential (Re-Generating CHAT, 2020). Aligned with Nasir and Hand’s (2006) assertion that “…racial and social processes play a critical role in shaping everyday cultural activity by affording particular practices, trajectories, artifacts, ideas, and identities…” (p. 468), I unequivocally assert that all activity systems are imbued with racial meanings. Racial meanings are commonly, yet often tacitly, reinforced within postsecondary classrooms. Take, for instance, the ubiquitous “race week,” wherein faculty relegate scholarship about race and articles written by People of Color to one week or class session. This seemingly mundane pedagogical decision sends the message to students that conversations about race and racism are to be contained to some aspects of the course rather than reverberating throughout. It tacitly reinforces an understanding of the shared learning as being about race only sometimes. This decision then informs whether and how teachers and students engage in collective learning and sensemaking about race throughout the course. Racial meanings function as cultural artifacts that persistently mediate the operation of all joint activity. By disregarding the role that racial meanings play in the production (or destruction) of joint activity within activity systems, researchers are left with incomplete understandings of how and why activity occurs. Therefore, researchers should consider racial meanings as central mediators that can (and should) be surfaced rather than taken for granted and subsequently re-mediated toward equity-mindedness (Warmington, 2009). Then, to re-mediate 49 racial meanings, as Leonardo and Manning (2017) proposed, requires “using the tools found in a critical study of race and whiteness to disrupt the implicit racial mediators and to introduce new signs into the activity system…. These new forms of mediation involve introducing new tools to solve existing problems” (p. 21). In the next section, I situate my argument within the historical and cultural landscapes of race and its meanings in U.S. American society. Race-Making as an Unstable, Yet Enduring, Historical Project Historically, the concept of race is tied to a larger capitalist and colonial project that sought to develop and maintain a systematically institutionalized, hierarchical societal configuration in which whites preside in ‘rightful’ dominion over everyone else (Wolfe, 2016). In a discussion of “the Orient” and its construction, Edward Said (1978) masterfully outlined how hierarchical meanings attached to race mutually transformed both the East and the West, rendering the East as lesser ‘Other.’ Race, as an organizing concept, is grounded not only in a commitment to difference but a commitment to maintaining the hierarchy that produces and legitimizes those differences. With the rise of modernity and a commitment to rationality came the inculcation of phenotypic differences in beliefs about morality, intellectual capacity, and value in society (Bauman, 2000; Gilroy, 2000). Beliefs about people’s superiority or inferiority became tethered to their racial identity. Race can be considered a contradiction in many ways—existing simultaneously as a socially imagined concept and a consequential reality. While there is ample evidence disproving the biological validity of race (Montagu, 1997), it remains a globally salient concept that materially impacts people’s lives. Race may be a social construct, but racial stratification is certainly real. Racialized patterns in incarceration rates (Sawyer, 2020), COVID- 19 infection and death rates (Denney & Valdez, 2021; Laster-Pirtle, 2020), dis/investment in 50 material infrastructure (Lipman, 2013), and educational access and attainment (NCES, 2019). These are just a few examples of how the “dangerous” and “tragic” myth of race and racial hierarchy lives on to structure people’s everyday lives (Montagu, 1997, p. 41). It is no surprise that Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) defined racism as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 28). The real and direct outcomes of racism are often the physical, spiritual, and psychological death of People of Color. Racial Projects in the United States Racial formation theory (Omi & Winant, 1986) set the stage for understanding how racialization, through the entrenchment of racial projects, has operated socio-historically to organize people’s lived experiences. In this process, “racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 109). Because racial projects are linked to a hegemonic nation-state, the racial meanings produced from these projects invariably work to reify “an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, [in] an effort to organize and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along particular racial lines” (Omi & Winant, 2015, p. 125). While Omi and Winant recognized that racial meanings are both ideological and cultural and therefore highly contested, their work on racial projects leaves the ongoing meanings of race as profoundly entangled with hierarchical racial logics that confer humanity to white people and infrahumanity (or subhumanity) to People of Color. While useful in many ways, Omi and Winant’s (1994) groundbreaking work on racial projects renders racial meanings solely a process through which hierarchically oppressive and violent regimes of race are established and maintained (Gilroy, 2000; Wolfe, 2016). In other words, Omi and Winant (1994) seemed to theorize racial meaning from the white gaze. From this perspective, the meanings emerging from racial projects seek to maintain a hegemonic 51 fallacy of white supremacy (Gilroy, 2000; Omi & Winant, 1994). I call this approach to conceptualizing racial meaning historical racialization. Still, racial projects remain ontologically unstable yet incredibly durable. The ensuing tactics undergirding racial stratification are flexible (Wolfe, 2016), and so too are the meanings we associate with race. Fredrickson (2002/2015) explained, “Depending on the circumstances of the dominant group, and what uses, if any, it has for the subaltern, the logic of racism can shift from inclusionary to exclusionary and vice versa” (p. 10). This approach may be familiar when we consider the ironic and pervasive inequities stemming from the predatory DEI initiatives in universities that do more virtue signaling than bringing about transformative change. Wolfe (2016) reminded us that, like any artifact of cultural practice, nothing about race is “unchallengeable” (p. 19). Many scholars have written about the subversive ways that People of Color embody a praxis of hope, transformation, and futurity in a dogged resistance to historical racialization (and its associated racial meanings) that might otherwise render them inferior (e.g., Davis, 2011; Johnson & Lubin, 2017; Kelley, 2002; King, 2019). Thus, we must not fall prey to reducing current processes of racial meaning-making to their origins. As Collins (2002) wrote, the perspectives aligned with historical racialization “[leave] little room for the language of community to describe group-based activities and ways of thinking” (p. 542). Ultimately, there is also a need to understand racial meanings that theorize from the stance of the subaltern rather than hegemonic whiteness. I recognize that scholars of race must reckon with the historical reality that race was created as a technology for domination. This perspective should always be the starting point from which we theorize. The pervasiveness of historical racialization often gets tethered to the material realities of unequal power distribution in an unjust social system, so much so that many 52 people find race as a social identity category nonsensical to try and redeem. From a cultural- historical perspective, Engeström and Sannino (2020) warned, “if one tries to understand actions without historicity, consequential phenomena...are easily dismissed as arbitrary irrational features, even pathologies, of certain individuals or classes of people, to be eliminated or, at best, ignored” (p. 4). Processes of historical racialization leave little room for transformation. In an interview, Cedric Robinson reminded us, “Racial regimes are not actualities but inventions; they constantly fray and fall apart, so they have to be repaired” (Camp & Heatherton, 2017, p. 100). It is precisely this durability that requires that we not only study race as a historical artifact but also understand how its meanings are (re)produced and morph over time. Therefore, understanding racial meanings as a process of cultural reproduction would help us better understand how the global project of race-making might be transformed and eventually re-mediated toward more expansive methodological and pedagogical possibilities. Racial Meaning-Making as a Sociocultural and Political Learning Process How is the historical process of race-making related to the micro-level processes that make the concept of race so enduring? I posit the answer is through racial meaning-making. Racial meanings keep beliefs about race, and therefore the project of race-making, alive. The various meanings associated with race (e.g., Blackness, Latinidad, whiteness) do not simply exist; instead, they are (re)produced and even learned in sociocultural practice, including classroom activity. All human activity is mediated through culture. As Hall and Jefferson (1976) asserted: Culture includes the ‘maps of meaning’ which make things intelligible to its members.... Culture is the way social relations of a group are structured and shaped, but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood, and interpreted. (pp. 10-11) 53 In this way, culture is central to meaning-making processes, including racial meaning-making. Relatedly, Giroux (1983) connected culture to the ideologies we internalize and undergird our ways of knowing and being. He wrote: Ideology is something we all participate in; yet we rarely understand either the historical constraints that produce and limit the nature of that participation, or what the possibilities are for going beyond existing parameters of action to be able to think and act toward a qualitatively better existence. (p. 145) These conceptions make CHAT, with its focus on joint activity, a particularly complementary perspective for studying how racial meanings emerge and are reproduced. Meaning-making is often considered a cognitive endeavor, but Saha (2018) described racial meanings as being inclusive of “practices, objects, and discourses” (p. 10). He made a compelling argument about the process of reproduction in the cultural industries, paying particular attention to “how the material shapes the symbolic” during racialization and the ensuing contradictions that open up possibilities for transforming racial meanings (p. 18). Most notably, Saha used cultural industries as a primary conceptual framework to move beyond examining the consumption of representations of race to assert instead the importance of studying how various forms of racialized representation in the media are (re)made. To Saha, racial meaning-making should be understood as a process of reproduction and consumption. “Culture moves beyond the terrain of ideology with its focus on the production, reproduction, and reconstruction of meaning” (Giroux, 1983, p. 163). Focusing on the reproduction of racial meanings gives us a way to understand how tools and artifacts that have already been infused with racial meanings can (and often do) evolve and change. As I have mentioned, my commitment to cultural-historical approaches to studying learning and human development leads me to employ an understanding of racial meanings that captures its multivoiced, dynamic elements. Instead of assuming that race is a static concept that 54 is inextricably tied to oppression, researchers should fundamentally reconstruct how we understand and enact sensemaking about race in generative and justice-oriented ways. For example, we can learn from critical scholars who model the tension of simultaneously recognizing the hegemony of a racial order while also amplifying how racially minoritized people have come to have meaningful and empowering ties to their racial identities (Collins, 2002). la paperson (2017) reminded us that colonizers and their technologies can be subverted toward decolonizing operations. While we can acknowledge that racial meanings are deeply tied to a history of violence and domination, to render all projects of racial meaning as hegemonic would be to miss the ways racial meanings can also be born out of a praxis of refusal, reclamation, and revolution. Historically, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have actively resisted having our identities, cultures, and beliefs erased through white supremacist violence, epistemological erasure, and cultural genocide. Resistance—as a form of joint activity on both large and small scales—becomes a large part of the identities and cultural practices of being a Person of Color in the United States. This type of racial meaning I call historicizing racial consciousness. Systems of domination, like the racial projects that maintain a racial hierarchy, necessarily create opportunities for dissent and resistance. Harkening back to Marx’s dialectical materialism, oppressive racial projects can be understood as a critical disturbance that provides the impetus for the powerful to maintain the status quo while simultaneously creating opportunities for meaningful transformation led by nondominant groups. Overall, cultural studies scholars remind us that “what” and “why” questions of race are important, but so too are “how” questions related to processes of racial meaning-making (Hall, 2016). I argue that this is a critical site of intervention. Theories of cultural production can offer meaningful insight into how people 55 and institutions engage in discursive meaning-making through processes of historical racialization and a historicizing racial consciousness—both of which are crucial to understand. The tension that arises from the contradiction of racial meaning-making can be generative. Hole (1999) wrote: Can we exorcise the tension? Should we? What if tension itself is essential to the process of learning for both our students and ourselves? Could I learn to see the tension and discomfort not as a negative thing to be avoided but as a marker, a kind of signpost that says, ‘pay attention here, something important is happening’? (p. 85) Indeed, something important is happening! Instantiations of racial meanings are essential to human learning and identity development (Nasir & Hand, 2006). Racial meanings are also highly complex and cannot easily be resolved. This is especially true in school settings. Next, I use the concept of racialized legitimacy to argue how education meso-level contexts, particularly doctoral education, represent crucial sites in which this meaning-making occurs and its implications for doctoral student learning and socialization. Schools as Vital Sites for Racial Meaning-Making In the U.S. context, schooling is not only a product of colonization but also a technology used to expand colonial conquests (Rogoff, 2003; Spring, 1996). For over a century, schools in the United States have been designed to facilitate the cultural genocide and violent assimilation of racially minoritized populations into whitestreamed cultural norms, practices, and value systems (e.g., Valenzuela, 2010; Woodson, 1933; Woolford, 2015). Carter G. Woodson (1933) argued in his groundbreaking book The Miseducation of the Negro that the schooling system in the United States reproduces the oppression of Black people “because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed [Black people], for example, philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching” (p. 2). The U.S. schooling system has also perpetuated other forms of 56 oppression, such as settler colonialism (e.g., Bang & Marin, 2015; Patel, 2021), homophobia and transphobia (e.g., Nicolazzo, 2016), and ableism (e.g., Annamma et al., 2013; Brown & Ramlackhan, 2021), to name a few. In this way, schools function as much more than mere sites of subject matter learning and instruction. Williams (2012) argued that “the foundational assumptions [of schooling] neglect the ongoing success of capitalism and the significance of the educational field as a reproducer of social relations rather than a tool of social liberation” (p. 71). Giroux (1983) argued that schools are also one of the most important institutionalized sites for the (re)production of hegemonic culture. He wrote: Traditional educational theory has ignored not only the latent principles that shaped the deep grammar of the existing social order, but also those principles that underlie the development and nature of its own view of the world. Schools, and these perspectives, are seen merely as instructional sites. That they are also cultural and political sites is ignored, as is the notion that they represent arenas of contestation and struggle among differentially powered cultural and economic groups. (p. 3) Giroux described cultural (re)production as a politicized process aiming to reinstate dominant ideology to support the maintenance of the ruling class. Yet, like any joint activity, reproduction does not occur passively without contestation. Giroux enunciated a longstanding need for empirical scholarship “focusing on the complex way in which schools mediate on a daily basis the ideological and material forces produced directly from within the contexts and sites in which they exist” (p. 192). Given schools’ central role in building culture and race-making, institutionalized schooling is an important site for intervention toward a more egalitarian society. Drawing on critical paradigms, scholars have named that the object of schooling is socialization—generating subjects that internalize and reproduce the existing social order (e.g., Giroux, 1984, 2018). An extensive body of literature situates schooling as a racialized process that results in the reification of racial stratification (e.g., Leonardo, 2009; Oakes, 2005; Pollock, 2004). Nasir et 57 al.’s (2012) study of racial storylines in classroom learning is an excellent example of racial meaning-making in schools and its implications for classroom learning. More than mere stereotypes, Nasir et al. defined racial storylines as “the vehicles for both how individuals make sense of race and how they appropriate and deploy race to position themselves and others in everyday activity” (p. 289). An example of a negative racial storyline within higher education would be some faculty’s perception that racially minoritized students are underprepared for the rigor of higher education. Racial storylines are important because “[they] are not just what people carry around in their heads; they get enacted in social interactions in schools and classrooms as students are positioned (and position themselves) as learners or as certain kinds of learners” (p. 286). A main finding of their research highlighted that “messages about race are not created in school settings so much as they are filtered, reproduced, reimagined, and enacted there” (p. 291). This study provided important insights into how racial storylines are used to reproduce hegemonic historical racialization or provide inroads towards building students’ historicizing racial consciousness. My dissertation project builds on Nasir and colleagues’ work by more pointedly exploring how these processes occur at a systems level in ways that coalesce during joint activity. Notably, few studies have grappled with the “how” of racialization as a learning process in higher education, broadly, and doctoral education, specifically. Next, I present racialized legitimacy, a concept used to explore how racial meanings permeate and legitimate whiteness in doctoral education. Racialized Legitimacy in Higher Education As I outlined in the literature review, the primary objective of doctoral education is to put students on a path to becoming legitimated members of their disciplines. By successfully 58 completing a series of developmental milestones—coursework, qualifying exams, dissertation prospectus, and dissertation defense—it is believed that doctoral students gradually demonstrate their ability to be stewards of their discipline. The dominant frame for understanding graduate student learning is through the lens of socialization. Tierney and Rhoads (1993) defined socialization as “a ritualized process that involves the transmission of culture” between organizations and their members (p. 21). As doctoral students move toward independent scholarship, they are expected to internalize, perform, and embody aspects of their discipline. Therefore, becoming socialized into the discipline demands a type of assimilation. Yet rarely do we pause to consider what exactly faculty are socializing students into. Leveraging insights from Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations and sociocultural learning theories (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991), Rodgers and colleagues (under review) argued that “in the context of a historically white academic environment, learners come to embody narrow constructions of legitimacy that are racialized, like the organizations in which they are formed” (p. 4). Because academic departments operate as racialized organizations that reward whitestreamed ways of knowing and being, the repertoires of acceptable practice that legitimate membership in the disciplines are reflective of whiteness. In this way, doctoral education is directly complicit in sustaining a racial (and racialized) hierarchy. Given how deeply race, and its often-associated racist meanings, are encoded into power structures and organizational cultures of doctoral education, an empirical investigation of its manifestations in day-to-day doctoral coursework is long overdue. Moreover, it is vital to understand the strategic ways that faculty—namely, Faculty of Color—take up the labor of transgressing against racist norms in their disciplines, departments, and classrooms. I now offer 59 R-CHAT as a framework for capturing the production of racial meanings in classroom joint activity. Towards a Racialized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory [Students’] development within an anti-racist paradigm actually hinges on a process of unlearning the racialized sign-system handed to them and exploding the contradictions inherent in it. – Leonardo & Manning, 2017, p. 22 As I have argued, and I hope you are convinced, people are constantly (either explicitly or implicitly) participating in (re)constructing racial meanings, making it an observable phenomenon worthy of empirical attention. Racial meaning-making is a dynamic sociocultural process that can and should be understood as a learning process. Race is a sign system (Wertsch, 2007), “…made real, in part, through the dynamic systems of thinking and speech that reinforce the hegemonic racial values mediating people’s interactions with the world” (Leonardo & Manning, 2017, p. 20). In this way, racial meanings do not just exist—they are made and re- made as people engage in cultural practice over time. People learn the diverse meanings of race in various settings, a vital setting being classrooms. Given how power unfolds in classroom settings, paying attention to the instructor is important for understanding classroom learning. Even in the most democratic classroom environments, instructors are imbued with positional power and authority over students. Instructors are considered ‘a more knowledgeable other,’ someone who has a greater level of proficiency and can therefore support the learning and development of their students. In some instances, that assertion is accurate. For example, faculty generally have more experience and expertise with the subject matter they teach than their students (Postareff et al., 2006). However, given that People of Color remain underrepresented in the professoriate (NCES, 2020) and race talk is often not considered central to the intellectual work of most disciplines (Bryan et al., 60 2012), faculty are rarely the experts on race in university classrooms. Research has demonstrated the need for faculty to cultivate their racial literacy by developing both a “racial grammar and vocabulary” through critical reflection (Jones, 2021, p. 39). Teaching is not an apolitical endeavor. Faculty bring their varying lived experiences, political commitments, values, and beliefs about the world to their work. Because faculty directly influence the shared sensemaking that happens in classroom contexts, who faculty are, what they believe, and how they approach the work of their discipline matter for student learning and the social organization of joint activity within classrooms. Surfacing how faculty subjectivity, including the various epistemological, axiological, and ontological commitments faculty hold regarding race and racism, influences classroom learning is essential to transforming doctoral education. This reflexive stance toward subjectivity exposes a common contradiction in doctoral education—the notion that researchers (or educators, for that matter) can be objective and divorced from the issues and people they study (or teach). R-CHAT pushes back on this notion— putting subjects and their subjectivities in the shared work of teaching and learning. CHAT provides a theoretical tool for uncovering practices and strategies to identify contradictions in higher education as a “multilayered network of interconnected systems,” while moving us toward transformative, equity-minded praxis (Engeström, 1999, p. 36). However, CHAT is not perfect. When considering the dimensions of the mediational triangle, CHAT scholars have emphasized that tools and artifacts are products of cultural practice—imbued with histories that impact the triangle’s base (rules, community, and division of labor). Yet, CHAT scholars often underemphasize the cultural histories and subjectivities of the subject (i.e., the people acting agentically within activity systems) and how they impact joint activity. In this way, CHAT’s analytical capabilities are enhanced when paired with critical theories of racialization. 61 My conceptual framework, R-CHAT, pairs the best parts of CHAT with wisdom from scholars of racialization to provide important affordances for articulating the nuances of racial meaning-making in learning environments and theorizing its implications for supporting or impeding learning. A key distinction in R-CHAT’s model of classroom joint activity emphasizes the role that faculty and their subjectivity especially play in mediating what gets taken up in the shared work of classroom learning and development. Instead of using a triangle to symbolize joint activity, I employ the metaphor of a prism. A prism is a transparent, triangular figure used to refract or disperse a light beam. As light enters the prism, it undergoes a process of refraction, becoming bent and separating the light into wavelengths as it exits the other side. I certainly am not the first to use the metaphor of a prism. In a less widely circulated work, Vygotsky (1935) used a prism to introduce and illustrate the notion of perezhivanie to describe “how a child becomes aware of, interprets, and emotionally relates to a certain event” (p. 341). Perezhivanie, then, connects context and individual subjectivity, and Vygotsky (1998) used the concept of refraction as a principle to demonstrate “the dialectical relations of the social and the individual in the process of development” (p. 294). He continued, “The social becomes the individual, but the dialectics of this becoming are that only those components of the social environment that are refracted by the perezhivanie of the individual achieve developmental significance” (p. 294). Like Vygotsky, I use the prism and the concept of refraction to articulate that individual subjectivity and meaning-making are informed by, and frequently reflective of, macro-level discourses and ideologies (reference Figure 2.3 below). 62 Figure 2.3 R-CHAT Framework Visualization 2 In my dissertation study, I am particularly interested in how racial meanings (like beliefs about racial hierarchy, the fallacy of white supremacy, and antiracism) relate to the subject matter learning faculty and students do together in doctoral-level courses. Notably, I situate faculty’s subjectivity as the lens of the prism—it is what refracts the racial meanings they bring onto the activity system. As students and faculty collectively engage in classroom learning (via discourse and interaction), those meanings are often refracted—bent, extended, and shifted in ways that produce multiple new meanings. Moreover, by understanding CHAT’s focus on community, division of labor, and rules as racialized, I consider questions like: Who gets included/excluded as members of an academic or classroom community? Who does the work of 2 Deep and sincere gratitude to Dr. Steve Desir for his labor and thought-partnership in designing this figure. He patiently supported me through many iterations of this figure to bring my idea to life. 63 raising race-conscious perspectives in class? Is the division of labor equitable, or is it racially stratified? What are the rules? Who might they disproportionately impact? Are they equitably enforced? Overall, studying processes of equity-minded change in higher education necessitates an expansive method to capture macro-level structural processes, the particularities of meso-level policies and routines, and micro-level discourse and interaction. When leveraged from a race- conscious paradigm, scholars have used CHAT to interrogate and advance faculty’s critical awareness of how race and racialization impact beliefs and practices (Bensimon, 2006). Additionally, when applied to other educational contexts, R-CHAT can reveal how higher education operates as a nexus of activity systems that perpetuate a matrix of domination (Collins, 2002) through which the normalized goals, roles, rules, and divisions of labor serve to maintain the status quo of white, patriarchal, heteronormative hegemony. R-CHAT provides a critical intervention to higher education and the learning sciences by deepening the connection between learning theory and critical theories of racialization to re-mediate core aspects of teaching, such as curricular design and pedagogical practices, and the configuration of learning environments. 64 Chapter 3: Designing to Witness Racial Meaning-Making: Methodology and Research Design The shift from research as surveillance to research as relationship is both an ethical imperative and a substantive approach to deepening ethnographic inquiry. This shift requires moving beyond the commodification of human experience as data, and toward a co-authored process of asking, learning, and knowing. – Shirin Vossoughi & Meg Escudé, (2016, p. 56) “What Does the Camera Communicate? An Inquiry into the Politics and Possibilities of Video Research on Learning” In the previous chapter, I asserted the need for a Racialized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (R-CHAT), proposing a conceptual framework that places learning theory in conversation with critical theories of racialization to study how racial meaning-making unfolds in the shared work of classroom teaching and learning. Now I use this chapter to detail the research design for my dissertation study: a comparative case study of racial meaning-making in three doctoral-level courses. Mainly, I studied the contours of whether and how faculty (re)mediate racial meanings in doctoral coursework and its implications for student learning and scholarly development. As a reminder, the following questions guided my inquiry: 1. What pedagogical forms of mediation do equity-minded faculty use to facilitate racial meaning-making in doctoral courses? How do students respond? 2. What differences in mediation are observed given the perceived salience of race to the course? The race of the faculty member? Comparative Case Study Given the situated nature of teaching and learning, research on this subject requires a methodology that privileges an up-close examination that is sensitive to the context of joint activity. This approach is congruent with qualitative research approaches (Maxwell, 2013). 65 Therefore, for this dissertation study, I employed comparative case study (Yin, 2014) to observe empirically how racial meanings emerged in carefully selected postsecondary classrooms. Qualitative case study is an “in-depth description and analysis of a bounded system” that describes a key aspect of social life (Creswell, 2014; Merriam, 2009, p. 39; Ragin, 1992; Yin, 2014). A case study methodology allows researchers to generate “an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single instance, phenomenon, or social unit” (Merriam, 1988, p. 21). A case is defined as a “complex, functioning…integrated system” that is intentionally bounded to forward a particular focus of analysis (Stake, 1995, p. 2). Generally, the focus of analysis in case studies is the naturally occurring phenomena in “real world contexts” (Dul & Hak, 2008, p. 4), which makes case study methodology especially commensurate with sociocultural and cultural-historical traditions. When conducting a case study, researchers collect multiple types of data that are triangulated during analysis to produce a case narrative that provides a thick description of the phenomenon under investigation (Merriam, 2009; Spillman, 2014). Therefore, a case study demands “[being] closely engaged with the phenomenon as it [is] happening, where it [is] happening” (Posselt, 2016, p. 180). A comparative approach to case study allows researchers to study how situated processes occur across multiple cases, providing theoretical power to extrapolate findings generated across cases (Yin, 2014). For my dissertation project, the bounded cases were the three classroom communities I followed, particularly regarding how faculty members mediated racial meaning-making and the subsequent meanings that emerged through that joint activity. I also bounded the case temporally following one cycle of activity, which constituted one academic term—Fall 2021. 66 Combining case study methodology with ethnographic perspectives (Green et al., 2012) allows for an explicit focus on creating a thick description of the culture of a group. Identifying the cultural dimensions of racial meaning-making in postsecondary classroom teaching and learning was a primary aim of my dissertation project. Thus, I intentionally married case study methodology with ethnographic sensibilities (Pader, 2006; Schatz, 2009) in the study of classroom practice—drawing particular inspiration from classroom ethnographies and critical analyses of classroom discourse (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Erickson, 2004; Vossoughi, 2014). Case Study Site This project took place in a research-intensive institution of higher education located in the Chicagoland area, the traditional and unceded homelands of the Council of Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations, 1 as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois Nations (where I lived and worked during data collection). I chose to position my study in a research-intensive institution for two reasons: (a) it represented a significant proportion of higher education institutions, and (b) faculty teaching rarely comes under scrutiny in these settings (Rodgers, 2020). Higher education research should trouble the idea that teaching is not a significant aspect of the work that faculty in R-1s do. Instead, scholars should provide tangible resources for faculty in these institutions to improve their pedagogical practice. 1 I acknowledge and honor the legacies of Indigenous resistance across what is now called the Americas. Structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism pose a significant and persistent threat to Indigenous peoples and communities across the world (Wolfe, 2016). Despite the histories of violence, disposition, and coercive assimilation, Native folks and their vibrant cultures thrive. To be clear, I support all calls for decolonization and follow the lead of my Native siblings as we struggle to historicize and reimagine our relationship with each other and our more-than-human family. I am deeply grateful for Black/Indigenous solidarity and the possibilities that emerge from demanding new and more expansive possibilities for our Peoples. To learn more about Chicago’s Native community, read “We’re Still Here”: Chicago’s Native American Community. Also, learn more about the histories of the Land you occupy and its traditional caretakers at native-land.ca. May our Peoples midwife a future world that is far beyond the constraint and containment manufactured by technologies of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. 