I appreciate your thoughts and experiences in making educators more human and “undivided” as Palmer states. When teachers aren’t able to express their values and opinions it equates us to machines; if we want our students to develop authentic voices we need to model that behavior as well.

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Thanks Gary! I feel that too often we have gotten into a place of complacency, at least for myself, this was the case. I was in this fog of inaction for a long time with my previous academic position. I slowly, but surely, let my values and beliefs be stripped from me and this semester, especially this course, has helped me feel like I’m getting my voice back.

Having taken a longish break between my undergraduate and my current pursuit of graduate school has really helped me know where my knowledge exists and where its limited. Your post really resonated with me, in particular; “The process and purpose is cyclical, fluid, ever changing and rooted in the intersection of learning, thinking, and sharing.”
It’s important to remind ourselves learning is a lifelong endeavor, and when we are able to teach students to tap into their curiosities, they can discover their passions that will keep them motivated to learn, think and share.

Thanks Cindy — I too really like Duckworth’s work on grit and the grit scale she developed.
Often I worry that students expect everything to simply be placed and explained to them, so they are no longer searching for answers. My hope is that if we can teach life-long learning techniques such as perseverance and leadership they will be better off in our rapidly changing society.

Thanks Robin! I really like Angela Duckworth’s definition of grit as the passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. Because we are sometimes only with students for one course, we aren’t able to always assist them for the long-term. Yet, I think we can still foster grit in our students by identifying, discussing, and labeling examples that exist in the real world and presenting activities and lessons related to mindfulness, meditation, and refocusing in order to assist students in times of frustration.
What definition do find the most helpful to you?

Wow; the inner-bureaucracy & politics of academia will never cease to amaze me and I’m surprised that VT doesn’t have ownership of the work due to fact that they all are employed by the university. At least, that was the case when I worked at UChicago. I wonder if it’s truly an issue of copyright and more of an issue of recognition.
I also whole heartedly agree with you that I support the free sharing of slides and homework assignments. If there’s an aspect of your work that would help a fellow teacher, we should want to help that teacher.

This post really drives home to me how essential it is to create a culture in our classrooms in order to make thinking possible by incorporating dialogue, debate, and dissent in order to produce critically literate and actively engaged citizens of tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing it!

I agree with you, perhaps it begins with the way we present information to our students in that we are careful to notate ideas are surrounding in complexity and that there are multiple perspectives that can be studied when approaching the work.

Thanks for the collective post, in reading it I can relate to Robin’s struggle with such a large number of students as I currently TA for a large class. One of the approaches we use is by asking the students for their first essay assignment to write about how art & creativity in used in their daily lives. Then the final essay in the class asks the students to explore how their perception of art has changed due to topics discussed in class. These assignments really help us as teachers have a better understanding for where are student’s perceptions lie in the beginning of the class and then how those have deepened throughout our semester together.

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Hey Tim- While I can’t answer how all the humanities may approach problem posing, I can share with you one approach through the medium of theatre is via Augutso Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” which was heavily influenced by Freire.
I’ve experienced his work with underrepresented communities in which a facilitator to help volunteers create dramas around problems that affect their lives. At the performance, audience members are free not only to comment on the action, but also to step up on stage and play roles of their choice. In doing so, they discover new ways of resolving the dilemmas that the play presents. In follow-up exercises, community members learn how to translate these insights into social action.