Design Approach

This case study focuses on a single week's lecture to illustrate how I structure content delivery within a learning unit. The example — Week 5, "Discrimination and New Racism" — demonstrates how historical context, theoretical frameworks, primary source evidence, and contemporary application can be sequenced to build toward critical analysis.

Pedagogical Arc

The lecture moves through five distinct phases, each building on the last. The progression is designed so that students encounter new theoretical concepts only after the historical groundwork makes them intelligible, and encounter discussion questions only after they've seen the theory applied to real data.

Phase 1: Historical Foundation

The lecture opens with a compressed history of racial discrimination from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement. This isn't background for its own sake — it establishes the baseline of explicit, codified racism that the subsequent theoretical framework (color-blind racism) defines itself against. Students need to understand what "old" racism looked like before they can grasp what's "new" about its contemporary form.

Phase 2: Theoretical Framework

With the historical baseline established, the lecture introduces Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's theory of color-blind racism and its four frames: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization. The concept of a "frame" is defined explicitly before the individual frames are presented — an example of front-loading vocabulary so students can process the typology without simultaneously decoding the terminology.

Phase 3: Primary Source Application

Each frame is illustrated with direct quotations from Bonilla-Silva's interview data — real people articulating real positions that exemplify the theoretical concept. This serves two purposes: it makes the abstract framework concrete, and it develops students' capacity to identify discursive patterns in naturalistic speech. The shift from textbook definition to primary source analysis mirrors the kind of interpretive work the course paper requires.

Phase 4: Contemporary Application

The lecture then pivots to contemporary examples, asking whether the "new racism" framework still holds or whether recent political developments represent a resurgence of explicit racial ideology. This section deliberately complicates the theoretical framework just presented — pushing students beyond passive reception toward evaluating the theory's limits and applicability.

Phase 5: Discussion Synthesis

The closing discussion questions are designed to operate at different levels of analysis: some ask for application of the framework, others ask for evaluation of competing claims, and others probe underlying assumptions. This tiered approach ensures that students at different levels of readiness can engage productively.