“It Opened My Eyes”

Background: Journal Writing Assignment

Students enrolled in two sections of an introductory sociology course at a private, Catholic, midsized university in the Midwest and one section of an introductory sociology course at a large state university in the Southeast were tasked with this journal writing assignment. Institutional review board (IRB) approval was secured at both universities to evaluate students’ experience of the assignment. For a student’s data to be included here, the student had to complete both a pre- and a post-assessment form, complete the journal writing activity, and provide his or her informed consent as per IRB guidelines. The total sample size for the three sections was 140 students (62 at the state school and 78 in the two sections at the Catholic school).

Prior to handing out the assignment, we ask students to complete a preactivity (or pretest) assessment form. This form allows us to gauge the students’ awareness of structural inequalities and perceptions of how race, gender, and social class affect their lives prior to any journaling. This pretest includes both qualitative and quantitative measures and serves as a baseline for comparison. After discussing qualitative research methods in sociology, such as unobtrusive participant observation and general field note taking, we provide students with the journal writing instructions. To summarize, we ask students to use unobtrusive participant observation methods to investigate their own everyday experiences that relate to race, gender, and social class. We ask students to keep a journal and write entries typical of qualitative field notes (Silverman 2000). The entries are designed to emphasize students’ observations (what they observed) as well as their reactions to and perceptions of the event (how they felt).

After completing at least 10 entries, students then write a two-page summary essay reflecting on (1) how their accounts relate to the course material; (2) how social class, race, and gender affect their everyday life; and (3) their overall responses to their observations. The journal entries emphasize descriptive writing and description reflection (Hatton and Smith 1995), and the summary essay emphasizes critical reflection as a whole. The grading rubric for the assignment is included with the journal instructions.

Course Goals and Learning Objectives

In developing and using this journal writing assignment, we distinguish three broad course goals for our students. First, we want students to reflect more deeply about their personal experiences and to make connections between their everyday lives and the academic course material related to gender, race, and class. Course concepts, such as male privilege, institutional racism, and class consciousness, can seem abstract and foreign to students until they recognize them in their daily lives. According to Lareau (2003:13), “the benefits that accrue to middle-class children can be significant, but they are often invisible to themselves and others. In popular language, middle-class children can be said to have been ‘born on third base but believe they hit a triple.’” Journaling activities can help to unmask these hidden advantages that many of our students have. Second, it is our goal for students to be exposed to field notes and qualitative research. We use the journal writing as an opportunity to illustrate how sociologists gather and use qualitative data to flesh out details and to provide narrative linkages and contexts (Gubrium and Holstein 1997). A final course goal is for students to recognize how their own everyday lives reproduce larger social hierarchies and to understand that these social hierarchies are contemporary issues relevant to today, not simply vestiges of the past.

In terms of specific learning outcomes, we identified three clear objectives for our students. As a result of completing this assignment, students should be able to (1) articulate how race, gender, and social class affect their everyday lives; (2) explain how specific course concepts, readings, and theories can be applied to daily life experiences; and (3) write field notes typical in sociological field research. Our postactivity assessment, in addition to gauging students’ awareness of how race, gender, and social class affect their lives after journaling, also includes quantitative and qualitative items designed to assess these three specific learning outcomes.

Assessment and Evaluation

In the preactivity assessment, students were asked to respond to three statements (“Racial relations impact my daily life,” “Gender impacts my daily life,” and “Social class impacts my daily life”), by circling a number from 1 to 5 where 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = somewhat, 4 = moderately, and 5 = strongly. A summary of student pre- and posttests is described in Table 1. (Responses are scored as interval-level measures.) Prior to any journaling, we find that, on average, students perceived racial relations to have the least impact on their daily life. When we explore shifts over time (see Figures 1, 2, and 3), there is a clear general trend from a larger number of not at all in the pretest assessment (before journaling) to a larger number of strongly impacts in the posttest assessment (after journaling). This occurs for all three items, although the greatest increase in student awareness is on the impact of race in their daily life. All three items exhibit statistically significant increases over time (significance levels from paired-sample t tests are shown in Table 1). From these quantitative data, it is evident that there was an increase in students’ recognition that race, gender, and social class affect their daily lives.

