The WSU First-Year Experience Program offers this professional development opportunity to faculty and staff who work with first-year students:
“Stereotype Threat Theory and First-Generation Students: Strategies to Help Faculty and Staff”
4:10 p.m. Wed., Sept. 24, in CUE 202
Eva Navarijo, director of the First Scholars Program, and Anna Plemons, director of the Critical Literacies Achievement and Success Program (CLASP), will present the basic tenets of Stereotype Threat Theory and how it might be applied to the work of WSU faculty and staff with first-generation students.
“We will discuss some strategies for working with first-generation students that help committed faculty and staff support students who are dealing with the myriad challenges of being first in one’s family to attend college while avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions.”
Stereotype Threat Theory was identified by psychologists Claude Steele (Stanford University) and Joshua Aronson (New York University) in the mid-1990s; it has been expanded upon by numerous researchers.
It says that when a person’s social identity is attached to a negative stereotype, that person will tend to underperform in a manner consistent with the stereotype. Results may include decreased performance in academic and non-academic domains, increased use of self-defeating behaviors, disengagement, and altered professional aspirations, for example. “Stereotype threat” is not limited to historically disadvantaged groups, certain races, or sexes: everyone experiences it, experts say.
The First-Year Experience is part of WSU Undergraduate Education.
