Learning to Understand Inequality and Diversity: Getting Students Past Ideologies

In this paper I present a pedagogical method called Writing Answers to Learn (WAL) which combines Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Exploratory Writing to address the interrelated pedagogical problems of misconceptions, resistance, retention, and transfer. I analyze the use of this combined method in a course on racial and ethnic relations and provide examples to suggest that students commonly use four ideologies to understand racial and ethnic inequality: blaming the victim, justification, naturalization, and colorblind racism. I describe how I helped students identify and unlearn these ideological misconceptions and replace them with a sociological conceptual framework. I analyze the results of a pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test showing that students' use of ideology declined on each subsequent exam while their use of sociology increased during the semester and was partially retained months later. Finally I discuss the study's limitations and the utility of students learning the falseness of ideology.