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Table 1.

Summary of Average Responses for Students’ Pre- and Posttests

Statement	Pretest	Posttest	t test of difference
Racial relations impact my daily life.	2.26	3.65	t = −11.62, p < .001
Gender impacts my daily life.	2.94	3.89	t = −8.28, p < .001
Social class impacts my daily life.	2.94	3.41	t = −4.15, p < .001

Note: 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = somewhat, 4 = moderately; 5 = strongly.

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Figure 1.

“Racial relations impact my daily life.”

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Figure 2.

“Sex/Gender/Sexuality impacts my daily life.”

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Figure 3.

“Social class impacts my daily life.”

In the pre- and posttests, students were also asked to answer three open-ended questions, “How do you think racial relations [or gender or social class] impact your daily life?” There was a marked qualitative shift from the pretest to the posttest. For example, one student’s response to the question, “How do you think racial relations impact your daily life?” in the pretest was “I feel that besides learning about different cultures and traditions, it doesn’t really impact my daily life.” After completing the journal writing assignment, the same student responded to the same question in the posttest by writing, “I think jokes, comments, and situations I have witnessed have really changed my perspective to show that racial interactions really do impact my daily life.”

Although the difference between pre- and posttest was most striking for racial relations, students also found that the journals affected their perceptions of gender and social class as well. In the pretest, one student answered the question, “How do you think social class impacts your daily life?” by answering, “I am middle class, so I feel very average as far as social classes are concerned.” The same student responded to the same question in the posttest, “Social class impacts both my perception of others as well as others’ perception of me. I have realized that my friends and I associate lower social class with a lack of work ethic and integrity. That is something that I consciously try to avoid now.”

While the pre- and posttest comparisons were all statistically significant (using paired-sample t tests), we must be cautious in evaluating the causal effectiveness of student journals. As there were no control groups in this assignment (i.e., students who did not participate in the journal-writing assignment but did participate in the course), we cannot be certain if the journals, by themselves, had the positive impact on meeting the assignment objectives, since the study design cannot disentangle the impact of other variables (such as course material, instructor emphasis, etc.). Still, the fact that significant changes occurred at both universities and with different instructors supports the conclusion that the assignment is effective.

In the posttest, students were also asked additional questions assessing their overall evaluation of the journal assignment and whether it helped them to meet various assignment objectives. Overwhelmingly, students were positive about the activity and felt the assignment helped them to meet the learning objectives (see Tables 2 and 3). Qualitative responses to the overall assignment emphasized the invisible influence of race, gender, and social class. For example, one student wrote, “I was very naïve in a lot of aspects. Without the assignment, I never would have noticed how much these social structures impact my life.” Another wrote, “So many racist, sexist, homophobic, classist comments are said to me every day and before I didn’t identify those comments as hurtful to others. It has become so second nature that we don’t realize how much these elements play into our lives, but this assignment made me realize they are more important than I thought.”

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Table 2.

Overall Assessment of Assignment

Statement	Posttest
This was a valuable experience.	4.4
This assignment helped me to understand course concepts and theories.	4.2
I enjoyed doing this activity.	4.4

Note: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = unsure, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree.

As noted in Table 3, 99 percent of students felt the assignment helped them articulate how larger social structures affect students’ everyday lives, and 95 percent felt it helped them apply course content and readings to daily life. Furthermore, 92 percent felt the assignment helped them to write field notes typical in the sociology of qualitative research. One student noted the difficulty of writing field notes: “I did not realize how detailed sociology research had to be. By doing this assignment I better understand how difficult research is.” The journal-writing process also helped some students articulate and organize their thinking and learning. One student commented, “Explaining my experiences in detail helped to give me more definition to what I was feeling.”

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Table 3.

