ABSTRACT

Teaching race, sex/gender, history, and other such potentially controversial course topics to undergraduates is uniquely difficult because these are subjects about which all students have personal experience and longstanding, deeply-ingrained attitudes and opinions. This can make a course rewarding, because class participation and engagement is often not an issue, but it also makes a course problematic because students can prioritize previously held beliefs over the content and theory they study in the course. There are two main approaches to teaching diversity courses in the social sciences: (1) data-driven teaching, which prioritizes presenting evidence and data about racial and ethnic disparities to ‘prove’ to students that discrimination exists, persists and is widespread or that a particular historical perspective is most accurate, and (2) theory-driven teaching, which prioritizes efforts to understand the role and function that discrimination and social construction plays in societies, by examining concepts such as race, class, and sex, and teaching students to challenge their discriminatory beliefs and attitudes and/or their hegemonic views about particular historical events.