Students Expressing Discomfort About Racism Are More Likely to Seek Change.

Program Abstract: At the University of Vermont, a principally white institution (PWI), Introduction to Forensic Biology is a high enrollment non-majors science class meeting this requirement. Most studies of the impact of such ‘diversity’ courses use pre-post surveys, which do not reveal students’ thinking or feelings around race and racism. To have a deeper understanding of students’ responses, we qualitatively analyzed anonymized student reflections after they read an opinion piece discussing the Aubrey killing and took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test. This analysis reveals the most common responses were discomfort or absence of emotion. Students who wrote about their discomfort were more likely to also reflect on pathways to change. Our results support Boler’s proposal (1999) that experiencing discomfort can trigger change in students’ approaches to challenging social problems.