Student Assessment of Whether the Assignment Helped to Meet the Course Objectives

Did the assignment help you successfully do the following:	Yes (%)
Articulate how larger social structures (race, gender, social class) impact students’ everyday lives	99
Illustrate ways in which course content and readings can be applied to daily life	95
Write field notes typical in the sociology of qualitative research	92

Students’ summary essays and journal entries provide additional quotes supporting the effectiveness of journaling. Many students noted how the assignment had “opened their eyes” and commented on their surprise at what they had failed to see previously. We selected comments to include in this teaching note that (1) expressed frequently occurring student sentiments and (2) provided well-articulated comments. For example, we did not include vague comments, such as “This assignment made me think.” Other than meeting the preceding two criteria points, the comments we selected for the article are randomly selected.

The following are a few examples of frequently occurring student comments:

This was a very interesting project for me. It opened my eyes to a lot of issues that go on in daily life that I usually ignore or do not notice.

Even though times are changing and so are peoples’ views, there is still underlying racism and social issues. Often times it is overlooked, and I never realized how much it affects our everyday lives.

For this journaling assignment I was encouraged to become more aware of my surroundings and to listen for statements about racial, gender, and socioeconomic stereotypes. At first I thought this assignment would be difficult to get any examples of these situations, however I was surprised to learn that these stereotypes often come up a lot in my life.

This journaling assignment provided me a great opportunity to take a moment and really observe my surroundings. I was astounded by some of the things I noticed when I just took the time to observe them. A person’s everyday interactions and choices bear with them an unconscious agenda. Ones [sic] interactions, the way they talk, their body language, and their actions can reveal things about them that they might not even know.

These comments illustrate the general effectiveness of journaling for making the invisible visible to students. Importantly, this recognition did not usually involve big, dramatic events but an ability to notice simple things that students might not have observed without this exercise. Student comments also highlight their sense that the journaling assignment will have a lasting impact on them. Some examples follow:

While there were negative and positive realizations as a result of my observations, in general it was a positive experience. Even after I had the ten entries completed I found myself paying much closer attention to these issues in my daily life. This is a change I gladly welcome and will strive to keep with me.

I also don’t believe that my heightened awareness of how my race affects those around me will stop with this journaling assignment.

Using the grading rubric (see Appendix), we assessed that, overall, students consistently provided quality journal entries. Their summary reflections were less uniformly excellent, but the majority of students did well on these, too. The second author, who had not used this assignment before, was especially impressed by the high quality of the work submitted. In our next section, we discuss the best practices that we use to help ensure that students’ journaling and reflection meet high standards.

Best Practices for Successfully Implementing the Assignment

Initially, some students perceive this project to be “easy” as it involves no outside research, interviewing, or “extra” work on their part. To ensure that students were on the right track, we encouraged them to submit a few sample journal entries early in the process. Sample entries allow the teacher to assess whether students are reflecting on the observations, providing their feelings, and engaging in critical reflection.

While some find the work relatively easy, others, especially members of the dominant group, may find this assignment to be especially challenging. Many white students in particular noted in their summary essays that when they first received the assignment, they did not think they would have anything to write about regarding race and ethnicity. It may be helpful to give struggling students a few guiding questions, even prior to seeing sample entries. Asking students to pay attention at mealtime can be especially effective: Who are (or aren’t) you sitting next to when you eat a meal? As you look around restaurants, the student union, or the cafeteria, who is sitting with each other? How close are they sitting next to each other? Who is serving food, handling a cash register, or emptying garbage cans? As you look around your university, who is cleaning the bathrooms, who is answering the phone in the academic departments, who is teaching your classes or serving as the deans, provost, and university president?

Some instructors may wish to impose rules about the type of journals they receive; for example, does the instructor want three entries on gender, three on social class, and three on race? We recommended to our students to include a variety of accounts. For example, if a student writes about the differences between what men and women wear to college parties on Friday night, she or he should write about something different on Saturday night. Some students may ask what constitutes one entry, as journal entries suggest a narrative form with a beginning and end, yet our lived experiences are not as discrete. For example, a student may have one interaction at a college party and wish to count it as multiple journal entries (one on gender and the types of alcohol consumed, another on racial segregation at the party, etc.). We discouraged such “double counting” by asking students to date each journal entry and provide narrative details when describing the interaction. To alleviate this concern, students can be shown sample journal entries. We also emphasize that one entry is typically a half page of text, single spaced.

