Students’ responses to evidence of racism in a forensic science class: An evaluation
Conference Year
2024
Abstract
Many institutions require students to take classes exposing them to information about race and racism in the United States. At the University of Vermont, a PWI, Introduction to Forensic Biology is a high enrollment non-majors science class meeting this requirement. Most studies of the impact of such ‘diversity’ courses use pre-post surveys, which do not reveal students' thinking and feelings around race and racism or how they experience these courses. To have a deeper understanding of students’ responses, we qualitatively analyzed anonymized student reflections after they read an opinion piece discussing the Aubrey killing and took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test. This analysis reveals the most common responses were discomfort or absence of emotion; guilt was rarely observed. Encouragingly, we found a high incidence of students reflecting on personal growth informed by their responses. We interpret these results using the conceptual frameworks of learning through discomfort.
Primary Faculty Mentor Name
Linden Higgins
Status
Undergraduate
Student College
College of Arts and Sciences
Program/Major
Biology
Primary Research Category
Social Science
Students’ responses to evidence of racism in a forensic science class: An evaluation
Many institutions require students to take classes exposing them to information about race and racism in the United States. At the University of Vermont, a PWI, Introduction to Forensic Biology is a high enrollment non-majors science class meeting this requirement. Most studies of the impact of such ‘diversity’ courses use pre-post surveys, which do not reveal students' thinking and feelings around race and racism or how they experience these courses. To have a deeper understanding of students’ responses, we qualitatively analyzed anonymized student reflections after they read an opinion piece discussing the Aubrey killing and took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test. This analysis reveals the most common responses were discomfort or absence of emotion; guilt was rarely observed. Encouragingly, we found a high incidence of students reflecting on personal growth informed by their responses. We interpret these results using the conceptual frameworks of learning through discomfort.