Policing/Teaching
These are not my ideas, but my advisor Adam M. Smith’s. I found this internal class discussion to be very effective so I decided to package it up in an easier readable format and share with wider CM peeps. It is on medium because that is what I could set up fastest and has the nice tweet embedding. Please don’t share externally, even though Adam is aware of this, it is just an internal canvas post in the end.
For context, the class is a graduate seminar on Computational Media Education research. The class had both foundational readings, such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and academic papers on how to do discipline-based education research.
Here is the original text:
In light of ongoing events and as well deep historical trends, I wanted to draw your attention towards a parallel between teaching and policing — a way of integrating the idea that Black lives matter into the ongoing discourse of this [CM Pedagogy] class.
This post is prompted by a recent retweet of a thread from 2019:
First, let’s consider some structural similarities between teaching (focusing on the instructor / student interaction in the context of public higher education classroom) and policing (focusing on the officer / citizen interaction in the context of interactions on the street):
- Both involve direct human-to-human, moment-to-moment interactions between individuals. At the same time, efforts to understand and reform the associated systems will often take a very human-distant, quantitative approach to understand aggregate outcomes.
- Both interactions involve a major power differential where one party (the teacher/officer) has some kind of state-recognized authority/credential and the ability (and expectation to) use their power in a way that leaves a lasting impact on the other party (the student/citizen).
- Despite varying levels of formalized training (e.g. in active learning techniques or non-violent de-escalation techniques), the teacher/officer is expected to react quickly, based on gut instincts, to rapidly changing conditions with different students/citizens.
- Both are part of governmental systems that consume significant amounts of public funding with the understanding that, on some level, the student/citizen (and their family) are one of the obvious sources of that funding.
- Both systems have well documented histories of racial inequality in their operation as well as a (growing) understanding of how those inequalities pile up across generations to profound effect. Within the USA, both systems developed from explicitly racist precursors. In the present, assumptions of a post-racist society stymie understanding and discussion of implicit and explicit racism in the present day systems. Ever-present pressures related to funding levels have the the effect of continually deprioritizing discussions of racial inequality.
- Efforts to reform both systems are surrounded by clouds of half-informed opinions — “if they would only do X, the problem would go away” / “when I do Y, the outcomes are just fine” / “technological gadget Z will finally bring accountability and let teachers/officers learn from their own mistakes” / “this list of K best practices has all you need to know to turn this situation around”.
Returning to the original Twitter thread…
#1 Body Cams: Research seems to show, contrary to some intuitions, that the use of police body cameras doesn’t reduce police violence. In the teaching world, we might think of classroom recordings as something similar (motivated by a different purpose and implemented in different ways). They way I use the UCSC webcast system quickly ramps up surveillance compared to a no-recording baseline, but they way I also use it quickly ramps up asynchronous student access to the recordings. Translating some of these ideas back to policing — imagine an implementation of body cams that came bundled with timely ability for the community to review the logs (like our webcast system). Meanwhile, who gets to be part of this “community”? I have only anecdotal evidence for interesting ways that my students use the webcast system for my specific courses, so more (education) research is needed before we can offer anything that might translate to policing.
#2 Training programs including implicit bias trainings: There seems to be no effectiveness of these changing police behavior. Meanwhile, some level of implicit bias training is now integrated to the new faculty orientation program at UCSC. I’ve been through a few of these kinds of trainings (and heard stories of others while talking to people at teaching events) and there seems to be a “preaching to the choir” effect — the trainings seem to deeply reach only those who were already predisposed to address bias in their own teaching (so little chance for behavior change).
(Aside on implicit bias trainings: It was almost fun to quantify my own implicit bias in the training exercises. I know the biases are in there, and I know the work to be done is to adapt and account for them rather than to repress them. However, what was much more eye opening for me, and galvanizing in terms of my teaching goals, was seeing the achievement gaps for my classes, including when they were taught by others in the past, as broken down by features like race, gender, or a wealth-like factor. It was a powerful experience to think through how teaching practices that seem harmless, neutral-by-default, could yield outcomes so unequal in terms of race.)
#3 Policies limiting the use of force: These seem to work for policing, although the details of the policy matter. In teaching, we don’t “use force” in the same sense (pass/fail grades our are main mechanism of race-related impact), but our teaching is still bound hard by campus policies and softly by the policies we setup in syllabi. Thinking through disparities in who has a consistently free schedule for lecture attendance and classwork, I’d expect attendance and late work credit policies to be some of the low hanging fruit or research that wanted to understand race-related outcomes in terms of syllabus-level details.
