In 1963,
bob dylan
“the times they are a changing.” was singing about how
it was one year before passage of the civil rights act, five years before the assassination of martin luther king, and six years before a jewish kid from new york city earned his doctorate in psychology from utah state university.
photo of peter kranz in class used in sara ortiz' presentation
she could tell you a lot about the students who were. Born in 2000, she is a senior at Logan High School and sums up what Kranz did back then in one word: “intense.” Through her connections with USU’s GEAR UP, a college readiness program, she became acquainted with what Kranz did and, as a Latina, especially liked the idea of open dialogue between whites and blacks. She created comparison charts of students who took the class that measures the degree of impact it had on them. She also created a timeline
LEARNING WITH
CONFLICTION Yet for Peter Kranz, nearly a half century later, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The groundbreaking class that he developed and taught on race relations in the early 1970s in Jacksonville, at the University of North Florida, remains as relevant today as it was back then. Students who were there will tell you that today. Some of them you can see interviewed on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in 1995 during a 20year class reunion. In that national broadcast, they talk about how the class positively changed their views on race. They say it in 2007 during a broadcast on Jacksonville public television. Again, in 2016, during another class reunion reported by Florida media, and most recently, they say it repeatedly in a just-completed book by Terence Clarke called An Arena of Truth: Human Conflict in Black and White that includes a forward by Price M. Cobbs, co-author of the 1960’s bestseller, Black Rage. Someone who was not at those class reunions was Sara Ortiz, although
by john devilbiss
"Little
did
the students know how much this class would affect them..." —Opening
passage on a website
Sara Ortiz, Logan High School Senior, in conjunction with a USU GEAR UP Project featuring, in part, the early work of Peter Kranz’s groundbreaking course Human Conflict: Black & White created by
that chronicles race relations in the United States from 1972 to 2016. Ortiz admires how Kranz got students to confront their differences and to realize that being different isn’t always bad or negative. “It offered one solution to a problem,” she says. “On a small scale, he had some great results.” “I guess the proof is in the pudding,” Kranz says during a phone interview from his office at the University of Texas, where he continues to teach fulltime. He began assembling the ingredients to that pudding at Grinnell College before going on to USU where he earned a master’s in psychology in 1965 and a doctorate in Child Psychology in 1969. Kranz did not know it then, but his early work watching children at play, and using that as a means of getting them to open up and communicate their feelings, would influence his later work with college students. He was also working through his own emotions in those early days SUMMER 2018 I UTAHSTATE
13