67 Sampling Criteria When designing a qualitative case study, researchers must strategically choose criteria for case selection and decide which subjects associated with each case would serve as the best informants to develop a thick description of the case (Merriam, 2009). Aligned with Dr. Julie Posselt’s (personal communication, February 1, 2021) advice, I have designed my case study in ways that allow me to “sample on the mechanisms that make a difference.” Therefore, I had three eligibility criteria for participation in the study. First, I sought involvement from tenured or tenure-track faculty who teach in either a humanities or social sciences department. I chose humanities and social sciences because the paradigms that are centered across these disciplines, relative to STEM, make race and racial meaning-making particularly salient in the tools, artifacts, and social processes germane to these disciplinary contexts. To create an appropriately “bounded system” for my case study (Creswell, 2007), I observed faculty at the same postsecondary institution during the same academic term. I also recognized that the racial and ethnic identity of the professor mattered deeply for this study. While the overall racial composition of the professoriate presented a challenge for gathering a racially diverse sample, my sampling decisions and case selection process were attuned to the particularities of my collaborators’ racial identities, as well as other social identities that intersect to inform their subjectivity (e.g., ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, dis/ability, immigration story). I intentionally had white, Black, and non-Black People of Color represented in my sample. Lastly, I sought to observe courses that enrolled no more than 25 individuals and had a seminar-style format. Given my commitment to understanding joint activity, I needed to observe dialogue-based rather than lecture-based courses. 68 Recruitment Upon receiving approval from the University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board in July 2021 (UP-21-00288), I sent personal emails to 472 faculty at my research site. The institution’s Registrar’s Office was delayed in finalizing the Fall 2021 course schedule (another impact of the pandemic), so instead of being able to target faculty who were listed to teach in the Fall, I had to email a much larger group. I emailed all tenured/tenure-track faculty in the social sciences and humanities departments with subject matter that I deemed intelligible. For example, I did not message faculty in French, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Russian, or in the Music Theory and Dance departments since I do not possess the skills to properly track the conversations and subject matter in those courses. I list the departments whose faculty I contacted in Appendix G. My recruitment email outlined the purpose of the study and eligibility requirements (tenured or tenure-track faculty teaching in a humanities or social sciences department who self- identify as an educator committed to engaging racial equity in their teaching practice scheduled to lead a course in Fall 2021). I was intentionally transparent about my desire to work with faculty who self-identified as equity-minded and race-conscious in their teaching. To opt into the study, I let collaborators decide what it meant to be equity-minded and race-conscious, knowing that I would ask more pointed questions about their commitment to racial equity in upcoming informational interviews. Mostly, this eligibility criterion was a move to invite faculty not yet on board with a commitment to racial equity to self-select from participating in my study. As a Black woman who has a longstanding personal commitment to racial equity, including this criterion was a move to protect my peace by avoiding faculty who may be antagonistic towards my work. 69 As many scholars have experienced, recruiting collaborators to collect data amid a global pandemic was difficult. Most of the faculty I messaged responded, letting me know they were not teaching in the Fall. Of the faculty who were teaching, some shared that they felt overwhelmed and did not have the capacity to take on an additional commitment. Others expressed concerns about safely making the transition back to in-person learning. Worries about the physical classroom environment like small classroom sizes, a lack of ventilation, possibilities for social distancing, and potential complications with contact tracing caused some faculty who would have otherwise participated to kindly decline. Seven of the 472 faculty I initially emailed consented to participate in an informational interview. These conversations marked the beginning of the data collection process. Data Collection Procedures Researchers use methods as tools to open up “possible ‘ways into’ the phenomena of interest” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 40). I deliberately chose methods that surfaced the wide- ranging ways faculty and students engage in racial meaning-making in classroom settings. The following section provides a detailed outline of my data collection and analysis procedures broken down into three main phases: (a) case selection, (b) fieldwork, and (c) reflective, retrospective think-aloud interviews. Phase 1: Case Selection Merriam (1998) posited that “the single most defining characteristic of case study research lies in delimiting the object of study, the case” (p. 27). Thus, case selection must be made with care and precision to ensure that the case a researcher selects has the elements needed to address their research questions. Yin (2014) named uniqueness (i.e., learning from an atypical case), typicality (i.e., learning from a typical case), or success (i.e., learning from a case that 70 accomplished an intended outcome) as three primary considerations for case selection. Furthermore, utilizing a comparative approach to case study methodology requires purposeful sampling because it necessitates balancing convergences and divergences across cases (Yin, 2014). I now provide insight into my case selection procedures. Seven faculty and one teaching assistant consented to participate in an informational interview in August 2021. Table 3.1 outlines the demographic information of my collaborators. Table 3.1 Demographics of Informational Interview Collaborators Faculty Member Race Gender Department Dr. Casillas Latinx Man Sociology & Gender & Sexuality Dr. Goodman White Man Political Science Dr. Spencer White Man English Dr. Berr White Woman Political Science Dr. Davis Black Woman Sociology & Black Studies Dr. Deere* American Indian Woman Learning Sciences Dr. Thomas* White Man Learning Sciences Future Dr. Alexander** American Indian Man Learning Sciences *Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas are co-instructors for one course in the Learning Sciences department. **Future Dr. Alexander is a PhD candidate in the Learning Sciences department and served as the TA for Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas’ course. Note: All faculty are full professors in their departments. 71 The goal of each informational interview was to learn about the history of the course I would be observing and the faculty’s teaching approach. I was particularly interested in knowing whether and how they thought about equity related to race issues in their teaching and their course specifically. I began each interview by collecting demographic information (e.g., race and ethnicity, gender, and pronouns) and inviting collaborators to tell me about the history, design, and learning objectives of the course I would observe. I also specifically asked about how issues of race showed in the course, paying close attention to how faculty storied this aspect of their course. Lastly, I allowed faculty to ask me questions about the study and tell me what dimension of my study may be helpful to them as they reflect on their own pedagogical practice. On average, informational interviews lasted around 35-40 minutes, with the most extended interview lasting 53 minutes and 41 seconds. All informational interviews took place via Zoom and were audio-video recorded to capture and reflect their responses accurately. The informational interview protocol can be found in Appendix B. Lastly, I recorded short analytic memos, defined as “brief or extended narrative[s] that document the researcher’s reflections and thinking processes about the data” (Miles et al., 2013), after each interview. When inviting faculty to participate in an informational interview, I also asked them to share a copy of their course syllabus. I conducted a brief document analysis (Owen, 2014) of each course syllabus. As Yanow (2007) wrote: Documents can provide background information prior to designing the research project, for example prior to conducting interviews. They may corroborate observational and interview data, or they may refute them, in which case the researcher is ‘armed’ with evidence that can be used to clarify, or perhaps, to challenge what is being told…. (p. 411) Because I was particularly interested in faculty’s use of tools and artifacts to mediate racial meaning, I noted whether their syllabus featured readings written by Scholars of Color and how 72 they discussed topics of race and/or racism. Triangulating brief document analyses with the analytic memos taken after each informational interview informed my final case selection. Core to designing a coherent and trustworthy comparative case study is balancing aspects of similarity and variation across all cases (Yin, 2014). With this in mind, I decided to follow three courses: (a) Introduction to the Learning Sciences (co-taught by Dr. Deere, Dr. Thomas, and Future Dr. Alexander); (b) Racialization in Latin America (taught by Dr. Davis); and (c) International Law & Politics (taught by Dr. Berr). I chose these three courses for a few main reasons. First, I chose all PhD-level courses, which allowed me to track racial meaning-making and faculty pedagogy in a similar developmental context. Next, these four faculty members represented the racial breakdown I hoped for in my sample (e.g., representation of white, Black, and non-Black People of Color). Lastly, the perceived salience of race varied significantly across these courses. For instance, the Sociology course explicitly dealt with racialization—it was literally in the title! Additionally, Dr. Davis talked about her lived experience as a Black woman and scholar of Black Studies, sensitizing her to teaching about race in the courses she designs. Thus, I anticipated race would be most salient in this classroom context. Dr. Berr, the political scientist in my sample, was much more agnostic about whether and how race appeared in the International Law & Politics course. She mentioned that she allowed students’ interests to drive the topics covered in the course, so race might come up or it may not. This framing piqued my interest in how race talk might be happening in unrecognized or surprising ways in the Political Science course. The Learning Sciences course seemed like a particularly rich case because it was co- taught by two faculty members who approached their pedagogy differently. In her informational interview, Dr. Deere shared a rich commitment to helping students recognize how various 73 systems of oppression, especially racism and colonialism, impact learning. Conversely, like Dr. Berr, Dr. Thomas expressed that race could show up in the course, but that is not something he actively designs for. Thus, this case felt like a case study within a case study—a very generative site for co-theorizing! The insights I gained from Phase 1 of this study provided a rich foundation for my dissertation project. For instance, I put emergent findings from the informational interviews and document analyses of course syllabi in conversation with my conceptual framework (R-CHAT) to formulate a list of sensitizing concepts (Charmaz, 1990). A few of these concepts included: course readings, race talk, resistance, disciplinary logics, and legitimacy. These concepts informed the development of an observational protocol I used in the study’s second phase. Phase 2: Field Work Case study requires “[being] closely engaged with the phenomenon as it was happening, where it was happening” (Posselt, 2016, p. 180). Ethnographers seek to distill the ‘everydayness’ of cultural phenomena, illuminating what people might otherwise take for granted in their culture and cultural practices (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011; Geertz, 1973). Foundational to my dissertation is the assumption that racial meaning-making is constantly occurring in explicit or implicit ways. Thus, racial meaning-making is a mundane phenomenon. Since “race talk” is a common yet underexplored phenomenon in classroom discourse and interaction (Pollock, 2009), it is a consequential phenomenon to study. Applying the tools of ethnography to my cases allowed me to powerfully capture and represent locally salient dimensions of racial meaning-making as sociocultural practice in classroom contexts. I now recount my data collection procedures for the fieldwork phase of my dissertation study, which consisted of conducting classroom observations, student interviews, and focus groups. 74 Classroom Observations. Observations can be powerful data sources for case studies about education as “[classroom] observations let [researchers] see the teaching and learning exchange” (Castillo-Montoya, 2017, p. 591). Much of the literature on faculty pedagogy relies on instructors’ reflections of their teaching rather than actual observations of classroom teaching (Rodgers, 2020). Kane and colleagues (2004) described the implication of this approach to research on postsecondary teaching and learning. They wrote, “...research that examines only what university teachers say about their practice and does not directly observe what they do is at risk of telling half the story” (p. 177). Given the absence of observational data, empirical evidence used to inform approaches to faculty professional development and so-called “best practices” around university teaching are often not grounded in the observed particularities of faculty pedagogy and classroom practice. I recognized that ethnographic explorations of postsecondary teaching and learning were scarce, so I designed a dissertation study that would contribute to this vital gap. Thus, I committed myself to being immersed in the learning environment with my collaborators throughout the academic term. Classroom observations were the largest part of my dataset. I attended and audio-/video- recorded a total of 64 hours of class sessions across the three courses I observed. Observations were spread throughout the 10-week quarter. With permission from each faculty member, I attended the first class session of all three courses. During this initial observation, I focused on building rapport, gaining trust, and obtaining informed consent from student collaborators. In each class, professors gave me a short window of time to verbally pitch my study to students. I introduced myself and my study, gave them an overview of the consent form, and opened the floor for questions. I reminded students that their participation was voluntary, and each professor emphasized that participation would impact neither students’ grades nor their social standing in 75 the class. All 29 students across the three courses enthusiastically consented to participate in my study (seven students in Political Science, 12 in Learning Sciences, and 10 in Sociology). I want to note that I did not video-record the initial classroom observation. The summer before data collection, I had a beautiful conversation with my femtor, Dr. Shirin Vossoughi, about establishing trust with collaborators while collecting video data. Recognizing that many of my student collaborators were first-year PhD students, I immediately thought about how nervous I would have felt walking into my first doctoral-level class to be welcomed by an eager stranger and a camcorder. At that moment, I decided that the camcorder might be unnecessarily obtrusive in this first integral meeting. I opted to rely on audio recordings and detailed fieldnotes during the initial observation. All subsequent observations were audio-/video-recorded. I used one camcorder to capture all large group discussions. The learning sciences course was the only class to routinely leverage small group discussions, which were not capturable by my sole camcorder. In those instances, I used audio-recorders 2 to capture how students engaged in collective sensemaking and racial meaning-making in those discussions. Each small group used an audio recorder to document their conversation. In addition to having the audio/video recordings, I took detailed field notes during class sessions. I paid particular attention to how faculty leveraged tools like the curriculum, multimedia, and guest speakers in their teaching to mediate racial meaning. I was also attuned to how these forms of pedagogical mediation seemed to open up or shut down student engagement 2 I noticed during the second observation that the participation structure in the Learning Sciences course would rely heavily on small group conversations. As I observed, I could overhear race talk happening in these small group conversations. I wanted to capture the richness of the conversations I overheard, but I did not want to do it in a way that felt like I was surveilling their discussion. Ultimately, with students’ consent, I decided to use audio- recorders (one for each small group) to record their small group conversations and empowered them to start, pause, or stop the recording at their discretion. 76 and possibilities for learning. As I noticed instances of racial meaning-making occurring during observations, I noted the approximate start and end time of these moments in my fieldnotes— marking it as a potentially salient ‘episode’ of racial meaning-making. Additionally, I wrote memos or recorded voice memos on the drive home from my field site after each observation. These memos featured musings on insights that would help me explore how assertions about racial meaning are taken up and/or resisted by collaborators. These data collection methods are known to support trustworthiness and reliability (Maxwell, 2013). The three foci of analysis for classroom observations included (a) beliefs about race and racial meanings (i.e., What beliefs about race do faculty and students bring to the classroom? How, if at all, do these meanings shift over time?); (b) the social organization of racial meaning- making in classroom joint activity (i.e., How does racial meaning-making happen in this classroom? Using R-CHAT, how do division of labor, community, and rules mediate racial meaning-making? What is perceived to be the object of racial meaning-making in the classroom? How is this negotiated among students and faculty?); (c) faculty pedagogical forms of mediation (i.e., What does the faculty member do to teach students about the meaning of race? What tools and artifacts does the faculty use to mediate racial meaning-making and how?). The observation protocol found in Appendix C outlines these sub-questions in greater detail. Student Focus Groups. A primary goal of my dissertation research is to generate theory that can contribute to future design conjectures that support faculty in re-mediating racialization in their classroom learning environments. In other words, while faculty pedagogy (particularly mediation of racial meaning-making) is a central phenomenon in my study, I aim to improve higher education pedagogy for students (namely Students of Color). Therefore, I maintained 77 that students were key stakeholders and collaborators in this research project. My study needed to include and honor the wisdom of student perspectives. You may wonder what this meant for my research design: capturing students’ voices! Seidman (2006) asserted: If the researcher is interested...in what it is like for students to be in the classroom, what their experience is, and what meaning they make out of that experience...their ‘subjective understanding’...then it seems to me that interviewing, in most cases, may be the best avenue of inquiry. (p. 11) I conducted interviews and focus groups with students across the courses I observed. While all students were invited to participate in a focus group, I employed purposeful sampling techniques to ensure racial and gender diversity. I should also note that some students expressed a desire to have a one-on-one interview rather than a focus group. Some students wanted to connect with me alone to feel more comfortable sharing their experiences more openly. In those instances, I greatly appreciated students placing this level of trust in me. For other students, scheduling demands made it such that they needed to have a one-on-one interview rather than a focus group. Overall, I conducted six one-on-one interviews and four focus groups, gaining insights from 18 of the 29 student collaborators in my project. My conversation with students prompted them to share their perceptions of faculty’s equity-minded praxis. I asked students how they would describe their faculty’s teaching philosophy and their experience in the class. I also inquired about whether/how issues of racial meaning are being generatively taken up in classroom practice. To learn more about the questions I asked student collaborators, refer to Appendix D, the semi-structured focus group protocol (which I amended to guide the conversation in one-on-one interviews). Conversations with students took place via Zoom during Weeks 7, 8, and 9 of a 10-week quarter. I chose to conduct these interviews during this time of the quarter to ensure that students had enough 78 experience with the faculty’s teaching to provide thoughtful feedback. I completed all fieldwork in December 2021 at the end of the fall quarter. Data Analysis Recognizing the iterative nature of data collection and analysis in the qualitative tradition (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015), some aspects of sensemaking about the data began before I officially started coding the data systematically. I routinely reviewed my fieldnotes, surfacing new wonderings about my collaborators’ sensemaking. After the conclusion of fieldwork, I submitted the interview and focus group audio files for professional transcription by a third party. Upon receiving the transcriptions, I conducted accuracy checks to ensure I was working with precise representations of what the collaborators actually said during the interviews. I also anonymized all proper nouns in each transcript during this process. The final transcripts were uploaded onto a password-protected external hard drive and saved securely on my laptop computer. Analysis of Interview and Focus Group Data I coded the interviews thematically using critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014) in NVivo, a popular qualitative research software. Critical narrative analysis combines micro- and macro-analytic tools to interrogate the bidirectional influence between personal narratives and institutional discourses. As Souto-Manning (2014) reminded us, “discourse is only powerful when it is recycled in stories everyday people tell” (p. 164). In this way, critical narrative analysis uses key principles from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001; van Dijk, 1989) and narrative analysis (Wortham, 2001) to study how discourse becomes real and enacted in people’s lives. For this study, I am particularly interested in how faculty and students’ discussions of race have implications for doctoral student learning and socialization. 79 I utilized the constant comparative approach to data analysis—going through cycles of open, axial, and selective coding (Corbin & Straus, 2008; Glaser & Straus, 1967). I began by open coding all transcripts in each case, starting with the faculty informational interviews, followed by interviews and focus groups with students. I conducted close, line-by-line readings of all transcribed data to arrive iteratively and inductively at my coding scheme. I first coded using the aforementioned sensitizing concepts (e.g., “course readings,” “disciplinary logics,” and “legitimacy”). Then I noted new patterns and tensions that arose within each case. Themes related to curricular design and pedagogical mediation emerged, including codes. As a result, I added new codes such as “the canon,” “historicity,” “resistance,” “subjectivity,” and “(un)stated learning objectives.” I developed a detailed code book from this process that supported my ability to stay grounded in the data and keep fidelity to my research questions. Equipped with a foundational understanding of ‘the big picture’ of my data, I moved next to axial coding. I refined extant codes into concepts during axial coding by aggregating some codes and theorizing relationships between other codes. For example, by putting data excerpts coded as “the canon” and “course readings” into conversation with each other, I was able to notice broader patterns in which authors/topics were positioned as central to the disciplines, which authors were considered peripheral, and what implications these positioning had for doctoral student learning and socialization. As I digested collaborators’ rich reflections, I wrote analytic memos while coding to keep stock of ideas and connections throughout the data analysis process. Before moving on to creating broader case narratives through the selective coding process, I switched my attention to video analysis. 80 Analysis of Video Sources Video constitutes a robust information source for ethnographic and microanalytic studies of teaching and learning (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Many learning scientists rely on video data to ascertain the complex and coordinated unfolding of joint activity in various learning environments (Derry et al., 2010; Goldman et al., 2014; Pea, 2006). Using video sources as data in my study allowed me to gather a repeated and up-close analysis of how faculty and students coordinated joint activity in doctoral coursework. I first had to decide how to digest the 64 hours of video data I collected systematically. I ultimately decided to take a narrative approach to video analysis. In their germinal article on video analysis, Derry and collogues (2010) described the goals of how narrative-oriented scholars use video data in their work. They wrote that, in narrative approaches to video analysis, “[Researchers’] aim is not to make the complex simple, reducing data to theorem. The aim is to make the complex understandable” (p. 12). Thus, systematically selecting video excerpts that provided revelatory insight into my phenomenon of interest was my main selection criteria for which videos to analyze closely. While this iteration of my analysis privileged deep dives into systematically selected focal events, I also heeded Derry and colleagues’ (2010) warning that “it is not enough to provide rich examples; analysts must also provide a sense of the broader sample and of how typical or atypical the instances presented are relative to some larger corpus of data” (p. 23). Thus, I aimed to provide a balanced and fair examination of the forest and the trees in the analysis and write up of my findings. Derry and collogues (2010) wrote, “Any video corpus captures many events. Selection determines which events are brought into focus for deeper analysis” (p. 13). I selected relevant clips for analysis by reviewing my fieldnotes and memos across class sessions to identify 81 instances I previously noted as moments in which I perceived racial meaning-making was occurring. Once I noted a few salient instances of racial meaning-making in each course, I reviewed all video footage of the class session in which that moment took place. As I watched the recordings, I created content logs featuring a detailed breakdown of the discourse and interaction in the class session in 2-minute chunks. I reviewed the videos multiple times, trying to understand what each session revealed about my phenomenon of interest. The content logs supported cycles of interaction analysis, enabling me to identify “hot spots” of activity and choose the final focal events upon which I focus my findings (Hall & Stevens, 2015; Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 43). I provide a screenshot of one of my content logs in Figure 3.1. Figure 3.1 Screenshot Example of Content Log After completing the first cycle of analysis using the content logs, I wrote detailed analytic memos that reflected emergent insights into aspects of discourse and interaction. Notably, I used R-CHAT to illuminate the interactional dynamics of how racial meaning-making was occurring in each video. Then, I turned to a finer grain of analysis—the focal events. 82 Focal events are “stretches of interaction that cohere in some manner that is meaningful to the participants. Some events have names and constitute recognizable, culturally significant tokens in social intercourse” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 57). In my study, focal events are short moments of interaction—particularly intervention—by the faculty member that facilitates (or sometimes impedes) racial meaning-making during classroom teaching and learning. I identified four focal events through the cycles of analysis that occurred while content logging: two in the Learning Sciences, one in Sociology, and one in Political Science. I transcribed the dialogue in these focal events and began analysis by creating playscripts of each focal event. Playscripts are close, line-by-line annotations of discourse and interaction. Using insights from conversation analysis (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990) and interaction analysis (Erickson, 2004; Jordan & Henderson, 1995), I sought to amplify collaborators’ knowledge-in-use about race. The shift from content logging to developing a playscript moved me from asking ‘what’ questions to asking ‘how’ questions. For example, as I engaged in content logging for each class session, I was trying to uncover what pedagogical forms of mediation faculty used when facilitating racial meaning-making. At the point of constructing the playscripts, I noticed myself asking how did faculty engage in pedagogical mediation? How did students take up or resist faculty interventions? How do faculty members’ interventions shape doctoral student learning and socialization? To answer these questions, I drew specifically on interpretive traditions stemming from studies of classroom discourse analysis and ethnography traditions (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Erickson, 2004; Vossoughi, 2014). Vossoughi (2011) defined interpretive inquiry as being concerned with “the kinds of things that matter to social actors as they go about their everyday lives” (p. 79). She continued, “Interpretive research is also centrally concerned with the socially organized nature of 83 learning environments and the improvement of educational practice” (p. 79), or how people work together to negotiate and/or achieve shared goals. I sought to understand and appropriately re- story collaborators’ shared sensemaking, recognizing it as a collaborative endeavor—a critical emphasis in interpretive research. Throughout the video analysis process, I sought to develop what Kris Gutiérrez (2004, as cited in Lee, 2008, p. 273) called “binocular vision,” wherein the researcher balances simultaneously holding space for the heterogeneous and homogeneous practices within cultural communities. I relied on Atkinson and Heritage’s (1984) transcription conventions (attached as Appendix F) to illuminate the faculty’s intervention in racial meaning-making. I noted pauses in speech, gestures, intonations, pacing, and other nonverbal cues in each playscript. Below is a screenshot of one of my playscripts in Figure 3.2. Figure 3.2 Screenshot Example of Playscript 84 Given that conversation and interaction analysis are interpretive practices that intentionally seek to place the micro (what is being indexed or said in a particular moment) in relation to broader macro-level meanings, it provides an excellent analytic framework to better understand how racial meaning-making occurs in classroom joint activity. The selection of these focal events directly informs the next stage of data collection: retrospective think-aloud interviews. Phase 3: Retrospective Think-Aloud Interviews Guided by insights from literature on teacher noticing (Sherin & Russ, 2014), I conducted 30-minute retrospective think-aloud interviews with three of the four faculty members I observed in March of 2022. The social viewing and reviewing of video data are believed to strengthen a study’s trustworthiness (Erickson, 2006). Jordan and Henderson (1995) posited that Elicitation based on videotapes has the advantage of staying much closer to the actual events than if one were to ask questions removed from the activity of interest. Thus, instead of interviewing designers about their practices (or, even more removed, asking them to fill out a questionnaire) one might ask them to look at a videotape of themselves or of other designers at work and ask questions about that work as they arise from the activity being viewed. Data elicited in this manner are likely to have greater ecological validity, that is to say, are more readily applicable to real conditions of work than data generated under more artificial circumstances. (p. 50) For these reasons, pairing video elicitation via think-aloud interviews with faculty collaborators with the other forms of data is poised to provide a more robust understanding. Each faculty member and I watched the corresponding thematic episodes for their courses (two in Learning Sciences, one in Sociology, and one in Political Science). Each clip lasted less than 5 minutes. I asked them to interpret what was happening in the episode, provide insight into their pedagogical moves, and reflect on what, if anything, they might do differently in the future. I also asked whether they would characterize the episode I showed them as a moment of racial 85 meaning-making and why. The protocol for retrospective think-aloud interviews can be found in Appendix E. It is worth noting that empirical studies of teacher noticing that leverage retrospective think-aloud interviews are intentionally broad and open-ended (Sherin, personal communication, October 22, 2021). Therefore, I designed my protocol to allow faculty collaborators to lead the conversation—naming what feels most salient to them. In addition to being an important form of member-checking, these interviews provide insight into how faculty mediate racial meaning- making and reflections about why they made particular pedagogical moves. Overall, analyses of these data allowed me to highlight the interpretive frames that faculty collaborators used to make sense of how their pedagogical moves mediated racial meaning-making. These data were an essential complement to the observation data. Besides the methodological and analytic affordances of capturing and going through video data with collaborators, my commitment to reciprocity also guided my decision to compile and share video data with my collaborators. Dr. Ananda Marin (personal communication, July 9, 2020) described video data as “a process of gift exchange,” wherein research collaborators gift researchers with records of how they both display their knowledge and how their knowledge unfolds in moment-to-moment interaction and the coordination of joint activity. Harkening back to the title of this chapter, I regarded data collection as a process of bearing witness. I was honored to witness the teaching and learning process unfold in real time. I am grateful that my collaborators trusted me to document what I consider an intimate process. One way I decided to honor this gift was to create an opportunity for faculty members to review and reflect critically on their teaching. Faculty rarely have opportunities to engage in meaningful reflection in higher education (Brookfield, 2017)—especially regarding their teaching practice. 86 Analysis of Think-Aloud Interviews. I coded the think-aloud interviews the same way I coded other interview data in the sample—going through cycles of open and axial coding to reveal relevant themes, patterns, and tensions in the data. Next, I started selective coding— triangulating the findings from the think-aloud interviews with the rest of the dataset to create case narratives of the production of racial meaning in postsecondary classrooms. I identified points of comparison between the cases, such as patterns of practice, common challenges, and similar pedagogical strategies. I also highlighted points of variation that cohered with faculty members’ racial identity and the perceived salience of race to the course. Trustworthiness Establishing trustworthiness is paramount in qualitative research. Trustworthiness, often used synonymously with rigor in qualitative research traditions, refers to the extent to which one’s data collection methods and findings are credible, dependable, and confirmable (Morse, 2018). I used a series of strategies to achieve trustworthiness. Triangulation An important way trustworthiness is established in qualitative methods, especially in case studies, is through triangulation. Triangulation consists of “collecting information from a diverse range of individuals and settings, using a variety of methods” (Maxwell, 2013, p. 128). I designed my study intentionally to leverage multiple forms of triangulation. I collected several forms of data (i.e., interview data, focus group data, observation data, and documents) from myriad collaborators (i.e., faculty and students) affiliated with each case over an extended period of time (e.g., one academic quarter). I was able to cross-reference evidence to construct richer and more robust case narratives (Yin, 2018). 