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Last week I attended a very interesting talk by Joshua Aronson, an NYU professor of psychology on the fragility of human intelligence. Aronson began his talk by recounting how intimidated he was by his academic advisor when he was a graduate student in Princeton and how he lost a few IQ points every time he entered his office. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the feeling. I can’t be the only one who thinks that part of the Ph.D. training is about constantly doubting our intellectual capacity and questioning whether we really belong here or not!

Ten years ago Claude Steele from Stanford University and Josh Aronson published a series of laboratory experiments with White and Black college students and argued that the achievement gap on standardized test scores between White and Black students is not only a result of racism, poverty and unequal opportunities, but also a phenomenon they called “stereotype threat”, that is an “apprehension arising from the awareness of a negative stereotype or personal reputation in a situation where the stereotype is relevant and thus confirmable”. In their study, before taking the verbal part of the GRE students were either told that the test was diagnostic of their intellectual abilities or that the test was in the process of being developed. While White students performed equally well under both types of instructions, Black students’ performance decreased sharply when they thought the test was diagnostic of their abilities, that is, when they were threatened by the possibility of confirming a cultural stereotype about their group if they performed poorly. In the non-diagnostic condition, they performed almost as well as Whites did. These findings stimulated over 100 other studies which replicated the effect with Latino students, Whites’ math ability when compared to Asians, women’s math ability when compared to men, and older people’s memory performance. Stereotype threat has been the hot thing in social and educational psychology in the last decade.

What this volume of research suggests is that academic learning and performance occur in very specific contexts that are shaped by cultural stereotypes and situational pressures such as the awareness of who else is in the room. This is of course not news for us. Nevertheless, I wonder to what extent we are aware of and how we deal with cultural stereotypes that inform students’ expectations for their own performance in our work as writing and communication fellows. For example, while working with immigrant students who hadn’t noticed my accent and who are almost always apologetic about their English, I see that they get more relaxed and more engaged in the work when I tell them that I’m not a native speaker either and that I used to make the same mistakes. I wouldn’t want to fall prey to stereotyping myself but I did notice that, at least among the students I met with, men tend to write shorter papers –and not necessarily more to the point. What are the stereotypes about writing, and verbal communication in general that lead some students to disengage from the activity or that make them anxious, and what do we do about them? And how does the diversity of CUNY classrooms inform students’ expectations for their performance? I’d like to hear from other fellows and those of us who teach.