"We always come back to the one question that is the subheading of all my classes: Why is social science so difficult?"
— Ariel White
Curriculum Information
Prerequisites
None
Requirements Satisfied
Unrestricted elective credits
Offered
17.269 was offered for the first time in Spring 2017.
Assessment
The students’ grades were based on the following activities:
50% Papers (2)
35% Final exam
15% Class participation
Student Information
Enrollment
Fewer than 10 students
Breakdown by Year
Mostly sophomores, juniors, and seniors
Typical Student Background
The class was racially and ethnically diverse, and students brought their different experiences with race to our discussions. Most students also brought some intuition about social science research to their work in the course.
How Student Time Was Spent
During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:
In Class
Met 2 times per week for 1.5 hours per session; 26 sessions total.
Class sessions were discussion-based, and some included reading quizzes.
During the final module of the course, students watched a screening of the film “13th”, directed by Ava Duvernay (2016).
Out of Class
Students completed readings and prepared two papers.
In this section, Professor Ariel Whiteshares some of the strategies she used to prepare students to engage in conversations about race and ethnicity in the course.
Discussions that Lead to New Places
"I emphasized the importance of having discussions that would lead us, collectively, to new places, rather than having individuals contribute unconnected monologues."
— Ariel White
Our discussions in 17.269 Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics went better than I anticipated. Many of the things that I worried about, such as students saying explicitly racist things that would make others uncomfortable, just didn’t happen. I don’t know if they wouldn’t have happened anyway, or if some of the ways I set up the early discussions helped. In those early sessions, we talked, upfront, about what good participation looks like. I highlighted quality or quantity of contributions, and we talked through ways to constructively build on others’ comments. I emphasized the importance of having discussions that would lead us, collectively, to new places, rather than having individuals contribute unconnected monologues.
Participation without Spokespeople
I also prompted students to consider their style of participation by asking, Are you a person who always jumps in? Or are you a person who sits back? And if you’re a person who always jumps in, can you look around and make sure everybody joins the conversation? If you’re a person who sits back, can you try to jump in? I asked these questions because I wanted students to think about how we could make sure everybody could contribute to our discussions. At the same time, however, I wanted to ensure nobody felt they had to be a spokesperson for an identity group of which they were a member. This was a dynamic I was worried about in this classroom. It didn’t happen. Again, I don’t know if it was because we explicitly talked about this issue, or if it just didn’t arise with this particular group of students.
Unpacking a Common Misconception
There is a common misconception in the United States that race and ethnicity are natural phenomena and that the systems we build around them “have always been this way.” Part of facilitating productive classroom discussions about race and ethnicity was unpacking this misconception right away. We started the course by thinking through how our society has arrived at our current understanding of race and ethnicity. What do we mean by race? What do we mean by ethnicity? It feels so obvious. We all know what we mean when we say Latino, but how did we get here? How did this category become salient? It didn’t have to be like this. We could have had any number of other line drawing activities. And over time, we have. We talked through the many different ways people have created ideas about race and ethnicity. Getting across the idea that race and ethnicity are socially constructed concepts that we then build social structures around (which, in turn, create social realities that impact people’s lives) was important because it was not obvious to all students upon first coming to the course.
Being Upfront about the Difficulties
Another strategy I used to prepare students for our class discussions about race and ethnicity was to be upfront about the difficulty of some of the conversations. I let them know that these would be hard topics to sit with, noting that sometimes we would be talking about traumatic violence that, for some students, would feel close to home. I let students know that if a particular conversation was too intense, they could step out of the classroom and that they could keep in touch with me so that we could talk about how to make the class work for them.
Focusing on the Research
Finally, I tried to keep our conversations grounded in the social science research. This was not a class where we were debating the merits of affirmative action or critiquing people’s personal views. We kept the focus on the body of research and critiques of it. Obviously, people had many feelings about all the research topics we discussed, but their emotions were not the main emphasis of our conversations.
In this section, Professor Ariel Whitediscusses how she makes use of the popular press and imaginative research design scenarios to prepare students to engage with social science as citizens.
A Case for Reading Blogs
Many of the readings in the course are from blogs, op-eds, and magazines. In the short term, assigning readings from the popular press that discuss social science work, or that highlight topics that we’re going to be covering in class, allows me to include more readings in the curriculum without students having to tackle myriad academic papers that they’d never get through in one semester. But it also serves a long-term purpose. Most of my students are not going to be social scientists in their professional lives. They are, however, going to be citizens who read blogs and newspapers and who will grapple with the social science issues we discuss in the course. Assigning articles from the popular press allows them to practicing connecting what they read in their everyday lives to the content of the course.
Imaginative Research Design
One thing I like to do in all of my courses is to foster in students an intuition about social science research. Although none of my courses are research design classes and many of my students won’t conduct social science research, I want them to develop a sense of how the research works so that they can think critically about studies they encounter in the media. When they read about a study, I want them think, How could this study have gone wrong? What can I learn from it? and What are the limits of what I can learn from it?
"It turns out measurement is hard, causal inference is hard, and humans are complicated. It’s fun watching students work through that."
— Ariel White
To help get them to this point, we do a fair amount of thinking through studies together. I ask students to imagine how they might go about answering the kinds of questions the authors are trying to ask. Students get really into it. In small groups they discuss their own answers to the following questions: What’s the perfect experiment to study what the author is exploring? What experiment would you run if you could do anything? And then we get into the gradations: What experiment would you run if you were omnipotent?What experiment would you run if you had endless research funds and no ethical constraints? What if you had a normal research budget and normal human powers? Then we can line up the research we read about in the media against the dream research project. We can think about how the real study diverges from the ideal study, but how it might still capture some of the components we would really want from our dream experiment. It turns out measurement is hard, causal inference is hard, and humans are complicated. It’s fun watching students work through that.
We always come back to the one question that is the subheading of all my classes: Why is social science so difficult? Particularly at MIT, where students tend to have limited experience with the social sciences, it can be useful to develop a sense of the challenges inherent in the work.
In this section, Professor Ariel Whiteshares how she became interested in issues of race and ethnicity in government and what inspired her to develop the course, 17.269 Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics.
"I developed 17.269 Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics because I want to give students a social science lens for thinking about how issues of race and ethnicity shape government."
— Ariel White
My research focuses on voting rights and issues of race and ethnicity in the criminal justice system. I developed these interests, in part, because of my experiences working in a legal services office prior to graduate school. I had the opportunity to talk with many people who were having bad experiences with government, sometimes in ways that were race-inflected. Being able to see how people interacted with the state, and how those interactions dramatically shaped their lives in ways that are not always reflected in conventional discussions about people’s experiences with government, made me want to talk more about issues like incarceration and bureaucratic responsiveness—what it means to have people call you back or not when you ask for help from the government.
I developed 17.269 Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics because I want to give students a social science lens for thinking about how issues of race and ethnicity shape our political experiences. Although our current political climate makes teaching a class about race and politics feel particularly salient, it is always relevant.
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