NEASC Annual Conference and Showcase

As academic institutions increasingly prioritize the development of a more global and rounded student citizenship, respective departments are obliged to teach material that contains and provokes uncomfortable ideas, themes, narratives and experiences. This session will consider how teachers might evaluate their own thinking processes, and the metacognitive processes of their students, to create spaces where uncomfortable discussions may be more comfortably approached. Why do students and teachers sometimes balk at discussions of sex, sexuality, gender, race, socio-economic disparity, politics and religion, for example? How can we meta-cognitively manage ourselves, our pedagogy and our classrooms to produce the nuanced, constructive and candid discussion that will help students to understand, listen to, and process that which is often shied away from?