Raising Critical Consciousness

Nick Burk: Communication and Identity

Introduction & Context

An impactful take-home message from this Critical Consciousness FLC is the challenging nature of understanding privilege. The issue of privilege is important because of the role it can play in perpetuating exclusivity and inequity in learning environments. Privilege can blend into assumed normalcy for those who are routinely provided access to resources and offered a strong sense of belonging in the university, and thus can easily become taken for granted. But those who enjoy the privilege of unimpeded access and belonging can often be blissfully unaware that others around them may experience the same environment in a very different “outsider” status, which can implicitly discourage their presence and invalidate their voice. If the role of privilege is left unexamined, then a false sense of stability or security in the classroom may befall a well-intentioned, but privileged instructor.

With this recognition, a strategic first step toward fostering more equity and belonging in the classroom should be aimed toward surfacing this hidden aspect of privilege. My proposed implementation of this Critical Consciousness FLC involves redesigning an existing lesson plan on social identity and difference, away from a lecture-only format into a class activity in which the instructor and students can discuss and reflect on the role of social identity, privilege, and power. The overarching purpose of this redesign is to establish a classroom environment in which students and instructors alike are encouraged to reflect on their own privilege while also hearing about the varied experiences of those with different social identity standpoints, particularly those outside of privilege. Through this activity, my goal is to model the type of exploration and reflection that encourages students to (re)discover their voice through the lens of their own social identities.

Successes and Challenges

The primary challenge that I can anticipate is that the discussion falls flat, if students are unwilling to share their experiences or examples. This could be a complex issue, particularly if I have failed thus far to build rapport and a supportive environment in the classroom. But to help prepare for the lack of discussion, I can have follow-up questions ready that are designed to spark thought. For instance:

Has anyone felt that they didn’t belong at the University?
What are particular times that you have felt you didn’t belong? Or did belong?
Are there ways to be outside of privilege that I haven’t mentioned yet?
What is it like to get a vibe that you don’t belong somewhere?

IMPEMENTATION

Teaching communication courses offers me the opportunity to discuss the effects of social identity on communication practices. In the past, I have covered these topics in a lecture format, with some minimal student involvement. Instead of lecturing on the research involving social identity and voice, I will restructure a lesson plan to include a brief lecture, followed by a class activity that invites students to reflect on their social identities and the impact they have on their classroom experiences and communication practices.

The lecture slide is below (Defining "Difference")

This lecture works to establish a baseline understanding of social difference as a social construction, which is not naturally or implicitly occurring. I then provide examples and highlight how organizational environments tend to assign us to these categories. Finally, I stress how these social categorizations can become so integrated into our daily lives that they produce naturalized difference, in which the categorizations achieve hegemony, often passing by critical examination.

With this groundwork terminology established, I illustrate these ideas and prepare for the class activity by providing examples of my own social identities and connecting them to naturalized difference and privilege.

As I go through this slide, I tell longer stories (Slide: my examples of recognizing "naturalized differences")

First, my experience as a Master’s student and learning to teach for the first time, in which having struggled considerably with overcoming confidence and imposter syndrome issues, I eventually discovered that the women minorities in my cohort had much more profound obstacles than I had, leading me to recognize that I am actually very privileged as a college instructor, due to my social identities of being a white, older male;

And second, my upbringing in a large, but relatively low socioeconomic family, in which I grew accustomed to hand-me-down clothes, rarely eating in restaurants, and only occasionally eating generic ice cream for dessert, only to one day in my twenties, encountering a dating partner who bought Haagan-Daz ice cream in droves - something I never allowed myself to do, based on my social identity of being poor and undeserving.

My aims with this slide are twofold: first, to illustrate how the social categorizations of our identity function in complex ways to shape our experience. But second, I hope that examples from my own life help to humanize myself in the eyes of my students, because I am modeling openness and reflection on how my life trajectory has been influenced largely by the privilege of being white and male, while also being outside of privilege due to the low socioeconomic status of my family. By humanizing myself, I aim to reduce the power status gap and encourage students to participate.

Finally, the activity slide follows (Class Activity: Your Social Identities)

This slide marks the transition from lecture to discussion, in which students are first given the opportunity to reflect and record their identity category memberships and how they have impacted their experience as students, and then to share those reflections during class discussion. Given that I am relinquishing some control, I do not know fully where students will take this discussion, but I hope that they will raise issues regarding identity memberships I have not discussed, or intersectionality, etc. At this stage, I will be learning alongside them, because understanding privilege is an ongoing process and I cannot be assured to understand all identity constructions.

I will collect the students’ writing before ending the class.

References/Resources

First and foremost, I have the resources provided by this FLC - the lecture slides, the results of the brainstorming, and the readings provided. But additionally, I have peers who were involved in the course. In particular, I have a colleague in my department who participated in this FLC that I can run ideas and successes/challenges by.

NEXT STEPS

The primary measures of success here are, first, the quality of the discussion, but also the students’ own writings. From them, I can assess how well they are understanding social identity categories and whether they are reflecting on privilege - both having privilege and being outside of it. I can then adjust my lecture accordingly - if for instance, they are not relaying examples from their own life.

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