Is That a Threat?: Language to Buffer Identity Threat in the Classroom EVA SHULTIS
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tudents took over the first day of August faculty meetings at St. Andrew’s. Spearheaded by two rising seniors, a panel of eight students came to school (a week before they had to!) to share things teachers and coaches have said to them during their academic careers that made them feel safe and welcome or invalidated and threatened. My immediate takeaway was that students should be part of our professional development more often. My longer-term takeaway is a slow-burning awe at the power of language and an ever-increasing attention to how I use it. I teach science – not English – and I’m pointing that out because language is a double-edged sword we all wield. Students can’t learn or use what they’ve learned when they feel under threat - we know this intuitively, and fMRI studies confirm it. Chronic stress can damage the hippocampus, which has the all-important job of consolidating new information into long-term memory. On a more momentto-moment basis, the amygdala, which is in charge of our fear response, acts like a cognitive train-track switch: when all is well it engages our prefrontal cortex, the home of working memory and engine of higher order cognitive functions. But when the amygdala perceives a threat, the switch flips to engage our more primitive hindbrain and send us into fight-or-flight survival mode.1 Thanks to this switching
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mechanism, the kinds of thinking we most want our students to do (connection-making, planning, analysis, self-regulation, etc.) are only possible in the absence of threat. What is a “threat” in a classroom context? For those of us fortunate enough to set physical safety concerns aside, I think of threat as the opposite of belonging: a signal from the environment that we interpret as “you don’t belong here.” Evolutionarily, belonging to a group was a life or death matter – and though times have changed, signs that we don’t belong still send our amygdala into fight-or-flight mode.
POTENTIAL SOURCES OF IDENTITY THREAT
T R A N S F O R M AT I V E
Students’ identity development
Academic belonging
Social belonging
Teacher
Classmates
T E A C H I N G
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L E A R N I N G
