Activating Diversity: The Impact of Student Race on Contributions to Course Discussions

Abstract

Racial diversity is understood to play an important role for all students on the college campus. In recent years, much effort has gone into documenting the positive effects of this diversity. However, few studies have focused on how diversity impacts student interactions in the classroom, and even fewer studies attempt to quantify contributions from students of different races. Using Web blog discussions about race and religion, the authors uncover the differences in contributions black and white students make to those discussions. The implications of these findings are important for scholars interested in how diversity impacts student learning, and for policymakers advocating on behalf of affirmative action legislation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for providing constructive criticism and advice on an earlier draft of this article.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Test cases on a small subset of our larger sample revealed that this concern was a reasonable one. We found that because students were responding to issues raised by the first discussant, the coding of the content of each response was often shaded by the initial post. For example, when a white student spoke about Latinos in an initial post, each of the five responses—three black, two white—naturally spoke to that issue. As the initial-post analysis will show, white students are significantly more likely than black ones to introduce other races into the discussion. Coding all five of the responses as instances where the respondent's race shaped their contribution to the discussion struck us as an inaccurate representation of the phenomena we were trying to uncover with this analysis. This was particularly problematic when responses were analyzed separately rather than as part of a single thread. In the end, we decided to restrict our analysis to initial posts.

² Students' names have been changed to maintain their anonymity.

³ Inasmuch as our research focuses on diversity at predominantly white institutions (PWI), we can only speculate on what might be missing in conversations about race on predominately or historically black college or university campuses (HBCU). If black students on PWI campuses are very unlikely to bring up the experiences of both nonblacks and ethnic whites, even in secondhand accounts (e.g., someone assuming a Hispanic friend did not speak English fluently), to what degree are those experiences being raised in discussions on HBCU campuses? Does it fall on the teacher to make these experiences “present” in the classroom? Does the lack of racial diversity—both physical and via surrogates—on these campuses stifle the kind of benefits we expect to see on racially diverse PWIs?