Hi, I'm Vikki Hill, Project Associate for Changing Mindsets at University of
the Arts London and I'm delighted to, once again, welcome Dr. Gurnam Singh,
Principal Lecture in Social Work at Coventry University and Visiting Fellow
in Race and Education at UAL. Welcome! Thank You, Vikki! Great. Gurnam today
I wanted to just frame our conversation around the Changing Mindsets
intervention so I'll just talk a little bit about that. Which is that Changing
Mindsets is a HEFCE funded project that began this year and it's an
intervention which is focused on closing the attainment differentials for black
Asian, minority ethnic and working-class students. And it's based on Carol Dweck's
theories of implicit intelligence and it aims to develop a growth mindset in both
students and staff (to avoid a student deficit model) and to alleviate the
negative effects of stereotype threat and implicit bias as barriers to
learning. So we are, we are working with professor Patricia Devine who's a
special adviser on the project, who from the 1980s has demonstrated that people
exhibit implicit or unintentional racial bias that can influence behaviour and
even in those who don't explicitly or consciously support racial stereotyping.
Her work is about developing bias habit breaking interventions and
providing the tools needed to break habits. And then we also draw upon the
work by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson on stereotype threat. So, from the mid 90s
their work has shown that stereotype threat can affect our actions and
performance and it relates, really, refers to the risk of confirming a negative
stereotype about a group into which you belong or alternatively about the risk
of not conforming a positive stereotype about a group to which you belong. And
the studies that they have carried out demonstrated how stereotype threat can
have a substantial impact on student attainment and on performance. So, Gurnam,
I just wanted to ask you, really, to expand on this in terms of your own
research. Well I will do and I think it's important just to put a bit
more meat on the bones for these three concepts that we're working with. One is
of course Changing Mindsets and Implicit Bias and Stereotype Threat and they are
all, you know, connected very much, talking about the same thing. But if we're just
gonna begin with Implicit Bias, I think we could all agree that we all possess
all kinds of biases and we harbour stereotypes about any number of things
that's not, there's nothing wrong with that.
Most psychologists would say that bias is quite a normal aspect of human
functioning. And because it would be impossible for us to constantly assess,
sense information our minds career was what we call heuristics or mental
shortcuts that ease cognition and make decision making easier, you know, for
example, you know another friendly system, we use a rule of thumb or you know we
talk about an educated guess or intuitive judgment or even a guesstimate
we said, this is my guesstimate. And stereotyping,
another concept sociologists use is common sense, we use a common sense kind of approach. Then, so,
our implicit bias is a form of unconscious bias you know where we make
judgments about others that don't stand up to reason and that's the key thing yet
examples, common examples, women area bad drivers, men are natural leaders, black people are
dangerous, and those kind of things. And actually there is an online test the Harvard
Implicit Bias Test, which is called Project Implicit, and you know anybody can google
that and do the test themselves. So that's Implicit Bias. I think Changing
Mindsets is also, you know, has a kind of a scholarship research base of its own, and that
research it has a longer history in the US particularly in the UK more
recently. And it was an attempt by progressive educators, particularly in
secondary education, I think, it's really, it's only recently touching higher
education. It was associated with this attempt to improve attainment levels of
students by confronting these kinds of stereotype, stereotypical views, common-sense views
that intelligence, particularly, was fixed it's a characteristic, almost, in
the DNA and that can, it was, challenging this view and you know for
them you can change people's sense of intelligence or their capabilities
through student effort and pedagogy. It wasn't a kind of, you know, a destiny.
The other concept is stereotype threat and all the kind of major studies on
sociology of education, you know you can go to Bourdieu's work, Balls and Ginty's, Bernstein's
work and even people like Willis. And more theoretical work of people at
like Paulo Freire and the work of Rosenthal and Jacobson is really important. Who
argued that the experience of schooling and university only valorised the experience
of students of the most privileged background, white male upper-class and
then does the opposite for those that don't fit those kind of categories. And one of things that can impact a
students performance, particularly in the context of race, gender and class is what
Claude Steele, and you mentioned Claude Steele earlier on, who's a psychology
professor at Berkeley, his term stereotype threat. And Steele defines this as
the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the
potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group. But
in contrast to Rosenthal and Jacobson's work, I think Steele focused on the
impact the stereotypes had on individuals. I mean, Rosenthal and Jacobson
were talking about impact on teachers and how they then made assumptions about
students and performance, yeah? Steele was more concerned with the impact of
stereotypes on students themselves. And what he found was that whenever race was
emphasized then black students consistently did less well than white
students therefore confirming suggestion that performance can be negatively
impacted by the prevalence and awareness racial stereotypes, yeah? So that's really
kind of the background to some of these ideas,
yeah. So, when we're thinking about this and what what are the implications for
for, for the university? So you know we know obviously, through Steele's work about how
students are affected but also thinking about academic staff and how might this impact upon them, this work?
Well I think, I think this notion of internalisation, that's the important thing, and I think institutions can internalise these
stereotypes, typical kind of ideas, common sense views. And of course students do
themselves, you know. So because the idea of innate intelligence
some how correlates with educational attainment and that is so embedded in
society and in higher education culture, strategies confronting this common sense
view have got to be multi-layered I think, you know. That's the first thing I
think for universities they have to approach this at every kind of level so.