87 Unsurprisingly, the triangulation process was complex. And indeed, it should be! Learning, itself, is a messy process, and facilitating learning for a diverse group of individuals is hard work. Think about how educators often plan a lesson that goes nothing like they imagined because they needed to attend to something a student raised in the moment. My point is that teaching is an improvisational craft, and I tried to adopt a similar approach of balancing creativity and systematicity with how I collected and made sense of my data. I sought to embrace the beautiful messiness of teaching and learning in my findings. In addition to identifying patterns and themes in the data, I also sought to pinpoint instances where I found data that went against a trend I had observed (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Miles & Huberman, 1994). Rather than perceiving counterexamples as a threat to the validity of my research project that must be resolved, I held space for tensions that arose in the data. As these distinctions emerged, I treated them as generative opportunities for discussion and collective meaning-making with trusted peers. Peer Review Actively pursuing feedback was another mechanism through which I ensured the rigor of my project (Shenton, 2004). I am grateful to have a dissertation committee of four incredible scholars whose research interests converged and diverged in ways that enriched my project. At every point of this process, I leaned on my committee as thought-partners and confidantes— routinely problem-solving, commiserating, sensemaking, and celebrating with me throughout this journey. My committee ensured that I had a comprehensive understanding of the relevant literature, methods, and theoretical frameworks most relevant to my project. In addition to receiving systematic feedback from my committee throughout the design, data collection, and data analysis processes, I sought additional feedback by presenting 88 preliminary findings from my dissertation at peer-reviewed conferences, like the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference, the Chicago Ethnography Conference, and USC Rossier’s Qualitative Working Group. I also audited Dr. Arturo Cortez’s 3 Learning and Social Interaction course at CU-Boulder to receive formal training in video analysis. I also shared emergent sensemaking with my faculty collaborators during the think-aloud interviews. We discussed how I interpreted the thematic episodes, and they shared valuable feedback on how I could better represent their perspectives. Finally, I also regularly talked through my findings with sibling-scholars both within and outside of the field of education. I am deeply indebted to my community for sharpening my analysis and helping shape the story I tell through my dissertation. Researcher Reflexivity and Critical Reflection The researcher is the instrument in qualitative research traditions, and the meanings made of whatever data are collected happens by one person or a team of people. Thus, data analysis is often precarious, given the vast variation in people’s lived experiences, social identities, and onto-epistemological commitments. In short, I believe that who the researcher is and how they make sense of the world matter for the type of findings they produce. Therefore, I take seriously my commitment to continuous critical reflection and transparency about my positionality. From a research design perspective, I recognized that my presence as an observer in the classroom fundamentally impacts the processes and interactions I study (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011). Indeed, this is true for any researcher. Given my dissertation topic, I was keenly aware that my subjectivity as a queer Black woman and unabashed racial justice advocate could influence how 3 I express deep gratitude and love to Profe Arturo Cortez, who always reflected profound engagement with and excitement about my dissertation study. The loving scaffolding they provided to me laid the foundation for the findings you will read in the next chapter. Learning with Dr. Areej Mawasi and Future Drs. Melinda Lopez, Scott Perkins, and Nelson Flores in the Learning & Social Interaction course was a gift. 89 my collaborators acted during observations. However, my sustained engagement throughout the semester lessened the likelihood that faculty and students would act performatively because of my presence (Emerson et al., 2011). I also routinely checked my biases and assumptions (Miles & Huberman, 1994). I kept reflective memos throughout the data analysis process to hold myself accountable for thoughtfully processing the many sentiments I had during data collection—pushing myself to be clear about naming distinctions between what I observed and what I felt while conducting observations. To be clear, this was not a move to be objective or neutral. Instead, I wanted to be transparent about how I—a researcher and a whole person—am present in the research process and the findings that I present. My memos were my attempt to balance and document my subjective interpretations while also staying close to the data and my collaborators’ perspectives. Ethical Considerations I always strive to rigorously and responsibly conduct research that complicates the taken- for-granted policies, practices, and beliefs that reproduce inequity for nondominant people in higher education. Therefore, I take seriously a call to ethically design and carry out research projects that not only do no harm but also intentionally aim to remedy past harm and prevent future harm. Below, I have listed some of the methodological and onto-epistemological commitments I made to articulate the ethical stance of my project, as well as bolster the well- being of my collaborators: Ontological Totality In a schooling system intent on perpetuating the ontological denial of Students of Color, I have a responsibility to protect and affirm what Cedric Robinson (2000) called “ontological totality” (p.168). Situated within the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson defined ontological 90 totality as “The renunciation of actual being for historical being...granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses” (p. 168). In other words, ontological totality refers to the dogged insistence, on the behalf of Black people, to assert our wholeness. From design to dissemination, theorizing from a space of affirmative ontological totality of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and others with nondominant social identities is a central aim of my praxis as a researcher. Throughout the research process, I affirmed my collaborators’ humanity. I made myself available to students, and I was grateful to support some students in meaningful ways. For instance, a Black woman second-year student asked for a one-on-one meeting to discuss her burgeoning second-year research project. During our discussion, she asked about how I chose my dissertation topic, suggestions of relevant literature related to her research interests, and approaches to scoping and bounding her study appropriately. More importantly, we also bonded over being Black women in academia aiming to do critical work. In another instance, I witnessed a Latina woman student waiting outside the seminar room for class to start. When I noticed her, I waved, and she walked over to the table where I was sitting. I smiled and asked her how she was feeling. She quickly responded, “Fine.” Her eyes and body language told a different story—I could soon tell she was not fine. I replied, “You know it’s okay to not be fine, right?” Her eyes filled with tears as she expressed how she struggled with adjusting to doctoral coursework. She was carrying tremendous pressure to do well in graduate school not only for herself but also for her family. I told her that I deeply identified with those feelings, and I shared experiences about how I navigated my transition to graduate school as a first-gen Woman of Color. I encouraged her, reminding her that she has tremendous potential, and then we hugged before walking into the classroom. 91 It was an honor to be present to witness my collaborators’ becoming over an academic quarter—and still, I know the process of becoming in violent institutions is hard and heart work. I wanted to show up in ways that allowed me to be fully human and invited my collaborators, especially Women of Color, to do the same. Being in community with collaborators in ways that intentionally transgressed against the machines of dehumanization may not usually be what comes to mind as researchers consider what to include in an ‘ethical considerations’ section of a dissertation. Yet, I assert that affirming the value and humanity of historically oppressed people is my ethical responsibility as a researcher. Informed Consent and Anonymity My project was compliant with all University of Southern California Institutional Review Board requirements regarding informed consent (UP-21-00288). Furthermore, I provided detailed consent forms to all collaborators to ensure that they were informed about the purpose of the study, their rights as collaborators, and how to withdraw participation. Relatedly, I did my best to protect the privacy of my research collaborators by pseudonymizing all proper nouns that can be traced back to them. For example, the site, collaborators’ names, and course titles are anonymized. Additionally, all data were securely stored on a password-protected external hard drive. Navigating Risks While there were no physical risks to collaborators in the study, recounting potentially racist events had the potential to cause psychological harm and/or distress. To ensure that I could care adequately for my collaborators in these instances, I studied trauma-informed research practices before the start of data collection. Also, I provided content warnings during interviews and focus groups and routinely reminded collaborators of my commitment to their well-being. I 92 also know that for some people discussing issues of racism can be uncomfortable (for many reasons), no matter what safeguards I put in place. For instance, literature on white fragility (e.g., DiAngelo, 2011) and the emotionality of whiteness (e.g., Matias, 2016) highlighted how some white people take a defensive stance when talking about race and racism. Evans-Winters and Hines (2020) asserted that for some white people, meaningfully engaging in race talk constitutes “an ‘arena of violence’ where they position whiteness as innocent, people of color as actors of violence, and race-based conversations as racially unsafe” (p. 2). This affective disposition is a manifestation of internalized white supremacy. As a Black woman, I have learned to create boundaries about how I engage with this type of defensiveness because these emotions are not mine to internalize. Therefore, I understood that engaging in my research study may be an act of radical discomfort for some collaborators (especially some white people). Besides, contradictions and discomfort can plant essential seeds for learning, and that is the point of my program of research! Limitations Researchers must make many decisions as they design empirical studies. Even with the most thoughtful approach, there are bound to be limitations associated with empirical studies. My dissertation project is no exception. One of the hardest decisions I had to make when conducting this study was determining its scope. I had to decide whether I wanted to privilege breadth (e.g., being able to speak to learning and development across the timespan of the academic term) or depth (e.g., conducting deep analysis on a few distinct and illustrative manifestations of my phenomenon of interest). Indeed, there were pros and cons for both approaches. Ultimately, I decided to take a narrative approach to video analysis where “[the] aim is not to make the complex simple, reducing data to theorem. The aim is to make the complex 93 understandable” (Derry et al., 2010, p. 12). I rely heavily on interpretive and microanalytical approaches to studying the discursive dimensions of racial meaning-making through the close investigation of four focal events. I do not seek to make arguments about the arc of racial meaning-making in the class. I also had to make a sampling decision about whether to try to have all my cases in one department or to have multiple departments and disciplines represented in the sample. Literature points to the ways teaching and learning in doctoral education are reflective of the cultural repertoires of practice that are deemed legitimate and valuable within their disciplinary context (Rodgers et al., under review). Thus, studying multiple classrooms within a single department and/or discipline could have opened opportunities to speak more powerfully back to the ways disciplinary and departmental norms permeate classroom practice. I took a different direction, though. While learning is different across the disciplines, especially when racial meaning-making is involved, there are still fundamental activities and practices that are central to doctoral education and persist across the disciplines. For example, reading and interpreting texts, argumentation, and writing are salient aspects of doctoral education broadly. I decided to prioritize disciplinary and departmental variation to be able to speak to broader patterns across doctoral education. Another limitation I encountered centered around the timing of the think-aloud interviews. In their innovative article on using video data in the study of human learning, Derry and colleagues (2010) suggested, “it can sometimes be helpful to have people who were recorded watch the video in the presence of the researcher to provide their interpretations of what was going on” (p. 17). Commensurate with this perspective, I designed this study to incorporate think-aloud interviews. More than mere member-checking, I wanted to offer my collaborators 94 the possibility to co-theorize with me—sharing their thoughts and reactions to a clip of their teaching (a focal event). Scholars advise researchers to involve collaborators in the data review process as soon as possible (Derry et al., 2010; Jordan & Henderson, 1995). With each passing day, their memory of the event can become fuzzier, thus impacting their sensemaking about the event. I originally designed my study to conduct these think-aloud interviews during the 8-week academic term. Yet, I quickly noticed that I needed more time to analyze aspects of the video data and triangulate them with the other data sources before I could confidently choose my focal events. I followed my intuition and took my time with the analysis. I identified the focal events and conducted think-aloud interviews with faculty in the Spring 2022 academic term. Despite more time passing than ideal, I still had deeply generative conversations with faculty about their pedagogical praxis. Lastly, another challenge I faced related to the think-aloud interviews was that only three of the four faculty participated in this final interview. As I was working on finalizing a time for an interview, Dr. Thomas, a white male professor in Learning Sciences, informed me that he had fallen ill and would be taking time off to care for himself. Of course, I honored that boundary. Given that his perspective is not represented via a think-aloud interview, my analysis and write- up of the ‘why’ of his actions may be humbler than for others in the sample who were able to talk me through their interventions. Structure of the Findings Chapters This chapter detailed the contours and considerations of the research design for my dissertation—a robust comparative ethnographic case study of racial meaning-making in three doctoral-level courses. Next, I share emergent findings from my project. In Chapter 4, I set the scene by providing in-depth descriptions of the three cases. I share insights into the culture of 95 each classroom, the instructors and their teaching/research philosophy, course structure and learning objectives, and student population. These descriptions provide the necessary context to engage meaningfully with the next chapter. Using a microanalytic examination of discourse and interaction, Chapter 5 presents four focal events detailing pedagogical interventions and their implications for racial meaning-making and learning—two in the Learning Sciences, one in Sociology, and one in Political Science. 96 Chapter 4: Tales of Three Classroom Contexts: Introducing the Cases We are talking about very real concrete social, political and economic issues which touch the students’ lives, which they experience. So we have to consider the problem of how to create an atmosphere in which those questions can be openly and honestly discussed—one in which your own position can emerge without people feeling over-weighted by its authority… – Stuart Hall (2021, p. 124) Selected Writings on Race and Difference In his article “Teaching Race,” Stuart Hall (2021) tackled a vital but often undervalued aspect of learning in higher education—context. He posited that facilitating students’ critical race consciousness in classroom learning hinges on faculty’s ability to create a particular atmosphere for learning. He argues a need for learning environments that “allow people to say unpopular things”—where the “natural and ‘commonsense’ racism which is part of the ideological air that we all breathe” can be exposed, questioned, and eventually unlearned (p. 124). Thus, the social, political, cultural, and historical dimensions of the environments in which learning and development take place are more than mere backdrops in the study of learning. Sociocultural theorists of learning have long emphasized the significant role that context plays in learning (Cole, 1998; Nasir et al., 2006; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1980). Gauvain (2005) explained, “Of particular interest to socioculturalists is how the [learner’s] own efforts to learn about the world are coordinated with the opportunities for learning that are provided by the social and cultural setting” (p. 12). In this way, context both animates and co-constitutes learning and development. To capture and understand the complexity of classroom learning, scholars would be well served to account for the ways social contexts mediate some modes of engagement and repertoires of practice while limiting others (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). In this chapter, I set out to detail the sociocultural contexts of the three classroom learning environments in which I was immersed. I leverage my fieldnotes, faculty interviews, 97 student interviews and focus groups, and document analyses of course syllabi to map the contours of the cultures that faculty and students co-created around racial meaning-making. I point to aspects of the cultures and histories of the disciplinary and departmental contexts, pedagogical design, and faculty and students’ (sometimes divergent) desired learning objectives. Overall, this chapter sets the stage for exploring how mutual engagement in the learning process mediates changes in both faculty and students and their social contexts. For each of the three courses, I provide context on the history and origins of the course, the course structure and pedagogy, and the make-up and dynamics of the classroom community. Sociology: “Racialization in Latin America” “Racialization in Latin America” is a course taught by Dr. Davis, a tenured Black woman professor in Sociology and Black Studies. Dr. Davis has worked at her university for more than 20 years. Over that time, she has gained recognition as a nationally renowned scholar of Blackness, urban sociology, and race and ethnicity. Dr. Davis offered “Racialization in Latin America” through the Sociology PhD program, consistently ranked as a top-10 program by US News and World Report. The Sociology Department is home to scholars with diverse research interests clustered in four substantive areas: (a) culture; (b) law, economy, and organizations; (c) social inequality; and (d) comparative-historical sociology. The course was new, offered for the first time in Fall 2021 when I observed it. It was developed as part of a curricular shift in the department’s doctoral program. Dr. Davis told me, “In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the protests [in 2020], the Sociology Department decided it was time to require a graduate course in race, racism, and resistance.” While the program is known to have “a national reputation [for] being strong in the study of race and racism,” the courses that explicitly had race as an analytical focus were often offered as 98 elective courses. While race and racism are not everyone’s “specialty” in the department, Dr. Davis shared, “I think there are few of my colleagues who would ever say, ‘Race doesn’t matter’ or that race is not central, even to what they study.” Surely, after what many refer to as ‘the racial reckoning of Summer 2020,’ the urgency of addressing race on college campuses changed. The shift in national discourse around race and racism touched college campuses across the United States. Many students, furnished with the power of righteous anger, called for accountability and made tangible demands of university leaders to support Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color on their campuses (e.g., Anand & Hsu, 2020). Dr. Davis noted, “We really took advantage. Those of us race scholars took advantage of the political moment to get this requirement passed.” “Racialization in Latin America” was the first course offered as part of this requirement. The course was designed to be a doctoral-level seminar inspired by Dr. Davis’s recent travels to Colombia for a prestigious fellowship. Dr. Davis explained, “Topically, the course is different” because of the focus on Latin America, “but I think most sociology classes, sociology is about structure.” When discussing what she hoped students would take away from the course, she told me: As a sociologist, I think it goes without saying to emphasize the structures of power and how those structures of power are manifested in institutions, in legal systems and education systems, in families, in political systems, obviously, in economics and so on. Related to this attention on structural analyses, Dr. Davis endeavored to offer students “a real, comprehensive and comparative discussion of race and comparative across racial formations and comparative across nation formations.” She explained, “Bolivia is different than Panama. Panama is different than Brazil. I think that issue of comparison was really key for me.” The course also ended with a discussion comparing Latin America’s and the United States’ racial formations. As stated in the syllabus, “The goal of the course is to destabilize the concept of race 99 by looking at its transformations across time and place, and to understand manifestations of racism and struggles against it across a range of geopolitical contexts.” I now turn to detail how Dr. Davis went about designing a course to meet this lofty learning objective. Course Structure and Pedagogical Design Dr. Davis is not new to teaching—she has taught more than 15 different courses during her time as a professor. Like many professors, Dr. Davis noted that she did not receive much pedagogical training as a graduate student. I got no training. Zip. Zero. I was a [teaching assistant] after my first year in graduate school, but we got no training. And I don’t think I’ve ever—now as a professor, I’ve taken some workshops in our Center for Teaching and Learning. Over the years, I’ve probably taken, I don’t know, five or six of those, maybe six to eight, something like that. But that’s been in the last ten years. In our informational interview, Dr. Davis told me that her teaching philosophy “grew out of [her] own personality in graduate school,” and how she teaches is a reflection of how she hopes to develop future social science researchers. In other words, Dr. Davis’s teaching philosophy was heavily influenced by her identity as a sociologist and social scientist. She told me, “My feeling as a social scientist is if our goal is to understand the social world, we have to observe it and document it, and that’s what we do through data.” Therefore, she designed a course where students could be immersed in data and then rigorously and responsibly make sense of those data to come to empirical insights about the social world. The course met in person once a week for 10 weeks, and each class session lasted 3 hours. Dr. Davis and her students described the course as being a pretty typical graduate seminar with lots of reading, writing, and deep in-class dialogue, and like most graduate seminars, the course had a lot of course readings! Students were tasked with reading an average of five readings each week (usually a book and peer-reviewed journal articles). The readings were 100 organized around themes for the week, which included the emergence of colonialism, the state, inequalities, identities, families, politics and resistance, and comparative dimensions of racial formations in the United States and Latin America. Dr. Davis noted that she has been “on the front end” of being intentional about the racial and ethnic identities of the people she included on her course syllabi. She said: I’m not sure how many faculty are really doing that as intentionally as I’m doing it, but I think lots of people are thinking about it, and students are certainly demanding it…but I think my discipline is moving in that direction. I think it’s gonna be hard to avoid [diversifying course syllabi] because sociology is becoming more and more diverse. As graduate students go, we are likely one of the more diverse graduate programs in the country…. I think the scholarship itself will start to reflect the faculty members, and so there’ll be more books and articles by us. Surely, the “Racialization in Latin America” syllabus features readings written by women and Scholars of Color of all or no genders. Yet, the fact that many of the readings were written by U.S. scholars and all of the readings were in English limited the type of diversity that could be represented on the syllabus. One student noted that “the word race is—I haven’t heard it used much in Spanish….” The student continued: By saying this, I don’t want to say that the phenomenon [of race and racism] doesn’t exist elsewhere. Of course, it does, but I think that the word itself is an artifact that has been forged in the United States, and you can never break free of language of course. You’re always bound by the very boundaries of the language you’re in. This dimension of the course design had implications for which perspectives on ‘race’ students were introduced to, as well as its likely entanglement with U.S.-centered perspectives on racial formation. Each week students read the assigned readings and wrote a response paper (1-2 pages single-spaced) highlighting areas that they found interesting or confusing. Additionally, students rotated to serve as presentation leaders—facilitating the conversation for the first half of the 3-hour class session. Students were paired up and charged with creating a 20- to 30-minute 101 presentation of the week’s readings (summary, key takeaways, connection to other readings) to present at the start of each class session. The co-presenters also posed a set of discussion questions to spark a dialogue with the eight other people sitting around the table with them. Typically, student presenters created some sort of artifact, usually a visual aid like a handout or Power Point slide deck, to scaffold the conversation. The second half of the class session was usually spent engaging with authors of the books that students read who virtually attended the class as guest speakers. In the 4 weeks that there was no guest speaker, students continued their dialogue of the course readings during the second half of the class session. Classroom Community Dr. Davis was mindful about how her pedagogical decisions set the stage for particular interpersonal dynamics that informed the classroom community. In the initial class session—the session where Dr. Davis spoke most frequently—she set the tone for the class, in part, by encouraging everyone in the space to engage with how they have learned and thought about race and racial formation in the past, both academically and otherwise. Moving beyond the initial course meeting, Dr. Davis made space for students, positioning herself as a listener while remaining actively engaged. For example, she routinely reflected back on and reframed students’ observations, assumptions, and interpretations. I provide an in-depth example of how Dr. Davis made interventions like this in the next chapter. Importantly, Dr. Davis’s commitment to teaching race is not limited only to classes about race. In her own words, even in classes “that don’t have race in the title, [we] still talk about race.” This commitment to cultivating equity-minded and race-conscious learning environments suggests that Dr. Davis also has an extensive repertoire of practices to pull from to facilitate classroom interactions about and around race. This approach to pedagogy influenced her beliefs 102 about the importance of engaging students at multiple stages of racial literacy (from advanced to less so). Not all race scholars are aligned with this perspective, though. Dr. Davis told me about a faculty member who staunchly prefers to work with students who want to learn about race rather than those who are new or resistant to the topic. She does not want folks who are taking her classes for requirements. She doesn’t wanna teach those folks. She doesn’t wanna teach the person whose arm is twisted into taking this class. She wants the willing, and I welcome the unwilling and the apathetic, and so on and so forth. Have I thought very explicitly about how I deal with that? Probably not, other than I wanna meet people where they are. Dr. Davis distinguished herself as open and even eager to work with students who are not only new but even skeptical about material around race and racism. Furthermore, she found value in the contributions students who are new to learning about race make to the collective learning that takes place in class. She noted: For the students who are more advanced, I remind them that we all still have something to learn from people who are learning some of the things we already learned because they have with their fresh eyes, [they] see things that we have either forgotten or that we have decided to go in a different direction, but their…fresh eyes are helpful, nonetheless. While she expressed a clear commitment to teaching students who are novices and/or resistant to classes about race, Dr. Davis knew that drawing boundaries about how those students engaged in dialogue was also important. It was clear from our conversations that she was prepared to take actionable measures to consider not only what to do when teaching about race but also what not to allow. For instance, she commented, “I try not to let folks say crazy stuff [in class], but if they do say crazy stuff, I try to meet them where they are, and that’s where they are in their learning journey.” For Dr. Davis, balancing compassion (e.g., creating a space where students can feel safe to make mistakes) and accountability (e.g., holding students accountable for taking responsibility and repairing harm) was the sweet spot for creating the type of open atmosphere necessary for supporting students’ critical race consciousness. 103 Student Perspectives Six doctoral students enrolled in the course, and three other people audited the course. The make-up of the students enrolled in the course was diverse in multiple senses of the word. There were students from the United States, Colombia, India, and a student who was French- born and Bolivian-raised. Students studied in a wide range of departments, such as Sociology, Business, Psychology, the Learning Sciences, and Black Studies. I did not collect racial and gender demographics for each student in the course, but I did keep field notes on how people talked about their racial and gender identities. Based on recollection of student comments and classroom observations, I posit half of the class presented as women and half presented as men. Three students identified as Black (one of whom identified as Afro Latina), two presented as white, four presented as Latinx, and one man identified as APIDA. Students generally came to this class with a high level of enthusiasm for the course, but for a few different reasons. When asked what drew them to this course, four of the five students I interviewed expressed being excited to theorize issues of resistance, especially about hegemonic racial formations. Alma, a first-year PhD student in psychology, recounted: The thing that stood out to me [about the course] was resistance. As somebody who is interested in creating social justice movements and engaging with them, I wanted to see models of that in Latin America, specifically movements that created solidarity between racialized groups. Whereas the remaining student, Martín, was excited to take a course centered around issues of Latin America—as it intersects with his research interests—he admitted to only taking a race- focused course because of the department’s new curricular requirement. He said: I’m not really that excited about a course on race and racism, but if it’s on Latin America, then I’m actually interested…. I registered because Latin America was close to my interests and because I had to. Now I’m very glad I did because it’s the course I like the most. 104 Students also said that Dr. Davis’s reputation—as both a scholar and a pedagogue—encouraged them to take the course. Martín mentioned that he consulted with a mentor, a sociologist in Colombia, about whether to take the class. While his mentor did not know Dr. Davis intimately, she told Martín, “Oh, I’ve heard about this person. I’ve heard she’s really good.” Brandon, a second-year student in the Learning Sciences department, also spoke about Dr. Davis’s reputation: “I [signed] up for this course because I’ve heard so many things about [Dr. Davis] as a professor. I was excited to learn from her.” Students also expressed eagerness to learn from each other and the varied perspectives and training that fellow students bring to class. When asked what prompted him to enroll in “Racialization in Latin America,” Xavier, a first-year student in African American Studies, shared, “I was more like, ‘Oh, the people that are in this class may be coming from different disciplines and backgrounds. Maybe those discussions will generate some new knowledge.” Each of the students I interviewed had distinct aspects of the course they were excited about. Overall, “Racialization in Latin America” was a space where students felt comfortable putting race on the table—which is not always the case. Leo, a student who audited the course through a French-U.S. American exchange program, described: I do feel that racism and gender, too, yes, they’re very difficult to bring up when you’re in an environment where it’s not explicit that you can bring them up, which is crazy. But when you do bring up—at least in my experience, when you bring up racism or gender, oftentimes you’re going to be told like, “Come on, that’s not a topic” or “You’re making this too social justice-y” or something which is totally bonkers. Leo continued, “To me, [Dr. Davis] set the frame so that we all knew that that was what the class was about, so that these discussions were more than welcome, actually. They were the point of it.” Put simply, many students chose the course “to learn how to think about race,” and Dr. Davis 105 cultivated a classroom community in which that learning objective was shared among all of its members. Political Science: “International Law and Politics” “International Law and Politics” is a course taught by Dr. Berr, a tenured white woman professor in the Political Science and Legal Studies departments. Dr. Berr is an internationally recognized scholar of international law and politics, capitalism, and the global economy. Having served as a professor at her institution for more than 20 years, Dr. Berr has written and edited six books and numerous articles contributing to her field’s understanding of the international courts and the factors leading to the sustainability of a capitalist world order. Her home department, Political Science, has specialties in five areas: (a) comparative politics, (b) American politics, (c) political theory, (d) international relations (IR), and (e) methods. Course Structure and Pedagogical Design This doctoral-level seminar was offered as an elective course in the Political Science department. It is a 3-hour course that meets once a week in person. Political science PhD students are required to choose two subfield specialties. Students who choose IR must take three courses affiliated with this subfield to fulfill graduation requirements. Dr. Berr mentioned that there is usually a shortage of IR course offerings and, given various idiosyncrasies around what other courses were being offered and which faculty taught which courses the prior year, she decided to offer “International Law and Politics,” not knowing how much interest there would be from students. The course began with a discussion of the field of IR and international law and “how the subject itself is a contested ground.” The field is changing, and Dr. Berr wrote on the syllabus that “the new international law scholarship is being built in an unusually interdisciplinary 106 fashion.” Thus, the first week set the stage for mapping the major questions and tensions in the field. For the next four weeks, students discuss foundational theory IR pieces. The topics for the last four weeks of the class students chose “à la carte.” Dr. Berr provided students with a list of topics and associated readings during the first week of class. Students reviewed the list and voted on which topics they would discuss. Students chose the following four topics: (a) Racial foundations of international law; (b) (International) Rule of Law; (c) International orders and state sanctions; and (d) Human rights and international law. Dr. Berr is very experienced at teaching this course. She told me, “I taught this [class] a number of times before. This is really right in my area of expertise.” Her approach to teaching was heavily informed by dominant disciplinary logics in political science. Disciplinary logics are “mental models that rationalize the cultural norms that govern and (re)produce ways of being distinct to an academic discipline” (Rodgers, 2020, p. 3). Beliefs about the shared work of the discipline are known to influence decision-making about faculty pedagogy (Posselt et al., 2020; Rodgers, 2020), so it was no surprise to me that Dr. Berr routinely prefaced her discussions of pedagogy with statements like “In political science” or “In our discipline.” For example, when describing her approach to teaching, she shared: In political science, what we do is teach different ways of thinking about the exact same thing. It’s our specialty. We’re not a single paradigm. There are multiple paradigms. It’s the skill of looking at the same thing from different vantage points. Students picked up on the adherence to disciplinary logics. I asked Daniel, a political science student in the class, how he would describe Dr. Berr’s teaching style, and he directly responded, “disciplinary.” He continued, “I find that she does prioritize getting people to think in, I guess almost disciplinary terms, telling people ‘This is what social scientists do.’ I’ve often noticed remarks like that over the past [academic term].” 107 On the other hand, interdisciplinary approaches are also valuable to the discipline. Dr. Berr shared, “We like to be able to connect to other subfields.” Indeed, making connections to multiple disciplines is common in low-consensus fields like political science (Posselt, 2016). Taking an interdisciplinary approach is especially generative in the “International Law and Politics” course, where many students do not have formal legal training. Dr. Berr described that “[bringing] students into the subject of international law when they have no background in international law” is a significant pedagogical challenge for her. Surely, certain particularities of the law matter for learning in a class on international law and politics. Dr. Berr’s primary learning objective for doctoral students in her courses, however, is persuasive argumentation. To Dr. Berr, doctoral education is a type of “bootcamp” that “[provides] certain skills about how to juxtapose arguments of different people and how to take different perspectives and see things differently.” She continued: I need to make sure that they understand the arguments, that they know how to read, because, in order to put arguments in conversation with each other, you have to understand what you’re saying…. If you don’t know how to read a theoretical argument and summarize it and get to the core of what the person’s arguing, well, then you’re sunk…. The stuff we’re reading together is teaching how to do theory, and the assessments are them doing it themselves in very small pieces to bigger pieces to biggest pieces. Thus, Dr. Berr designed her course to provide students with ample opportunities to practice making an argument and receive feedback on how to refine and strengthen their argumentation. The course ran like a typical graduate seminar. Dr. Berr and her students spent their time together in each class session, sitting around a large, oval-shaped table in a seminar room discussing the readings. Dr. Berr always provided some form of context-setting for the class, usually in the form of very abbreviated lectures, but she spent most of her speaking time clarifying students’ comments and probing students about aspects of their arguments. 108 Assessments were an important part of Dr. Berr’s pedagogy, and she described them as “critical learning tools.” She administered multiple assessments throughout the course. As part of students’ participation grade for the course, students rotated taking notes on the week’s readings and shared the notes with the class. When describing the purpose of that assignment, Dr. Berr told me, “I want them to realize that education is a collaborative process and that we’re not in competition with each other. We’re all gonna take notes, and we’re all gonna share the notes.” In addition to getting practice in how to take notes succinctly, it was also an activity to track students’ mastery of course content. In other words, it was a form of assessment. Admir, a second-year student in political science, recounted that he found it “very surprising” that Dr. Berr spent time during the weekend editing students’ notes. He said, “On the one hand, [that is] a bit too hands-on, but on the other hand, it really shows…she cared about the class.” Dr. Berr provided students with a targeted set of questions to consider as they engaged with the weekly readings. These questions, which were listed on the syllabus, were designed to focus students’ attention to certain aspects of the readings, scaffold their sensemaking about the main arguments, and lay the foundation for in-class discussions. Additionally, students had to choose two weeks to write three-page papers addressing the questions Dr. Berr posed. When grading, Dr. Berr assessed the arguments presented in the papers and assigned students a check plus, check, or check minus. The final formative assessment is the final paper—for which students have the option to write a practice comprehensive exam, a review essay, or a traditional research paper. Regardless of the ways students decide to tackle course assignments, what was most important to Dr. Berr was that students “choose something that is useful to them.” She recalled during an interview: 109 I tell my first-year students…they should use all of these classes as ways to build toward their dissertation project, maybe by exploring a literature they need to explore, maybe by investigating a topic they think they might want to pursue. Maybe at the end, they decide, “I never wanna work on that again,” and that’s progress. As doctoral students learn about the discipline through coursework, they also make decisions about whether and how they want to participate in the discipline, which questions they want to pursue in their research programs, and what conceptual and methodological tools they may want to employ. Dr. Berr recognized that not all students come to study political science or IR from the same intellectual vantage point, but she wanted her class to be a place where students could explore their interests—as they evolve and develop over time. She believed that “[students] are best off if they say, ‘How can I take this class and my interests and marry them?’” Classroom Community The “International Law and Politics” course enrolled seven students. Four were students in the Political Science PhD program, two students were taking the class as visitors from another local public university, and one student was auditing the course. All seven people in the course identified as men. Interestingly, and perhaps appropriate for an IR course, students were from all over the world. In fact, no one but the instructor and I were from the United States. Students were from Argentina, Canada, Palestine, India, and Kazakhstan, to name a few places. Daniel, a PhD student in Political Science, told me about how students being from the global south impacted the dialogue in the course. He remarked: Most of [the students in the class] are from the global south…and so they kind of already came in with at least an appreciation of the possibility that international law and its relationship to American hegemonic power isn’t necessarily this progressive force for good, and a lot of the ways of thinking and throughout the weeks, some they’d bring up this is a very Eurocentric way of thinking about these issues…so they just know from having sort of grown up in the global south that there’s an innate skepticism that’s warranted. 110 Having a classroom community composed of students with such diverse backgrounds and lived experiences enriched the dialogue and provided students with a critical perspective for making sense of course readings. Still, there was a contentious relationship with critical scholarship in the class. Multiple students reported that Dr. Berr has a reputation for “being quite hostile to critical research around race and colonialism” by students in the department. One student mentioned in an interview, “A lot of people who do that kind of work said that if you like that, don’t take [Dr. Berr’s] class because she’s not gonna buy that.” Dr. Berr corroborated this stance in our informational interview when she candidly told me, “Now [students] will learn, and you [laughing] will learn that I’m not—I do read a lot and embrace a lot of what we call ‘critical theory,’ but I’m annoyed at it.” She explained: I’m annoyed at the theory that just—and I even say this in the articles—if you’re just gonna tell me it’s more complicated, well, I know it’s more complicated. The heart of the challenge is coming up with something that works in an argument. Don’t just tell me it’s more complicated or that I left out a factor that also matters. Don’t just say there might be other possibilities without showing me what the possibility looks like and convincing me that possibility—it’s just too easy to say, “It’s more complicated; there are other possibilities.” That’s a false binary. I need you to take the next step…you don’t have to take my step, but let’s start to come up with a solution. In this excerpt, Dr. Berr harkened back to an emphasis on argumentation, expressing a belief that the responsibility was not only to pose problems but also to come up with persuasive and rigorous answers to solve those problems. She mentioned that problem solving is what distinguishes PhD students from undergraduates and is an important mark of good scholarship— something that, according to Dr. Berr’s analysis, seems to be deficient in critical scholarship. Although Dr. Berr was still very much apprehensive of critical approaches to her discipline, she mentioned multiple times that she has a growing commitment to historicizing IR and highlighting the impact of dominant (what I might call oppressive) power structures on 111 knowledge production in the discipline. Daniel mentioned that “the political movements and rupture of the past few years sort of changed [the] direction” of scholars’ approach to critical issues like race and racism in IR. He posited, “Growing attention has been paid to these kinds of issues in the field.” A new wave of political scientists, many of whom identify as People of Color, are contributing to a new body of research focused on the role of racialization and racism in IR. At the same time, many white scholars who have been socialized into a race-evasive understanding of the discipline are “on a journey” of unlearning and relearning. Indeed, Dr. Berr’s own understanding of IR’s relationship to whiteness and hegemony has shifted over time. She related: I took international law as it was given. It’s very clearly extremely Eurocentric, very associated with empire. My discipline of international relations—it’s astounding, really. America came to power. We were not an empire. We were not ‘colonists,’ which I put in quotes because we were colonists, but we didn’t think of ourselves as colonists. We certainly weren’t European colonists. Empire was done. No reason to think about empire. We’re starting to study international relations in America, where empire is gone, which of course, makes no sense at all, especially given that international law was constructed for empires by empires. As Dr. Berr reflected on the master narrative of her subfield, she also reflected on how her education taught her not to ‘see’ racism. She told me, “I’ve had to retrain my thinking on this. I’ll be open about that, that I had to understand why I didn’t see it before.” Despite the growing awareness of the role racism and other matrices of domination play not only in international law but also in how students in IR are taught about international law, Dr. Berr maintained a pedagogical approach that let students choose whether they would tackle a pointed racial analysis of international law. When Dr. Berr initially responded to my recruitment email, she questioned whether she would be a good fit for the study because race was not core to the class. She explained, “Race is there, but it is not central—mostly because of the topics I teach.” Instead of imposing discussions about race and racism in IR on students, she provided it 112 as one of many options that students can dive into in one of the final four weeks of the academic term. As a reminder, students were given multiple options for potential discussion topics for the last four weeks of the course. They voted on which topics they wanted to engage, and one of those options was the racial foundations of international law. Lin, a Political Science PhD student, shared: I think [Dr. Berr] took race as one subject that has to do with part of the literature about international law. She was like, “Okay, this week is only for race.” The next week, for example, is only for human rights and things like that. It wasn’t only about international law, in general, and how it’s connected to a lot of things, including race. It was about race and international law, and that’s it, I think. Racial meaning-making, then, was not a core activity of this learning community. It was positioned as a “possibility,” and the choice (or, put differently, onus) was on the students to decide whether they would prioritize race in the discussion of international law and politics. Dr. Berr expounded: If they wanna pick it up, that’s—it’s not a week on race. It’s putting those issues on the table, but if they wanna pick it up, well, then we can have a week on race and international law. That’s one way they can pick it up. The contradiction of her saying “It’s not a week on race” and then going on to say “We can have a week on race and international law” is notable. Dr. Berr was keenly aware of the critiques of siloing deep engagement with race and racism for one week in an academic term. There was a salient tension in how to have a meaningful conversation about race during the class session that was dedicated to that topic while also recognizing that, pedagogically, having a ‘race week’ is far from a best practice in facilitating critical race consciousness in classroom learning. All of the students I spoke with, however, reported having a positive experience with talking about race in the course. Admir told me, “This was a better discussion than I’ve had in all my other classes. All my other classes just like almost very rarely talk about race.” Relatedly, 113 Daniel shared, “People say [Dr. Berr] is not really open to race. For me, it was much more open than other classes that I’ve taken before.” Students’ interest in the subject, along with the wide variety of their lived experiences of race and racism, made for a compelling context in which racial meaning-making unfolded. In sum, the “International Law and Politics” course was a learning environment where students learned that race matters to their discipline, but what to do with that information remained fuzzy. Learning Sciences: “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” is a course co-taught by Dr. Deere, a tenured Native woman, and Dr. Thomas, a tenured Jewish white man in the Learning Sciences department. Both Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas are prominent scholars in their field. Future Dr. Alexander is a PhD student in the Learning Sciences department, and he serves as the TA for the course. He identifies as a Native man. Dr. Deere is a leading scholar of culture, learning, and development and the design of just learning environments, with a particular commitment to nurturing and enriching Indigenous Ways of Knowing in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) education. Dr. Thomas described himself as “the cognition guy,” and his program of research has pointed to dimensions for facilitating conceptual change in students’ knowledge systems in science education and computational linguistics. Both Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas have built reputations for being experts in their areas of study and influencing policy and educational practice. Learning Sciences is a fairly new field of study. Unlike Political Science and Sociology, which were established as disciplines in the 1800s, the first Learning Sciences program was established in 1990. Early scholars involved with the establishment of the Learning Sciences field eschewed approaches to studying learning and instructional design in highly ‘controlled,’ 114 lab-based settings that were popular in educational psychology and cognitive science. Instead, folks who would come to be known as pioneers of the Learning Sciences sought to understand the complexity of real-world learning in naturalistic settings. At the heart of Learning Sciences’ intellectual projects are endeavors to understand how people learn and how to design environments and experiences that promote learning. The Learning Sciences is an “empirical, interdisciplinary, contextualized, and action-oriented” field (Hoadley, 2018, p. 11) that draws from education, cognitive sciences, psychology, technology, and computer science. The Learning Sciences program I observed focuses on three main areas of inquiry: sociocultural contexts, the design of learning environments, and cognition. It is also noteworthy that since its founding, the department has significantly diversified, both in terms of racial and gender composition and the research interests of faculty (e.g., there are more faculty who take up critical perspectives in their work). Course Structure and Pedagogical Design “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” is a required introductory survey course for master’s and PhD students in the department. The class convenes for 3 hours each week in a classroom in the College of Education. Dr. Thomas explained that the course is designed as “an entry course for the students,” and it is always offered in the fall academic term, making it one of the first classes students take in the program. Although faculty in the program rotated taking turns to teach the class, the main objectives of the course remained the same. First and foremost, Dr. Thomas shared that “it’s a cohort building, identity building course…we want people to feel like learning scientists. We want them to be comfortable. We want them to get to know each other. We want them to be a community.” Becoming acquainted with the field is important 115 because there are very few Learning Sciences undergraduate programs. Therefore, most graduate students enter the program having never taken a Learning Sciences course. Borrowing from the Learning Sciences’ Communities of Practice theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991), Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas designed a course that apprenticed students into the field—establishing their legitimate peripheral participation and helping them to shift their identity to become learning scientists. Students got the sense that engaging in identity development was important for their learning, as well. When I asked students in an interview about how they would describe learning in the course, Luke, a first-year PhD student in the Learning Sciences, summed it up in two words: “discursive identity.” He continued: I think this quarter has been a lot of identity work for me, not only as—what [the learning sciences] means to be me but what it means to be a researcher and why, and I think it’s been a lot of thinking about sort of…who is doing what already, why are they doing it, how do I fit into this? Luke’s remarks, which resonated with sentiments expressed across my conversations with eight of the 12 students in the class, articulated the deeply personal nature of the learning that happened in the course. Dr. Deere mentioned, “I think part of what I try to do is, I push Dr. Thomas to do this, is actually…I’m pretty human in this class, where I talk a lot about my own processes and thinking about [identity].” “Introduction to the Learning Sciences,” then, was an environment where students were encouraged to think discursively about how the field of Learning Sciences shapes them and how they, too, can shape the field. A significant dimension of learning about the field happened through the intentional storying of the field’s history. In a 2018 chapter of the International Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Christopher Hoadley, a prominent learning scientist and founding president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, wrote: 116 Disciplinary communities reflect not just epistemological, intellectual, and methodological commitments in the abstract. Rather, as is well documented in the sociology of science, research fields reflect the people in them and both their interconnections and disconnections from other communities. Understanding these as well as their origins is enlightening with respect to what aspects of a field are core commitments, what aspects are hidden assumptions, and what aspects might merely be accidents of history. (p. 11) In other words, we can learn a lot about the disciplines themselves and what constitutes legitimate ways of knowing and being by mapping their histories in ways that upend taken-for- granted premises and animate notable tensions. Yet, even between Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas, there was no general consensus on who is (not) canonical to the learning sciences. Dr. Deere boldly stated in an interview, “I have feelings about how the history of the learning sciences get taught, whose perspective on the history of the field and what traditions get brought forward.” Like many other fields of study, the people who are normally included in the ‘canon’ are overwhelmingly white and mostly men. For example, when discussing how the instructional team made decisions about what to include in the syllabus, Dr. Thomas reflected, “In a way, it seems kinda obvious.... They gotta do cognition, social context, and design…so we’ll have weeks on those. We gotta have Piaget and Vygotsky. There, you’ve got the outline of the course.” To which I quipped, “Mm-hmm. And maybe sprinkle a little John Dewey in there somewhere.” Dr. Thomas smiled and nodded. Dr. Deere described her rationale for designing the syllabus differently, however. She mentioned that an explicit aim of her role as an instructor was to historicize the field. She said: We’ve expanded [the syllabus] so people now read Freire as part of the history of the learning sciences now. Now, not everyone thinks that Freire is part of the history of the learning sciences. But what I was really after is making sure that the intellectual traditions that actually are part of a lot of the really well-known learning sciences are visible in the history part rather than “Roger Schank founded the learning sciences” kind of thing. 117 Calling into question who normally gets positioned as central to the field and why was paramount to the ways Dr. Deere imagined students become part of the field. Mei, a Learning Sciences student, recalled: A big part of me at the first half of the course was really [thinking], “I wanna know what the learning sciences say about this. I wanna know what the mainstream thought behind certain things in learning sciences” until a point that I figured [out], “Oh, maybe there isn’t a mainstream thing!” Dr. Deere shared that that was the point! She described how she partnered with Dr. Thomas and Future Dr. Alexander to create an environment where “[students would] not start to fall into stupid camps that reproduce things like methods wars or disciplinary wars.” Endowing students with “basic skills” as they get accustomed to graduate school was a large part of the course objectives. Dr. Deere noted, “One of the things we’re trying to get students to do is learn how to read carefully.” Like the other graduate course, teaching students to annotate texts, read critically, and argue persuasively were key learning objectives for students in this course. A notable distinction, however, between “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” and the other two courses I observed was that Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas routinely varied participation structures. To prepare for class each week, students were assigned readings corresponding to each week’s theme. Students engaged in group annotation using Perusall, a digital annotation tool, where they jointly shared and responded to each other’s reflections on the week’s readings. Additionally, students prepared a short (quarter page to one page in length) response paper to their Course Management site, identifying two passages from the readings: one that was confusing and another that resonated with them. Students came to class each week ready to discuss those passages. 118 Typically, each class began with a summary of the prior week’s exit tickets. At the end of each class session, the instructional team provided students with a few questions to inquire about what went well in the class session, what could have gone better, and what concepts they needed to revisit moving forward. Grounding students in a recap of how the class, as a community, felt about the prior class session set the stage for the framing of the current session. Next, either Dr. Thomas or Dr. Deere gave a mini-lecture on the topic of the week—introducing the main concepts and theorists. They then posed a series of questions, and students went into groups of four to discuss. Additionally, students were expected to come to class having identified a passage from the week’s readings that was interesting or confusing to offer to the group for discussion. As students engaged in small group dialogue, the instructors circulated around the classroom, spending time with each group. As I observed, I noticed that the instructors wanted to do more listening than talking. Often, they jumped in on two occasions: to probe students to clarify a point or respond to a question students asked. Classroom Community Given that cohort- and identity-building were central objectives of the course, Dr. Deere, Dr. Thomas, and Future Dr. Alexander put a lot of labor into cultivating a sense of community among people in the course. The class had 12 students, all of whom were graduate students in the College of Education. Ten of the 12 students were affiliated with the Learning Sciences PhD or master’s program. Therefore, it was of particular importance to the co-instructors that they were supporting students in becoming learning scientists on their own terms. Isaac, an LS Masters (LSMA) student, reflected on what made the learning experience in the course memorable for him: 119 It’s a big practice, for me, to think about humanity and how that shows up in the classroom. It’s like people are not vessels to pour information into. Yeah. I feel like there’s a respect for the people and the thoughts and the presence that they bring to the space. Dr. Thomas and Dr. Deere modeled how to do that in a few different ways. Dr. Thomas was infamous for his “laid-back” demeanor and for evading opportunities to provide students with direct answers to their questions. Ana, an Educational Policy PhD student, joked, “He never tells you right or wrong…. He’s like, ‘That’s one way to look at it.’ ‘Some people would say that….’” Dr. Thomas almost never spoke in definitives and instead opened up space for students to assert their own interpretations of the content in discussions. While students generally appreciated this approach, it also led to a bit of frustration. Ana followed up on her original comment by mentioning, “And sometimes I’m like—I want [someone] to be able to say ‘No, Ana, that thinking is wrong. Put it away.’” The co-instructors remained committed to allowing students to make their own pathways into the discipline guided by their own sensemaking about the field. While students recounted that Dr. Deere was a lot more likely to be clear about her position on an argument or theorist than was Dr. Thomas, she was intentional about modeling multiple ways to approach the study of learning. Dr. Thomas shared with me during an interview, “Dr. Deere is unusual because she’s the everything person. She could be the cognition person, the social context person, and the design person easily.” Dr. Deere would agree with this characterization—describing herself as being “theoretically and methodologically promiscuous.” She further explicated: I think there are many different ways to build knowledge, and if you’re not trying to claim universalisms, they all have their strengths and benefits. I try to approach this course in that way, to help people not start to fall into stupid camps that reproduce things like methods wars or disciplinary wars. That’s not the point of this class. 120 Dr. Deere leveraged her pragmatic approach to research to support students’ varied intellectual interests. It is likely no surprise that Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas perceived the salience of race in their course very differently. Dr. Thomas posited that while students always had the choice to highlight race as an analytic focus in class conversations, the class was not centered around race. Dr. Thomas and many students agreed that most of the focus of the readings on race was clustered into the week on sociocultural context. He detailed, “The sociocultural context week, those are the people you read, what they’re writing about is, at least in part, are issues of race in education. That’s not all sociocultural is about, but it’s definitely a central part.” Amara, a PhD student in the Learning Sciences, reflected, “I had written in one of my notes before that any conversations we have about race are gonna come from our lives because they’re not explicit in the readings.” Yet, when I asked Dr. Deere how, if it all, issues of race and racism show up in the class, she quickly responded, “All the time.” For her, coming to understand the role of power in the study of learning was an important responsibility. Her advisee and teaching assistant, Future Dr. Alexander, told me, “I think that one thing that I really appreciate about Dr. Deere pushing on a lot, and I think this is something that—a specific goal to—see the more political and ethical dimensions of learning.” He proceeded to explain: I think that not all scholars would agree with this…but people like Dr. Deere, people like you…would say that a fundamental part of understanding learning, and something that all people should be introduced to, is asking those why and toward what ends questions— and you should be asking those questions of everything. To ask those questions, even though the goal isn’t explicitly—of the course– to talk about power and those things…in some ways, it is indirectly because we should always be asking and examining power relations. 121 Overall, Dr. Deere’s pedagogy created space for students “to become practiced” at questioning structures of power and their impact on historically marginalized students. Dr. Deere was indispensable to racial meaning-making in the course. Darius summed up the dynamics of this shared work: I can’t think of too many examples where I feel like Dr. Thomas was challenging the systems that exist that would alter the work that is being done as far as the research, but that’s not to say—I don’t think that he doesn’t do it…. I feel like my experience of Dr. Thomas is I think he sticks more to the program or the reading material and his own research and tries to explore that and offers commentary on what Dr. Deere brings to the space. Isaac, a PhD student in Education Policy, offered an explanation for why that might be: “Dr. Thomas probably doesn’t feel as much like it’s his own place to do that as much as Dr. Deere.” Similarly, Future Dr. Alexander told me, “I think they all have very different sensibilities and degrees of comfort in talking about that stuff.” He continued: “That’s not his work. Dr. Thomas is not the type of person that will push up against it. He sees the value in it, but he’s not gonna shoot it down.” Future Dr. Alexander chuckled while saying, “Dr. Thomas is like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, and I’m gonna do my thing.” Dr. Thomas himself even admitted: If I didn’t have Dr. Deere in the room, it might be hard for me to channel that well enough to make it be like the social context course. Yeah. There’s faculty for whom that’s more or less their focus of work and then were expert at talking about issues of race. If they have Dr. Deere or someone like Dr. Deere in the room as the instructor, that’s different than if you have me or [redacted list of other white men faculty in the department], people for whom that’s not their—not our focal interest. Dr. Deere routinely made interventions that prompted students to analyze critically often taken- for-granted assumptions about learning, often cueing students to think about how structures of power like race and settler colonialism impact learning in formal and informal learning environments. Amara noted: 122 When I think about the moments where we actually will talk a little bit more about race or things that are more problematic, it’s usually because Dr. Deere kind of took it there to remind us in some way like, “Well, don’t forget what was happening at the same time.” Darius, another student in the class, strongly stated, “Whether they want to assimilate to that or not, it is up to them, but I don’t think the class affords you the ability to not confront the systems that affect learning.” During my observations, I noticed that outside of a few instances, much of the dialogue that facilitated racial meaning-making took place in the small group discussions. Moreover, the race talk and subsequent racial meaning-making that occurred in the small groups rarely carried over to the large group discussions. Amara theorized it has to do with the object of activity or what the co-instructors’ privilege with regard to student learning. She said: I think it comes up in the small groups for me because, in the small groups, it feels much more personal. I’m gonna talk about what [race] is and how I think it connects to my life. I don’t necessarily think that’s what my professors are looking for me to learn, so that doesn’t get brought up in the big group because the whole group is about these larger takeaways as learning scientists, not necessarily like Amara’s takeaway as a Chicana who went through XYZ. Still, students regarded the “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” as a context in which talking about issues of race and structures of power and oppression was a “productive space.” Darius reflected on this, given his identity as a Black man. He told me: I feel like the people who are investing themselves into learning about these things aren’t going to leave this classroom space and not continue to think about how they can address these things in the lives of people who are facing these different systems of oppression. To me, that grounds me in a different level of comfort that is like I’m not being taken advantage of, or the struggle in which I’ve experienced in my life, and the struggle that other people experienced in their lives is something that is valued here, valued in the idea that we want to think about these things to understand how we can change them. Dr. Thomas and Dr. Deere worked to create an environment where students felt comfortable engaging in hard conversations. 