The following section provides a review of scholarship that informs the pedagogical approach to stereotypes, bias, and prejudice that underpins the exercise and the discussions the exercise is intended to foster. This realization breaks down barriers and prepares the class for a lively discussion.
In doing so, the exercise helps students recognize that their own preconceived notions often are based on stereotypes and generalized assumptions. In the exercise described in this paper, students are specifically challenged to explore how they identified party affiliations and to consider the trigger words that led to their choices. For such teaching to be effective, however, students should be engaged and empowered through meaningful discussion that emanates from an experiential learning approach (Guthrie & Jenkins, 2018). Guthrie and Jenkins (2018) noted that “discussion-based pedagogy is the most widely used instructional strategy in leadership education” (p. While such data points on their own would enliven a leadership education lecture about stereotypes and political bias, an exercise that demonstrates to students the pervasiveness of misconceptions has the potential to stimulate more discussion and serve as a more effective teaching device. As for Democrats, the research showed that people surveyed thought about a third of the party (32 percent) are either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual, whereas the actual number is about 6 percent (Ahler and Sood, 2016). For example, the authors found that people surveyed thought that 38 percent of Republicans have annual incomes of more than $250,000 when in reality only about 2 percent of those identifying with the party make that much money. The Washington Post article reported on a survey study by Ahler and Sood (2016) that demonstrated how wrong the perceptions of party attributes can be. These stereotypes endure across generations, are resistant to change, and often have very little connection with the people that they claim to represent (Sides, 2016). That is, we associate certain racial, religious, and social groups with each party - often the same ones that we have for decades” (Sides, 2016, para. According to the article, “When we hear ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican,’ we often think of who that party is.
The article appeared as the 2016 presidential election was escalating and presented an intriguing premise: Democrats and Republicans do not like each other very much, but how they characterize each other has little to do with reality and more to do with long-entrenched stereotypes. The seeds of the exercise explained in this paper were planted by a Washington Post article whose headline read, “Democrats are gay, Republicans are rich: Our stereotypes of political parties are amazingly wrong” (Sides, 2016).
0 kommentar(er)
