A Kitchen Table Pedagogy for Interrogating Whiteness through a Research Experience Course

After sociology undergraduates have learned about inequalities in their substantive courses, a research experience course in which they critically apply these concepts can be invaluable for fostering deep learning. Coteaching a sociological research experience for undergraduates course three times, the authors witnessed the emergence of an emotional connection to critical perspectives on race and ethnicity that enabled students to analyze and creatively apply these concepts to their research projects. The inquiry-based course was built around the authors’ current research project on how families with tween and/or teen children manage food provisioning. Although the course was not explicitly about race or whiteness, many students could relate to the marginalization felt by study participants because of their own ethnicity or race, leading the whole class to become a cohesive team that was attuned to the power of white supremacy in food discourse. Here the authors describe two key assignments they believe were essential components of the course: (1) writing and sharing your food autobiography and (2) analyzing “what’s interesting here?” to find themes in the interview data. The authors found that the intercultural sensitivity cultivated in the first weeks of the course through personal storytelling carried forward into the interviewing process, into the grounded theory discussions that took place in the classroom, and into the students’ final research projects. The result was that each semester, students interrogated the whiteness of American food discourse by studying the forms of difference embedded in the food stories of themselves and of the study participants