Faculty Perspectives on Teaching a Race and Crime Course: A Replication and Expansion

Abstract

This study administered an updated version of Gabbidon and Preston's (2003) survey, which provided an overview of Race and Crime courses, to 48 criminal justice faculty who had experience teaching a Race and Crime course. Descriptive statistics revealed that: (1) less than half of faculty members’ universities required Race and Crime at the undergraduate level; and (2) more than half of faculty members’ universities did not offer Race and Crime at the graduate level. Most faculty (88%) rated their overall experience teaching Race and Crime positively. Sixty percent of faculty considered teaching Race and Crime more emotionally exhausting than other courses they taught, but 56% of faculty also indicated that teaching Race and Crime was more emotionally rewarding. Bivariate analyses generally failed to find significant differences between nonwhite and white faculty on these measures.

Keywords:

• Race
• race and crime
• teaching
• criminal justice education
• pedagogy

Notes

1 Walton (2019, para. 4-5), an Associate Professor in Dartmouth’s Department of Sociology, observed that when she teaches a course on white privilege:

“Everyone learns, but I find that the small handful of white students in the class usually learn the most. That’s because for the first time in their lives, they begin to look at themselves as members of a racial group. They understand that being a good person does not make them innocent but rather they, too, are implicated in a system of racial dominance. After spending their young lives in a condition of ‘white blindness,’ that is, the inability to see their own racial privilege, they begin to awaken to the notion that racism has systematically kept others down while benefitting them and other white people.”