In the “Frequently Asked Questions” portion of the journal instructions, we advise students to focus their analysis on interpersonal interactions and not TV, movie, or other media content. And so, while a discussion they had about a movie would “count” for a journal entry, a content analysis of the movie would not. We also place restrictions on the number of entries students can submit that are based on past events. Our goal is for students to examine everyday mundane examples in a sociological way and not simply to recall memorable events. For students who are struggling with journal content, we suggest guiding questions (such as those noted earlier at mealtime). Students might also be asked to observe when they spend money: what are they purchasing, where, why, and how does it relate to gender, social class, and race?

We also suggest that students pay special attention to their emotions. For instance, the second author urged students to observe when they had feelings of fear and to write an entry about it. Here is one example:

Wednesday night I studied in the Library until about 3:00 am. Usually I am with a friend, but that night I had been studying alone. While walking to my car, I passed 2 boys. They were white, about 6 feet tall, and seemed to be college students. I didn’t even give it a thought that I should be worried that they could bother me or potentially hurt me. I just kept walking. A couple minutes later I saw a man standing in the distance. He was tall, African American, and wearing dark clothes. Immediately I pulled out my keys that had my pepper spray attached. I was prepared for the worst as I walked past him. We walked past each other, made eye contact, and kept going our separate ways. When I got in the car I thought about how I reacted differently when I saw the 2 white boys and then when I saw the African American man. It is sad that even though I didn’t mean to discriminate, I couldn’t help but do so. I know that not all African Americans are dangerous or are out to steal your belongings, but there was still a worried feeling that I got when I saw him. Maybe it’s because I am constantly getting emails from the [campus] police department saying that the typical 5’10 African American man, robbed a student while she was walking on campus at night. It is unfortunate that I associate African Americans as being harmful; it is something that I definitely need to work on.

Not only is this entry about race, but it also illustrates gender dynamics by designating the “typical” robbed student as a “she.” If this gender construction were missed by the student, the professor could point it out in the written feedback or in follow-up class discussions, as we note below.

Finally, it can be helpful to tell students to pay attention at different times. For example, Picca and Feagin (2007) have found that racist comments are more likely to occur on the evenings, weekends, and other times when excessive alcohol is present. Instructors may be mindful that certain times of the year are more likely to elicit common journal responses. The first author has used student journals in the classroom for more than a decade and has found that particular holidays, such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, tend to be fertile grounds for racial conversations. Halloween and costuming, for example, is an excellent opportunity to discuss how costumes are raced, gendered, and classed (Mueller, Dirks, and Picca 2007).

As time of year is often a factor in the content of student journals, we have found it useful to strategize when to introduce the assignment to class and when to set the due date. In a 16-week semester, the first author usually waits a full month to introduce the assignment until students have a good sense of the course material. Because many students do not know what it is that they are looking for initially, presenting the assignment too early can cause anxiety and frustration. The first author introduces the assignment in week 5 of the semester and sets the due date around week 11, ideally after key holidays (Halloween or St. Patrick’s Day, for example). During the journal-writing time, it is helpful to periodically check in with the students to see if they have questions about the journal writing or at least to remind the students of the due date.

While this timeline works for the first author, there are benefits to setting the due date earlier in the schedule. The journal-writing assignment tends to enhance class discussions. In later course discussions, students would often bring up their own experiences from the journal entries to personalize discussions. The course content is made less abstract as the students engage with the course material.

Benefits of the Student Journal-Writing Assignment

This journal-writing activity is transferable to most high school and university settings and has been successfully used in both upper-division and lower-level sociology courses. Instructors can easily modify this journal-writing project to focus on any single social location (or “axis” of intersectionality, such as gender, social class, race, religion, ability status, nationality, etc.) rather than the three that are presented here. Instructors may decide to have students write in their journals every day for a specific period, such as two weeks, or alternatively to write a specific number of journal entries over the course of a few weeks or months. In this project, students were given five to eight weeks to document at least 10 journal entries.

