![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My bits are WHAT?!
Jul. 4th, 2005 10:27 am| kimberkit's bits are best described as her "urgent pool-party". |
Jul. 4th, 2005
What should be mandated in college
Jul. 4th, 2005 02:57 pmWhat I am going to say is not intended to be social engineering. (Although Williams College, by implementing its new housing sytem, is certainly encouraging just that.) But there is something that really needs to be mandated in college, and never is: an introductory course on how to find compromises to loaded emotional and political questions, where the emphasis is on finding compromises. I'm thinking of this in particular because the articles that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ginnunggap linked to point out the political split in our country, and how people are trying to find compromises in politics as they stand right now, and I can't help but think that "finding compromise" should be pretty basic, and it should be explicitly taught.
Example of how a course might go: you start off with two weeks on the basics of how to acknowledge what someone else is saying and letting them finish speaking -- because when people are riled up, there's this tendency to say, "I heard you!" and cut the other person off without ever having actually heard anything the other person said. Then you give students ways of framing their thoughts in a manner that isn't attacking, but descriptive: "when you say this, I feel like this," or, "I hear you. I can sympathize with that, although I think the main point is actually x." Then you spend some time with having people practice their new skills on some loaded issues - the environment, gun legistlation, etc. Then you spend the latter half of the course making people come up with a way to teach what they learned, to serve as peer mediators in high school (cross-age tutoring), so that they feel that what they learned was meaningful. (You notice that this proposed course outline is highly constructivist in theory. That's because teacher-centered lessons are arguably less effective in getting material to stick, and because constructivist thought hasn't penetrated past the high school level yet. And because professors don't know how to teach, half the time, so groupwork is the best way to go.)
If we actually taught *1* course like this at a higher level, we probably wouldn't have had stupid issues like the witch-hunt mentality of people who were angered at an anti-queer chalking and wanted to persecute the Williams Free Press in '99. We would have taken a deep breath and not strung the Mad Cow up in late '01, when there was an article that was perceived as racially biased. We would have much more open dialogue in politics, eventually, because right now, this country is highly liberal, at a college level and much more conservative across the rest of the country.
There's a split between the intelligentsia and the rest of the country.
I know I sound like a hippie, or perhaps like I'm being condescending, because these skills should be so basic. But the problem is real -- people don't listen to each other, when their politics and personal views happen to be pretty strong.
Research reveals that in schools where violence is a problem, metal detectors actually do nothing to stop the violence -- the only effective solution to violence and strong feelings that is *consistent*, as a matter of fact, is peer mediation, and strong mentorship from the faculty at a school (Noguera, 2003). It's not a gimmick to say that teaching how to have real dialogue where participants actually listen to each other is the key to creating a good community.
ginnunggap linked to point out the political split in our country, and how people are trying to find compromises in politics as they stand right now, and I can't help but think that "finding compromise" should be pretty basic, and it should be explicitly taught.Example of how a course might go: you start off with two weeks on the basics of how to acknowledge what someone else is saying and letting them finish speaking -- because when people are riled up, there's this tendency to say, "I heard you!" and cut the other person off without ever having actually heard anything the other person said. Then you give students ways of framing their thoughts in a manner that isn't attacking, but descriptive: "when you say this, I feel like this," or, "I hear you. I can sympathize with that, although I think the main point is actually x." Then you spend some time with having people practice their new skills on some loaded issues - the environment, gun legistlation, etc. Then you spend the latter half of the course making people come up with a way to teach what they learned, to serve as peer mediators in high school (cross-age tutoring), so that they feel that what they learned was meaningful. (You notice that this proposed course outline is highly constructivist in theory. That's because teacher-centered lessons are arguably less effective in getting material to stick, and because constructivist thought hasn't penetrated past the high school level yet. And because professors don't know how to teach, half the time, so groupwork is the best way to go.)
If we actually taught *1* course like this at a higher level, we probably wouldn't have had stupid issues like the witch-hunt mentality of people who were angered at an anti-queer chalking and wanted to persecute the Williams Free Press in '99. We would have taken a deep breath and not strung the Mad Cow up in late '01, when there was an article that was perceived as racially biased. We would have much more open dialogue in politics, eventually, because right now, this country is highly liberal, at a college level and much more conservative across the rest of the country.
There's a split between the intelligentsia and the rest of the country.
I know I sound like a hippie, or perhaps like I'm being condescending, because these skills should be so basic. But the problem is real -- people don't listen to each other, when their politics and personal views happen to be pretty strong.
Research reveals that in schools where violence is a problem, metal detectors actually do nothing to stop the violence -- the only effective solution to violence and strong feelings that is *consistent*, as a matter of fact, is peer mediation, and strong mentorship from the faculty at a school (Noguera, 2003). It's not a gimmick to say that teaching how to have real dialogue where participants actually listen to each other is the key to creating a good community.