An informal Fred’s University study of class participation found that, regardless of race, class or gender, students with more anxious personalities were more likely to be self-conscious about their participation. The study found that regardless of race, class or gender, all students were concerned about whether they were being listened to and being respected. But the study also confirmed the results of previous studies that found that students of color, students who were not male, and students who did not come from a privileged background, had a large number of other concerns about their class participation. “Stereotype threat”, the fear of being reduced to a bad stereotype, played a significant role for students of color. As many studies have shown, female students, conditioned to defer to males, carefully calibrated their participation in relation to the men in the class. LGBTQ students experienced fear in the heteronormative environment of the classroom and constantly felt they needed to monitor and modulate their own gender performance. Students from outside the bourgeois world of Fred’s University were self-conscious about the displays of social class and status in the classroom and about their own accents, vocabulary, and dress. These concerns took up a significant amount of the internal monologue of students in class and made it harder for them to participate in discussions.
At the end of the study, conducted by a team of Fred University graduate students over the course of a term, the student subjects were invited to participate in a class discussion of the results. First-year student Dexter Thornegood Jr spoke for the group when he said he was really happy to hear that everyone shared the same basic concerns regardless of race or gender. He got a warm chuckle when he told the class his girlfriend always said he was a great listener. Thornegood said he thought Fred’s University was more egalitarian than the French school he went to on his year abroad. He believed that everyone should be valued regardless of whether they were white. Thornegood told the graduate students he really enjoyed being in the study and hoped he could participate in other studies, especially if he could get paid. Afterward, he talked to one of the female graduate students, who he privately joked was really hot, about the possibility of a summer internship in the Psychology Department. Thornegood noticed the grad student seemed a little uncomfortable when he approached her, and he was happy to report that the study gave him the insight that she probably had a bit of an inferiority complex because she obviously did not have the advantages he had grown up with.
Over the summer when the graduate team reached out to Thornegood about a program on how to prevent racism in the classroom, he declined to participate on the grounds that the study had taught him race did not affect him and it was bad for students to focus on race. Thornegood was also happy to let the researchers know he had received a perfect participation grade in the seminar, which he attributed to not being an anxious person and really focusing on the material instead of his hangups.
Also Read: The Group Work Game