Tufts University
09/27/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/27/2024 07:19
Difficult Dialogues and Challenging Classrooms
What's many people's least favorite color-and the most important color of all?
To Dana Grossman Leeman, interim director of the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT) at Tufts, it's gray.
We live in a society of extremes, notes Leeman, but critical thinking is achieved in the space between polarized views-in nuance, in those gray areas.
So critical is nuance to constructive intellectual discourse that it is the focus of an entire session in CELT's fall 2024 series for faculty called Difficult Dialogues and Challenging Classroom Roundtables. Heather Dwyer, CELT's associate director for teaching, learning, and inclusion, will facilitate that session, "Managing Difficult Dialogues and Promoting Nuanced Thinking," to be held October 15.
Dwyer has reflected on the distinction between drawing students away from safetyism (the prioritization of protecting oneself from disagreeable ideas) and protecting students from genuine harm. While it may not always be clear where the line is between the two, there is, says Dwyer, "a clear difference between the harm inflicted by, say, hate speech, and being unsettled in a productive way."
Dwyer hopes to equip faculty members with the tools to help students move beyond the need for the comfort of "a right or a wrong answer" and toward an embrace of the ambiguity that characterizes many subject areas.
"Our goal is to guide faculty on how to push students enough so they can engage in dialogue with curiosity and a willingness to begin to understand," Dwyer says, "while not pushing them so far that they cannot do the learning that the course requires."
Practical Strategies, Undergirded by Research
Each offering in the Difficult Dialogues series gives faculty evidence-based strategies to employ in their classrooms. Among these are community agreements, a compendium of guidelines that instructors develop with their students to hold all participants in that course mutually accountable.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons for faculty is how to keep current events from derailing the course. As Leeman notes, while faculty members can hold space for their students to express feelings, that does not mean that they abandon their curriculum.
CELT Fall 2024 Events
Faculty are invited to sign up for any Fall 2024 workshop or roundtable on the CELT website.
In addition to the fact that for some students, the classroom offers respite from all the conflict outside its walls, Leeman says, the faculty member's responsibility is to teach and the students' responsibility is to learn: "While the faculty member should make an effort to understand that a student feels deeply about what's happening on campus or in the world, the faculty member's primary responsibility is to ensure that the learning happens."
Another strategy is emotional regulation. Leeman notes that, from seeing their students often over the course of the semester, faculty members often begin to pick up nonverbal cues from their students."Sometimes when your students walk in the classroom, there's an affective change-an electricity," she says. "Maybe they're especially quiet, disengaged, or even visibly upset."
While they cannot stop the class to address the emotions that their students may be displaying, instructors can, Leeman notes, help students "titrate some of that flood of feelings" using some of the techniques of emotional regulation offered by the Difficult Dialogues series. Strategies like encouraging deep breathing or inviting students to name in their own heads their feelings can help students become more conscious of what they're feeling and why. That can, in turn, relax students' central nervous systems so that they can shift what they are feeling and attend to their learning.
Support During the Election Season
As a response to our polarized politics, CELT is also offering two Difficult Dialogues sessions focused on the 2024 election: one on October 29 and the other on November 6, one day post-election. Leeman will co-facilitate these sessions with James J. Fisher, researcher for the Generous Listening and Dialogue Initiative at Tisch College of Civic Life.
Fisher encourages faculty to assume good intentions on the part of students, unless a question or remark is deliberately inflammatory. "A student might well be asking something not out of malice but simply because they don't know enough in order to phrase the question more constructively," he says.
Fisher also provides questions that instructors can ask of themselves when classroom dialogue (election-related or otherwise) has the potential to become charged or challenging.The questions guide faculty to ensure that they heard a student correctly, to give themselves time to consider their response, and to position themselves to best understand their students as people.
In addition to the formal series, the team provides an abridged version of this material for the Faculty Fellows and as part of other CELT programs. CELT is also available to deliver dedicated sessions on these topics at departmental meetings.
Faculty are encouraged to visit the CELT websiteto register for any of the Difficult Dialogues sessions-or other Fall 2024 offerings.