Guess Who : Experiential Learning and Reflexivity in Race and Ethnicity Courses

The Study: How we Played the Game

Hasbro’s original Guess Who game is played in pairs. Each player is dealt a tray containing a number of “face cards,” each representing a different character. They then select a face card as their “mystery card,” and players win by guessing their opponent’s mystery card. Players ask “yes” or “no” questions about the appearance of the characters to eliminate cards and identify the right one first.

Michael I. Norton et al. (2006) conducted an experiential study on race-talk avoidance based on a modified version of Guess Who. Specifically, they added a series of black and white dots to the face cards. White participants were more likely to ask about the dots than to ask about the race of the characters on the card. This occurred primarily when their partners were not white. Norton et al. argue white players avoided questions about race to perform as if they were not racist. However, their BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) partners perceived them as more biased.

Building on this study, Brunson developed an experiential learning activity to study how students think about race and racism and how R&E courses impact their perspectives. The study was conducted at a predominately white institution with 75.1 percent white students, 15.4 percent BIPOC students, and 9.5 percent international students. During the pre-and post-tests, student participants identified as 71 and 62 percent white, 17 and 26 percent BIPOC, and 12 and 12 percent international.

In Brunson’s activity, volunteers replaced the character cards and sat at the front of the classroom. The remaining students played in pairs, selecting a volunteer as their mystery card and attempting to guess their partner’s “card” by asking “yes” or “no” questions. Players then reversed roles so that each participant had a chance to ask and answer questions.

Students played the game on the first day of class and at the end of the semester. After each activity, students responded to reflective questions in writing. Their responses provided the study’s data. Brunson used this activity in five 100-level R&E courses—ranging from 35 to 60 students—at a large, predominantly white, four-year institution in the Midwest. ¹

Before introducing the game, Brunson informed students of their rights according to the institutional review board (IRB). Students could participate in the activity, but had the opportunity to opt out of the study. The six self-selected volunteers who would stand in front of the class were allowed to return their seats at any point if they felt uncomfortable. ² Players did not have to identify the volunteer quickly or within a set number of questions. Brunson did not instruct students to ask or avoid questions about demographic groups. She was prepared to disrupt interactions if students used rude or demeaning remarks, but this did not occur in any of the sessions.

During the activity, each player wrote down their questions and answers and those of their partners. After the activity, students reflected on the following questions:

Volunteers did not write reflective responses because they did not play the game directly. Instead, the instructor met with student volunteers after class to discuss how they felt about the activity.

Over three years, Brunson conducted these activities with students in five different sections of the institution’s introductory-level R&E course. The 16 weeks of course content focused on institutional inequality, stereotyping, prejudice, socialization, and other topics.

In our view, this experiential learning activity encouraged reflection and reflexivity while contributing to a shift in students’ attitudes toward race and racism. It also facilitated more responsive pedagogy by allowing the instructor more opportunities to respond to students’ assumptions. Finally, student responses provided surprisingly direct explanations of how course content impacted their perspectives.

What Students had to Say: White Fragility and Race-Talk

Robin DiAngelo (2018) defines white fragility as a range of defensive responses used to escape racial stress. These rhetorical moves protect white individuals from having to think about racism, maintaining the racial hierarchy (DiAngelo 2018). Race-talk describes how we talk about race and racism, or how these conversations are avoided. Derald W. Sue (2016) contends that race-talk can reduce racial prejudice, present accurate information about race, improve racial literacy, and encourage positive race relations.

Racial socialization shapes race-talk and processes of racialization. For example, families shape youth’s perceptions of race and identity (Telzer and Vazquez Garcia 2009). Familial socialization practices may be influenced by diverse environmental contexts. Because of this, BIPOC and white individuals navigate institutions and social interactions differently (Crutchfeld et al. 2021; Vittrup 2018). However, Margaret A. Hagerman (2016) contends that youth have more agency in their racial socialization than suggested in previous research.

In our study, pre-test responses from the beginning of the semester demonstrated that students avoided talking about race to avoid offending their partners or other students in the class. At the end of the semester, students’ reflections on their partners’ and their own questions demonstrated a significant decrease in white fragility compared to the beginning of the semester. Post-test results indicated a reduction in white fragility as a race-talk characteristic from 31 percent to 24 percent in students’ reflections of their partners’ questions (p = .030). Students’ reflections of their own questions also exhibited a significant reduction in white fragility from 59 percent to 34 percent (p = .0076) (Brunson and Benedict Cartright 2020). In general, student responses demonstrated a greater understanding of socialization and a reduced instinct to avoid race-talk.

