By Elise Murowchick (Seattle University), Robin Yaure (Penn State Mont Alto), Jacqueline Schwab (Penn State Mont Alto)
Information
We will present three exemplar exercises with key resources that build upon work across several introductory courses (economics, criminal justice, an honors course, human development, and several psychology courses). Each exercise, piloted in small (15-30 students) required courses for liberal arts majors, was designed to push students to go beyond the basic ideas of statistical education and engage in ethical data practice with the goal of expanding how students think about complex social issues. The first assignment uses Krieger’s (2021) perspective of the “two-edged sword” regarding structural racism where students must learn to weigh the cost and value of collecting data in a historically fraught domain. The second assignment requires students to reflect on theory generation, non-experimental design, and crowd-sourced data regarding police violence, an area where traditional data is not available (Sinyangwe, 2017). Finally, we will present an exercise that uses U.S. Census data (1900 and 2010) employed initially by W.E.B. Dubois to illustrate racial inequality (Chalabi, 2017; Rosenstein, 2019). We will share the exercises, our methods to employ them within the classroom and plans for future adaptation to other courses and contexts.