Students Engaging in Diversity: Blogging to Learn in an Undergraduate Black Studies Course

• In Event: Listening and Not Listening to Students’ Voices

Abstract

This study provides a contextualized examination of how undergraduates in a Black Studies class interacted with others from different ethnic and academic backgrounds and engaged with content about diverse peoples and perspectives. We analyzed how students interacted and constructed knowledge dialogically through blogging in a course designed to meet the university’s diversity requirements. For this study we constructed an ethnographic logic of inquiry based on a multi-analytic examination of video records of lectures and section meetings, blog entries (including comments), other course handouts, pre and post course surveys, and interviews with the instructor. By analyzing blogs in relation to others types of data, we found clear differences in how students within each of their sections blogged over the academic quarter.

Authors

• Anissa R. Stewart, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Jacqueline Marie Reid, University of California - Santa Barbara