What Experience Do Students Have with Multiple Perspectives?
Prior to coming to college, many students have not had the opportunity to observe lively communities of discourse, much less participate in them.
Rarely do lower-division students have prior experience in engaging in reasoned decision making by examining diverse points of view. Even upper-division students may be lacking in the experience of seriously and considering competing claims and perspectives.
In general, many of our students have not been encouraged to think critically in their prior learning experiences, and though they may have been encouraged to observe others thinking critically, they may not have internalized such an approach. Textbooks tend to reduce myriad perspectives to a simplified, singular viewpoint that implies that it is fact or “the truth.” Developmentally, students may have not been open yet to the notion that there may be more than one reasonable answer to a question.
Engaging Perspectives—Three Levels
To become adept academic decision makers, students must be able to interact as experts to engage perspectives at three levels:
Engaging a perspective for content. Here, students develop the skill of being able to represent a perspective in traditional summary form—they can restate the perspective in their own words, neither adding any additional material nor leaving any main ideas out.
Engaging a perspective with empathy. Here, students learn to restate a perspective in such a way that those in agreement with it feel that the speaker has presented their perspective as well as or better than they could—that the speaker has been able to “stand in their shoes.”
Engaging a perspective critically. Here, students work toward analyzing and critically examining a perspective. They become experts on the perspective in terms of the definitions, assumptions, claims that it relies on, and they are able to speak the validity of the perspective through clear articulation of its smaller building blocks.
A Note About Dualistic Thinking
Additionally, many students are caught in the mode of dualistic thinking and are inexperienced in reflective, critical thinking. Oftentimes, we urge students to think more critically, yet we find that they seem to be unable to do so.
