176 Difference
dents’ talk. One corollary of this is that while some aspects of law school structure
may have greater impact on students with traditionally marginalized identities, they
may not be helpful for many white male students as well. In this sense, focusing on
the experiences of students of color and female students may yield results that are
useful for all students.
Race in Law School Classrooms
Research on the impact of race on school experience in other educational settings
has for some time documented the “way in which social inequalities are maintained
through the schools.”^9 As broad-scale patterns of school failure became apparent
through the 1960s in schools serving largely working-class and minority communi-
ties (evidenced, for example, by high dropout rates and low success in supporting
academic achievement), educational researchers began to perform observational
research in classrooms that suggested ways the teaching in these schools might be
contributing to the problem.^10 These studies revealed differential treatment ranging
from overtly discriminatory practices (e.g., differential allocation of resources, or
repeated incredulous questioning of minority children who performed well on tests)^11
to more subtle clashes of language and cultural norms. Erickson and Schultz’s and
Philips’s germinal work demonstrated how differences between mainstream and
minority identities, along with affiliated communication styles, could in quiet ways
negatively influence the availability of resources to minority students, a result sub-
stantiated in another classic study by Cazden and her colleague Michaels.^12 Similarly,
James Gee used rhetorical analysis to demonstrate the ways a seven-year-old African
American girl’s narrative, properly understood, was a tour de force; the child’s teacher,
however, told her to stop talking and sit down (and eventually had the child sent to
the school psychologist on the basis of her “incoherent” storytelling).^13
This dramatic illustration of the silencing of alternative narrative forms in stan-
dard classrooms underscores the point made across numerous studies: that classroom
dynamics and misunderstandings can have a strong impact on students’ participa-
tion and their sense of being valued or heard. Indeed, one study that compared black
and white male elementary school students found that “among Black males class-
room interaction variables generally had a higher correlation with achievement than
was true for the sample of White males,” so that black male students’ overall success
in school seemed to depend even more on the quality of their classroom experience
than did the success of white students—a troubling result when taken in combina-
tion with findings indicating that they were less likely to have high-quality classroom
experiences.^14
Thus, we see, as Weinstein has eloquently noted, that students learn more
than academic lessons in the classroom: “It is a social context in which students
also learn social lessons—lessons about appropriate behavior... , about one’s
self as a learner and one’s position in a status hierarchy, about relationships with
students from other racial and ethnic groups, about the value of competition and
cooperation.”^15 Interestingly, scholars have been able to trace very specific ef-
fects of classroom structure on racial dynamics. Qualitative analysis of classroom