Fostering Productive Ideological Reasoning With Differences Through Journalistic Practices

• In Event: Journalism Education as a Gateway Discipline Toward Fostering Moral, Civic, Ideological, and Activist Transformations

Abstract

Given the enormous diversity that exists in our society today, educators have advocated a reconceptualization of the heterogeneity of human knowledge, experiences and practices as fundamental to learning (Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino, & Warren, 2010). However, as encounters with ideological differences oftentimes engender conflicts and disconnections, how best to leverage learners’ diverse ideologies—the sets of values, beliefs, and norms learners subscribe to and bring to the learning space—as resources for learning is yet to be explored. Ideologies concern learners’ conceptions of what is normal and what should be, and they are tied to a learners’ identities, and how they define themselves. Learners might have to struggle with what it means and what it says about themselves as a person if they decide to engage with evolution or climate science when they endorse opposing ideological positions such as creationism (Rissler, Duncan & Caruso, 2014). Struggles like these might evoke strong emotions that affect their participation, or they might even decide to shut down further engagement. Moreover, even when learners are willing to participate, sustained, productive engagement with diverse ideological viewpoints is rare in classroom discussions as learners tend to marginalize opposing views or dismiss challenges to their ideological stances, and are quick to converge to those that are ideologically congenial (Philip, Gupta, Elby, & Turpen, 2018).

This paper explores the affordances of journalistic practices in fostering productive ideological reasoning with differences that leads to ideological expansion in two learning designs, drawing on sociocultural and cognitive theories respectively. The first study features how a class composed of youth from diverse populations grappled with contentious social issues in a civic journalism curriculum focusing on documentary production. Using Bakhtin’s dialogism and internally persuasive discourse (IPD), my analysis revealed that documentary making, as a special genre of journalism, can be a generative context for IPD where must “struggle” (Bakhtin,1981) and dialogically test a diversity of “historically, culturally, and socially important voices” in relation to our own, and “develop responsible replies to them” (Matusov, 2009). In this space, students critically examine the perspectives of their audience and interviewees against their own through dialogic addressing and responding, and in so doing generates more nuanced and expanded understandings, as manifested in both their culminating documentary work at the end of the course and exit interviews. The second study highlights an undergraduate journalism course on global reporting, designed with an aim to explicitly engage learners with differences through perspective taking (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000) and empathy building (Batson, 2011) in cross-cultural contexts through journalistic production in the US and abroad. Tracking the elements and processes of learners’ ideological reasoning throughout the journalism process through observations, interviews and think-alouds, preliminary findings suggested a shift from overreliance on forms of reasoning that only consider and conform to one’s prior ideological beliefs, such as biased assimilation (Lord, Ross, & Leeper, 1979) and motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990), to a more analytical, systemic processing (Kahneman, 2003) that can override such propensities. Some learners also self-reported ideological shifts (e.g., from the more ethnocentrist notion to the more cosmopolitan).

Author

• Amy Chang, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Human Development and Social Policy