Learning to Navigate Difference

It is difficult to read any account of current events without being reminded that we are increasingly a divided society. The hypotheses of what has produced such balkanization are myriad, including echo chambers from internet algorithmic controls, racist systemics, radical income inequality, relatively high immigration, isolation due to the demise of family and community groups, and on and on.

Within university communities, the commentary focuses on cancel culture sensitivity to language that touches identities, a perceived reduction in class participation, increased reports of mental health impairments, and challenges of new cohorts in forming class bonds, and a lack of skill to encounter differences.

From the provost perch, one begins to see faculty efforts to continue a devotion to formation of our students, the nurturing of mind, body, and spirit to be a leader in a society with such attributes. Of course, we must admit that the classic design of university teaching decades ago offers few features to address this new world. In those years, courses would be dominated by readings read in solitude by the student, lectures with limited questioning from students, and homework assignments, examinations and papers as assessment of learning. For the most part, there was little need to interact with other students with different perspectives.

Of course, many courses presented to students alternative theories or viewpoints on the substance of the course material. Effective instructors would convey how radically different theories were resolved over time, if ever. They would give the student a flavor of how differences were confronted in the dialectic of the scholarship.

Increasingly, this old format is being replaced by innovative designs of university instructors. It is more common now to create group assignments, where a cluster of students are asked to work together to create a product demonstrating concepts and tools emerging from the course content. Of course, as the students will learn in group work later in life, this exercises interpersonal skills of consensus-building, division of labor, and shared devotion to task. (A funny quip going around notes: “Georgetown: where everyone is smarter than you, except the three students assigned to your work group!”). When instructors design these groups to induce heterogeneity of background within them, students are forced to grapple with differences.

Other instructors bring into the classroom (increasingly via Zoom) guest speakers who offer a different perspective on the material than that in the readings and lectures. These are deliberate attempts to have the students confront a vivid disagreement in the field, as a stimulus to question and deliberate on their own synthesis of alternatives.

Flipped classrooms can also be designed to heighten discussion about differences. Lectures are viewed online before a face-to-face class discussion. If the lecture is designed to heighten attention to alternative theories or perspectives, then the in-class discussion can deliberate on those differences. Sometimes these can be prepared debates among students; other times, they are designed point-counterpoint discussions involving all students.

One course design that has promise is more difficult to organize. When the content of the class yields itself to alternative perspectives and two instructors co-teach, new possibilities emerge. Each class setting can be discourse between one instructor presenting one argument and the other presenting the alternative viewpoint. The extended presentation of a disagreement, civilly presented, with each participant obviously listening to the other, without rancor or shouting, can model for students the behavior that they so infrequently see on cable news. This class format requires more coordination and support for equitable reward for co-teaching. It holds promise, however, in modeling how two adults with strong disagreements can present their cases to the other, listen carefully, show understanding of the conflicting argument, address the counterargument, and then end the discussion with an amicable agreement to disagree. It is such behavior that our students need to see more and more, as a way to build the skills to navigate their future.