Two students’ post-test responses reflect this shift:

We didn’t ask questions about race because they have been programmed into our brains as “bad” and rude. In all reality, they shouldn’t have this negative connotation. We should notice people’s unique qualities, and it is ok to identify them by certain physical traits. The line begins to be drawn when we take these physical traits and begin discriminating against certain people . . . (White, Man, Agriculture, Sophomore, Urban)

. . . We may not think directly not to ask about race, but we already know intuitively not to bring it up . . .The questions we ask reveal a little about how we have been raised and our morals. Parents have a great influence on the way their kids will grow up . . . Therefore, if parents put it into their child’s head that race, religion, and stereotyping are off-limit topics, chances are they will avoid confronting them when they get older. (White, Woman, Arts and Sciences, Sophomore, Urban)

Students are often socialized to avoid discussions of race or assume these discussions are biased in themselves (DiAngelo 2018; Hagerman 2016; Vittrup 2018). However, understanding the role of racial socialization allows students to reconsider social and institutional perspectives.

The learning activity gave students an opportunity to think about their race-talk and how and who it was changing. Throughout post-test responses, students recognized the role of racial socialization and connected it to their own discursive choices. Writing about their partners’ choices, students discussed issues they may have avoided to present themselves more favorably:

Since I never met my partner until we began the game, he like most people, tried to be vague and not come off as judgmental. If he asked, “Is the person you are thinking of black?” It would be a great question to ask in my opinion because it’s an identifying physical feature and that’s all we had to look at, but he didn’t because in our society it would be an inappropriate question. (Black, Man, Rural, Human Ecology)

The experiential learning and activities brought class concepts to the foreground and provided a concrete social interaction for reflection. In post-test responses, students were less likely to perform colorblind race-talk or minimize the existence of racism. Rather, they became more aware of racism and more capable of talking about it in an evidence-based manner.

Experiential Learning, Reflexivity, and Racial Justice

Games are a form of experiential learning (Sato and de Haan 2016). David A. Kolb, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Charalampos Mainemelis (2001) theorize four modes of experiential learning: experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Experiential learning provides learners with “hands-on” experiences that require reflection and application (Wright 2018). Reflexivity is an important focus in racial justice education (Bozalek et al. 2010) that goes beyond reflection, enabling students to critically evaluate their social locations and socialization (Harbin, Thurber, and Bandy 2019).

Our experiential learning activity facilitates the reflection stage, in which students consider their own experiences and identify inconsistencies between their assumptions and their developing understanding of course material. As students engage in readings and discussions, they learn how institutions shape socialization and biases (Emirbayer and Desmond 2021). When students play the game the second time, they move from general reflection to reflexivity. Students incorporate observations into broader concepts and revise prior knowledge with new evidence (Wright 2018). This recursive process leads to acting. At the end of the semester, students employ their increased understanding of racial literacy and social justice, which reflects their fourth stage.

Experiential learning also develops students’ understanding of the curriculum’s relevance to their lives (Maxwell and Chesler 2019). Games provide opportunities for students to experience and reflect on the social phenomena at the center of our courses and then practice reflexivity when examining their positionalities and choices. As instructors provide detailed explanations of these phenomena, students can incorporate this information with their own observations of their experiences. This game, and curricula focusing on institutional racial inequality, can help students understand how mainstream, colorblind racism dehistoricizes and decontextualizes racial inequities leaving institutional racism intact (Bonilla-Silva 2020; Burke 2018). R&E courses should emphasize reflexivity because it enables students to critically evaluate their social positioning, relationships, and how the sociopolitical climate influences how they navigate social institutions (Smele et al. 2017). The modified Guess Who activity provides potent opportunities for reflection and synthesis.

More Responsive Pedagogy

After students completed the first activity, Brunson discussed their responses during the following class. Students’ responses guided this discussion, which introduced concepts like colorblindness and structural inequality. Students often discuss their reticence to talk about race, so Brunson acknowledged the reasons students offered and then asked how we can solve institutional racial inequalities if we do not talk about race and racism. The activity allowed the instructor to directly address some of the students’ preconceptions from the start of the course.

Instructors of R&E courses are familiar with the various ways students can shut down when dealing with sensitive topics. Discussing these ideas in the context of a parlor game and reflecting on their partner’s choices may have helped mitigate the damage to self-perception students might experience when confronted with their own biases. The discussion after the first activity allowed students to express their perspectives in reference to a shared experience. It also provided the instructor with a chance to demonstrate how the classroom itself is a place of socialization.

