A friend of mine showed me a text from a friend of hers who had recently been substituting. She said several things, but she ended with "teachers are saints, and cell phones should be banned in schools." I've thought about this message a couple of times because I wondered if other parents took on a week or two of subbing if they would walk away with a similar thought. Would people who have texted their children during the school day or insisted that their child must have their phone on in case of an emergency feel differently if they had 30 kids in front of them? Would the change of position change their perspective? Would a change of perspective cause a change of opinion?
We are all influenced by a wide variety of things, from DNA to parenting to culture to religion to formative experiences. We have overt opinions, and we have biases of which we are not even consciously aware. Infants as young as 8 days old have biases about the flavor of foods. This isn't wholly a bad thing as we couldn't get through the day without certain automatic assumptions. The people who bother me most are those unwilling to acknowledge that they have biases. I encounter this a lot among scientists. They believe they approach their work without bias because they know they are supposed to. The problem with that belief is that it prevents them from taking steps to mitigate the effects of bias. I also have some stubborn friends and family members who won't admit that unconscious bias exists, to which I want to reply, "How would you know? It is, by definition, unconscious." Again, the problem with believing that your perspective doesn't influence your opinions is that it leaves you believing your perspective is the only one and that anyone who disagrees with you is ignorant.
While there are some first-dgree issues to which we must stubbornly cling, those are fewer than our behavior would reflect. When the opportunity to challenge our assumptions arises, we should absolutely take a moment to examine our perspective. There are many things that don't bother me as a middle-aged white woman that might be quite offensive if I were a 17-year-old black male. Those are quite obviously different perspectives. When a religious person interprets the results of a scientific experiment, he will do so differently than an atheist interpreting the same results. They are both biased and coming at the data from their perspective, and they should both be willing to challenge that perspective as they examine the results.
We live in a world where people do not take the time to challenge their assumptions. We rarely listen to the perspective of another person with a motive to learn, only to object. Social media hasn't helped. We all view it a a platform for our voice, but we rarely use it to educate ourselves about the reasons for another position. I can't think of an issue that isn't currently divisive along party lines. We will never heal this problem without a willingness to listen to each other and challenge our own perspective (or at the very least acknowledge that our stance is informed by our perspective and might be different if we had different life experiences).
How can we, as educators, train our students in this? First, as always, we must model it. When a question comes up about a controversial issue, we should not just spout our own opinion. We should give the reasons for our opinions and talk about how we would likely feel differently if we had different information. We should ask them, not only what they think about an issue, but why they think it. We should then ask them if they can see how they might feel differently if they came from a different family or attended a different school. If we don't ask them to challenge their assumptions and show them how we do, the world will only become more entrenched.
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