Students often expect their professors to provide them One Correct Perspective during class lectures. As professors of Educational Linguistics, however, we see our role not as telling, but rather as facilitating critical thinking about difficult topics—and it takes some deliberate strategy to build genuine discussions that lead students to engage in multiple possible ways of thinking about emotionally charged social issues. In this workshop we will demonstrate and discuss how to engage multiple perspectives on potentially controversial issues by focusing on text/artifact-based discussion. We will first focus on issues of language use in charged encounters, providing participants with examples of texts and artifacts from researchers with different approaches, modeling how to engage multiple viewpoints. Following that discussion, we will recap the elements that go into choosing texts/artifacts that lead to multi-faceted discussion and point participants to potential artifacts they may use to build engaging, discipline-specific discussions in their own field.

All graduate students are welcome. This event grows out of concerns in the Education department and so may be most useful to students in related fields.

Counts toward the CETLI Teaching Certificate.