Intergroup Communication
I recently completed a 3 quarter, 30 week series with Stanford’s Diversity and First-Gen Office. I started fall quarter when I took Psychology 103: Intergroup Communication. I then trained to facilitate it in the winter and finally was one of 16 TAs this last spring.
In Psych 103, a hundred students meet Tuesday and Thursday evening to discuss race, gender, income, and sexual orientation. Each unit, subgroups sit in the center of the room and are questioned by groups surrounding them. In the race unit, subgroups include the Native, Black, Latinx, Mixed, Asian, White, and Middle East and North African groups, while groups for income are low, middle, and high. Questions are formed and voted on prior to this fishbowl and are posed anonymously to the members of the group inside. Students are then asked to share their opinions and experiences. “Would you be okay if your child came out as gay?” “Do you feel safe at Stanford?” “What does being a man mean to you?” “Do you hold any stereotypes over your own race?” “What is the richest thing you’ve ever done?”
Along with in class fishbowls, small sections of 12 students meet weekly to debrief their experiences and have more intimate discussions. Every unit consists of mandatory readings and reflections. Students go on walks together and are required to meet one on one with someone who identifies with another group.
There are 4 units, 10 weeks, 20 class meetings, and countless conversations. Many continue into the night as students leave to the bike racks and head back to their dorms.
Students learn. A lot. The process is built this way - exhilarating and painful. The students on the outside sit circled around, listening to the fishbowl of 10 - 15 students. These are students who talk like them, look like them, and act just like them, but whose life stories and experiences are wildly different.
Inside the fishbowl, students are sharing. Some look down at the carpet while others speak out. There are nods and verbal acknowledgements, but also silence. The quietness is heavy, as if to say: “these are the shoes I walk in, I have no other pair but my own.”
While reactions are not allowed during the fishbowl, there are plenty to go around. There is surprise when members of the Black group talk about biking while black. There is hurt when the gender unit begins with three groups, but discussions mostly concern two. There is anger when members of the high income group talk about their understanding of wealth. These reactions, on everything from colorism and colonialism to arranged marriage and parenting, are shared in section and debriefs.
If our institutions accepted anger in lieu of privilege, perhaps things would be different. But instead, students in Psych 103 lean into discomfort. Usually in school, thoughts and ideas flow inwards. In Psych 103, students take them out, asking, “Why is this here? Should it still be?”
Every Tuesday and Thursday, something subtle is celebrated at Stanford. Vulnerability. Diversity. The ability to be wrong. And the privilege to be able to say: “I understand. What’s next?”
Psych 103 ends not with a call to action, but a call to question - and a call to see consequence, not in headlines or textbooks, but behind the eyes of real students.
[1] My gratitude to all the students in Psych 103 for this experience. Thanks to our teaching team Dereca, Danny, Hazel, and Gabriela; my facilitation instructor, Danny; my TA partner, Tracy, my section, and the other TAs.
[3] Critique: As with any program, there is room for critique, but unlike most other programs, the Psych 103 professors actively seek it. While I am no longer involved with it, were I to organize or do it again, I would add units on ability (including health/chronic health issues) and spirituality/religion. I would also put more emphasis on theoretical frameworks for understanding power and privelege. I would also devote time to empowering students and discussing `what’s next.’ I also often felt a need to choose and claim an identity and to allow it to define me, when identity-based understanding is quite different from the way I (at least spiritually) approach myself. I think students can learn that the world views them under certain identities without feeling pressured to label or box their own self.
[3] Disclaimer: this is based solely on my own experience with Psych103. Due to the units that we chose, I was many a time part of the more priveleged group. The experience of students who were in marginalized groups was likely very different.