#4 Demilitarization: Research shows that more military weapons leads to more people killed. I’m not sure how to fit this one into my teaching-as-policing analogy. One thought: entangling student conduct issues with criminal issues (relevant to students here who may have been charged with illegally access computing resources in relation to the grading strike).
#5 Police union contracts that include purging of misconduct records: Cities with the most history-erasing contracts have higher police violence rates. I’m too early in my career to have had meaningful exposure to the faculty misconduct processes, but I have directly observed a UCSC instructor call the police to remove a Black student from their office in a situation where doing so seemed a very inappropriate and unprofessional action. I can imagine it is very hard for heavily discriminatory teaching practices to impact an instructor’s career because I know how complicated and uncommon it is to even get access to data on the disparate impact of my own teaching (I had to jump through some hoops to get a report on my own achievement gaps included in my last review here).
#6 Predictive policing on the police: The idea (at this point in the original Twitter thread) is to use techniques like social network analysis to track the spread of abusive behaviors within a police department. Interesting, something like this has already been done a bit for teaching! Instead of tracking abuse, however, they were tracking the adoption of new, evidence-based teaching practices. I originally heard of the work via an overview talk I attended at the STEM Equity Conference, so I’m having trouble finding the original paper. I think this might have been part of it: [Link to Article]. The big idea is that the (helpful/harmful) perspectives and behavior patterns of police/instructors are observed to spread along relationship lines in local social networks. Another paper like this for the teaching domain (one I can’t find right now) specifically identified “teaching professors” as the super-spreader hubs for teaching ideas. Most faculty who had recently adopted an evidence-based instructional practice (EBIP) had picked it up via contact with a teaching professor, rather than via their more common interactions with research faculty peers in similar research areas. If you what to know who is likely to change their teaching practices (or policing practices) you should look at who they talk to about teaching (or policing) the most.
#7: Investments in alternatives to police as crime prevention strategies work. If traditional teaching reliably provides such unequal outcomes, it might be better to divert funds into alternative programs for supporting equalization of student success rather than trying to use the same amount to fix the faculty. (This might sound like giving up on the problem, but I see it as acknowledging that only a few kinds of learning happen in traditional classroom setups, and we should be investing in and researching the effectiveness of many alternatives.)
#8: Establishing non-police alternatives to 911 calls (e.g. for those involving mental illness) reduces police violence. Translating this to higher-ed teaching, providing and supporting other ways of getting help beyond the single instructor’s office hours is important. TAs are some of our alternative first-responders for student issues, but they have often had the same (zero) level of training with respect to how racial inequalities arise in teaching.
#9: (Difficult to translate) There seems to be a need for a body outside of an academic department that can step in and intervene when the teaching outcomes by race (or another factor) get too bad. Something like this seems to be in place as, before I started teaching CMPS 5J, I got an email that included “CMPS 5J has been identified as a high-risk course for marginalized UCSC through an HSI grant titled Science Education & Mentorship in Latino Lives in Academia (SEMILLA).” in reference to getting a larger-than-normal allotment of support from the Learning Support Services (LSS) program. It’s nice that this was a pro-active action based on past data on the course (as taught by others) rather than a punitive action laid against me based on by past teaching (of other courses).
#10 Research shows that meaningful change in policing is possible (example given is how Oakland went from 8 police shootings a year to zero in a 5 year span recently). I’ve seen race-based achievement gaps exposed and significantly reduced (even slightly inverted!) from quarter-to-quarter in my own teaching. Observable change is certainly possible, and a big first step is even being able to observe the current state. Students often gossip about the average grade in a course as taught by one instructor or another, but they don’t have the data tools to disaggregate this by race or other classes. Imagine one instructor gives out B as an average grade while another gives out A as an average grade — maybe you’d like to take the second class to boost your GPA. Next you learn that the average grade for students in your same demographic bucket (one that happens to be rare in this major) is A for the first class and D for the second. It could be sampling error or it could be a preview of the kind of inclusion or discrimination you are about to experience — which class willy you take now? Obviously students don’t have this kind of data right now, but we could do research projects to figure out how they might use it if they did — there’s some important education research to be done that might impact local policy.
Research that directly impacts Black students need not always involve data analysis that disaggregates student demographics. For example, you can get at how more equitable (as validated by past research) teaching strategies are being adopted and spread by talking to instructors with no students present.
As a TA or future instructor, I encourage you to think through the ways that ideas like “let’s just focus on students in our major, not the ones who are here for a general education credit” or “let’s just focus on the common case, the freshman, not the ones who are strangely taking this class in their senior year” can quickly turn into something that has the effect that Black students matter less to your teaching. Treating as if they were identical people is far from treating people fairly.
