Student Participation and Social Difference 177interactions has demonstrated the ways that teachers create “communicative
status,” conferring on favored students a sense that they are “students you can
learn from.”^16 This status can attach to students regardless of the quality of their
answers. Use of recitation (the closest analogue to Socratic dialogue), with its
intensely public potential for evaluation of responses (both by teachers and peers),
tends to encourage the formation of entrenched, segregated groups.^17 Conversely,
classrooms with more “status-leveling factors” and fewer competitive structures
encourage the formation of more interracial friendships; at the opposite end of
the continuum from recitation are structured programs for cooperative learn-
ing, which “were superior in producing positive race relations, pro-social devel-
opment, and classroom climate for all students.”^18 Research results converge on
the conclusion that the “formal social interaction of the classroom can influence
students’ informal interactions” in powerful ways.^19 Hence, even apparently
neutral structuring of classroom interaction using particular pedagogical tech-
niques (such as recitation) may contribute to hierarchies that take on a racialized
character. This is particularly the case when the indigenous discourse norms of
a minority community run counter to the norms embedded (indeed, hidden) in
those pedagogical techniques.^20
There is also a well-established literature documenting differential schooling
practices along class lines. Studies in this tradition have located a “hidden curricu-
lum” in the schooling of working-class students: teachers in these classrooms more
often train students to submit to authority, to focus on maintaining proper form
(rather than developing creative approaches to content), and to tolerate boredom.^21
The more empowered, active attitude toward learning that is encouraged in stu-
dents from middle- and upper-class backgrounds was vividly demonstrated in a
study that involved administering a questionnaire in nine high schools in the Los
Angeles area. In response to a forced-choice survey in which one set of answer
brackets had been omitted, middle-class students complained about and resisted
the forced choice but drew in their own set of answer brackets. Students from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds unquestioningly accepted the forced choice but re-
peatedly asked for permission to draw in the missing answer brackets in order to
complete their answer.^22 This vignette demonstrates the telling differentiation that
can occur when schooling practices teach only particular students that it is their
prerogative to assert themselves, to make decisions independently in their learn-
ing process. Thus, work across various kinds of schools points to the importance
of a thorough examination of context in understanding classroom dynamics and
their impact on students from different backgrounds.
A number of studies have focused on minority students’ experiences in col-
lege. One observational study found that white students “were asked significantly
more complex questions by professors, were pushed more to better their response
to professors’ questions, and received greater amounts of time during the profes-
sors’ response to their question than did minority students.”^23 Other studies had
previously demonstrated that teachers treat students differently depending on their
expectations; this subsequent observational study found some of the same differ-
ences in treatment between minority and nonminority students as had been found
in earlier studies between low- and high-expectation students.^24 Studies of African