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Listed in: Psychology, as PSYC-224
Moodle site: Course (Login required)
Elizabeth J. Aries (Section 01)
Allen J. Hart (Section 01)
This highly interactive course brings together students to examine the roles race and other intersecting identities play in their lives. Course work includes an interdisciplinary blend of scholarly readings, in-class dialogue, experiential learning activities, reflective writing, and an intergroup collaborative action project aimed at bettering relationships and communication patterns outside the class itself. The course readings link students’ personal experiences with race to a socio-historical understanding of individual, institutional, and structural discrimination, and to the ways social inequality is embedded in social institutions and individual consciousness, constraining life chances. The readings address power imbalances within and between racial groups, and the ways privilege is allocated and social inequalities are sustained. Students will engage in sustained and respectful dialogue around racial divisions, learning to build skills in intergroup communication, collaboration, and relationships. Class members will explore similarities and differences between their experiences with race and privilege within and across racial identity groups, with the goal of coming to understand the underlying conditions that account for these different experiences and perceptions.
Students engage in structured activities in each class in pairs or groups of four and then debrief the experiences as a class. They will bring their own experiences with race into the classroom as a legitimate process of learning. Students select three current topics of interest to dialogue about. They work together in mixed-race teams to research a racial inequity/inequality on campus, with the potential to use their data for change.
Requisite: PSYC 100 and consent of the instructor. Limited to 14 students. Fall semester. Professors Aries and Hart.
If Overenrolled: Priority given to sophomores and juniors.