Does Social Constructionist Curricula Both Decrease Essentialist and Increase Nominalist Beliefs About Race?
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Does Social Constructionist Curricula Both Decrease Essentialist and Increase Nominalist Beliefs About Race? John Tawa 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Increasingly, educators in the biological and social sciences teach about the concept of race from a social constructionist perspective. Scholarship on race pedagogy suggests that to fully appreciate the complexity of race, students must be able to both deconstruct multiple false beliefs about the fixed nature of race (i.e., racial essentialism) and be able to articulate the sociopolitical development of race (i.e., racial nominalism). In this study, a “knowledge in pieces” theory provides a framework for examining students’ learning about multiple beliefs about race. Participants (N = 116) were recruited online and were randomly assigned to watch either a video about the social construction of race or a video about stereotypes. Participants completed multidimensional measures of racial essentialism and racial nominalism before and after watching the videos. As predicted, participants in the social construction video condition showed significantly greater decreases in genotypic and behavioral racial essentialism but surprisingly showed moderate increases in phenotypic essentialism, relative to changes among participants in the stereotype video condition. Moderation analyses explored how changes in racial essentialism were concurrent with changes in racial nominalism, and whether these concurrences depended on which video participants were exposed to; for example, in the social construction video condition only, decreases in genotypic and behavioral essentialism concurred with increases in sociopolitical nominalism. Findings are discussed in light of pedagogical and curricular strategies for teaching the social construction of race.
1 Introduction Race is a sociopolitical invention developed to rationalize atrocities including enslavement of Africans and attempted genocide of Native Americans (Omi and Winant 1994; Smedley and Smedley 2005). Early mid-nineteenth century theories of the inherent inferiority of Blacks and the pseudoscientific efforts to support these theories were widely embraced by the public, for example, by slaveholders seeking to legitimize their own inhumane possession and treatment
* John Tawa [email protected]
1
Department of Psychology and Education, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075, USA
J. Tawa
of slaves (Smedley and Smedley 2005). These pseudoscientific efforts were widely disseminated to the public through means such as public literature, educational institutions, and political platforms (Omi and Winant 1994). Relatively recent scientific achievements, such as the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, have confirmed that presumed races (e.g., Black, Asian, White) do not comprise genetically distinct groups or share inherent genetic carriers that would give rise to specific behavioral traits (e.g., intelligence, sexual promiscuity, tendency to gesticulate). For example, genomic research confirms that at
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