EVA SHULTIS

Is That a Threat?: Language to Buffer Identity Threat in the Classroom

EVA SHULTIS

Students 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 aca- demic careers that made them feel safe and welcome or invalidated and threatened. My immediate takeaway was that students should be part of our professional develop- ment more often. My longer-term takeaway is a slow-burning awe at the power of lan- guage 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 mechanism, the kinds of thinking we most want our students to do (connection-mak- ing, planning, analysis, self-regulation, etc.) are only possible in the absence of threat.

What is a “threat” in a classroom con- text? 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

Students’ identity development

Academic belonging

Social belonging

Teacher Classmates

To cultivate a belonging mindset at school, we need to be aware that it has multiple components. According to middle school students, a sense of social belonging and academic belonging are distinct from each other – and students may feel one, both, or neither. 2 It’s easy to imagine how signals from a teacher can be a source of academic threat, and signals from classmates can be a source of social threat. But as the diagram on the previous page attempts to illustrate, the arrows fly in all directions: I’m sure we’ve all witnessed students feeling academically threatened by each other. Teachers can also be a source of social threat when we fail to validate our students’ identities.

Identity development – and identity threat – are in the center of my diagram because they touch both the social and academic realms. Our students continuously grapple with their identities across all of the “big eight” social identifiers (including our students with normative/systemically privileged identities – there is a lot to come to terms with when you have a white racial identity, for example). This is a shared mandate of equity work and Mind, Brain, and Education Science: we need to build space for our students’ identities in our classroom and be attuned to potential sources of identity threat so we can minimize them.

The language we use around identity, expectations, assessment, feedback, etc. is an easily accessible tool to buffer both social and academic threat. Beyond using inclusive language, in general, (family rather than parents, folks rather than ladies and gentlemen, outside of school rather than home), there are unconscious beliefs students often hold that we may want to address head-on. My takeaways from three studies that have influenced how I speak and write to my students are shared in the box to the right.

As multiple articles in this volume of “Think Differently and Deeply” touch on, emotion and cognition are inextricably interlinked, and a sense of belonging is a critical ingredient for learning. I’m also suggesting that minimizing identity threat is essential to cultivate social and academic belonging in our schools. And rather than crossing our fingers and hoping students will feel our beliefs about intelligence and aptitude emanating from us – and hence understand why we push them with critical feedback, and why they should persevere through challenges without taking things personally – we can harness the power of language to state all of these things - explicitly, early, and often.

Eva Shultis (eshultis@saes.org; @evashultis) teaches Science at St. Andrew’s and is Associate Director of Program Development and Research for the CTTL.

Social psychologist David Yeager and his colleagues recruited 44 white and Black seventh-grade students who were earning Bs and Cs in Social Studies. They asked the students to write a personal essay and then gave them to their teachers to grade and write comments on. Before the teachers returned the essays, researchers randomly assigned the students to receive one of these two notes from the teacher clipped to the paper:

Control group

“I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”

Wise criticism group

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

When offered the opportunity to revise and resubmit their essays, 72% of Black students and 87% of white students in the wise criticism group did so, compared to 17% and 62% of the Black and white control groups. Notably, wise criticism made the greatest difference for students who chronically self-reported lower levels of trust in the people, policies, and procedures of their school environment, and “seemed to slow the tendency for early mistrust to beget deeper mistrust for minority students.” 3

State your belief that all students have the potential to perform at the highest level in your discipline

In a series of studies across multiple university contexts, Aneeta Rattan and her colleagues found that women and historically underrepresented racial minorities in STEM courses reported a greater interest in and sense of belonging to that field if they perceived that their professors held the following beliefs: • A growth mindset about intelligence (that intelligence is malleable and can increase with effort) • A belief in universal aptitude for the discipline (that all people have the potential to succeed in STEM, in this case)

In two of Rattan’s studies, students were presented with a fictional transcript of a professor welcoming them to the first day of a course, expressing a belief in either universal or non-universal aptitude for the subject:

Universal aptitude group

“I know that everyone has high intellectual potential in science, technology, engineering, and math. What this means is that the potential is there in all of you. I want each and every one of you to realize your potential.”

Non-universal aptitude group

“I know that not everyone has high intellectual potential in science, technology, engineering, and math. What this means is that the potential is there in some of you. I want those of you who have this potential to realize it.”

When the professor expressed non-universal aptitude beliefs, Black students reported lower interest in enrolling in the course than white students, and women anticipated a lesser sense of belonging to the field than men. Both of these gaps were eliminated in the universal aptitude condition. 4

Depersonalize struggle from identity

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen designed a series of interventions to bolster first-year college students’ sense of belonging in their new schools. In one experiment, they presented a group of Black freshmen with the results of an upperclassmen survey, in which the responses of older students indicated two important points: • That students of all racial identities had experienced academic hardship and doubt about whether they belonged in their first year • That these struggles lessened with time

After being presented with evidence that the doubts and struggles they experienced were normal and not particular to them or their racial identity, this group of Black students reported a greater sense of belonging and belief in their potential to succeed (and went on to earn higher GPAs) than Black students in the control group. 5