At an undergraduate level, particularly in classes that directly take up the historical formations of social identity, I have increasingly asked my students to reflect on their positionality as they approach their coursework.
What this kind of exercise will vary from class to class, but it generally involves an introduction to the idea of positionality and intersectionality, followed by a credit/no credit brief writing assignment asking students to reflect on their relationship to the ideas.
At the end of the class, I ask students to revisit what they originally note, and write a brief response reflecting on their initial essay.
For students who have taken multiple classes with me where I have used this exercise, rather than requiring them to simply rewrite what I call their “Positionality Paper,” I ask them to write an addendum to it that reflects what aspects of their original paper still hold true, and what aspects have shifted, and reflect upon why that might be true.
Pedagogical value
I assigned this exercise the first time in a course I taught on the history of Race and Racism in the US. In part, the essay was to call attention to how a student’s experience with a topic like race, and their preconceptions about the idea impacted their classroom experience.
In thinking about this assignment, I particularly considered the first chapter in Ambrose, et al.’s book How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. In the chapter, “How does Students’ Prior Knowledge Affect Their Learning?” the authors posit,
Students do not come into our course as blank slates, but rather with knowledge gained in other courses and through daily life. This knowledge consists of an amalgam of facts, concepts, models, perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes, some of which are accurate, complete, and appropriate for the context, some of which are innacurate, insufficient for the learning requirements of the coruse, or simply inappropriate for the context. As students rbing this knowledge to bear in our classroom, it influences how they filter and interpret incoming information.”
Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K Norman; Foreward by Richard E. Mayer, Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 13.
A problem, however, can arise, when the student’s prior knowledge is inappropriate, insufficient, or inaccurate. Ambrose, et al. refer to the inaccuracies that are particularly ingrained as “misconceptions,” and note that “research has shown that deeply held misconceptions often persist despite direction institutional intervention,” (25).
Yet they also suggest that “carefully designed instructions can help wean students from misconceptions through a process called bridging,” which may not bear immediate results but start the process of a more gradual conceptual change (26).
Considering this information, I found the multi-step process of writing and revisiting a positionality paper to be a way to begin the process where students could assess their prior knowledge and begin to articulate their misconceptions as they conceptualize their relationship to course content.
Outcomes
Based on the essays I’ve received over the last few years, I have found that the version of the response at the beginning of the semester will sometimes take the form of a biographical essay. By the end of the semester, it seems that the same people who wrote a more biographically oriented response often begin to analyze the impact of the things they mentioned initially.
Savitri Maya Kunze 