My classroom is a place in which students are not just encouraged or required, but are permitted to develop into the kind of critical thinkers that active and informed participation in a global society will require.
In my classroom, students decide what they think and provide decisive evidence to support their ideas.
In my classroom we engage contemporary events and literature to enter the discourse that often, before entering the University, is a world seemingly separate from and outside of students’ own. And these topics are consistently connected to historic events of the same theme and/or magnitude in order to reveal the continuum of which students are—but do not necessarily realize they are—part.
In my classroom, students are expected to be expansive in their their thinking about the “big stuff” by localizing it: exploring and understanding their own values, beliefs, fears.
In my classroom, teaching is not imparting my alleged knowledge or truth to students; my classroom is designed to be a safe but rigorous space where I encourage students to find their own knowledge and truth—for themselves. This is my attempt at training them into the confidence that they are capable.
After all, in our ever changing world, truth is rarely finite; even the human condition is relative as any two people understand fear or joy according to his or her own experience.
darlene anita scott 