As graduate students, we may be teaching or working as teaching assistants for the firsttime. It can be intimidating to have to prepare content each week on top of keeping up withour writing, research, coursework, etc. I compiled a list of resources that can help you more efficiently prepare for teaching your classes or discussion sections. While not an exhaustive list, the following resources are ones that have been helpful to me.

The purpose of this activity is to help students identify and respond to biological and colorblind racisms they may hear in their everyday lives. The activity uses a pedagogical technique of chat stations where students move around the classroom to visit five different chat stations that each list one statement containing racist discourse. Students work in groups to identify if the statement is either biological racism or one of the four frames of colorblind racism and then record their answers on a worksheet. Students then individually evaluate how they would respond to the statements if they were to encounter them in their everyday lives.

The purpose of this activity is to help students inductively learn Goffman’s concept of impression management through examining how they behave in four social situations: professional settings, with friends, on social media, and important but personal settings. To complete this activity, students will examine their own behavior in each of these settings, such as their word choice, style of dress, posture, and conversational topics. Through a class discussion, students will learn Goffman’s impression management – that we adapt our behavior in different social situations in order to impress the people that we are speaking to.

This photograph features a bird sitting on a tree on the UC Merced campus during the fall 2016 semester.

As graduate students, we are constantly managing multiple tasks. From staying up-to-date on the latest research to creating a great classroom experience for our students, our calendars are filled each week. Below are 9 steps you can take to organize your calendar for graduate school.

Graduate students are often tasked with leading discussion sections, yet graduate departments sometimes do not provide adequate training on how to teach effectively. During the first year in my Ph.D. program, I remember my cohort and I feeling unsure about what we needed to do in a discussion section since, for many of us, our undergraduate institutions did not offer discussion sections. Even if you have experience being a student in a discussion section, it can be difficult to know how to plan your classes. The goal of this guest blog post is to help ease graduate student anxieties about what to do in discussion sections by providing a structure you can use in your own classes. 

Ten years after sociologist Mary Romero lamented the “ideological and theoretical gulf between immigration research and the sociology of race,” researchers have begun to bridge this theoretical gulf by centering critical race theory in studies of migration. Building on these analyses, this article argues that migration flows and immigrant incorporation are shaped not only by white supremacy but also by patriarchy and global capitalism. Insofar as migrants, predominantly from the Global South, are usually racialized as non-white, and come to work in a labor market shaped by exploitation, oppression, and patriarchy, it is critical to think of migrant flows and settlement within the context of what bell hooks describes as a White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. We draw from examples from our research with a broad spectrum of migrants and their children to elucidate how these three systems of oppression shape the experiences of migrants.

Methods

Using regression methods to analyze data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, we examined how attributional and relational dimensions of ethnicity affect: 1) intragroup differences in Latinx mental and physical health status, as measured by feelings of worthlessness and self-rated health, respectively; and 2) intergroup differences between Latinxs and non-Hispanic Whites in these health outcomes.

Results

Latinxs have higher odds of feelings of worthlessness and lower odds of self-reporting good/excellent health compared with non-Hispanic Whites. Additionally, intragroup differences in health are observed among Latinxs, conditioned on attributional or relational dimensions of ethnicity.

Conclusion

Multidimensional measures of ethnicity that distinguish between characteristics associated with ethnicity (attributional) or race (relational) offer a nuanced explanation of health disparities by revealing aspects of ethnicity that shape health outcomes differently, contributing to the goals of health equity.