ALFORD A. YOUNG, JR. Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Chair of the Department of Sociology University of Michigan This talk will draw from a qualitative study of the teaching experiences and pedagogical commitments of faculty in a higher educational institution to explore the unique relevance of social group identities for faculty and students in the STEM classroom. It will consider how faculty members with dierent social group identities address some issues – questions about their subject matter and questions about the authority of the faculty role – as well as issues pertaining to how social identity composition of the classroom implicitly and explicitly shapes the learning experiences of dierent kinds of students. Biographical Statement Alford A. Young, Jr. is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and (by courtesy) in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Studies. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago, and his B.A. in Sociology, Psychology, and African American Studies from Wesleyan University. Professor Young has pursued research on low-income, urban-based African Americans, African American scholars and intellectuals, and the classroom-based experiences of faculty as they pertain to diversity and multiculturalism. He has published The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton University Press 2004), co-authored The Souls of WEB Du Bois (Paradigm Publishers, 2006), and co-edited Faculty Social Identity and the Challenges of Diversity: Reections on Teaching in Higher Education (Paradigm Publishers, 2013). He also has published articles in Sociological Theory, The Annual Review of Sociology, Symbolic Interaction, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and other scholarly journals. He is completing a manuscript entitled, “From the Edge of the Ghetto: African Americans and the World of Work” as well as a follow-up manuscript to The Minds of Marginalized Black Men that examines how African American men who were reared in poverty but who have engaged extreme upward mobility as young adults discuss learning to navigate of race and class-based constraints over the course of their lives. He draws from his own teaching experiences and administrative service to supplement on-going research and writing about the challenges faced by faculty of color in higher education and the craft of instructing about race and ethnicity.