The Decision Not to Furl the Confederate Flag in My Classroom

ABSTRACT

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and digest evidence that may go against their preconceived worldviews and opinions: teaching rational versus irrational thought and quantitative research design and critique. Guiding undergraduates through empirical studies on sensitive topics and encouraging them to critique their findings in a rational, academic manner can help ease them into more reasoned and less reactionary discourse about race, gender, religion, politics, and any other controversial topic in today’s contentious climate. I use my own experience teaching students research design in the months following a race-related murder to illustrate the effectiveness of this method in an extreme circumstance.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• political learning
• research-based learning

Notes on contributor

Karyn Amira is an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston and an experimental researcher in the fields of ideology, public opinion, candidate perception, and media effects.

Notes

There are a few empirical papers on the Confederate flag. Hutchings and Benjamin (2010), for example, have documented gender differences regarding support for the flag after being exposed to explicit racial cues. Cooper and Knotts (2006) examine how both region and race predict support for the flag using a rolling cross-sectional survey. My class focused on one article by Ehrlinger et al. (2011).

During this time, my class was not very racially diverse, although it was quite ideologically diverse. The minimal racial diversity likely made our empirical debate about the flag less tense. Since this class ended, I have taught the course again, this time with more racial diversity. I have also incorporated this into other classes that were also racially diverse. From my perspective, the same results regarding class participation and deliberation have occurred from students of various racial backgrounds.

Although regional experience with an issue likely enhances learning, the study you include does not need to relate to the students’ lives as intimately as the Confederate flag study related to the lives of my students. That it applied to STATE REDACTED, South Carolina itself was coincidental but demonstrates that research critique can help students think rationally even when faced with abnormally tense topics. I have asked students in other courses to critique alternative racial studies (that could apply to any region) after learning about motivated reasoning. Similar results emerged.