There's a lot to like in this article, but there is also significant room for caution. I am especially wary of the following expressed as a classroom objective: "I worried mostly about what would happen to the particular alchemy that takes place in the classroom, when the abstract questions that I deal in become concrete and urgent as they become shared. How could I approximate the conversations, the back and forths, and the in-jokes that together cohere into the space of shared purpose?" It brings to mind something I saw in the very next article I read this morning: "Fitting in is human: forcing someone to fit in is oppression." Or perhaps a more neutral way of putting it: you can ask students to think and reflect critically, or you can ask students to cohere around shared understanding and objectives, but you can't do both.
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