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Cultivating Skills

Putting effort into preparing students for potentially provocative or personally challenging academic inquiry and dialogue sets the stage for productive learning. Ensuring students feel empowered to share and partake in these dialogues will be a key to how productive these conversations can be. The focus here is not on training students to be polite or to avoid saying anything inflammatory. Instead, this work involves empowering students to engage conscientiously and with confidence that the learning community can hold together even when difficulties and disagreements arise. Once a productive environment has been established, preparing our students involves cultivating the active skills the students will need in order to meaningfully engage.

Create opportunities for self-reflection on identity and positionality

Spending class time on self-reflection can increase learning (Dewsbury et al., 2022). It is also an integral part of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm and is intended to encourage students to reflect on their experiences (Mountain and Nowacek, 2012).

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Emphasize that effective inquiry and discourse are skills that can be learned and must be practiced

The skills required to engage students in meaningful, respectful dialogue cannot be taken for granted. They must be articulated and taught, just like written communication or quantitative literacy skills must be taught (Erfan, 2024; Longo, 2024).

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Help students prepare for vulnerability and potential personal discomfort

Interacting across difference, encountering new ideas, and ideas you might disagree with, is uncomfortable (Carey et al., 2022; Clancy & Bauer, 2018). But of course there’s a difference between discomfort and harm (Barre et al., 2023).

Learning requires courage, and so does contributing to the learning of others. This is why many educators are now emphasizing “brave spaces” over “safe spaces.” “Brave spaces, as described by Arao and Clemens (2013:141–49) are jointly defined guidelines to engage in difficult conversations with the understanding that it requires disagreement, ‘strong emotion and rigorous challenge,’ a sharing of the ‘emotional load,’ pushing ‘the boundaries’ of comfort zones, and challenging participants in a respectful manner” (Martinez-Cola et al., 2018).

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Foster and demonstrate empathetic, responsible, and curious listening

Any robust invitation to free expression must be paired with a call for deep listening; thoughtful listening makes open discourse possible (Halteman Zwart, 2022; Nossel, 2020). Receptiveness to opposing views, meanwhile, predicts better attention to and evaluation of others’ arguments (Minson et al., 2020). This may call for a “brave space” rather than a completely “safe space.” “Brave spaces, as described by Arao and Clemens (2013:141–49) are jointly defined guidelines to engage in difficult conversations with the understanding that it requires disagreement, ‘strong emotion and rigorous challenge,’ a sharing of the ‘emotional load,’ pushing ‘the boundaries’ of comfort zones, and challenging participants in a respectful manner” (Martinez-Cola et al., 2018). 

In the midst of this challenge, nobody should expect any individual to stand in for an entire identity group. The value of cura personalis demands that we attend to the “unique gifts, challenges, needs and possibilities” of each member of our community. Doing so also sharpens our understandings of people; knowing people as individuals reduces the likelihood of viewing them with bias and stereotypes based on their identities (Rubenstein et al., 2018), and is associated with better classroom experiences and more student success, even beyond graduation (Dewsbury, 2019; Gallup, 2014). And, as we know from intersectional thinking (cf. Jones and Wijeyesinghe, 2011), every student has a variety of dynamically interacting dimensions of identity, and so cannot in any accurate way be reduced to membership in a single group.

In many academic settings, competition and “being right” make up the path to success. For collective inquiry and collaborative conversation to happen, however, we need to recognize the limitations of our own knowledge and try to see things from others’ point of view. Perspective-taking rooted in curiosity will help the group reach new and better ideas.

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Foster and demonstrate thoughtful, responsible speech and sharing

By definition, the topics we’re talking about are difficult. Stepping out on a limb to express an opinion is likely to be daunting for students. Bravery is going to be required—and you probably need to name that fact so that students see nervousness not as a sign that they should back away but instead as a sign that they’re going to need to dig a bit deeper for courage. Encourage students to approach conversations from a place of authenticity, grounded in the courage of their convictions.

That said, freedom of expression doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to speak thoughtfully (Nossel, 2020). Students will need to reflect on the relevance of their identities and positions to how they approach expression and dialogue; people with privileged identities (i.e., people who are more used to being listened to) may need to be particularly thoughtful about speech, and particularly committed to persevere through discomfort in listening to new perspectives (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2014).

As with listening, it’s important for individuals to act—and, in this case, speak—as individuals rather than as members of groups. As we know from intersectional thinking (cf. Jones and Wijeyesinghe, 2011), every student has a variety of dynamically interacting dimensions of identity, and so cannot in any accurate way be reduced to membership in a single group.

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