Churn – Claude M Steele

And this pushing has consequences. Several social psychologists—Victoria Plaut, Paul Davies, and I— joined Sapna Cheryan in an ingeniously simple experiment to examine these “consequences.” The question: Could the incidental, material features of a setting be enough to affect something as important as a person’s career interest? We had college students come to the lab one at a time to complete a survey of their “current feelings toward computer science.”

The experiment varied the clutter in the room where participants completed the survey. For half of them, the clutter consisted of objects that “one might find in the office of a stereotypical computer scientist” or “in the dorm room of a typical computer science geek”—a Star Trek poster, comic books, video game boxes, electronics, soda cans, and junk food containers.

For the other half, the clutter wasn’t associated with computer science at all—a nature poster, water bottles, poster art, healthy snack boxes, coffee mugs, general interest magazines and books. Sapna’s reasoning was this: Computer science is a male-dominated field. Male-oriented clutter shouldn’t deter men’s interest in the field. But it could affect women. It could tell them they aren’t part of that “we.” If the incidental features of a setting can have such influence, if they can affect one’s feeling about an entire field, then the male-oriented computer science clutter would depress women’s interest in computer science yet have little effect on men’s interest.

This is precisely what happened. Male clutter depressed women’s interest in computer science. It had no effect on men’s. Again, the agency of a setting; its incidental features alone affecting something as important as women’s interest in an entire field. 3. Imagine you are a high school senior from a working-class family. You just got admitted to an elite university. You’re ecstatic. You hit the jackpot. It’s a pathway to a secure, maybe economically better life.

Your family is ecstatic too, and very proud. But soon worries emerge. Your mother frets that you’re moving into a world she’s not part of, that she’s losing you. Your father frets too. He and your brothers have a gardening business. They always thought you’d be part of it. They need you.

You feel the pull of obligation, responsibility. And there are other worries. Will you have the funds to cover the costs of college, not to speak of the cash to socialize with fellow students?

chapter 1: What Is Churn? chapter 2: Where Does Churn Come From? chapter 3: Churn Has an Antidote chapter 4: Being Wise, Not Color-Blind: How Individuals Can Build Trust Across Identity Divides chapter 5: Trust in the Face of Power chapter 6: Making School and Work Settings Wise chapter 7: Making Institutions Wise chapter 8: Making Guiding Paradigms Wise: K–12 Schooling and Low-Income Students chapter 9: Going Forward: A Perspective and a Strategy coda: And Everyone Can Do It acknowledgments references index 1kitap1.com/en PROLOGUE Imagine a regularly scheduled parent-teacher conference in an American middle school.

The student in question is a seventh-grade boy. He and his parents are African American. His teacher is white. If you’re an American, you may already sense a possible tension in the air. It’s a meeting visited by American history, by the racial roles the parents and the teacher have been assigned by that history, and by the stereotypes that history has attached to those roles. For their part, the Black parents know how their group can be seen; they know this society’s stereotypes about Blacks’ intellectual potential and aggressiveness.

They want desperately for their son not to be seen in these ways. They don’t know that he is. But they know he could be. And schooling is so important. On the car ride over, they sort through their questions. Is this a good teacher? What’s her style? Empathic? Tough love? Let’s be sure not to jump the gun about race, they say to each other. But does she know anything about race? About bias? Does she push race under the rug—asserting color-blindness? Or is she comfortable with its realities?

They enter the conference room vigilant, friendly but tense, poised to confront the ghosts of history if they have to. Their heads are in churn. The white teacher has anxieties too as she prepares for this meeting. She knows the stereotypes about her group. She worries that saying anything that is less than totally positive about this student, even if it’s intended to help his development, could get her seen as racist. She doesn’t know that this will happen. But she knows it could happen.

She would hate that. She tries to be fair to all her students—and sensitive to the needs of minority students. But how could these parents know that? She can’t just claim she’s not a racist. Entering the conference room, she too is vigilant, friendly but tense, worried about imagined and real trip wires. Her head, too, is in churn.

It’s easy to imagine that this meeting might be a routine exchange— information given, resisted a bit, but largely received.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 21679c72fcd53af5
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,896,871 bytes (1.809 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 157
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 250.85 minutes
• Total Words: 50,171
• Total Characters: 314,267
• Average Words per Page: 319.56
• Average Characters per Page: 2001.7

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