And as you know, until relatively recently, any growth, interesting growth
mindsets and implicit bias will have been confined to kind of specialist interest in
educational psychology or maybe teacher education but now there is a kind of a
much broader attempt to focus on attainment and closing gaps. Changing
Mindsets is seen to be one of the many strategies that appear to have a good evidence base.
It means challenging the mindsets of staff, I think, both academic and support staff who maybe internalise
ideas about innate intelligence, about other people of other races, yeah? And of
course that could be internalised, um, negatively because if you're stereotyped
yourself negative then you internalise a negative stereotype. Gender and class
stereotypes also could often be a player here. So, so far universities have been
doing some work on implicit bias which is a good starting point but for me this
work needs to go much deeper. At the moment we've moved, as I say, from what I
would call unconscious bias to conscious bias. Okay so it's progress but bias is still there.
I think what we need to do is, we need to move towards what I would call conscious
non-bias and then ultimately to unconscious non-bias, yeah. So I think they are the stages we need to go through.
And how would you foresee that happening then? What would be your idea, your vision, for
the ways forward? Ok, I think the universities need to nurture a new world view, I think
that we are looking for a paradigm shift where the idea of innate, bounded and
fixed intellectual ability becomes totally redundant. I think that that
affects the way we select students, the way we define and construct curricula, the
way we talk about the university experience , you know,
we still have this tendency to talk in elite terms in terms of, you know, you
know high and low and all those kinds of things. In some senses the work on closing attainment gaps is also trying
to take us away from, even paradoxically, this notion of attainment, into the
gaps themselves, yeah? Because every individual in a sense needs to be judged
on their own kind of contribution that they make. yeh? I think for students, by the way, I
think we need a lot of sensitivity and skill in working. I don't think that you
can as it were force people to drink the water, you know drink the water. You have to
convince them that drinking the water is a good thing for them, yeah? And in
university because we have people who have high levels of critical
thinking of reasoning skills, we need to engage with them at the critical level
of evidence, reason not just emotion. Yes, yes.
Can I ask you more on that? I know in your essay about 'Intellectuality in student
attainment in the contemporary higher education system', you you delivered an
intervention that was student based about developing intellectuality and and
how that reduced stereotypes threat. Do you have any other case studies or
interventions perhaps with staff that you think are, or have had, positive effects or are
particularly interesting? Well we had a case study where we did that research
because we were trying to, as much as we could, try to replicate Jacob Jacobson
and Rosenthal's studies about where, if you give, give some information
to teachers about the ability of students and how that then impacts the
way in which they might judge them. But it's difficult to replicate because of ethical problems, but
we what we did do is that we took a group of postgraduate certificate
lecturer students, but lectures who were new lecturers, and we split them into two
groups and we gave each group a sample of essays to mark and it was the same
sample so we simply just replicated the same sample with the two groups. The only
difference that we did do was in one sample we try to suggest that this
was written by people who maybe were not from English
backgrounds, as it were, whose language might be different. There was some hints that these people
might not be White English ethnicity, yeah? But they were superficial, they weren't
there was nothing to do with the content of the arguments. But what was really
interesting it was about when we took the averages of the marks and everything, there's
about a 15 to 20 percent difference in the marks allocated, yeah these were
essentially the same pieces of work. So that was an implicit bias, it was
assumptions that were made based on certain kind of message that were being taken.
Yeah, so you know, that's there really I think, you know the evidence is there
and I think that we can do this work, you know, with colleagues. It doesn't have to
um, you know, we don't have to get into any complex kind of methodology, I think. So what
would be your your three takeaway points, three three points for
moving forward in this kind of work, what would they be?
I think that we've got to try and you know go for a win-win situation. I think
the first point is to communicate this work, not as if somehow this is robbing
Peter to pay Paul. I think that if we're going to be you know confronting
stereotypes it's really about being more objective in the way in which we
assess, yeah, because stereotypes in a
sense compromise our objectivity so I don't think that's necessarily against
the kind of the broader culture of higher education which is to try and be
more rigorous and more objective, yeah? I think that's the first thing. I think you
know what the main barriers in alleviating the affects of stereotype threat
or implicit bias and how can these be addressed that's the first
thing we need to focus on, yeah? And, you know, James Baldwin noted that most human
beings possess and I'm quoting here 'a rigid refusal to look at themselves' and I
think, you know, sadly, I think academics are probably the worst at that
you know, we we always look at the students but we don't look at ourselves
now. So I think we need to, you know, we talk about reflective practice but I think we
need to trigger reflective practice beyond this sense of well I did this
and I did that, I think we need to then situate our reflections within new
paradigms, and I think that's really important.
And so, I think that those things so they're attitudinal changes and I think
we need to present evidence in as transparent and a plain way to
academics because certainly you know we'd like to think that that if nothing convinces
academics evidence would. OK, Gurnam, thank you very much. I just wanted to
finish there and say thank you for joining us and and also for those
watching, you can find out more information about this from the Changing
Mindsets website which is mindsets.port.ac.uk There's a blog there where
you can post questions and comments and find out more about Gurnam's work as
well. OK, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Vikki.
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