Assessing Outcomes, Demonstrating Effectiveness

To assess the effectiveness of a course, instructors should consider students’ knowledge and preconceptions about key concepts at the start and end of the term (Harbin et al. 2019). Using a variety of assessment tools is important for women and racially minoritized scholars because teaching evaluations can be biased against educators with marginalized statuses (Chávez and Mitchell 2020). For R&E instructors, evidence of students’ changed understanding of race and ethnicity before and after the course demonstrates the learning outcomes and value of our pedagogy (Harbin et al. 2019). R&E courses are one of the most influential agents of socialization on students’ understanding of racial inequality as demonstrated by change in race-talk (Winkler 2018).

Together, students’ responses provided substantial evidence that their race-talk was changing and that they were aware of how and why it changed. Throughout post-test responses, students recognized the role of racial socialization and connected that socialization to their own discursive choices. By asking students to play and reflect on the modified Guess Who game, the course was able to produce specific, detailed, student-authored evidence of these learning outcomes. A change of race-talk can be considered an example of the effectiveness of the course. However, our findings do not indicate that only one particular curriculum will produce a change in race-talk or that this is the only beneficial outcome of R&E courses. Rather, assessments of race-talk is one way that R&E instructors can demonstrate teaching effectiveness.

Conclusion

Required R&E courses may be the only time that students privileged by race will confront their own racial biases and assumptions (Jayakumar and Adamian 2017). For instructors of R&E, but also for instructors engaging with subjects shaped by systems of power and oppression, experiential learning activities offer a mechanism to embody course concepts and give students a safe place to reconsider their preconceptions.

Having reflected on Brunson’s use of these activities in her class, we conclude that other instructors can benefit from incorporating these activities in their own classes. However, there are several limitations instructors should consider. They include course autonomy, the willingness of students to engage in the activities, and small class sizes. A set course curriculum may not allow for two game sessions and a follow-up lesson after the first. All experiential learning activities require buy-in from participants, so not every session can be equally productive. Smaller classes may not have enough students for a sufficient number of volunteers and players. Student pairs are also within earshot of other pairs, which could influence their question choices.

All students have internalized racial ideologies that merit reflection. However, in any discussion of race and racism, BIPOC students face different stakes than their white peers and pay a cultural tax (Holliday and Squires 2020). No activity can entirely mitigate the potential tax on BIPOC students, but games can help reduce the stress associated with discussing uncomfortable topics.

While many other assignments can encourage experiential learning and reflexivity, the modified Guess Who game provides a particularly fertile grounding that allows students to engage with concepts related to R&E in a more embodied manner. In our perspective, the game made social and institutional dynamics more apparent to students because it gave them the opportunity to act these dynamics out in a low-stakes activity.

The activities can be simplified in a variety of ways, but instructors should consider how each modification impacts the learning experience. For example, using character cards can overcome the limitations of a smaller class, but it changes the activity by removing the real student volunteer from the dynamic. There may be no inherent limitation to the use of cards rather than volunteers; they offer benefits for social distancing and may reduce the risk of discomfort for some students. In our case, we theorized that a human volunteer would elicit more thoughtful questions and reflections from players because (1) their physical presence provides more information than a drawing, and (2) they represent a member of the learning community with whom the player would spend a semester. Some student responses confirmed our hypothesis:

I played the game as a child. Not until we played it in class did I realize what we were really doing. When I was younger, I was so naive to race and outward appearance. Another reason that it was different was that I was playing a board game. In class, we were playing with real people at the front of the room. Being in class and being the actual students that were part of the game must have been difficult. (White, Woman, Urban, Sophomore, Human Ecology)

R&E courses are essential because they have the most influence on students’ understanding of racial concepts, and classrooms are a place of racial socialization. Instructors should incorporate experiential learning and reflexivity in their courses when possible to embody course concepts and give students a chance to play out and reflect on social interactions. This process can only help students become better equipped to discuss race and racism, which will always be necessary for meaningful progress toward racial justice. R&E courses that focus on institutional inequalities, and exercises like this one, can help students overcome social conventions that adhere to politeness norms that excuse ignorance and reproduce colorblindness. Although not all students are comfortable with talking about race, they can develop improved racial literacy and be socialized to feel more competent in conversations about racism.