123 Now that we have a broad understanding of the contexts in which learning took place, I now turn to present an in-depth microanalysis of four focal events in which faculty and students are collectively making meaning of race in these three courses. By paying special attention to the particularities of classroom discourse and interaction, I highlight the social organization of racial meaning-making in the three classroom contexts I observed. 124 Chapter 5: Refracting Racial Meanings in Classroom Discourse and Interaction: A Microanalysis of Four Focal Events Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. – Audre Lorde (1977, p. 83), The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action One of the most important things I learned in graduate school as a Black woman was when (not) to speak. There were many instances that I felt the burden to speak—particularly about issues of race and racism. I was in a program that prided itself on its commitment to racial equity, so race was all over the curriculum. However, not everyone in the class was equally practiced at talking about these issues, nor was everyone committed to antiracism as a social- political project. Rather than this variance being a deficit, I often approached it as an opportunity. So, I spent the first semester of my PhD program talking…a lot. My comments were almost always driven by what I perceived as a pedagogical imperative—to clarify, probe, push, problematize, and support what I thought to be expansive understandings and experiences of racialization. I tried my best to be careful but pointed with my words, and to call people in rather than singling out anyone for their comments. Although what I brought forward as an invitation into dialogue and collective meaning-making was not always received as such, I felt better knowing that I had moved beyond my reticence—and spoke…mostly because I felt that if I were to swallow my words, I would choke on them. Audre Lorde (1977) reminded us of the power of speaking, especially when we are afraid, and prompted us to reflect on the following questions: 125 What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? (p. 74) For faculty and students who are committed to un/learning the fallacies of white supremacy in favor of more expansive epistemologies, using one’s voice as part of a collective to speak truth to power is an undeniably powerful tool. It is also an incredibly generative offering to a learning community. To me, Lorde’s provocation is as pedagogical as it is moral. For instructors, whose literal job is to support student learning, deciding when (not) to speak is indeed consequential. Cazden (2001) posited that “One of the most important influences on all talk (some say the most important influence) is the participants themselves—their expectations about interaction and their perceptions of each other” (p. 67). While research on classroom discourse emphasizes that students continually act in ways that express their agency (e.g., Candela, 1999; Gutiérrez et al., 1995; Jackson, 2003), extant power dynamics in classroom settings give influence to what instructors say and model to students. Discourse is a significant unit of analysis for understanding classroom interactions because conversation gives meaning to the world, and dialogue is a vital mediator for learning (Freire, 1970; Moll, 1990). The premise of learning in many graduate-level social sciences and humanities courses revolves around conversation. Khost and colleagues (2015) described the role faculty play in graduate seminars as “orchestrat[ing] conversations about texts, figures, periods, and methods” (p. 20). Faculty teach students the importance of being “in conversation” with the authors and texts that they read and cite, and then they facilitate conversation among students in the learning community. As students engage in classroom discourse, they are encouraged to raise questions, make assertions, and extend the readings in new and exciting ways. These moves all contribute to developing their unique scholarly identity, in which one’s “voice” is a well- 126 recognized tool of expression. Yet, the discourse that students leverage in classrooms is about much more than just dimensions of content knowledge; classroom discourse serves a socializing function in schooling settings (Cazden, 2001; Cazden et al., 1972), and a set of occluded norms usually guides the conversations that take place in classrooms. Faculty often set the stage for what are considered acceptable forms and frames of talk. In a U.S. context, where race is one of the most salient social identities, systems of power, and sources of stratification, race talk is omnipresent (Thomas, 2015), and racial meaning-making is a routine form of joint activity. Pollock (2009) introduced the concept of race talk to describe everyday conversations about when and how race matters. It is ironic that despite race talk being a typical dimension of classroom joint activity, engaging in race talk remains a threatening activity that causes feelings of discomfort, stress, and danger for many people (Bryan et al., 2012; Leonardo & Manning, 2017; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). The tensions that arise during race talk in classrooms can generate what Thomas (2015) termed race talk dilemmas, or situations wherein the discussion of race can become contentious. As these dilemmas occur, members of a classroom community have some choices to make. Two immediate ones are whether to speak and what to say. For faculty, whom I perceive to have a pedagogical responsibility to develop students’ capacity for generative racial meaning-making and racial literacy, 1 the implications of their interventions are deeply consequential to learning. This chapter illustrates how racial meanings are constructed in and through moment-to- moment interaction in three doctoral-level classes: a political science class on “International Law and Politics,” a sociology class on “Racialization in Latin America,” and an introductory Learning Sciences class. I highlight four focal events that constitute salient instances of racial 1 Racial literacy is “an understanding of the powerful and complex ways in which race influences the social, economic, political, and educational experiences of individuals and groups” (Skerrett, 2011, p. 314). 127 meaning-making. In the following sections, I provide a thick description of each focus event followed by a brief analysis using R-CHAT, my conceptual framework. Thus, I use this chapter to detail how four pedagogical interventions—one planned and three improvised in the moment—functioned to re-mediate and refract racial meanings of everyday activities in doctoral coursework. I conclude by exploring the implications of these interventions for student learning and scholarly development. “We All, Also, Live These Things”: Developing Intersubjectivity and Reflexivity in Sociology As we entered Week 4 of the “Racialization in Latin America” course (taught in the Sociology department), the learning community was preparing to discuss the topic of identities. The week’s conversation built on previous discussions of racial formation as a colonial invention, the role of the nation-state in those racial formations, and racialization’s part in (re)producing social inequality and stratification in Latin America. In addition to a slew of articles, the focal text was Dr. Christina Sue’s (2013) Land of the Cosmic Race. The book presents findings from her ethnography study of “how urban Mexican mestizos of mixed European, indigenous and sometimes African heritage understand and negotiate race and how these dynamics relate to Mexico’s official ideology” (p. 2). Sociologists have studied interracial relationships and interracial marriage as a “barometer for understanding relations between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.” (Lewis & Ford-Robertson, 2010, p. 407). Sue extended this inquiry to the context of Veracruz, Mexico. The book’s fourth chapter recounts how Veracruzanos 2 talk about race mixture with attention to interracial relationships and marriage. Despite reporting that they were open to interracial marriage, Sue (2013) described, “When 2 Veracruzanos are people from the state of Veracruz located in eastern Mexico. It is notable that Veracruz is known to have a significant representation of mixed race and indigenous people. 128 discussing the topic [of interracial marriage], they frequently erected a series of barriers and forwarded a set of contingencies that made interracial marriage hypothetically but practically unrealistic” (p. 67). Notably, her research collaborators outlined strict specifications about the qualities Black, Indigenous, or dark-skinned partners must possess in order to enter into a relationship with them. Sue noted, “Setting the preconditions of an attractive black or dark- brown-skinned individual or a highly educated indigenous person is extremely restrictive in a society that equates beauty with whiteness and indigeneity with illiteracy” (p. 67). The in-person class session began with two students, Flora and Martín, giving a presentation highlighting key points from the week’s readings, including considerations for distinguishing between race and color and its implications for racialization and racial identity- formation in Latin America. As was customary, the presenters offered a few potential directions to take the conversation and opened the floor to start the whole group conversation. Another student, Alma, promptly raised her hand to comment on the colorism and interracial marriage patterns reflected in the Sue reading. She summarized a point in the reading: “It’s common and acceptable for men to marry women who are lighter than darker women marrying lighter men.” She then started to make sense of this assertion by positing, “I think this has to do with gender stereotypes surrounding color. I think darker-skinned women are often stereotypically more masculine, and performing a gender is probably a very important component to when heterosexual people choose their partners.” Martín retorted by arguing that there is often some variation. He shared: I think it depends on the real darkness and the color palette because I think that—maybe not dark, but darkish…. Maybe that’s good for a one-night stand, but not for a lasting partner…. If you go too dark, then it’s perceived as more masculine. If you’re the right amount of dark, it seems to be something that is (desired). 129 Up to this point, Dr. Davis has not said much. At the beginning of class, she welcomed everyone and reminded them that Dr. Sue would be joining them as a guest speaker in the second half of the session. After making those announcements, she let student discussion guide the direction of the course—that is, until this interaction. She decided to speak after listening to Martín’s and Alma’s remarks. Promptly after Martín’s last utterance, Dr. Davis raised her hand briefly to physically display a desire to pause the conversation and said: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 So, I just want to intervene, and I don’t know how to do this the best way ‘cause I do not want to stifle conversation. But I also want to recognize we all have skin color, ((moves her hands move to flow around the room, gesturing to each student)) And we all, a:nd we hear things in different ways. (1-second pause) Again, I don’t know how to (1-second pause) intervene without- other than just >saying that< Here, Dr. Davis entered the conversation intentionally, marking her intervention as such. Harkening back to my previous point about how faculty’s voice shapes the direction of the conversation, she seemed to realize the impact that her comments could have on dialogue. She pointedly emphasized with her pacing and intonation that her intention was not to suppress the unfolding conversation. Instead, she wanted to reframe it—grounding what comes next in recognition of how “we all” relate to the topic. I read this as a strategic move to situate the rest of her comments as a call-in for everyone. As Dr. Davis continued, her eyes scanned the room, making eye contact with each student at the table. She let out an exasperated pause and went on to say, “The text can be very difficult for people.” Students nodded as Dr. Davis continued speaking. She declared: 12 13 14 15 There were so many examples— super painful examples— that I think all of us could identify with, ((she leans in towards students with hands extended and palms facing up)) 130 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 as we read them on the page, where we saw somebody being disparaged, where we saw— I’m thinking of this time where the mother is explaining her family’s African heritage, and she’s telling the daughter. This is her first time, >ever, talking about this with her daughter<, and she’s saying, “Yeah, you have the nose of—” ((she gestures towards her own nose)) she’s talking about slavery. “You have the nose of enslaved people.” Her daughter’s like, “Oh, no.” ((she places her hand over her nose as to hide it shamefully)) That was not a badge of pride for her daughter. In this excerpt, Dr. Davis named the emotionality connected with reading the book, describing the examples that the author shared as “painful.” Of particular notability is her continued use of the pronoun “we.” She made the assertion, and perhaps the assumption, that “all of us could identify with” what she considered to be painful examples in the reading. Seeming to recognize that “painful examples” might be too broad a characterization, she did what any good academic would do—she grounded her assertion in the text by providing a specific excerpt for students to consider. Certainly, Sue’s (2013) research highlighted multiple instances of anti- Black and anti-Indigenous sentiments, so there were many to choose from. As Dr. Davis recounted the encounter between a mother and daughter discussing their African heritage, she embodied aspects of the interaction—putting herself into the exchange as she gestured towards her nose and covered it shamefully. Dr. Davis made it clear with her words and actions that she was connected to the reading. This example was the bridge to her main point: 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 And that we should remember that we’re both readers ((gestures towards the book when saying “readers”)) and livers of these things ((gestures towards her chest when saying “livers”)) in the U.S. and in Latin America. Again, I just wanted to put that on the table. I don’t want us not to talk about this. ((she crosses and uncrosses hand motion as to signal no)) 131 Dr. Davis’s pedagogical move here was deeply significant. Rather than the text being merely an object and the students being objective readers (as is the norm in academia), Dr. Davis shattered the veil to call students into a different relationship with the text instead. She did so firmly but gently, saying she “just wanted to put that on that table.” In my analysis of the focal event, her intervention functioned more like an offering than an indictment. This is often a difficult balance to strike in unplanned interventions. Again, using “we,” Dr. Davis called out the dialectical relationships that folks in the learning community had to the text as both “readers” and “livers.” Her comments here reminded students of three essential considerations: (a) racialization is alive and commonplace in the United States and in Latin America, (b) racialization impacts all of us, and (c) this class is a space where we can make sense of that together. Recognizing the interpersonal implications of her intervention, Dr. Davis turned her comments and gaze to Alma and Martín, the two students involved in the dialogue that initially sparked her intervention. She said: 40 41 42 43 44 45 I think this discussion about interracial relationships is super important, ((gestures toward Alma, the student who raised initially raised the point)) and I think the hypotheses about–who is seen as more sexually ava:ilable ((gestures toward Martín; then starts counting on her fingers as she lists “sexually available, erotic, and more masculine)) or more ero:tic or more ma:sculine— All of these things, I think we could identify i:n the literature, right? Pay close attention to what Dr. Davis did here. This intervention was initially prompted by a need to pause and then shift the direction of the conversation away from a form of talk and sensemaking that two students initiated during the class session. Yet, Dr. Davis made a move to affirm Alma and Martín. Her comments in lines 40 and 45 demonstrate a desire to legitimate the topic of discussion. She even hypothesizes that the line of thinking reflected by the students 132 could likely have an empirical basis. In lines 47-62, Dr. Davis mentioned that she Googled the interracial marriage patterns for Brazil and found the opposite correlation than was the norm in Veracruz, Mexico. She emphasized that the directionality of the phenomenon of interest went in “multiple directions,” and the correlations we observed broadly reflect cultural values, histories of racial formations in various nation-state contexts, and people’s position in relation to multiple marginality (e.g., race, color, gender, sexuality). Her pedagogical move created space for students to discuss the topic at hand while also nuancing how they came to think about it. “I Remember Thinking Someone Could Get Hurt” Balancing affirmation with accountability and repair was important to Dr. Davis because she cared how her students felt. In an interview where we watched the video of this focal event together, I asked her what prompted her to intervene at that moment. She provided this pithy response: “I remember thinking someone could get hurt.” Indeed, that was a likely possibility. Alma was visibly uncomfortable with the dialogue. As she listened to Dr. Davis’s intervention, Alma sat quietly with her arms folded in her lap. Although she was reflecting on Dr. Davis’s comments, I could tell by her furrowed brow that Alma was uncomfortable. In the moments when Dr. Davis addressed Alma, I noticed that Dr. Davis softened her gaze, smiled at Alma, and even laughed. Later during the class session, Alma apologized to Dr. Davis in front of the class for how she initiated the conversation about interracial marriage patterns. Dr. Davis responded, telling Alma, “[The comments] wasn’t actually directed at you. It was a reminder about my experience as I was reading the book.” While Dr. Davis’s intervention focused on redirecting the conversation in class, her actual goal was to prompt students to reflect on what she called their “reading practices and experiencing practices.” How she made students feel during that process 133 was of utmost importance to Dr. Davis. Alma told me during a focus group that Dr. Davis’s subtle affirmations signaled that she cared. Dr. Davis ended her comments by sharing the following reflection: 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 So-I think-there is such an abundance of stereotypes about skin color that, in different national contexts and times, could go in multiple directions, ((counts on fingers national contexts and times)) and I want us to be able to talk about them. ((she repeatedly bounces her hands in an up and down motion to emphasize her point)) I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but with the recognition of how we all also live these things. Well, I shouldn’t say we have all. That’s a good question (0.5) My guess is [we have] experienced color words in our family, or we have participated in the coloring of other people amongst our classmates, in our families, in our workplaces— along those lines. You read this, and you saw so much of what you have experienced. That’s true for so many of us. We have either, variably, been on either side of the coin of being disparaged or being the one who is disparaging someone else. I just wanted to put that on the table. Hopefully, we can have a conversation, still, with respecting that truth. In this final excerpt, Dr. Davis reemphasizes her initial point—that the experiences and impact of racialization students witnessed in the book are things that “we all” have lived. However, in lines 75-76, we witnessed Dr. Davis finally pause and question her use of the proverbial “we.” Do “we all, also, live these things”? Albeit omnipresent, racialization is a deeply intersectional phenomenon, for not all people are racialized in the same ways, given their other identities in relation to systems of power. In a class with such diversity along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and national origin, holding space for the ways each person has a different experience of racialization was very important. However, Dr. Davis’s intervention not only created space but actively prompted students to leverage their own experiences as valued tools for 134 sensemaking around course content. The focal event concluded with Dr. Davis encouraging students to join in the conversation because she did not want to stifle it. Focal Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis In this focal event, students engaged with one of the primary tools for learning—a course reading. They tried to make sense of the week’s learning goal of distinguishing between race and color and its implications for people’s lives. Mainly, they focused on an empirical finding of the week’s core text about interracial marriage patterns in Veracruz, Mexico. During the discussion, broader discourses relating to misogynoir and Eurocentric beauty standards surfaced, but in very matter-of-fact ways. Students leaned on racist logics and harmful stereotypes to make sense of the reading but did not challenge them. In the context of academia, where being “objective” is often perceived as the gold standard, being divorced from what you’re learning is the norm. Yet, Dr. Davis’s intervention prompted reflection on what she referred to as students’ “reading and experiencing practices.” She shared with me that her own experiences with misogynoir and colorism as a light-skinned Black woman made her sensitive to how the conversation unfolded and led her to intervene. When I think about this [incident], I often think—you know, as a light-skinned person with a lot of privilege and not just with privilege, but with a lot of affirmation for my whole life because that’s what light skin, especially Black people experience…. And, [I am] someone who’s experienced that affirmation for my whole life and someone who knows that dark-skinned Black women don’t experience that affirmation. She further reflected: I would hope that a faculty member, even a white faculty member who was teaching this material would recognize the weight of colorism and the emotions that it includes. And so would even be able to intervene. I don’t know if it’s just because I am Black and have lived in a very color—well, the whole world is colorist—but lived in a, you know, very clearly, explicitly colorist world that it affected me in that way. But you know, I can imagine that it requires a next level of education for white people as well. 135 Here, Dr. Davis pointed to her desires for white faculty to recognize the “weight” and “emotions” of colorism and be able to intervene. But she also seemed to recognize the ways that her own lived experiences as a Black woman bolstered her ability to notice and then respond to problematic classroom race talk. She told me, “I remember thinking someone could get hurt” if the reading discussion stayed at the level of repeating stereotypical and controlling images. Later in the class session, she often said in reading about colorism, “Darker-skinned people are retraumatized and lighter-skinned people are reaffirmed by reading that light-skinned people are pretty and rich.” Marquis, a PhD student, spoke extensively in a focus group about how intersubjectivity was at the core of many students’ sensemaking practices in the course. He reflected: I think that amalgamation of the naming of how we showed up—our social locations towards these conversations were important. I think we talked about our experiences in ways where—I think some folks—this is not an indictment. I think some folks talked about their experiences through a window given their various identities. I think [other] people talked about their racialized experiences as a mirror, as a reflection, ‘cause there was more of a—of maybe an immediacy to what that connection or how that lived experience manifested. If we use Marquis’s metaphor, we can argue that Dr. Davis’s intervention was trying to coach Alma and Martín to see a mirror that they might have otherwise characterized as a window. Her intervention shifted not only the nature of the conversation but also refracted and recast what counted as tools for learning. She shattered the veil of objectivity—calling attention to the fact that “we all have skin color” and what we read about race can be painful, and we should bring those emotions to the class. In fact, from that point, the discourse in the class session shifted— students put themselves and their lived experiences with colorism and misogynoir at the center of their analysis of the text. Dr. Davis’s refraction of broader discourses and disciplinary logics 136 served as a direct invitation for students to develop a new and critical stance towards a deeply important shared practice of academic work—reading and interpreting course readings. “I’m going to be the devil’s advocate”: Arguing the Reality of Racialization in Political Science Next, we dive into the culture of racial meaning-making in the “International Law and Politics” political science doctoral seminar. We enter at Week 6 of the academic term where the topic of the class session was the Racial Foundations of International Law. As you might remember from the previous chapter, students voted to choose the focus of the last 4 weeks of the academic term. Many students were excited to discuss readings on race and international relations and international law (IR/IL) because the discipline, broadly, has not seriously contended with this topic. Lin, a visiting student taking the course through a partnership with a local university, told me: Usually, when we’re talking about international relations and international law, the scholarship was mostly Western dominated. Race was not really an issue that they wanted to talk about. They focused more on the generic principles like justice and the role of law. They didn’t want to talk about race. I think this is a new thing that emerged in the scholarship. This is why all of us are really excited about this, like, “Wow, this is the first time that I read something like that about international law.” It usually has to do with treaties and principles and stuff like that, but no. This is about the real thing. Dr. Berr would be inclined to agree with Lin—she mentioned in an interview with me that the discipline of international law “is very clearly extremely Eurocentric, very associated with empire.” Daniel, a PhD student in political science and critical scholar, told me: I think in more relative terms, because political science, the expression in the U.S., the dominant epistemological framework is that of positivism, and the way in which questions are framed, using a positivist framework is—often erases the kinds of concerns that I have and many others completely out of view. The role that whiteness and the legacy of white supremacy play in the field generally gets taken- for-granted by many IR/IL scholars. 137 In recent years, scholars have taken up a more critical analysis of the role of power in IR/IL. For example, scholars who adopt Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) produce powerful research that engages power-conscious analyses of IR/IL. Achiume and Bâli (2021) explained that TWAIL attracts “scholars who still typically share the foundational premise that international law cannot be understood or analyzed apart from its mutually constitutive relationship with empire, specifically European colonialism and its enduring contemporary legacies” (p. 1489—of which race is a significant point. When defining the focus of the class session in the syllabus, Dr. Berr wrote: Diagnosing how race is and has been sublimated and written out of history and policy conversations regarding international politics and law is an important first step, but addressing this issue is the easy part. The harder question, and the question of the day, is whether the entire international legal and political system is predicated upon sustaining a racial divide? Students read six articles focusing on race and IR/IL, and they came to class prepared to engage in discussion. Sitting in her normal spot at the head of the table in the seminar room, Dr. Berr started the class by saying, “This topic…it’s not like I’m…it’s pretty new to me, too, [1 second pause] it shouldn’t be but it is.” She shared that she considered whether she should have invited a student to lead the class session, but she recognized that “it’s more work for [students], and I feel like we’re supposed to be taking work off your plate.” It is noteworthy to name that Dr. Berr entered into this conversation in a markedly different way than any other class session. She takes a lot of pride in her expertise. In an interview, Dr. Berr quipped, “I am opinionated, as all academics are.” Then she elaborated: I do feel that I create room to disagree with me, but I’m not gonna not—you’re gonna know where I stand on issues. That’s a pedagogical choice. That can also—I’ve got the authority. I’ve got the power. I have the knowledge. I have a huge amount of knowledge. This is totally in my area of expertise so disagreeing with me is really hard. 138 Students agreed that Dr. Berr was incredibly knowledgeable about IR/IL. One student specifically said that Dr. Berr has “an encyclopedic knowledge of international law.” So, for her to approach this class so tentatively was peculiar. Dr. Berr opened up the conversation by asking students which readings they liked and why. Students shared their thoughts on the readings, and interestingly, many of the students said that the week’s readings were the most concrete of anything they have read during the academic term. Some students felt like the readings were “redundant.” One student shared that the readings felt commonsensical. He said it feels like “we’re including this article so that people who have literally never heard about racism will read this and be like ‘Oh, yeah. So, this is what it is.’” Dr. Berr responded, “Yes, I’ve said I think this is the easy question—calling it out. But then figuring out where to go is hard.” The class continued to discuss the readings—aiming to tease apart the nuance of the various arguments and the ontological and practical in relation to three key questions posed by Dr. Berr. First, she asked: How is international law built on racial foundations and what did students learn and think about this point? Second: How does international law permit ongoing racialization in IR/IL? Finally: Do international relations or the International Legal Order need to sustain its racialization and thus the racial divide to survive? She wanted to explore the “practical and ontological” dimensions of these questions in relation to the arguments presented in the readings. Surely, Dr. Berr believed that argumentation was a key learning objective in the course. She told me in an interview: Yeah, I think [argumentation is] the name of the game and social science, I mean. There are ways economists have ways to do social science which has ironclad causal inference, but most of the important and interesting things to study to start not amenable to that so. Most of the interesting stuff in politics are about argumentation and putting together persuasive evidence and believing it when you’re confident you believe, because you believe it. You’re going to be more likely to persuade others to come towards you, so I absolutely believe that the goal is persuasion. 139 She continued, “When they go on the job market, they’re going to have not a hostile audience, but a lot of people who are going to be poking holes. And so, they have to get practiced in how to come back when someone pokes a hole.” Relatedly, Pepe, a student in the course, told me that engaging in the class is not just about reading the article for the sake of it or reading it. You’re also expected to identify the cases or case’s points that are made in a word. What are the arguments that are generated in that piece of work? You can list all those arguments. Students picked up on the fact that argumentation was the objective of joint activity in International Law and Politics. As the conversation continued, Dr. Berr seemed to become into less content with how students were articulating their arguments to the focal questions. This prompted an intervention—taking on the role of the devil’s advocate. Dr. Berr interjected by saying: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 >I think I’m gonna be the devil’s advocate.< That’s how I’m gonna do it, because I want you guys to address how it’s important to name the racial foundations. To do that, I’m going to tell you that there’s no racial foundation to this. It’s not that international law for a long time has not denied that it has its civilized/uncivilized- <in fact>, it was written in, and in terms of barbaric- and that international law was civilizing. That was the legitimating narrative, that all involved told themselves that they were doing. It’s not just that it permitted, it legitimated imperialism. MacDougall and Baum (1997) defined a devil’s advocate as “a person who tests a proposition by arguing against it” (p. 536). In this excerpt, Dr. Berr took on the persona of someone who is arguing that there are no racial foundations of IR/IL. Clearly, this is not a position that Dr. Berr herself believes. Notably, people who play devil’s advocate generally do 140 not agree with the position they are arguing. Instead, it is used as a tool to test the strength of an argument. This was precisely Dr. Berr’s course of action. Next, she then turned to discuss slavery. She proclaimed to students: 13 14 15 16 The other thing to say is slavery also existed in a non-racialized form. >I mean<, the Vikings used slavery. The spoils of war were that you won, and everybody became a slave. You won against your European neighbor, and they all became a slave. In line 13, Dr. Berr argued that “slavery also existed in a non-racialized form.” This move to position slavery was a direct attempt to separate slavery from race and racism, thus preempting the use of slavery as a marker of racial foundations of IR/IL. 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Now, it’s true that international law will tell you heroic stories about how it found human rights and the banning of the international slave trade at the same time that- was engaged in the slave trade and at the same time that it didn’t actually ban slavery. It just banned the international slave trade. There’s all kinds of problems there, but these problems are not necessarily predicated on race. This is what actually me and the authors are saying or contributing, is to bring Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and critical race theory— it wouldn’t have to do that if TWAIL already had critical race theory. They have to bring it in because they’re saying it’s missing from TWAIL. Why is it important? Why is it impossible not to think about the racial dimensions of it and important to bring it in? Dr. Berr concluded by naming the ironies in the ways the field of IR/IL has positioned itself as being part of a project that undoes the harm of historical racialization. In lines 18 and 19, she mentioned how IL has contributed to human rights and banning the international slave trade. Surely, concessions are part of any good argumentation strategy. Yet, the statement ends with her reasserting that “the problems are not predicated on race.” She broke character when she 141 pointed students back to the readings starting at line 26—arguing the need for TWAIL’s integration with critical race theory as a means to address the racial foundations she just sought to undermine. Finally, she re-posed this question to her students: “Why is it impossible not to think about the racial dimensions of [IR/IL] and important to bring it in?” Admir, a Political Science student, tried to answer this question. He told Dr. Berr: I feel that there is a difference of treatment that is obvious if we try to look and actually compare which countries are poor, which countries are suffering. There was, for example, a—just as a hypothetical, would the international reaction to South Africa be in the form of economic sanctions if it was a Black majority dominating a white minority. Dr. Berr at first empathized saying, “I hear you saying that,” but then she went back into character and rebutted: Although I could see us saying, “Well, we did rebuild Japan.”