Given the enormous diversity that exists in our society today, the need intensifies for educators to create a transformative environment that fosters productive encounters with the differences that emerge in a diverse society. Nonetheless, limited attention has been devoted to generating a systematic understanding of how students engage with and make sense of varied ideological perspectives and resources present in the learning environment, and the ways to foster generative, productive forms of ideological reasoning for learning. This dissertation is an attempt to fill this gap. It is driven by these guiding questions: How do learners engage in ideological reasoning? What do shifts in learners’ ideological reasoning look like? What interventions lead to more enduring, productive changes in learners’ ideological reasoning? To answer these questions, this work investigates the reasoning and traces the learning of a class of 18 undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds in a three-month journalism course at a Midwestern University. This course was designed to engage learners with differences in perspectives and identities in cross-cultural contexts through journalistic production. Specifically, this dissertation took a socio-cognitive, complex systems approach, and developed an empirically-based conceptual model to capture the variety of elements and their interactions/dynamics in the moment-to-moment unfolding of ideological reasoning in everyday contexts. Prior research has claimed that student ideological reasoning is resistant to changes. However, an aggregate analysis of the whole class revealed remarkable differences in students’ reasoning postcourse toward productive forms of reasoning. Additionally, these changes were shown to extend beyond the context of the intervention. Further case analysis using the model revealed variability in ideological reasoning across and within individuals, and identified different pathways, synergies, and cycles that produced changes in reasoning. Lastly, the curricular analysis illuminated the role of different design elements in fostering shifts, and how they collectively instigate and propagate shifts within and across all elements in the model to foster more enduring changes. These findings highlight and necessitate a systems approach that integrates the cognitive, relational, and reflective, to better capture and attune to variable ways students engage with the ideological dimension of issues in learning, and to design for productive ideological reasoning.

Creator

• Chang, Amy A

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3xvp-xx49

Subject

• Education

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_947336
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16378

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright