Profile Final Draft

Crossing Community Borders Led Barraclough to the Front of the Classroom
By Jessica Maas

Laura Barraclough begins her Urban Sociology class one Monday morning with a question: “What is an ethnic enclave?”

Her students take notes, and answer and ask questions throughout the lecture, but many of them may not know that it was a class similar to this one that answered so many questions for the second-year sociology professor and led her to want to teach others.

Born in the San Fernando Valley in California, Barraclough crossed community borders everyday, from the rural area she lived in to the suburban area of her magnet school and even beyond that to the nearby Los Angeles city she loved.

But these borders didn’t just represent population size; crossing those lines also meant interacting with different groups of people and, maybe more importantly, different ways of thinking.

Barraclough recognized the racial and attitudinal borders at a young age. At school, her best friends were Mexican, Peruvian and Korean, but at home she listened to a barrage of derogatory comments from her father and neighborhood friends; she can still remember going out riding and picking up on the way other children talked about Mexicans.

“And I didn’t have anything to say back to it, I just heard the tone and I knew it was wrong, I knew I objected to it because I had Mexican friends at school, but I had none of the knowledge to, like, ‘Hey, what are you doing, why are you talking that way?’ So the only thing I could come up with was ‘Hey, they’re not Mexicans, they’re Hispanics.’ That was it—that was all I had to say,” says the now thirty-one-year-old Barraclough. “So I convinced basically everyone I knew to stop saying Mexican and instead say Hispanic, but there was no content behind that, it was just, ‘Here’s something bad, and I don’t know what to do with it.’”

It wasn’t until she went to college that she really began to understand.

“I took this class called Ethnic Diversity in the City by Professor George Lipson, who’s my mentor to this day, and he just laid it all out, you know?” says the UC San Diego alumna. “In ten short weeks he explained to me and everybody else why my parents were this way, and how this persists, and it was the piece I’d be looking for—both the p-i-e-c-e and the p-e-a.”

Today, Barraclough works inside the classroom and out to help students understand systems of inequality like those she grew up surrounded by. She teaches classes like Prisons and Public Policy and Race and Racism; she guides senior students on capstone projects, including one on the school-to-prison pipeline; she helped two students put together a documentary on prison re-entry in Kalamazoo over the summer; and she’s been working with one student all year on an independent research project related to homelessness.

On one Friday, the five-foot-six brunette hesitantly interrupts her energetic Urban Sociology students to start class; the beginning is the only time she ever appears nervous at the front of the classroom, and may contribute to the initial impression that some students get of her.

“I thought that she was a little bit soft at first, like kind of a soft teacher you could get away with, and then we were reading this really cool article…and no one read this article, and she got so angry…and she was like, ‘If you don’t do my reading, please don’t show up in my class. I give you attention, why don’t you give me your time?’ And it was just, like, ‘Damn,’” says Dana Robinson, who took a class with Barraclough last year and is working on the homelessness project with her this year. “And then she was like, ‘If you haven’t done the reading, class is dismissed. Please take the time to do something fulfilling.’ And it was so scary and then everyone was scared into place and did their reading for the rest of the quarter…So she’s really nice, but she cuts you down when you need to be cut down.”

Though she always looks shy in the beginning, it quickly ends. As soon as she launches into her lecture about gender and urban areas, Barraclough’s in her element, gesturing animatedly with chalk in her right hand and typed notes in her left. Her dress usually tends toward casual, and on this day in particular she sports jeans, sandals, a yellow sweater layered over a yellow shirt, and a pair of her trademark long earrings that hang near her shoulders.

She talks for 40 minutes before splitting the class into small groups and handing them envelopes containing identical scenarios. Each group reads about a recently-divorced woman with two children and a very low income, and they are then asked to come up with a “plan” for the woman, including a new job, new housing, and a childcare situation; Barraclough encourages them to be creative. The options are presented on note cards, and the students talk in groups for about fifteen minutes before engaging in a whole class discussion and presenting their thoughts. One group states that they weren’t able to come up with a scenario, but that they understand the take-home message about the woman’s situation.

“She cares deeply about students, and works with them, and really wants to take them to a new place in their thinking and this critical place of understanding the world,” says Kiran Cunningham, Barraclough’s department chair. “She’s got a lot of passion that she operates out of that I think is infectious, and students come away from her classes just wanting to know more.”

For Barraclough, it all goes back to crossing borders and that one class she had in college with George Lipson.

“…that has driven me to this day, that one class. It’s why I’m an urban sociologist, it’s why I study the stuff I do, because I feel like there’s probably a lot of students who are having similar experiences like I was.” She pauses.

“And I don’t know if that’s true,” she laughs, “but I feel like if they’re out there, I want to make this available, you know?”