… I can see that you’re saying that the pattern is self-evident, but what is the problem with ignoring the pattern? Because I can give you alternative facts—alternative narratives. I don’t wanna call ‘em alternative facts—alternative narratives that actually are true. I think they’re true. They just are whitewashed. Putting aside the revelatory nature of first accidentally calling alternative narratives “alternative facts,” Dr. Berr emphasized that those narratives are still true (read: legitimate form of argumentation) despite being whitewashed. Admir nodded and said, “True, but that is the problem with whitewashing is that there is less recognition of what is actually driving—” At that moment, Dr. Berr quickly cut Admir off to ask, “Why do we have to name the racial foundations of international law?” Admir’s voice started to elevate a bit and he let out an exasperated chuckle. Then he responded: Because then that is not the causal variable that is actually influencing what is happening. It’s not like internal process of law that’s influenced this. It’s also an implicit structural understanding of race that influences your decision with various—we all are here in that monocausal goal, but I feel that recognizing that is important if you wanna actually understand the consequences of policy. For example, an invasion of Iraq is an international reaction to how it was—in what it was rooted. Or just the Middle East. There was a way in which—there are a lot of— 142 Note that at this point, Admir leaned on a postpositivist framing to make his argument. He pointed to the efficacy of a causal variable. Still, Dr. Berr seemed to be unsatisfied with his argument; she cut him off again to embody the role of the devil’s advocate and argued: I can tell a whole Iraq story that doesn’t have race in it. It’s about not having nuclear weapons. Why aren’t we invading North Korea? Because they have nuclear weapons, and they could conventionally destroy Korea. I can tell a whole narrative that doesn’t have race in it. Admir and Dr. Berr continued to go back and forth, with Dr. Berr poking holes in Admir’s line of argumentation. Multiple students shared with me in interviews that there was often an expectation of what Dr. Berr expected students to leave the class believing. Reflecting on his own experiences of discourse in the class, Admir shared: It was often very clear to me where Dr. Berr stands and what kinds of answers…. I felt that there was a particular range of acceptable thought that was clear to me that I could say, and it would fly. I was very aware of the kinds of things that might not…and it caused a lot of back and forth. Although Admir found those exchanges entertaining, it caused him to wonder when it is best to be completely transparent about his beliefs about the reading versus when to “take a middle-of- the-road approach.” Focal Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis In this focal event, we witnessed a conversation between Dr. Berr and a student about the racial foundations of international law. They were discussing why it is important to name explicitly that there are racial foundations to the field. Reflecting on the conversation, Dr. Berr told me that her goal was to not only have people say, “Wait a second, we can’t keep writing race out” of the history of the field, but she was also “trying to push them to articulate what that reason is and to figure out what they think the problem is.” What is most remarkable about this intervention, however, was that she took on the role of a devil’s advocate to do it. By giving students a direct argument to contradict, she turned the object of activity away from prioritizing 143 racial meaning-making and towards traditional conventions of persuasive argumentation. I asked students what they learned about race from the class, and one student shared, “You get to learn different perspectives about race. One can also acknowledge that the different or contradictory opinions may not be wrong opinions. That is something I noticed in this seminar.” I agree that holding space for heterogeneity and not aiming to position certain perspectives as right or as wrong are important pedagogical commitments. Yet, what Pepe raised makes me wonder about the implications of rendering racialization, a deeply significant part of people’s lived experience, as merely a topic of argumentation. Daniel told me that the approach folks take to eschew race in their analysis often comes from a personal place. He said: I think a lot of times when race and colonialism are dismissed in these kinds of academic circles, it’s because of this comfort and a lack of understanding that stems from having a particular position over time than it is that these issues are not important or they’re not relevant. It’s more of a visceral internal reaction that it is anything of scholarly merit. Indeed, Dr. Berr was transparent about the journey she was on as a senior scholar in the field un/learning a lot of the race-evasive approaches to the study of IR/IL that she learned as a graduate student. Yet, more attention must be paid to the ways that taking on the position of the devil’s advocate might restrict learning to be centered on the white gaze. Historicizing the Canon of the Learning Sciences: Reading Power into John Dewey We now travel to the “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” course, where in Week 3 of the academic term, students are grappling with the work of three scholars who are positioned as historical precursors to the learning sciences: John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, and Paulo Freire. John Dewey is often regarded as the father of education. He was a philosopher and education reformer whose pragmatic vision of schooling is routinely taught in many education programs. For this class session, students were assigned the first two chapters of Dewey’s (1915/2013) 144 book, The School and Society. In the book, he put forward a set of provocations about the future of schooling and the types of education young people needed at the turn of the century. He argued: At present, concentration of industry and division of labor have practically eliminated household and neighborhood occupations—at least for educational purposes. But it is useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back. It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices. We must recognize our compensations—the increase in toleration, in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature, the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater accuracy of adaption to differing personalities, contact with greater commercial activities. These considerations mean much to the city-bred child of today. (p. 9) Given the rising tension between the increasingly industrialized world and agrarian society, Dewey posited that a key question that the future of education must contend with is “how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in relation to the physical realities of life?” (p. 9). Dewey’s theorizing was deeply philosophical and dealt with the moral responsibilities of the U.S. school system to youth. This intellectual project is significant to a group of people committed to studying human learning. Positing the Purpose of Education After reviewing student feedback from the prior week’s exit tickets, the co-instructors started the lesson by prompting students to engage in reflection. They invited students to free- write, responding to the following questions: “What do you think the purposes of education should be? Are they the same as the purposes of schooling?” While students spent 6 minutes reflecting individually, the teaching team (consisting of Dr. Deere, Dr. Thomas, and Future Dr. Alexander) huddled to catch up and finalize their plans for the rest of the lesson. Dr. Thomas brought students back together, and he gave directions for the next part of the class session. 145 Students were tasked with working in small groups (four students in each group) to share their responses to the free write as well as discuss the Dewey reading. As students dialogued, the co- instructors rotated spending time listening in on each group’s conversation. After 20 minutes, Dr. Thomas walked to the front of the room to bring groups back together for a large group discussion. Dr. Deere and Future Dr. Alexander sat on the side while Dr. Thomas led this part of the class session. Dr. Thomas began the lesson by asking students why Dewey focused on the skill of sewing in his readings—“What’s the core argument here?” he questioned. Multiple students responded connecting sewing to various cultural values and historical repertoires of practices that were salient to the social context in which Dewey was writing. For example, Darius, a master’s student in Learning Sciences, postulated that Dewey focused on sewing because of “the family being a central part of how [the society] operated.” He continued to explain how sewing was part of “the social obligation” of the community, so it was a practical skill that people needed to learn. “There was a need,” according to Darius, for sewing to be used as a tool to support learning “rather than something [else] that had no relevance to the actual student’s position in life.” By conventional standards, Dr. Thomas expertly facilitated the conversation. Students continued to offer interpretations and justifications, and Dr. Thomas posed questions and revoiced their comments. He never asserted whether students were right or wrong. In fact, there was a lull in the conversation where students were not speaking, and Dr. Thomas took advantage of that moment to confess, “I have to say when we wrote these questions, I’m not really sure that I know myself what the answer is for Dewey.” This remark signaled that, for Dr. Thomas, the objective of learning in that moment was not to get a correct answer, but to get students engaged 146 in developing, sharing, and justifying their understanding of core texts. The large group conversation went on like this for 14 minutes. Theories of Learning as Theories of Society As the conversation proceeded, I noticed Dr. Deere’s demeanor change. At first, she was sitting on the side with Future Dr. Alexander, listening as students engaged with Dr. Thomas. But over time, she started to fidget, and her eyes began to shift around the room as if she was trying to lock eyes with Dr. Thomas. I could tell that she was gearing up to contribute to the conversation. After Ana, an Education Policy student, shared her perspective on the Dewey reading, Dr. Deere jumped in. She placed her hands on her forehead pensively and said, “So this is sort of a complicated day in my mind.” She continued: 3 4 5 6 7 I always think about- Dewey is writing this in 1915. What is happening in 1915? And then why are some of the things that are happening in 1915 undetectable for me in his writing? Like students, Dr. Deere’s point of analysis begins with the social context of the time— she first rhetorically asked, “What is happening in 1915?” Yet, her sensemaking took a different direction than her students’. Whereas students were thinking about how the society shaped what the project of schooling should be, Dr. Deere was fundamentally questioning who even had the privilege of imagining benefitting from institutionalized schooling. She continued: 9 10 11 12 13 14 we didn’t have robust public schools in 1915, right? Not everyone could go to school. Like some people weren’t citizens or didn’t have voting rights. And so the tension always for me is as we think about this, what Dewey was...his vision for education in many ways I think was really great, I just wonder who he was talking about as he was writing. 147 Here, Dr. Deere raised a set of facts for consideration that others in the space did not speak to. The aspects of the social context she was interested in were related to dimensions of power and personhood—questions of rights. The fact that not everyone could go to school or had voting rights in 1915 casts a very particular light on who Dewey had in mind as he was articulating his vision for education. When we interpret the text from this perspective, we come to appreciate, as Dr. Deere told me in an interview, that “[Dewey’s] talking about white boys through all of this, like his work is on this vision of society.” In this previous excerpt, Dr. Deere also made a specific discursive move to soften her critique of Dewey. After profoundly problematizing the onto-epistemological grounding from which Dewey was theorizing, in line 13 she told students, “His vision for education in many ways I think was really great.” Interestingly, she employed that rhetorical strategy again in lines 23-24 where she said, “There are many things that Dewey argues for that frankly I think we should be learning together still.” The dilemma of forwarding serious critique without falling into binaries that position Dewey as good or bad was something that Dr. Deere was concerned about. In our informational interview that took place the summer before the class began, she explained: For me, the approach to the class is, let’s learn the history as it’s been written. Let’s realize this history was written at a time when Dewey was also a racist and it’s hyper- colonial in all of its premises. Show people that’s all true, and I still read it. Right? There [are] still things that are potentially learnable and usable in here. I try to orient students to say, “Look, you need to understand the premises of the time. You need to understand what the problems are, the legacies of the thought that are continued in our fields that you might take up.” For me, that’s about helping graduate students recognize, “I can learn something from Roger Schank. It doesn’t mean I have to accept his terms or agree with all of it.” It’s for me, it’s a more resilient way to apprentice in students into the academy. Because at some point, you’re like, “This is all a little bankrupt.” What then? Apprenticing students into the academy and into the learning sciences meant facing contradictions and telling fuller truths about the people whom we consider trailblazers— 148 exposing the good, the bad, and the ugly. In the same interview, Dr. Deere recalled the first time she read Dewey: “The first time I had to read Dewey I was like, ‘This dude in the 1920s was part of advocating for why boarding schools were good.’” She posited that this aspect of Dewey’s vision of education was often glossed over when faculty teach Dewey. “Nobody gives that. I try to actually integrate and ask people to think about who is this person in the time they’re thinking about.” This comment brings us back to the teaching moment Dr. Deere facilitated during the class session. In the class session, Dr. Deere gave students a window into her reading practices. She told them, “For me, when I’m reading something, I’m thinking about like, ‘So what does he miss if he’s thinking about schooling and social progress because his view of society is from a particular framework?’” In this instance, Dr. Deere modeled reading between the lines. She reminded students that their reading practices should include both engaging with the arguments the authors present in the text as well as grappling with the axiological positionings that underlie their argument. Axiology refers to “values about what is right, good, and beautiful” (Marin et al., 2020), and Bang and colleagues (2016) argued that “Axiological positionings of self and others with respect to knowledge, knowing, and human activity are routine parts of interaction” (p. 29). Indeed, Dr. Deere’s pedagogy is informed by a political commitment to expand students’ capacity to critically historicize (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2010) both the field and its legitimated repertoires of practice and ways of knowing and being. In our informational interview, Dr. Deere was explicit about the politicized aims of her pedagogy. In designing the course, and particularly this week’s lesson, she shared, “What I was really after is making sure that the intellectual traditions that actually are part of a lot of the really well-known learning scientists are visible in the history part” of the course. Moreover, she wanted to ensure that the history of the field was 149 neither flattened nor de-politicized. Dr. Deere drove that point home when she posed this powerful provocation to students: 28 29 30 31 So, these notions of like, how school and society function and what we should do in school and in what configurations whether it’s a cooperation or for the individual, <al:ways has a theory of society> with it - I think. Here, Dr. Deere emphasized that theories of learning are “always” also theories of society. In their article, “Theories of Learning as Theories of Society: Contrapuntal Approach to Expanding Disciplinary Authenticity in Computing,” Philip and Sengupta (2021) asserted: As a field, we must do more to understand theories of learning as emergent within the contradictions and tensions of researchers’ cultural and sociopolitical contexts; these theories of learning must also be seen in light of the worlds they in turn co-construct. The work of learning scientists, then, is not just intellectual. It is also deeply moral, political, and ethical work. Throughout this intervention, what is most remarkable to me about Dr. Deere’s intervention is that the question she was pushing students to consider was not fundamentally different from Dr. Thomas’s initial question. The object of activity was the same—to articulate Dewey’s vision for schooling and education. Yet, Dr. Deere’s intervention significantly expanded what it means to engage in this activity. Dr. Deere aimed to help her students do just that through her intervention. The intervention ended with Dr. Deere highlighting the irony of Dewey making an argument about schooling with no mention of the ways that structural power and oppression operate within society. Her final words were, “And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t continue to take things from him, but I just want you to know, right, that that is happening.” I scanned the room to find students sitting with the weight of all that Dr. Deere had illuminated for them. The co-instructors, too, seemed to scan the room with their eyes to check whether a student wanted to 150 respond to Dr. Deere’s comments. Twelve seconds passed. With a soft-spoken tone, Dr. Thomas interjected, “In my estimation…we…should we move on to Bruner?” Dr. Deere smiled at Dr. Thomas when he said that. He repeated the question, “Should we move on to Bruner?” Dr. Deere responded “Yeah,” accompanied with a giggle. Focal Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis In this focal event, we witnessed a conversation among students facilitated by Dr. Thomas about a canonical piece of writing in the field of education by philosopher and social reformer, John Dewey. Dr. Thomas was very intentional in his facilitation style—revoicing student comments, probing for clarification, asking questions that build on students’ line of thinking. Darius, a Learning Sciences student, reflected on Dr. Thomas’s pedagogy in an interview. He recounted, “Dr. Thomas would say things like, ‘I genuinely don’t know what this author means by this. What do we think as a class?’” He went on to say: Learning is a communally lived experience in that [classroom] setting. We are all working together to figure out what’s going on, and that, to me, validates all of us bringing our perspectives to [the conversation] because it’s like, well, we are contributing. It’s helping us to explore further what those concepts mean. For Dr. Thomas, supporting students’ conceptual change and helping them come to understandings of the text for themselves was the object of joint activity—very on brand for a cognitivist! Yet, Dr. Thomas neither spoke to issues of power and historicity nor supported students to make those connections. Recognizing that the conversation was not moving toward a critical discussion of who Dewey was a theorizer, Dr. Deere intervened to call attention to the political and ethical dimensions of Dewey’s work and axiological positionings. When discussing her choice to intervene in the conversation to historicize John Dewey, she told me that she did so because she “felt uncomfortable by [Dr. Thomas’s] framing” because it did not critically 151 historicize the text. Dr. Deere continued, “So I do feel like sometimes people are afraid to like go after canonical texts in this way and don’t think you can both elevate good ideas and point out the problems.” Dr. Deere aimed to teach students how to hold complexity around what it meant to engage with so-called canonical texts. In the focal event, the object of activity was not radically changed—but expanded such that students’ reading and sensemaking practices were generatively challenged. Dr. Deere positioned the act of historicizing as being central and consequential to understanding John Dewey. R-CHAT attenuates us to the ways Dr. Deere’s leveraged macro-level discourses (e.g., naming historically racist ‘theories of society’) to situate meso-level routines and practices (e.g., the deeply important practice of reading and interpreting canonical texts) in ways that expanded the object of joint activity to be more responsive to racialization. Put simply, she modeled for students how to read power into texts that might otherwise evade it. Every student I spoke with in an interview or focus group mentioned the vital role that Dr. Deere played in normalizing interrogations of power related to race in the course. Alma, a PhD student in the Learning Sciences, shared, “When I think about the moments when we actually talk a little more about race…it’s usually because Dr. Deere took it there to remind us.” This is primarily because canonical LS literature tends to be race-evasive. Dr. Deere told me that since the readings represented on the syllabus do not always explicitly deal with race or other systems of domination, it is incumbent upon the professor to help students make those connections. While it is clear that, as one student mentioned, “It’s in the culture [of the class] that race and ethnicity is important,” there is an apparent contradiction in whether and how the tools and artifacts mediate racial meaning-making in this course. Moreover, given the divergent subjectivities and pedagogical commitments of the co-instructors of this course, this dynamic creates a situation where the distribution of labor to facilitate racial meaning-making was 152 unbalanced and fell primarily on Dr. Deere. She described her interventions as being part of “the dance” that she and Dr. Thomas does. Witnessing Racialization in Video Data: Political and Ethical Imperatives for Design and Analysis Let’s fast forward to Week 9 of the academic term in the “Introduction to the Learning Sciences” course. It was the last traditional class session; the last week of the term was reserved for presentations of students’ final projects. Weeks 8 and 9 were dedicated to discussing design research in school and informal environments. By way of context, design-based research (DBR) is one of the signature research methodologies in the learning sciences, and DBR was developed in response to a growing desire from the field to address the complexities of learning in context (Brown, 1992; Collins; 1992). In this way, DBR supports researchers in dealing with “the messiness of real world practice,” instead of controlling for variables in testing the efficacy of educational interventions (Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 3). The Design-Based Research Collective (2003) identified five essential characteristics of quality design-based research: 1. The central goals of designing learning environments and developing theories or “prototheories” of learning are intertwined. 2. Development and research take place through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign. 3. Research on designs must lead to sharable theories that help communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other educational designers. 4. Research must account for how designs function in authentic settings. It must not only document success or failure but also focus on interactions that refine our understanding of the learning issues involved. 5. The development of such accounts relies on methods that can document and connect processes of enactment to outcomes of interest. (p. 5) After identifying an educational problem in a real-world learning context, DBR scholars seek to design and implement an intervention (often a curricular tool of some sort). They carefully, and usually in partnership with people from the learning community they are studying, examine the impact of the intervention on practice. Insights from DBR can support the iterative 153 improvement of evidence-based educational interventions while also generating important conceptual insights into the process of human learning (Rodgers & Stewart, 2020). Penuel and colleagues (2016) argued that “a concern with praxis, or practical human activity to transform the world” (p. 490) is a central aim of DBR. A growing sect of critical scholars within the field of learning sciences have further developed approaches to design-based research. Methodologies like social design experiments (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and participatory design-based research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) approach design work with an explicitly politicized ethic. In their discussion of design research, Vossoughi et al. (2018) argued it is a vital responsibility of learning scientists to “explicate, amplify, and further theorize ethical dimensions of human learning that orient our thinking towards what could or ought to be and sensitize us to the ways ethics, like politics, are always mediating learning” (p. 1283). Scholars in this tradition, like Dr. Deere, position learning as both a cultural- historical, and deeply political, endeavor. Video Data in the Learning Sciences In addition to design being a significant strand of the learning sciences, video analysis is also an important tool for empirical inquiry (Derry et al., 2010). The dynamic unfolding of moment-to-moment interactions is a common focus of analysis in learning sciences research. As Jordan and Henderson (1995) reminded us, “Video provides optimal data when we are interested in what ‘really’ happened rather than in accounts of what happened” (p. 50). Therefore, increasing students’ familiarity with the design, implementation, and analysis of inquiry using video data is an important learning experience for Learning Sciences graduate students. When discussing the course scope and sequence, Dr. Deere talked about the importance of apprenticing students into aspects of design work with video data. She shared: 154 We built in the course a look into a design project that is pretty mature, right? This is a mature project that is not something that you do as a dissertation study, but as a way to give people a view in. When planning the lesson for Weeks 8 and 9 that focused on design-based research, she jumped at the opportunity to share data from some of her own projects with students as tools for collective sensemaking. Racialization as a Form of Learning Dr. Deere began Week 9’s lesson by grounding students in how she and her research team approached the design work of their lab. She told students, “One of the things we’re trying to understand in studies all the time is what is the relationship between the framework, the actual implementation, and what do we see in kids thinking or teacher practice.” She then went on to share how her team collaborated with research collaborators to use empirical findings from a project to generate theoretical insights. We focus on the second part of the lesson, which consisted of data dives into two sets of video data from an ongoing design project her team conducted in partnership with teachers and families in a school district. Dr. Deere described: So one of the things that has been really important about this work, and as you will kind of see, there are all kinds of ways that power and historicity are being reproduced and may be disrupted…um—but if you’re gonna do anything in the classroom, either way that’s going to happen—but for us, part of what we think to be ethical and responsible is to be accountable to the things we’ve designed and to figure out how to intervene and help teachers grow about that. This commitment to accountability to designs led their research team to be highly transparent and action-oriented when they found harmful and problematic dynamics being reproduced in the learning environments they studied. Dr. Deere recounted that during their first round of implementation of the DBR project, they found evidence for something they already knew: The bodies of young boys of color were “overpoliced in classrooms all the time.” Moreover, related especially to Dr. Deere’s commitment to exploring field-based science education, for teachers 155 who are not critically aware of their own roles in perpetuating this racialized dynamic, policing is escalated when students are taken out of the confines of the classroom space. Drawing from literature on interpretive power 3 (e.g., Cohen & Ball, 1999), Dr. Deere and her team aimed “to make visible what’s happening” as teachers interpret the ideas, actions, and embodiments of students in their care and their implications for student learning. She continued, “In our work, we say you can’t get to ethical design of pedagogical decision-making if you can’t understand the difference between [a behavioral stance and a sensemaking stance] and be more reflective about it.” Whereas a behavioral stance focuses on what students do and say, a sensemaking stance finds intellectual generativity in the heterogeneous expressions of and approaches to learning. Indeed, it is much more common that teachers base their decisions on a behavioral stance than a sensemaking one, and Dr. Deere aimed to name the ways that this harmed students, especially young boys of color in the learning process. Dr. Deere then showed students an excerpt of a clip of video data. In the vignette, a group of second graders and two teachers were taking a “wondering walk” in nature. The video students watched was recorded from the perspective of Tyrus, a Black boy, who, like everyone else in the setting, was wearing a GoPro camera as a data collection method. As Tyrus walked around outside, he expressed excitement and curiosity about his surroundings. He eventually happened upon a charger, and that sparked a few questions for Tyrus. He exclaimed, “What?! A charger?! How did this get here?” The entire time Tyrus is making his observations audible, yet no one seems to be engaging him. He starts kicking the charger closer as he walks to show others the artifact he found, and a young girl, Rebecca, tells Tyrus to stop kicking the charger because it 3 Cohen and Ball (1999) described the impacts of expanding teachers’ interpretive power. They argued that with an increased interpretive power, “[teachers] should be less likely simply to see in terms of what they bring, but might be able to see new things and consider more alternatives, analyze students’ learning more finely, and consider their practice more deeply and in more complex ways” (p. 16). 156 was stirring the dirt around on the ground. At this point, Dr. Deere paused the video and recapped what students just watched. She then showed the second part of the vignette. We pan back to Tyrus who was confronted by a white woman teacher who blatantly asked him, “Didn’t she [Rebecca] ask you to stop doing that?” She continued to ask Tyrus why he was not complying with Rebecca’s request. Tyrus attempted to explain that he was trying to show the class the cool item he found, but the teacher responded by saying, “Well, she said the dirt was going into her eyes.” Tyrus challenged her, saying, “She never said [that].” The teacher then told Tyrus to turn his camera off. At that point, I had a good idea about where the interaction was going. As I looked around the classroom to see the looks of shock and disgust on many students’ faces, I could tell others in the class had thoughts, too. At this point, Dr. Deere paused the videos, walked from behind the podium to get closer to the students, and again said, “So [1.3] Tyrus has been asking for intellectual attention this whole time.” She continued: 3 4 5 6 He is getting none from any of the teachers An:d part of what is really important is Rebecca says something behavioral, and we get a fast response from [the teacher] An:d she escalates it that he is actually causing harm [to Rebecca] Through the class session, Dr. Deere has intentionally revoiced what was happening in each video clip to establish a shared understanding of what students were watching and which pieces were most relevant to the project’s focus of analysis. Additionally, in the above excerpt, she modeled how to tie a conceptual framework to data analysis by interpreting aspects of the video using the language of the framework. Key to Dr. Deere’s assertion about “what’s made visible” in this interaction is the notion that the teacher is leveraging a behavioral stance, and her subsequent pedagogical decisions are both reflective of and limited by that stance. 157 Students remained engaged as they listened to Dr. Deere’s comments about this vignette. I noticed multiple students nodding as she provided her interpretations of the events, and some people even let out “mhmmms” as Dr. Deere described the tension that arose in the room when the teacher made a false claim about Tyrus causing harm to Rebecca and then asked him to turn his camera off. Dr. Deere emphatically pointed to the screen that had a still of the video displaced: “I mean, it’s almost shocking that we actually have this on film a bit, right?” She then placed her hands on her head and exclaimed, “Like it’s so stereotypical it’s unbelievable.” Yet, as McDermott and Roth (1978) posited, “A careful analysis of people in interaction shows how the smallest and least talked-about strips of behavior can help to constitute and reveal a great deal about a social order” (p. 324). Dr. Deere went on to explain that Tyrus did not seem to be particularly affected by this interaction. She mentioned, “Um, I’ll just say that Tyrus is a beautiful boy that continues to be quite happy and—and is fine, and he doesn’t shut down after this” exchange with his teacher. Still, Dr. Deere moved on to raise a particularly powerful point: 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 But part of what we say to teachers i:s that this is routine in learning (1second) right? And we might not think that this one incident leads to all kinds of problems >But what we point out to them< (1.7) ((Walks to computer at podium and changes slide to photos showcasing headlines about the Central Park birdwatching incident)) <Is that> there is a direct relationship wi:th broader societal kind of things ((walks back to the side of the slide with her hands folded in front of her)) And this had just happened ((gestures toward the PowerPoint screen)) The move to explicitly name that interactions like the one in this vignette are “routine” rather than an aberration in learning is significant because it positions the contradictions that emerged among Tyrus, Rebecca, and his teacher as being consequential to learning—thus legitimizing it as part of the purview of the learning sciences. 