With students’ permission and maintaining anonymity, instructors can use narratives from student journals in class. Journal writing also allows the instructor the opportunity to connect with each student as a unique individual and yet be less intimidating than during face-to-face interactions. Fisher (1996:158) refers to this as the “journal dialogue” yet also warns that reading and commenting to each journal takes considerable time and effort. To facilitate a quicker turnaround time, we attached the grading rubric (see Appendix) to the student papers, which can save time.

As we mentioned earlier, gathering sample entries early on and then commenting on a few “example entries” for the entire class can be helpful and is a way to minimize the time commitment involved, especially for large classes. At the same time, just reading student journals without making comments can be useful for getting to know students. Journal writing can be a safe place for students to disclose about themselves to instructors. Several students from oppressed groups (such as women, men of color, students from a lower social class, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer students) wrote especially compelling entries for the assignment, disclosing their feelings and concerns arising from daily struggles. Identity struggles of all sorts are common for students and will show up in these entries, although entries for most students will not be as fraught and poignant. The information provided in journal entries is not easily disclosed in class interactions but can be especially meaningful for developing connections with students who may take courses from you in the future and continue to interact with you. Even with less dramatic disclosures, journal entries often provide access to students’ unique viewpoints and quirky senses of humor.

Challenges in Doing the Assignment

There are potential difficulties that arise in using this student journal-writing assignment of which instructors should be especially mindful. Students can sometimes use the academic journal as a personal diary and reveal too much information (related to alcohol and drug use, intimate behaviors, and criminal activity). We remind students that the assignment is for an academic course and to follow normative procedures that they see in their sociological readings. We also make the obvious point that they should not write anything that they would not want their professor to read (but students’ standards can sometimes be very different from our own). We also emphasize that students should maintain the anonymity of others in their entries by using pseudonyms, and we note this clearly in the assignment instructions.

Instructors should be aware of potential ethical concerns, such as knowing when it is necessary to intervene when events warrant. It may be wise to remind students that (in many U.S. states) professors are nonconfidential sources who may be obligated to report acts of violence, such as sexual assault. Failure of universities to disclose known acts or threats of violence have made international news. Instructors may also intervene if the collective journals reveal patterns of behavior in the broader community. For example, in a previous semester, the first author noticed that many African American males in her class wrote about negative interactions with campus police. As a result of this finding, she collaborated with students, campus police, and Student Development to create policy changes at the university. The journals can be a useful tool to keep a pulse on the campus community.

Students will often report awareness that racism, sexism, and classism are problematic but then leave it at that. For example, quite a few students ended their summary essays with comments such as “I am now in a position to end inequality.” Although recognition of inequality is important, it should not be mistaken for a solution to inequality. It is important to point out to students that recognition or consciousness raising is only a first step, albeit an important first step.

Another potential pitfall of the assignment is a concern for social desirability, or that students will be conscious of their audience and document what they perceive to be the “right” thing to say. Students are often aware of social desirability in their journal writing. For example, quite a few students offered disclaimers before writing something that may be viewed as racist, sexist, or classist. One white student started his journal entry that focused on a conversation he had about campus crime with the statement, “I do not want to sound racist or biased with this journal entry but there is no other way to put it.” Even though the student made comments that are racially biased by linking campus crime with African Americans, the student is still likely concerned with how the reader (who is assigning a grade on the assignment) perceives him.

While social desirability is a concern, we were surprised by the “confessional” nature of student journal writing. Consider a journal entry written by a white female:

Sometimes I run in a certain neighborhood and I noticed that my first reactions are usually negative. I have to tell myself constantly that I’m not being fair and I shouldn’t think about the stereotypes. It is hard not to be a little worried when passing a group of underprivileged, predominately black, high school kids. It is a constant struggle not to judge someone based on their assumed background. I don’t like how I get nervous or uncomfortable when passing those school kids while running. Nothing negative has ever happened to me in order for me to think that way.

