Our third seminar will be from 9 – 11am on Wednesday November 8. Schedule changes due to this are noted in your Replacement Reading Schedule.
The readings for the seminar focus on issues of representation in physics, this time with emphasis on race:
- Why Race Matters in Physics Class
- An Open Letter to SCOTUS from Professional Physicists (also, link including timeline and list of signers)
We will hand out paper copies of these articles and book chapters in class Monday so that you can mark those with your annotations and questions, and have them available during Seminar (without people using electronic devices during the discussion).
Pre-Seminar Writing Assignment. Beyond reading the two pieces, we would like for you to respond in writing to the following prompts. Please keep all the prompts in mind as you are completing the reading.
- Please type up your responses and bring them with you, along with the two reading handouts, to Seminar.
- Your typed responses will serve as your Seminar Entrance Ticket.
- Faculty will collect these at the end of Seminar and check for evidence of attempting to complete.
These readings are responses to comments made during an oral argument before the Supreme Court that revolved around the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity (Fisher v. University of Texas, 2015). Discussions about identity and difference are often hard, and discussions about race are particularly so. Given the larger political context and particularly our local campus context, we understand that discussing the content of these readings will be challenging, and differentially challenging for each of you. The readings themselves offer some theoretical frameworks and tools to help us have these conversations better.
- Consider particularly the discussion of racial anxiety. Based on your understanding from the law review article discussion of racial anxiety, try to write down up to 3 specific guidelines for your interactions in Seminar that could be adopted to manage the challenges created by racial anxiety.
- In past seminars, we discussed impostor syndrome and mindset theory, as well as gender and class issues in STEM classrooms. Which of the issues addressed in this week’s Seminar readings can be thought of more broadly in terms of creating an inclusive STEM classroom, and which seem particularly related to race and ethnicity?
The law review article lays out four specific considerations regarding the benefits of diversity in the STEM classroom. In answering each of the following you may draw on either that article or the letter from physicists (or both). For each, your typed response should quote, paraphrase, or summarize the element of the assigned reading, indicate article and page, and describe why you chose it.
- Identify at least one specific element of the discussion of the role of diversity in innovation and problem-solving that you found particularly striking or surprising. Why?
- Identify at least one specific element of the discussion of implicit bias that you found particularly striking or surprising. Why?
- Identify at least one specific element of the discussion of racial anxiety that you found particularly striking or surprising. Why?
- Identify at least one specific element of the discussion of stereotype threat that you found particularly striking or surprising. Why?