158 Moreover, Dr. Deere employed a real-life incident to scaffold sensemaking and to place this interaction into a broader cultural history of the devaluation of Black lives. Related to her earlier point about this interaction being connected to learning, Dr. Deere wanted students to recognize that there was a connection between Tyrus’s experience and what she described as “broader societal kinds of things.” In 2020, Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police on Christopher Cooper, a Black man who was birdwatching in Central Park. The incident sparked many conversations about racism and racial profiling across the United States, and Dr. Deere used it as a tool for learning. Dr. Deere pulled up the Power Point slide referencing the Central Park event, students across the classroom started to nod. I admit that I also let out an audible “yep!” Figure 5.3 is a screenshot of the slide Dr. Deere shared when referencing the Central Park racist incident. Here, she outlined two main takeaways: (a) “everyday interactions produce AND are products of powered social dynamics,” and (b) “policing of Black bodies is deeply historicized, especially regarding outdoor spaces and white women.” Figure 5.3 Redacted Photo of Power Point Slide Dr. Deere Shared in Class 159 Not only did Dr. Deere convincingly argue that the same macro-level discourses and ideologies that allowed Tyrus to be mistreated by his teacher were at play between Christopher Cooper and the Amy Cooper in Central Park, but she also used the incident as a tool to mediate students’ comprehensions of the video data as a racialized and racist interaction. To this point, Dr. Deere had been very pedagogical—bringing students into her analysis process. Then, she shared her main point, an emphasis on what the interaction could teach the field and, more importantly, teachers who were part of the DBR project about racialization. 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 We put it back to [the teachers] and said, “Partly what you need to recognize is that the thing that happened between Tyrus, Rebecca, and the teacher is scripted very similarly to what happened in Central Park”, ok? ((continues gesturing toward the screen)) And re:ally pu:shing on the idea and >recognizing that the policing of Black bodies happens over and over again.< ((rolls wrists to gesture “over and over”)) Here is how it’s happening to a 7-year-old. And, you know, one of the things we push on is Rebecca is learning- that, too. So Tyrus is learning something ((raises left hand with palm facing up)) and Rebecca is learning something at the same time. ((raises right hand with palm facing up)) She is learning that she can access power (or/for) punishment for Tyrus like that. ((snaps finger)) And so, for us this was one way that we intervened. Throughout her lesson, Dr. Deere routinely stressed the collaborative nature of the project and its implications for teachers and teacher learning. In line 31, she said, “We put it back to the teachers,” and she talked about the work that she and her research team did as an intervention. It is noteworthy that the original research questions of the project were not explicitly centered around the policing of Black boys in informal learning environments. Dr. Deere and her research team noticed this interaction in the data analysis process, and they felt a responsibility to intervene, address it with teachers, and stop this racist behavior. 160 Still, the most compelling dimension of how Dr. Deere mediated student learning in this moment was her explicit naming of this incident as an actual and significant instance of learning. Her main argument was not that the teacher’s response to Tyrus negatively impacted his experience of learning or could potentially be deleterious to his achievement or development of a STEM identity, although those hypotheses could surely be made. Instead, she defined the moment-to-moment unfolding of the interaction itself as learning. In a think-aloud interview where we reviewed the video clip together, Dr. Deere reflected: Some people in the room were trying to get inside of like, “Why does this little detail stuff matter?” And this video, in particular, I think, demonstrates it, and we can slow it down and see what is happening about how race is reproduced. Even in kind of what people might see as mundane activity, yes, in like startlingly obvious ways and I was trying to show [students] that. She underscored that her intention was to demonstrate to her students that these problems are being reproduced with young children in everyday kinds of ways… and for me it’s partly the power of the learning sciences, is that it, it can make visible how race is being remade all the time, so that’s why [I chose to teach] this video. Overall, this event revealed that Dr. Deere privileged understanding racialization as a form of learning in two main ways: (a) she helped students recognize the ethical dimensions of being accountable to the findings of your designs; and (b) she legitimated the microanalysis of racialization in learning environments as a legitimate topic of study for scholars in the field. Of these, the second is particularly remarkable given the Learning Sciences field’s general race- evasiveness in the study of human learning. Dr. Deere socialized students into a new way of thinking about what counts as learning and, thus, is an appropriate focus of analysis of research in the learning sciences. Focal Event Summary and R-CHAT Analysis In this focal event, Dr. Deere planned a lesson to give students a window into the practice of designing, conducting, and analyzing design-based research using video data. This activity is a 161 routine and culturally salient practice within the field of the learning sciences and, therefore, an important element of an introductory LS course such as this one. Throughout the lesson, Dr. Deere provided insights across a few cases. I focused on one example of a video of a racialized incident between two second-grade students (one Black boy and one white girl) and their teacher (a white woman). Dr. Deere used multiple tools to support student learning and racial meaning-making. Her choice of the video itself serving as a powerful tool was deeply consequential. She told me, “For me, sometimes when we only think about broad-scale policy change as the answer to social change, we let everybody off the hook about the ways that they’re reproducing it in micro moments, too.” Therefore, she aimed to mediate students’ ability to recognize and even empirically observe how this process is unfolding in learning environments. She told me: I think partly what we have come to is that oftentimes what people do when they elevate how is racialization is playing out for Black boys or kids of color, we don’t also say the white kids are learning things at the same time, right? And Rebecca, in this moment is learning…every Karen comes from somewhere. Rebecca is learning to be a Karen right here. Readers here may be familiar with the term “Karen”—a cultural trope for entitled white women who act as “the policewomen of all human behavior” (Miller, 2019). To posit that students portrayed in the video were learning white supremacy in the interaction between Tyrus and the teacher is no understatement. Yet, where there is learning, there is also the opportunity for un/learning and for conceptual change. Dr. Deere told me in an interview, “I also feel like it is really important, and what bothers me, though, is that this particular video is second graders. I am also unwilling to say Rebecca is destined to be a Karen.” This emphasis on the possibility for change demonstrates Dr. Deere’s belief in the transformative power of learning—something she tried to instill in her students. 162 Multiple students noted that Dr. Deere’s political commitments as a researcher are also reflected in her pedagogy. Isaac, an Education Policy PhD student, told me during a focus group: Even showing us that video last week, I think other professors may not necessarily have been willing to discuss that or show that to people because of a fear of how it could—fear of making people uncomfortable or whatnot, and Dr. Deere, that’s not how she views it, ‘cause she’s like, “This is reality, and so we need to discuss this.” Darius, a Learning Sciences graduate student, shared comments that reflected a similar sentiment: I think Dr. Deere, in particular, does not shy away from trying to get us to engage with things that are uncomfortable, and I think she can push us, too. She is not gonna—she’s gonna be honest and not try to edge around things, like be overly cautious in terms of—I mean, she is cautious about making sure everyone feels comfortable about talking about things, but I think she is willing to push us all and not sugarcoat things. She’s gonna be honest about the reality. Surely, understanding the reality of racism and racialization in the process of human learning is a large part of Dr. Deere’s program of research. Conclusion Over time, I have come to think about classroom discourse as a type of dance between instructors and students, and I hope that the presentation of data in this chapter captured a bit of that spirit via the focal events I presented and analyzed. In some instances, the dance is highly choreographed—the instructor teaches a routine that the students practice. Other times, instructors use improvisation—freestyling and going wherever the rhythm of the environment takes them. Cazden (2001) posited, “There are…multiple agendas within any single classroom– shifting from hour to hour and even minute to minute” (p. 54). Indeed, some of the most impactful learning moments are unplanned. Times when faculty forego choreography for improv, being responsive to the emergent and immediate needs of students and their learning, can constitute highly generative moments of collective meaning-making. Barnes (1974) 163 emphasized that studies of classroom curriculum must also account for this type of improv. He wrote, “The actual (as opposed to the intended) curriculum consists of the meanings enacted or realized by a particular teacher and class. But this possibility depends on the social relationships, the communication system, which the teacher sets up” (p. 1). In this dissertation, I aimed to understand the social organization of the dance of classroom discourse, particularly around racialization and the moment-to-moment interactions that come to constitute racial meaning-making. I analyzed four focal events that highlighted how faculty’s intervention served to mediate or undermine racial meaning-making in three courses. Whether they are formal policies or informal norms of engagement, articulating the implicit and explicit rules of race talk in the classroom is an important aspect of understanding learning and racial meaning-making. Faculty played a significant role in mediating what those norms for engagement were. In contrast to Dr. Thomas and Dr. Berr who adhered to conventional approaches, Dr. Deere’s and Dr. Davis’s interventions not only welcomed a race-conscious and critically reflexive stance to the valued practices of reading, research design, and analysis, but they required it. In the next chapter, I explore the comparative dimensions of these focal events. 164 Chapter 6: Making Learning a Paradise: Discussion and Conclusion To produce practices that advance educational justice…teachers must develop deep understandings of their own multidimensional identities, privileges, power, and oppression. Such literacies include the historical, sociocultural, and political contexts of education, as well as the enduring and shifting constructs of race, racism, and power that form past and present social relations and practices in schools. – Josephine Pham (2022, p. 4), “Racial Micropolitical Literacy: Examining the Sociopolitical Realities of Teachers of Color Co- constructing Student Transformational Resistance” Classrooms are bustling constellations of activity marked by students and instructors negotiating the “what” and “how” of their shared work in collective and complex ways. Learning is a collective endeavor, and tools and artifacts play an essential role in learning. In the learning process, tools are mediators—designed to extend our ability to do things we are not yet able to do on our own (Vygotsky, 1980). Within the context of higher education, faculty routinely appropriate and employ tools to support their students’ learning in classroom environments. Such tools for learning used in university classrooms can be material (e.g., a course syllabus), ideational (e.g., ways of thinking that are valued in the discipline), or embodied (e.g., faculty’s instructional moves, strategies, forms of assistance). Gutiérrez (2008) argued that understanding the role tools play in the learning process is vital to the study of human learning because they “give meaning to everyday life” (p. 151). This meaning-making process is often achieved communally and dialogically. Put simply, conversation animates our social world. Bangerter and Clark (2002) argued that “joint activities take coordination, and people achieve much of that coordination through dialogue” (p. 196). Indeed, this is the case in classroom settings. Part of what makes teaching such arduous and exciting work is its improvisational nature. If you have ever taught a class, you 165 know how many stars have to align for a lesson to go as it was originally planned. Classrooms are comprised of people with competing interests and objectives. In this way, Schlegloff (1982) was right to encourage scholars to conceptualize discourse as an “achievement,” “something that may have taken some doing in the face of potential resistance” (p. 104). Scholars, then, should consider the coordination of joint activity as something that can take place both because of and in spite of everyday acts of resistance as a key focus on analysis in the study of dialogue. Sociocultural learning theories, like Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), are well-suited to provide scholars with the conceptual clarity to detail the unfolding of joint activity such as the focal events presented in the previous chapter. CHAT also creates space to acknowledge how tools mediate learning (e.g., Cole & Engeström, 1996; Roth, 2004; Roth & Lee, 2007; Stetsenko, 2020). In particular, CHAT’s focus on analyzing micro-level (i.e., interpersonal, moment-to-moment) interactions as situated within sociocultural contexts makes it appropriate to study both how faculty mediate student learning and all members of the classroom community work collectively to support learning (Cliff et al., 2022)—crucial phenomena of interest in my dissertation study. Yet, a lineage of scholars in the learning sciences has emphasized that tool mediation is neither apolitical nor race-neutral (Leonardo & Manning, 2007; Nasir & Hand, 2006). Instead, the tools we use and how we use those tools to mediate learning are reflective of broader sociopolitical ideologies extant in our cultural contexts (Esmonde & Booker, 2016). An important ideology is race. Race is an omnipresent social system in the U.S. American society (Bell, 1991), and the institution of higher education continues to reflect, and oftentimes reproduce, the racialized and gendered stratification that exists in our broader society (Liu, 2011; Patton, 2009, 2016; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998). Racism is taught and rationalized daily in university classrooms 166 via the persistent privileging of a whitestreamed curriculum, the admonishment and erasure of epistemological diversity, and socialization processes that reward assimilation into whiteness (Masta, 2021; Sleeter, 2011). Its effects are also felt. Literature on doctoral education, for instance, has called attention to how racism is a common occurrence for graduate Students of Color (e.g., Davis & Livingstone, 2016; Gildersleeve et al., 2011; Johnson & Strayhorn, 2022; Nagbe, 2019; Noy & Ray, 2012; Truong & Museus, 2012). While studying racism as an outcome is undoubtedly significant, we must also interrogate the processes of sensemaking about race that produce material realities that persistently disadvantage People of Color in higher education. These processes of sensemaking are foundations of inequity. Therefore, I conceptualize classrooms as not only racialized spaces but also racializing spaces. This begs the question: How does racialization (which I define as the discursive (re)production of racial meanings) occur in doctoral classrooms? And what role do faculty play in mediating racial meaning-making? This dissertation presented findings from a qualitative study designed to witness how four faculty (a Black woman, a Native woman, a white man, and a white woman) supported students to make meaning of race within the context of three doctoral-level class(rooms). The first set of research questions asked: What pedagogical forms of mediation do equity-minded faculty use to facilitate racial meaning-making in doctoral courses? How do students respond? To answer these questions, I began by outlining the culture of the Sociology, Learning Sciences, and Political Science classes I observed. Then, I provided a thick description and deep analysis of four focal events. These micro-moments of racial meaning-making were facilitated by interventions of faculty members. In the next section, I provide a summary of the key findings presented in Chapters 4 and 5. I then turn to synthesize insights across all three cases, with a specific focus on 167 comparative dimensions of the study (i.e., racial identity of the faculty member and perceived salience of race to the course, as articulated in Research Question 2). Summary of Key Findings Chapter 4, the initial findings chapter, set the stage for the potential of making such inferences through a thick description of each course’s instructor and their background; the goals, pedagogy, and curriculum of the course; the department or graduate program in which it was situated; as well as each professor’s effort to create community and connect the course to broader social issues and socialization for doctoral students. Then, in Chapter 5, detailed analyses of the four focal events—one with each of the four faculty instructors’ class facilitation at the center of the story—brought to life a professor’s general approach as it concerned a moment in the course where racial meaning-making was occurring via the planned curriculum or via the intra-classroom discourse and dialogue. Across the cases, I uncovered: (a) how race can become salient to classroom interaction in a variety of disciplines and around a variety of formal learning goals; (b) how racialization of curriculum is not a question, but a given; and (c) how a professor’s actions mediate racial meaning-making. Findings suggested that the social organization of learning and racial meaning-making were anchored around a primary objective: developing a scholarly identity. To use the language of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), apprenticing students into the discipline as peripheral but legitimate members was important to each of the faculty members in my study. Doctoral coursework was a space where students could learn the tools and tricks of the trade. By exposing students to extant cultural practices, histories, and tensions in the field, faculty sought to reveal what Brown et al. (1989) called authentic activity, or “the ordinary practices of the culture” (p. 34). Two of the most salient authentic activities included reading and interpreting 168 texts and argumentation; they were emphasized in all three learning environments. Through dialogue and collective meaning-making in large and small group settings, students learned how to think like a sociologist, learning scientist, or political scientist. Yet, each faculty member had a very specific idea of what it meant to think like a sociologist, learning scientist, or political scientist—that is, their idealized ideas of scholarly identity within the context of the discipline. Mendoza (2007) reminded us that “Discipline-based cultures are the primary source of [future] faculty members’ identity and expertise…” (p. 74). However, if you ask two people to describe the culture of their discipline, you might get three different answers. While the disciplines and fields represented in my sample contained aspects of shared identity that provided some unity among its members (i.e., social sciences), there is ample diversity of thought within the sample—indeed within each of these fields. These divergences in beliefs about the epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments that the discipline itself, as well as the members of the discipline, have were salient to the learning faculty and students did together. For instance, the Learning Sciences class was co-taught by Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas, who had very different ideas about what it means to engage in the study of human learning. Seemingly reflective of his work in the hard sciences, Dr. Thomas is a cognitivist, and this aspect of his identity shapes his perspective on learning. Surely, he is willing to engage with sociocultural perspectives on learning but does not lead with it. On the other hand, Dr. Deere was steadfast in her belief that studying human learning demanded attunement to the political and ethical. “Theories of learning,” as she told students, are simultaneously “theories of society.” The work of learning scientists, then, is to work through what type of society we are collectively building. Are we building societies where schooling can continue to reproduce racism and colonialism, or are we dismantling that toward more just ways of communing? This type of 169 reflexive and power-conscious analysis was very distinct from Dr. Thomas’s approach to learning. Comparing Case Insights A key aspect of my dissertation study was its comparative dimensions. I purposely chose three courses instead of two to enhance the opportunities for comparison within the social sciences. I also purposely chose one that was co-taught to capture how, even within the same course, two professors could facilitate racial meaning-making in very different ways. This research design decision was linked to a fundamental goal of mine to understand within- and across-discipline variation. Ultimately, I endeavored to examine how the racial identity of the faculty member and how the perceived salience of race to the course intersected with faculty’s approach to mediating racial meaning-making. In this section, I synthesize key insights across the three cases. Perceived Salience of Race to the Course Jurow and Shea (2015) emphasizes that “Attention to equity reminds us to focus on moments that have often been relegated to the margins or deemed unimportant to consequential learning” (p. 292). Put another way, (in)equity is embedded into the most mundane aspects of social life. So, too, is racialization. Race is (re)made both as a social structure and meaning system in micro-moments, and classrooms are important contexts within which these racial meanings are (re)produced. The true irony is that racialization is so endemic to our society that people can engage in race talk, and thus racial meaning-making, without ever even saying the word ‘race.’ In this way, racial meaning-making is happening everywhere and all the time; its salience and omnipresence are real. There is no monopoly on racial meaning-making. 170 However, not all faculty in my sample were aligned with this perspective. When I asked the white faculty in my sample about whether race was salient to the courses they were teaching, they both answered with ambivalence. Dr. Thomas (Learning Sciences) and Dr. Berr (Political Science), neither of whom have formal expertise in the topic of race, mentioned that they leave it up to students to decide how race shows up in the class. For instance, when discussing the Learning Sciences class, Dr. Thomas told me, “There’s students for whom those are—the issues of race and identity are their guiding interests. That will show up in their work throughout the course.” Dr. Berr expressed a similar approach, naming that she puts the issue of race “on the table, but it is up to students to decide “if they wanna pick it up.” Students could decide to focus on race individually in their course papers or they had the opportunity to choose the topics of study for the last 4 weeks of the class. “Racial Foundations of International Law” was one of many choices that students could choose from. It was not that Dr. Berr or Dr. Thomas believed that race was unimportant—they just did not perceive race as central to the core intellectual project of the class. This approach entrenches a belief that race and, by extension, racial meaning-making, is something that some individuals can opt into rather than be an aspect of the shared work of the discipline. Notably, in the co-taught Learning Sciences course, Dr. Thomas’s tendency to be tolerant, yet agnostic, to racial meaning-making meant that that labor fell on Dr. Deere. Students, Dr. Thomas, and even Dr. Deere herself all told me that she was at the center of whatever racial meaning-making happened in the course. Dr. Thomas confessed that he relied on Dr. Deere for her expertise in that topic, noting that students would not get the same level of training around sociocultural and political and ethical perspectives of human learning if only just he were in the course. Thus, the Dewey focal event was but one of multiple instances wherein Dr. Thomas 171 made a comment that Dr. Deere historicized. She described that dynamic as part of “the dance” that she and Dr. Thomas have developed over time. Racial Identity of the Faculty Member Dr. Berr’s and Dr. Thomas’s perspectives about the salience of race in the course stood in stark contrast to the perspectives of the Women of Color in my sample. When describing what prompted their interventions in the focal events I analyzed, both Dr. Davis (Sociology) and Dr. Deere (Learning Sciences) talked about the need to be responsive to feelings they were experiencing in that moment. Their comments were motivated by the everyday, affective components of their racialized experiences. For Dr. Deere, it was a feeling of discomfort. She explained that she was uncomfortable with how Dr. Thomas facilitated the discussion about John Dewey’s vision of education. In fact, Dr. Deere shared that she had learned the vital importance of historicizing texts a long time ago. She recounted the first time she read the work of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky. It was an emotionally taxing experience for her, as a Native woman, to have to absorb anti-Indigenous sentiments reflected in Vygotsky’s writing or to be in classes that taught Dewey with no mention of his entanglement with Indigenous boarding schools. She learned early in her career to find ways to engage the gems represented in the scholarship of canonical writers in the learning sciences, while also naming the harm they have propagated. Dr. Deere believed that holding complexity is paramount for Scholars of Color aiming to do transgressive work in academic spaces. With racialization literally being in the title of the class, it is likely no surprise that racial meaning-making was a very prominent aspect of learning in the “Racialization in Latin America” course. All the texts for the course were centered around race; thus, racial meaning- 172 making was definitively the core objective of activity in the course. In this way, Dr. Davis’s point of intervention was distinct from that of Dr. Deere, who had to teach students to search for race in readings where it was otherwise left elusive. Dr. Davis realized the need to invite students to be intentional about how they engaged in racial meaning-making by rethinking their “reading and experiencing practices.” Student comments about interracial dating patterns, an empirical finding from the week’s key text, were steeped in logics reflecting misogynoir. Dr. Davis recognized that this conversation could cause students harm. In an interview, we discussed how her identity as a light-skinned Black woman afforded her certain privilege. She also talked about how common it is for dark-skinned Black women to be robbed of that. She said that she was unsure whether white faculty (and I would add non-Black People of Color) would have known whether or how to intervene, but she, as a Black woman, felt uniquely positioned to redirect the dialogue. In summary, the narratives Dr. Davis and Dr. Deere shared about how and why they paused and reframed the conversations in the focal events I analyzed were motivated by aspects of how they experienced their racial identity. Their interventions constituted pedagogical forms of mediation—refracted by their own lived experiences as a Black woman and a Native woman, respectively. They pulled from their own intersubjective understandings to support student learning and racial meaning-making. In this way, Dr. Davis and Dr. Deere leveraged their racial identities as fundamentally embodied forms of knowledge—making them attuned to learning opportunities around racialization in their classes. To be clear, my choice to explore how faculty’s racial identity impacts how they mediate racial meaning-making is not an attempt to render race a static or causal variable. Instead, I recognize the ways that the lived and felt experiences of race constitute a powerful sense of (inter)subjectivity. Thus, people’s experiences 173 of racialization can serve as funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014) that sensitize them to particular ways of knowing and being. It is significant that the Women of Color in my sample used their racial identity as a tool—a resource in their pedagogy—whereas the white faculty did not mention their racial identities at all. These findings suggest a need to affirm and guide faculty in how to use aspects of their lived identities, like their racial identities, as funds of identities in their pedagogical praxis. Study Significance I began my dissertation project with a desire to trace how faculty and students negotiate working together to make meaning of race in the context of doctoral coursework. Through in- depth ethnographic accounts of learning across three courses, I analyzed four distinct instances in which faculty intervened to mediate racial meaning-making. I now highlight two meaningful contributions that my research makes to the literature on teaching and learning in doctoral coursework. Doctoral Coursework as a Racializing Space I have argued that within the context of doctoral education, coursework is a socializing context. As my findings elucidates, the classroom is an environment where faculty introduce students to key scholars, histories, and debates in the field. It is also a space where students learn (implicitly and explicitly) whose voices are respected, which types of research questions are (de)valued, and which writing styles and argumentation conventions are validated. This type of learning is not a passive process. Faculty play an active and agentic role in student socialization. Although faculty-student interactions are known to shape doctoral student learning and socialization (Anderson & Anderson, 2012; Felder et al., 2014; Karpouza & Emvalotis, 2019), classroom practice and faculty pedagogy remain a black box in doctoral coursework. Borrowing 174 Walker and colleagues’ (2008) language, if doctoral education is the formation of scholars, the field must take seriously that the classroom, and the bustling interactions that take place within it, is a necessary site of empirical inquiry. There is a growing body of literature that conceptualizes the university classroom as a racialized space (e.g., Bensimon & Gray, 2020; Ching & Roberts, 2021; Harper & Davis, 2016; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Sleeter, 2011; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998). Scholars have long exposed the racialized disparities and experiences of racism that doctoral students of color face as they pursue their doctorates (e.g., Felder et al., 2014; Gildersleeve et al., 2011; Nettles, 1990; Patterson-Stephens & Hernández, 2018; Turner & Thompson, 1993). Gay (2004) argued: Graduate students of color face many of the same issues as their younger counterparts in K-12 educational institutions. They, too, have to function in an alien and often hostile environment, consistently encounter irrelevant curriculum, and frequently are taught by culturally insensitive and uncaring instructors. (p. 266) It is clear that doctoral students enter into spaces and interactions that are racialized (and too often racist) during their time in graduate school. Yet, few scholars have explored the dimensions of how these spaces and interactions are racializing—learned and negotiated in the context of joint activity. This gap is where my work can make a significant contribution. The difference between racialized (an adjective) and racializing (a verb) is noteworthy, and it points to two distinct foci of analysis. In a study that positions the racialized dimensions of doctoral coursework as its phenomenon of interest, scholars might point to experiences and outcomes of racialization within the course-taking phase. Although their focus did not center explicitly on coursework, an excellent example of a study like this is Felder and colleagues’ (2014) paper using racial socialization as a framework to “elucidate systems of meaning related to race and their relationship to doctoral student success and degree completion” (p. 26). Their scholarship makes a significant contribution to our understanding the racializing dimensions of 175 doctoral education. On the other hand, a study that grapples with the racializing dimensions of doctoral coursework, like my dissertation, demands a more ecological focus that seeks to reveal the social organization of racial meaning-making. I developed Racialized Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (R-CHAT) as a model to explore how racial meanings are constructed and organized in the everyday unfolding of classroom joint activity. R-CHAT is a transdisciplinary framework that draws on critical theories of racialization (Omi & Winant, 2015; Saha, 2018), racialized legitimacy (Rodgers et al., under review), and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001; Gutiérrez et al., 2016; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004; Vygotsky, 1980). R-CHAT provided a framework for me to situate racialization, or the discursive (re)production of racial meanings, not only as an outcome of learning, but as constitutive of the learning process itself. A striking feature of R-CHAT is its simultaneous focus on macro-level discourses and ideologies, meso-level disciplinary and departmental routines and practices, and micro-level joint activity. Of central importance is the blue lens, which you can reference in the Figure 2.3, which represents dimensions of faculty subjectivity. Together, the model affords a deep analysis of how big-D Discourse (Gee, 2015) and common disciplinary approaches to race become filtered through the faculty person and refracted onto the activity system (i.e., the classroom) in ways that influence the racial meanings that develop in that context. Additionally, R-CHAT’s focus on faculty subjectivity aims to position faculty as whole as dynamic people instead of reducing them to a monolith. It also honors their active and agentic ways that faculty (acting as stewards of their discipline) facilitate learning and racial meaning-making within their classroom context. Given faculty’s own socialization into the norms and routine practices of the discipline, I found that the racializing dimensions of faculty’s pedagogy also took on a disciplining character, which I discuss in the 176 next section. Overall, it is my hope that scholars will employ R-CHAT to enrich deep sociocultural and microanalytic studies of racial meaning-making within and beyond the context of doctoral coursework. Disciplinary World-Building in Doctoral Coursework Research has demonstrated that various individual, organizational, and institutional factors influence how faculty make decisions about their pedagogy (Hora & Ferrare, 2013; Kane et al., 2002; Kember & Gow, 1994; Posselt et al., 2020). Nelson Laird and colleagues (2008) argued that a core part of faculty’s work is to “learn what is appropriate, expected, and accepted in terms of their behavior in the field, including how to teach and how to learn” (p. 472). Thus, the distinct histories, ideologies, and cultures of the discipline influence what is considered ‘good teaching’ and, by extension, become one of the strongest influences for course planning (Lattuca & Stark, 1994; Stark, 2000). These distinctions are partially what produce variations in pedagogical practices among the disciplines. As I like to say, the disciplines often discipline— they shape us as scholars and thinkers and impact how we bring newcomers into our communities of practice. Furthermore, the histories of the disciplines, and higher education writ large, are riddled with racism (e.g., Gilroy, 2000; Steinberg, 1998; Wilder, 2014), and these histories are reflected in many of the tools, artifacts, and authentic activities faculty commonly used in service of doctoral student learning and socialization (Rodgers et al., under review). In Chapter 5, we witnessed Drs. Berr, Davis, Deere, and Thomas contend with fundamentally disciplinary questions in the interventions they made with their students—questions about what it meant to learn together, whether racialization was part of that work, and in what ways were at the heart of each focal event. Who are you as a person in the social world (sociology)? How do you engage 177 in persuasive argumentation (political science)? What is your political and ethical responsibilities as a burgeoning researcher in our field (learning sciences)? And across the three cases, how do you read and interpret texts? I do not raise these questions because I think my findings have the answers to these questions. On the contrary, I argue that these deep tensions among scholars in the disciplines can be brought to light in the empirical investigation of doctoral coursework. Take, for instance, Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas in the Learning Sciences course. Their personal histories and pathways into the field led them to very different understandings about what it means to study human learning. These differences raised generative contradictions about what is considered the shared work of the field, and the classroom became a powerful and consequential context for both faculty and students to work through those contradictions. In each classroom I observed, I noticed that faculty were not only teaching about the course content in racialized ways, but their pedagogy represented a type of disciplinary world- building. For Dr. Deere and Dr. Thomas, the disciplinary worlds they sought to build transgressed against normative notions of what it meant to become a sociologist or a learning scientist to redefine and expand those roles. On the other hand, Dr. Thomas’s and Dr. Berr’s pedagogy was reproductive—socializing students into conventional approaches to disciplinary learning. Overall, my findings suggested that doctoral coursework is an important context in which students learn what has their discipline been, what it currently is, and what it can (and should) become. This study serves as an important reminder of the connectedness among the histories and futures of the disciplines, faculty pedagogy, and doctoral student learning. Implications for Future Research Findings from this study can motivate multiple lines of future empirical inquiry. First, scholars who study graduate education should conduct more empirical studies of doctoral 178 coursework. As I have highlighted, there remains a dearth of literature on postsecondary teaching and learning. Of that literature, there are considerably fewer studies that explore learning in the context of graduate education. Khost and colleagues (2015) provided a possible explanation for this gap in the literature. They wrote: Scholars theorize less about graduate than undergraduate pedagogy because of unstated and suspect assumptions: graduate students already know how to learn, content coverage is most important, graduate student writers are future professionals in training, and graduate courses are for advancing innovations in research, not teaching. (p. 19) The problem, of course, is that assumptions beget more assumptions; a lack of evidence illuminating the purposes, problems, and possibilities of teaching and learning in doctoral education limits how effective interventions designed to improve graduate education can be. Therefore, future research should aim to generate deep, observational research about how learning and racial meaning-making unfolds in doctoral coursework. Leveraging the R-CHAT framework, a related study could focus on the impact of meso-level routines and policies on racial meaning-making in classrooms. For instance, scholars might bound the case study to have a set of classes (requisite and elective) in the same department at the same university. This research design would produce empirical research building on the disciplining dimensions of coursework featured in my study’s findings. Additionally, for scholars seeking to substantively and sustainably change the material conditions for and experiences of learning in postsecondary classrooms, I urge you to remember that faculty are necessary partners in this work. In a context like doctoral education that devalues and even disincentivizes good teaching, it can be easy to make broad generalizations about who faculty are, what they know, and what they need to learn and develop as pedagogues. Yet, to ignore the multiple resources that faculty bring to the teaching process effectively reproduces a banking model of education. It reproduces the precise dynamic this dissertation aims to disrupt. 