Got Skillz? Recasting and Negotiating Racial Tension in Teacher–Student Relationships Amidst Shifting Demographics

This paper reports on a curriculum designed for Black students whose school teachers and administrators sought to address concerns about students’ academic underachievement and behavioral challenges. In order to design the curriculum, we examined Black students’ reactions to race- and academic-related stress as a result of their interactions with mostly White teachers and peers in an increasingly diversifying predominantly White, middle-class community. Grounded in principles of Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST), a paradigm for understanding the racial coping strategies utilized by individuals to contend with racial stress and well-being, the study sought to elucidate racial tensions found in schooling relationships that foster racial disparities in classrooms. Specifically, our team conducted focus group sessions with Black parents and students which were guided by our use of the Cultural and Racial Experiences of Socialization Survey (CARES), a racial and ethnic socialization measure that elicits responses from students about the kinds of messages students receive about race and ethnicity from people parents and teachers. Data from the sessions subsequently informed the design of Let’s Talk? (LT), a racial conflict resolution curriculum for Black adolescents. In this paper, we share what we learned about students’ school experiences and coping mechanism through their participation in LT.

Estimating Achievement Performance: A Confirmation Bias

This study expands on John Darley and Paget Gross's 1983 research examining the process leading to the confirmation of a perceiver's expectancies about a target individual when the social label that created the expectancy provides poor or tentative evidence about the target's true dispositions or capabilities. In line with previous findings, stereotype information in the no-performance condition did not produce differential estimates of the child's achievement ability, but stereotype information did affect estimates of the child in the performance condition. Thus individuals found evidence in the ambiguous performance sequence congruent with the race, class, and gender stereotypes. The combination of race, class, and gender resulted in more extreme expectancy confirmation for the Black, lower class, male child than for the other race, class, and gender combinations. Thefindings are discussed with respect to implicationsfor teacher education.