People Like us - Teaching Notes - teaching about social classes in America - Brief Article

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Jackie Grutsch McKinney

Directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker. 120 minutes. Available from CNAM Film Library (800-343-5540).

Like many teachers, I have had difficulties getting students to discuss class issues. If you ask students if they have friends who are of a different class, many times, they'll shrug. They're just not sure. Ask the same about race, gender, or even religion and the students will know how to answer this question--and perhaps even think it too simple to bother with. Last spring, I taught a 100-level speaking-intensive composition course at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro that used the American Dream as its central theme. Although I tried to broach the subject of class with my students in discussions of various texts, it wasn't until we watched People Like Us that the discussions really worked.

People Like Us is a two-hour TV documentary showcasing twenty-three different Americans talking about class in honest, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking ways. The film is divided into four parts, each part containing two-to-three separate stories that take us to places around the country from Beverly Hills to Appalachia to the Hamptons where classes are congregating or clashing. Because this film shows real people and how they live, it puts the subject of class on the table in a tangible way. The filmmakers make a concerted effort to show how class is visible if we just know how to look for it; for example, they argue that the stuff we surround ourselves with (big screen TVs, Balsamic vinegar, lawn trolls) asserts our class to others.

Before showing the film, I gave each of my students a person in the film to watch for--printing out the pictures and names of the people from the website (http://www.pbs.org/peoplelikeus). After showing most of the film (I had to edit for time), I had students write briefly in class about their reactions and specifically about the character they were assigned. Then students shared their responses. The characters bring forth strong reactions, so discussion was lively. The next class, I brought in the fairly sobering fact sheet (again from the website) giving statistics about how difficult class is to escape in America despite our American dreams and about how race and gender are so deeply intertwined with class. From this, I was able to get students to talk seriously for the first time about class in their own lives. When I asked if any of them had ever had a moment where they felt out of place because of class, they told me they had. One student shared how she always felt she was straddling class--she felt to o poor to be in college, but her family considered her too uppity to fit with them since she'd left home.

The most interesting part of the discussion for me was when I asked my students--mainly middle-class, white and African-American, many first-generation college students and native North Carolinians--whether they would go if given a full scholarship to Yale or Harvard. My students told me, "no." They said they wouldn't fit in, which is exactly what Alvarez and Kolker were trying to argue with their film; we stay where we are because it's comfortable. This film opened many doors for further discussions throughout the semester; I will definitely use it again.