179 Each faculty member who participated in my study cared about their teaching, their students, and their discipline. They showed up and tried their best. I continuously reflect on how Dr. Davis began her intervention in the focal event I highlighted. After announcing that she was going to intervene, she acknowledged to her students, “I don’t know how to do this the best way…” Still, she attempted an intervention, and it turned out to be one of the most salient learning moments in the class. Multiple students across different interviews mentioned the role this interaction played on how they understood racial meaning-making in the course. My point is that faculty have deep and important insights about their disciplines and embodied forms of knowledge that can contribute to the equity-minded transformation of doctoral coursework and the disciplines. Future research should consider methodologies such as social design experiments (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and participatory design-based research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) as ways to involve faculty as thought partners, co-designers, and co-theorizers in the work of re-mediating doctoral education. I hope others will join me in the work of better understanding how learning takes place in doctoral classrooms so that we can transform it towards more just ends. Implications for Practice Reflecting on findings from my dissertation study, I offer three considerations for how readers can engage with my work to advance equity-minded and race-conscious practice in doctoral education. Cultivating Critical Literacies Around Racial Meaning-Making First, educators should challenge the equivocal uptake of racial meaning-making in faculty pedagogy. Across the disciplines, race talk is a common problem space in doctoral education (Bryan et al., 2012). There is a misconception that only those with content expertise in 180 race are poised to support students’ capacity to make meaning of race in classroom learning. This perspective must be challenged. As a scholar of racialization, I have deep respect for the amount of study and reflection it takes to develop expertise in this topic. It is a rigorous field of study, and my comments are not meant to imply otherwise. However, I also believe that to suggest that only some people should take on the labor of supporting students’ critical race consciousness has dangerous repercussions. The reality is that everyone is making meaning of race all the time. Race operates as a sign system (Leonardo & Manning, 2017) and a set of social relationships (Ince, 2022). Drawing on critical race theorists, race is an endemic part of U.S. American society (Bell, 1991). Moreover, race is present (even when rendered invisible) in the tools and artifacts that shape classroom learning. Reticence or even downright refusal by some faculty to acknowledge the persistence of racial meaning-making does not mean it is not happening in their classrooms. More likely, this stance suggests that it is happening in harmful or inequitable ways. Consider, for instance, what might have been students’ experience in the Learning Sciences course if Dr. Thomas recognized it as an aspect of his role as a professor to support students’ understanding of power and historicity. Additionally, perhaps more telling, what would students have learned if Dr. Deere were not co-teaching the course? The dynamic between Dr. Deere, a Native woman, and Dr. Thomas, a white man, is symbolic of a broader social pattern around the inequitable distribution of labor of racial equity work in higher education. Research continues to demonstrate the ways that Women of Color and other multiply marginalized people experience identity taxation relative to their colleagues (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012; Porter et al., 2018). Indeed, Dr. Deere is a fantastic and wonderfully capable 181 scholar-educator-practitioner, and she balances the many balls she keeps in the air very well. Yet, this emotional and intellectual labor should not rest solely on Dr. Deere. Drawing on Gutiérrez’s (2008) notion of sociocritical literacies, I argue that all faculty must cultivate students’ sociocritical literacies around racial meaning-making in classroom practice. Gutiérrez (2011) defined sociocritical literacies as “a historicizing literacy that privileges and is contingent upon students’ sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally” (p. 149). A critical focus of learning and object of activity in all courses should be to expand doctoral students’ repertoires for developing sociocritical literacies that they can then use in service of future research, teaching, and service. This pedagogical approach also recognizes the need for humanizing and historicizing pedagogies that combat the everyday epistemic violence People of Color experience in the academy. Of course, for this to be possible, faculty, too, must expand their own sense of sociocritical literacy—which brings me to my following recommendation for future practice. Continued Opportunities for Equity-minded Learning for Faculty The intentional and equity-minded design, implementation, and iteration of faculty pedagogy can have a profound impact on doctoral students’ scholarly formation. Yet, many faculty need support to intervene appropriately in racist forms of racial meaning-making in their classrooms (Bensimon & Gray, 2020). Ball (2018) highlighted how teachers operate within “discretionary spaces,” using their individual judgment to guide pedagogical decision-making and interpretation. Let’s imagine a department institutes a curricular change as part of a college- wide adoption of racial equity as a strategic priority. The department chair might work with other faculty to update the syllabus of a core course to include the perspectives of more People of Color. In many ways, this change could be positioned as a win. Yet, the faculty assigned to teach 182 the course still have the discretion to decide what to teach, how to teach, what (not) to say, when (not) to intervene, and what tools to use to meet their learning objectives. These everyday decisions (some of which are well-planned and others on the fly) have resounding implications for students’ learning experiences in the class. Ball (2022) argued that discretionary spaces can be profoundly generative for change. She asserted: These discretionary spaces can be an enormous resource for good, because it is through them that teaching can be practiced in ways that are culturally responsive to communities, that build on their resources and ways of knowing and doing, and that responsibly serve the children and families that are so often harmed. (para. 16) This shifts the focus of change away from being a project of control where policies are designed to limit the agency of faculty and control for manifestations of problematic behaviors towards one of learning. This would require university administration to say to faculty, “We trust you, and we know you can do better. Here is how we will support your continued development.” Taking my cue from Dr. Estela Bensimon and her wonderful colleagues at the Center for Urban Education (CUE), I propose that universities provide and structurally incentivize the participation in routine and meaningful learning opportunities for faculty to engage in reflection about their pedagogy. I was hesitant to list this as a recommendation for practice given how lofty it feels. I come to this topic of study recognizing the structural barriers that give rise to a system that disincentivizes faculty at research-intensive universities from making an investment in their teaching. I truly believe that most faculty do not want to be ineffective teachers, but I also believe that most faculty want to be granted tenure. When forced to make a choice between investing in the continued development of their pedagogy or job security, tenure will almost always win. These institutional factors are significant, but as we struggle to re-mediate the university in ways that represent our values, we can still make movement. Cultivating cultures of inquiry, 183 as Bensimon would say, is a much needed and feasible point of intervention. Providing faculty with tools that spark conceptual clarity to the ways their classroom is a racializing space, a safe and intellectually rich environment to surface taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching in their discipline, and a community of practice that can lovingly hold them accountable to continue un/learning and development are all necessary. Moreover, these learning opportunities must be differentiated learning to maximize their impact. The types of support and intervention Dr. Berr and Dr. Thomas need are markedly different from those needed by Dr. Deere and Dr. Davis, but they both deserve environments in which they can grow as pedagogues. Learning opportunities should be tailored to fit the needs of the participants rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Designing programs that appropriately differentiate where multiple people can learn without sacrificing the possibility of one group’s learning for another is essential to not reproducing similar racializing dynamics we seek to destroy. Challenging the Lure of “Best Practices” Lastly, I urge readers to resist interpreting findings from this study as a list of best practices. Too often, scholars and administrators approach the challenge of transforming pedagogy by identifying and adopting best practices. Researchers are pressured to offer very straightforward answers and scalable solutions to some of our social world’s most complicated and historically accumulated problems. Make no mistake, I agree with Chairman Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, who once said, “Theory’s cool; but theory no practice ain’t shit” (Malloy, 2017, p. 9). I sincerely believe that our research must be actionable and accountable to the communities we serve. It should be clear, rigorous, and persuasive, and provide openings for new ways forward. 184 Nonetheless, our research need not spoon-feed people or restrict their agency. In other words, practice without theory ain’t shit, either. The wholesale adoption of best practices is dangerous. One of my study’s most beautifully revealing findings is that faculty subjectivity was a powerful mediator for sensemaking and a catalyst for intervention around racial meaning-making. You can’t teach subjectivity; it’s not a best practice. It is who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming. Indeed, there is much to be learned about how faculty can intervene to expand students’ capacity for racial meaning-making and contribute to the transformation of doctoral education from this manuscript. I am deeply proud that my dissertation can make this vital contribution to the field. However, as readers contend with where to go from here, I hope that instead of foregrounding the question “What am I supposed to do?”, they reflect on “What can I stand to learn?” Concluding Thoughts As we struggle towards building a more just academy, the classroom can either be a site of reproduction or a portal of possibilities. The moment-to-moment decisions faculty make regarding the design of and their participation in the learning environment is a large part of what swings the pendulum toward reproduction or possibility. Besides, it is in graduate education that students themselves learn whom their disciplines want them to become as knowers and scholars within their field. Moreover, in considering how we contend with the “for what, for whom, and with whom” of doctoral education, I recognize abundant possibilities for transformation in disciplinary communities and academia more broadly (Philip et al., 2018, p. 83). I have argued that racial meaning-making is a routine part of the learning we do together in doctoral education. Yet, many faculty evade the ways their teaching can reinforce, reject, or 185 reimagine the ways that doctoral students—who are the future of the academy—come to (mis)understand and (dis)engage in racialization. Surely, this has always been a timely topic of study. However, it is not lost on me that as I write this dissertation, legislators are waging targeted attacks on anything they consider to be critical race theory (Ray & Gibbons, 2021). This is but one new instantiation of how the lives and epistemologies of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are constantly surveilled, policed, and attacked, all to protect the fallacy of white supremacy. Eluding the responsibility of providing students with critical literacies to historicize racialization both in their work and their discipline, especially in times like these, ensures that the academy remains morally bankrupt. I offer this dissertation as an urgent invitation to consider the moral, intellectual, and pedagogical dimensions of racial meaning-making as a form of learning in doctoral coursework—one that has consequential implications for graduate student development and the future of academe. Faculty themselves must learn to be accountable to examining the racial(ized) assumptions, beliefs, and meanings into which they socialize doctoral students. Doing so demands a fundamental reckoning of faculty’s pedagogical praxis, as well as aspects of their own training and socialization into the discipline! Given that faculty teach in ways that their faculty taught them, it is easy to comprehend how what are truly socially-constructed norms, values, and practices have become canonized as the legitimate ways of knowing and existing in the disciplines over time. Yet, all is not lost. We are at a critical juncture where un/learning is a necessary and powerful way forward. Finding opportunities for faculty to engage in critical reflection about their identity, leverage tools that expose the contradictions in their pedagogy, and expand their capacity for equity-minded teaching are all feasible ways to take learning in doctoral education from problem to paradise. Postsecondary classrooms can be places where life, 186 love, and liberation, through the pursuit of learning, abound. This is our collective charge, and it is my sincerest hope that this dissertation takes us all one step closer to paradise. 187 References Achiume, E. T., & Bali, A. (2021). 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New York, NY: SAGE. https://doi.org/10.1177/109634809702100108 216 Appendix A: Departmental Contact List - African American Studies - African Studies - American Studies - Anthropology - Art History - Asian American Studies - Classics - Communication Studies - Comparative Literary Studies - Economics - English: Creative Writings - English: Literature - Gender & Sexuality Studies - History - International Studies - Jewish Studies - Latinx Studies - Linguistics - Middle East and North African Studies - Performance Studies - Political Science - Psychology - Radio/Television/Film - Religious Studies - Sociology - Theatre 217 Appendix B: Informational Interview Protocol (Semi-Structured) Hello, Dr. [insert name]. My name is Aireale J. Rodgers, and I am a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California in the higher education program. I use she/her pronouns. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. In the next 30-45 minutes, we’ll be reflecting on your experience teaching [insert name of course]. Particularly, I’m interested in learning more about if and how you think about equity, as it relates to issues of race, in your teaching. Before I get started, I want to remind you that your participation in this interview is entirely voluntary. If you need to finish early or if there is any question you’d prefer not to answer, just let me know, and we’ll move on. I just hope you’ll feel comfortable enough to share your honest thoughts and feelings with me. You should have received a copy of the informed consent form in the confirmation email I sent you. If you did not get a chance to review it, please take time to do so now. Also, if you have any questions about the consent form, I’m happy to answer them now. I am committed to protecting your privacy so I will use a pseudonym that you’ll get to choose shortly. Do you have any questions or concerns so far? Also, to help me capture and accurately represent your responses, I would like to audio-record this interview. Do I have your permission to do so? Before we get started, I’d like to collect some demographic information: 1. To protect your anonymity, I will use a pseudonym for you throughout the project. Is there an pseudonym you’d like me to use for you? 2. How do you identify racially and/or ethnically? 3. What is your gender identity? 4. Which gender pronouns may I use for you? Thank you! Do you have any questions before we get started? 1. We’ll start by discussing the class I’m observing: [insert name of course]. Tell me about your how you came to teach this class. a) How long have you been teaching this course? b) Did you inherit the course from someone else? If so, tell me about how this came to be. c) How, if at all, did the course change as a result of your taking it on? 1. Probe for curricular changes such as readings, assignments, guest speakers, etc. 2. There are multiple course options for undergraduate students in your department, what would you say makes this class different from other courses that students take in your program? 218 3. We know a lot of work can go into course design. As you set out to design the course, what was your vision for the course? a) What do you want students to take away from the course (i.e., learning objectives/goals)? 4. Are you planning to have a teaching assistant for this course? If so, what do you perceive their role to be in the course? a) What role will the TA have in teaching, if any? b) What do you hope your TA will learn from working with you? 5. In a few sentences, please describe your teaching philosophy. 6. What inspired you to adopt this approach to teaching? a) Probe for connection to life history, experience as a student, previous teaching experiences. 7. How, if at all, do issues of race show up your course? a) Do you think this is similar or different from how race is discussed in other courses in your program? 8. In your perspective, do your students in your program have experience navigating conversations about race and racism? a) If so, where would you say students get these experiences? b) If not, how do you make sense of that? 9. What are some ways you support students in talking about race? 10. Reciprocity is very important to me as I think about designing my dissertation project. How might a research project like this be useful to you as a faculty member? 219 Appendix C: Classroom Observation Protocol Fieldnotes File Name Instructor Observation Date & Time Student count Length of observations Unit/Lesson Pre-assigned readings Beliefs about racial meaning 1. What beliefs and dispositions about race are salient in this classroom context? a) What about intersections of race and other social identities (e.g., class, gender, dis/ability, immigration status)? 2. How do these beliefs and dispositions influence joint activity? 3. What evidence do we find for historical racialization or historicizing consciousness in classroom learning? The social organization of racial meaning-making in classroom joint activity Joint Activity 1. What are collaborators actually doing and saying in class? What are collaborators not doing and saying? 2. How are current activities related to prior or future activities? 3. How is assistance in racial meaning-making organized within activities? 4. How are words like race and racism used by faculty? By students? a) Are there other words used to signal race without saying the word race? (e.g., urban, underserved, minority) 5. What social interactional events and shifts in participation lead us to infer that learning about race (i.e., racial meaning-making) is taking place? (Use these to identify relevant episodes of learning to be used in retrospective think-aloud interviews) 6. What are students learning about race? What is the faculty member learning about race? Division of Labor 1. If the faculty member is not talking about race, how, if at all, does conversations about race happen? 2. Who asks questions in class? Who answers them? 3. What is the division of labor with regards to racial meaning-making? In other words, who is doing the work of facilitating racial meaning? Community 1. How is expertise distributed amongst the group? (For this project, expertise is operationalized in connection to critical race consciousness and equity-mindedness) 2. Which aspects of social relations mediate racial meaning-making? 3. How do collaborators bring themselves, their cultures, and their histories into joint activity? 4. How do the histories and cultures of the discipline inform activity? 220 Rules 1. Do students participate in the class unprompted? 2. How is that participation received by the instructor? Object of Activity 1. What are the purposes of the activities facilitated by faculty? 2. How, if at all, do those purposes remain salient or change during the course of activity? 3. How, if at all, is critical race consciousness an object of learning? Faculty pedagogical moves Pedagogical Moves 1. How does the faculty member talk about race? 2. What pedagogical moves do faculty make to facilitate student learning about race? a) If faculty aren’t making these moves, are they being facilitated elsewhere in classroom activity? If so, how and by who? (related to division of labor in previous category) 3. How do students engage with faculty pedagogy? In other words, how are faculty’s pedagogical moves being taken up or not by students? 4. What strategies do faculty use to elicit student participation? 5. How does the faculty member respond to questions about race? 6. How do faculty re-mediate racial meaning? 7. How do students re-mediate racial meaning? Tools and Artifacts 1. How are tools and artifacts incorporated into activities? 2. What are the racialized histories of the tools and artifacts used by faculty to facilitate learning? 221 Appendix D: Student Focus Group Interview Protocol (Semi-Structured) Hi, everyone! My name is Aireale J. Rodgers, and I am a third year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California in the higher education program. I use she/her pronouns. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. In the next hour, we’ll be reflecting on your experience in [insert name of course]. Before we get started, I want to remind you that the focus group is confidential and your participation in this interview is entirely voluntary. If there is any question you’d prefer not to answer, just let me know, and we’ll move on. I just hope you’ll feel comfortable enough to share your honest thoughts and feelings with me. I want to provide a safe space for you all to connect and anonymously share feedback on your learning experience to your faculty. Everyone should have received a copy of the informed consent form in the confirmation email I sent you. If you did not get a chance to review the informed consent form, please take time to do so now. Also, if you have any questions about the consent form, I’m happy to answer them now. To help me capture and accurately represent your responses, I would like to audio-record our conversation. Do I have your permission to do so? Before we get started, I’d like to collect some demographic information: 1. To protect your anonymity, I will use a pseudonym for you throughout the project. to use in this interview? 2. How do you identify racially and/or ethnically? 3. What is your gender identity? 4. Which gender pronouns may I use for you? Thank you! Do you have any questions before we get started? 1. How did you decide to take this course? a) Has anyone taken a course with Dr. __ in the past? b) What was your experience like then? 2. What were you hoping to learn by taking this course? 3. There is a wide range of teaching styles that faculty can employ, and I’m wondering how you would describe Dr. __’s teaching style? a) How does their teaching style compare to other faculty members in the program? 1. What similarities do you notice? Differences? b) What stands out to you about how they teach this course? 4. Tell me about your experience in this class. What, if anything, would you say you learned from taking the class? a) How would you describe learning happened in the class? b) What does Dr. __ do that facilitates learning well? 222 c) What teaching practices does Dr. ___ use that do not facilitate learning well? 1. Probe for connections to R-CHAT (my conceptual framework) 5. I noticed that many of the readings touched on issues of race and racism throughout the semester. How would you say the class engaged with those topics? a) How would you describe the tone of the conversations? b) How did the professor participate? c) How did students participate? d) How did you participate? 6. How, if at all, did Dr. __ support the class in having conversations about race and racism? a) How might Dr. __ better support students in navigating these conversations? 7. What, if anything, did you learn about race from this class? a) What, if anything, did you unlearn? 8. If Dr. __ were to teach this course again with the goal of increasing students’ critical race consciousness, what is something you would want them to consider? a) What should they do the same? b) What might they do differently? 223 Appendix E: Retrospective Think-Aloud Procedure (Semi Structured) This protocol will be used for retrospective think-aloud interviews with faculty members. Hello, Dr. ___. Thank you, again, for taking the time to speak with me today. In the next hour, I am excited to have the opportunity to reflect on some of the important work you have been doing in your virtual classroom this semester. Before we get started, I want to remind you that this interview is confidential, and your participation is entirely voluntary. We can take breaks, skip questions, or stop whenever you need to. You should have received a copy of the informed consent form, and I am happy to answer any questions or address any concerns you may have now. What we will be doing today is called a retrospective think-aloud interview. I’ve compiled short videos of what I’ve identified as instances of racial meaning making that happened in your classroom. I have 1-2 videos that we will watch together, and I will ask you a series of questions. The videos are close captioned so you can read what folks are saying, and you will be able to rewind, fast-forward, and review the video as many times as you need. I’m mostly interested in how you make sense of what you witness happening in the video, why you made the pedagogical choices you made, and any reflections you may have after watching the videos. To help me capture and accurately represent your responses, I would like to audio-record this focus group. Do I have your permission to do so? Thank you! Do you have any questions before we get started? We will start with the first video: 1. What is happening in this video? 2. What were you doing? 3. What were students doing? 4. How would you assess your pedagogical moves? a) Would you say your teaching was effective? b) Why or why not? c) If so, for whom? 5. Do you observe instances of racial meaning making unfolding in this video? a) If so, how did this happen? b) If not, where might there have been opportunities for it? 6. What, if anything, can you learn from this episode? *Repeat procedure for the other videos* 224 Appendix F: Transcription Conventions according to Atkinson and Heritage (1984) (Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (Eds.). (1984). Structures of social action. Cambridge University Press.) ● Colons denote sound stretch (“do:g”) ● Underlining denotes emphatic stress (“I know”) ● Brackets indicate overlapping speech, for example: o Th: [Or George Washington] o Du: [I’m not dead] ● Equal signs indicate closely latched speech, or ideas, for example: o A: [And they do]= o Th: [But-] o A: = Joint custody but it doesn’t work out. ● Intervals of silence are timed in tenths of second and inserted within parentheses (0.8); short, untimed silences are marked by a dash when sound is quickly cut-off (“But-”) or with a period within parentheses (.). ● Rising intonation within an utterance is marked with an arrow (“re↑ally”) ● Utterance final rising intonation is marked with a question mark, continued intonation with a comma, and falling intonation with a period ● Asterisks indicate lowered volume (*yeah on a beach*) ● Descriptions of speech or gestures are italicized in a smaller font size within double parentheses (“((raise hand))”) ● Single parentheses surround items of doubtful transcription ● Boldface indicates items of analytic focus ● (h) indicates laugh within an utterance, for example “te(h)eacher” ● .hhh indiciates inbreath; hhh. indicates outbreath ● Inward facing brackets indicate speeded up speech, “>then she said<“ ● Outward facing brackets indicate slowed or stretch out speech, “<then she said>“
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Despite being a core context for graduate student learning and socialization, doctoral-level coursework remains undertheorized in higher education literature. Classrooms are important because they operate as sites where students develop enduring frames to support racial meaning-making, or “the interpretation of racial differences” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 10). Scholars have documented how adherence to Eurocentric epistemologies and whitewashed curriculum impoverishes knowledge production and entrenches a hegemonic university. Yet, few scholars have empirically studied how racial meanings are (re)produced through faculty’s use of various racialized tools and artifacts (e.g., syllabi, course curriculum, knowledge from their disciplinary contexts, their own subjectivity) in classroom practice and its implications for learning and socialization in doctoral education.
My project is a comparative case study of how faculty and students collectively engage to (re)produce, resist, or reimagine racial meanings in three doctoral-level courses at an R-1, historically white institution: a sociology course on race, racism, and resistance in Latin America, a political science course on international law and politics, and a foundations course in the learning sciences. Using nine interviews with instructors, six interviews and four focus groups with students, and 64 hours of classroom observations across one academic term, this study analyzes the racialized dimensions of faculty-student interactions, pedagogical forms of mediation, and curricular design to uncover how racial meaning-making mediates learning in doctoral education. Across the cases, I uncover a) how race can become salient to classroom interaction in a variety of disciplines and around a variety of formal learning goals, b) how racialization of curriculum is not a question, but a given, and c) how a professor’s actions mediate racial meaning-making. Overall, this project provides a novel perspective to a growing literature on teaching and learning in doctoral coursework and graduate student socialization, with a particular commitment to antiracist and equity-minded pedagogical praxis.
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Creator
Rodgers, Aireale J.
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Core Title
Race in the class: exploring learning and the (re)production of racial meanings in doctoral coursework
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Urban Education Policy
Degree Conferral Date
2022-08
Publication Date
07/28/2022
Defense Date
07/28/2022
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University of Southern California
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cultural-historical activity theory,doctoral coursework,graduate education,Learning,OAI-PMH Harvest,racialization
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Posselt, Julie Renee (
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), Bensimon, Estela Mara (
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), Tynes, Brendesha (
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), Vossoughi, Shirin (
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375576
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cultural-historical activity theory
doctoral coursework
graduate education
racialization