Although the student knows what the “socially correct” response is (“I’m not being fair and I shouldn’t think about the stereotypes”), she reports her feelings of nervousness and discomfort that violate social desirability (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Feagin 2009).

The content of the student journals may also be influenced by the (perceived) social location of the instructor or grader. The instructors presented here are both white, which may influence the comfort level of student writing. At the school where Leslie Picca teaches, she regularly reads student journals with racially biased comments against African Americans, among other racial groups. However, when an African American colleague at the same school asked her students to keep a journal, she noted that the students reported no racially biased comments against African Americans but those against only Asian Americans and international students. Since the race of the professor may influence the content of the student journal writing, if feasible, it can be helpful to have multiple colleagues use the student journal-writing assignment and offer comparisons.

Another option for dealing with the issue of social desirability is to offer a postjournaling informal writing assignment. On the journal due date, students are asked to write for five minutes, reflecting on the process of writing in their journals. Students are given guiding questions, such as the following:

After asking students to write individually for about five minutes, students are asked to gather in small groups and share their responses. They also may be asked to share one or two journal entries, if they feel comfortable. It may be useful to have students gather with students in the class with whom they do not regularly interact. (Students could be randomly organized by birthdays or simply by counting off. Students who are friends may become easily distracted with comparing what each other wrote about, particularly if they interact frequently outside of class.) After a few minutes of sharing in the small group, the larger class resumes and examines any commonalities. For heterogeneous groups, students may be asked to notice any apparent differences in the journal writing (for example, among different racial groups, between women and men, among younger students and nontraditional-age students, etc.). Instructors should be mindful to not single out any underrepresented group and remind students to share to their level of comfort. To encourage honest reflection and encourage potential awareness of social desirability, it may be best to have the informal writing assignments either anonymous or simply not collected.

Students may think that if they notice more egregious cases of racism or sexism, their grade will improve. As a means of decreasing this concern, we provide an explicit grading rubric (see Appendix) so students know in advance the criteria by which they will be graded (such as the quality and detail of systematic observations and field notes). Although we felt the journaling assignment was a central component to the course, it was worth a small portion of the students’ final grades. In general, these assignments were given high grades. With the grading rubric we provide, many points are awarded simply by turning in on time a neat, presentable paper with 10 entries. Because of the concerns for social desirability and the subjectivity of grading, the assignment was worth only 15 percent.

However, we do not want to minimize the impact the assignment had on student learning. The journal assignment enriched class discussions, as students often referenced the experiences that they wrote about, resulting in more personalized, less abstract discussions. Additionally, we found the journal writing enhanced the quality of student work in other assignments. The second author used the student journals as a form of scaffolding for deeper thinking on the final exam. His final essay includes a question asking students to identify why they are responsible for social change and to link class material to their own lives and how they are complicit in social injustice by simply maintaining the status quo; as expected, a large percentage of the students referenced their journal writing in their exam.

We also provide sample journal accounts and highlight mundane examples so students do not feel they need to describe “jaw-dropping oppression” to earn an A. For example, a former female student wrote about eating lunch with her boyfriend and noticing the different table manners between women and men. In her summary essay, she related her experience with the concept of gender as a social construction and “doing gender.” We emphasize that this student did not need to search hard to find an extraordinary experience worth journaling; the goal is to view “the same phenomena in a different way” (Berger 1963:28).

Conclusion

In this article, we have described a journaling assignment that asks students to observe their everyday experiences to become more aware of the impact of race, gender, and social class on their daily lives. This assignment promotes reflexivity (multiple points of reflection on the connections between their daily lives and the academic course material) and helps students develop their sociological imaginations. Surveying students engaged in this assignment over time, we find statistically significant increases in awareness after journaling at two very different universities (one a private, Catholic, midsized university in the Midwest and the other a large state university in the Southeast). Qualitative responses also support the effectiveness of this assignment. While there are challenges to implementing this assignment, the benefits make it well worth the time and effort.