B.1 | Perspective-Taking Strategies for Deepening Understanding and Critical Thinking
(6th - 12th)
Tricia Ebarvia
Room # Chamber Given today’s challenging social media and (dis)information ecosystem, it’s easy to see how many of us — teachers and students — can fall into either-or traps of thinking or to accept, as given, many dominant (and harmful) narratives we have about the most important issues of our time. Every day, we see evidence of how fear and bias are used to manipulate the public, and our kids are not immune to this.
But as psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt reminds us, “Neither our evolutionary path nor our present culture dooms us to be held hostage by bias. Change requires a kind of open-minded attention that is well within our reach” (Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, 7). Every day in our classrooms, we can engage in an “open-minded attention” that not only protects kids against biased thinking traps, but also empowers them to seek perspectives beyond their own and beyond those loudest in the room or on their devices. In this session, we’ll explore strategies we can practice with our students as they read, respond, and interpret texts and the world beyond those texts. We can seek answers to questions like: What other possibilities exist? Whose voice or perspective am I missing? Whose voices or perspectives have I dismissed and why? What do I have to learn here? How can I know better, think expansively, and see more clearly? We can make looking again, behind, and next to a habit of mind. When students are practiced in perspective-taking, they exercise the flexibility and empathy required to understand issues and ideas from multiple points-of-view. With the problems we face in the world today, we need more young people who are practiced in seeing issues from varying, even contradictory perspectives.
A co-founder of #DisruptTexts, Tricia Ebarvia advocates for literacy instruction rooted in equity and liberation through critical literacy. Tricia taught high school English for 20 years and is currently the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at an independent school in Philadelphia. She is the co-founder of the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy (IREL), a National Writing Project educator, and the author of Get Free: Anti-Bias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers (Corwin).