As teachers, how can we teach to multiple perspectives within our lessons?
“We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.”
-Gloria Jean Watkins (author, educator, human rights activist)
Perspective: an outlook of weighing importance of the subject to the individual.
Having multiple perspectives is having the ability to look at the subject on a larger scale and weighing out how it might be important to another person.This is something that I have found to be difficult to teach students.
Throughout my lessons that I have been teaching I have posed many questions to my students. Most answers are similar, but that one student that gives a different view, they find something interesting that I did not notice or consider at first. I am then able to teach the students how another persons point impacts ideas and interpretation.
One brain can think of things that the other brain has not connected with yet. We teachers need to help build more connections by letting students add input into their daily discussions. Teachers should quit lecturing for hours and start asking questions to find out what their students think about what they are learning.
We must note that students do NOT have the same value system as we. We know that our excitement over a subject does not always extend to them. So, it is our job to at least relay our importance and try to get them to see it from our point of view. Students need to learn how to view life and its situations from multiple perspectives in order to become the most successful.
Students need to be guided throughout learning, they need to be guided in how to learn about themselves. We need to guide them and teach them how to reflect on what they know and build on their knowledge.
Today in class we talked about LGBT students and how they suffer from harassment everyday. Here is a subject that requires having multiple perspectives in order to be able to understand and even care about what is being said. We need to teach acceptance of others, at least in their perspectives. It should be the outline of every lesson.
Randy Bomer talks about how teachers need to take multiple perspectives on how they teach so that it is significant to them: “We have to help students become involved and invested in literate tasks that are significant to them not because they were born to love reading and writing but because of the ways literate activity connects to other things in life that matter to them.” Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms
We have to connect our ideas to their perspectives... to their backgrounds.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ---Jalad Rumi (Persian Poet)
