By Emma Brown, TLS staff writer
It was the last day of class. The students had questions.
They wanted to know what their animal rights professor, Craig McFarlane, personally thought about the issues he had been presenting to them for the last 12 weeks. Before he answered their questions, he made them guess what they thought he would say.
They were mostly wrong.
Getting wrong answers from students is not usually a good thing but McFarlane took it as proof of success.
“It seems that I’m good at hiding my own personal views and I think it’s kind of important to do that with these sorts of classes because [students] might feel that they’re being forced into adopting a particular position if they knew what my position was,” he says.
Many courses at Carleton deal with controversial subjects where students are asked to grapple with polarizing views. Managing discussion around these issues and encouraging critical thinking is a challenge for professors.
McFarlane says letting students participate in open discussion is the best way for them to engage with the material. He tries to talk as little as possible, only to facilitate turn-taking or clarify technical points. The students are also asked to respond to the readings in weekly papers.
The topic of animal rights can bring up intense feelings and personal struggles for students, says McFarlane.
“A lot of them take it quite personally to begin with because it touches upon parts of their identity: what they eat, what they wear, what they do… It bumps up against how they see themselves,” he says.
Religion classes often “bump up” against students in a similar way. Zeba Crook, professor of religious studies at Carleton, says students sometimes struggle at first because, “they tend to think of their religious truths as self-evident and obvious…religious studies asks them to think about religion in a different way.”
Rather than run away from the uncomfortable and controversial side of religion, Crook leans into it.
While teaching a class on Islam, he included pictures of Muhammad on his slides. Depicting Muhammad is forbidden in Islam. As a result, three students began yelling at Crook during class. He quieted the students and pointed out that the images were produced by Muslims in the 13th century. He wanted to teach the class that depictions of Muhammad were not always forbidden in Islam.
“I can be more strident in my demand that students think about [religion] in a way that they’re not comfortable with, because that’s what university is for. It is for pushing that envelope, pushing students to re-evaluate things that they thought were obvious and clear,” he says.
However, he’s careful not to let students poke fun or disrespect one another. He doesn’t have an online discussion board for this reason. After all, he says, “The Internet brings out the worst in people.”
Vida Panitch, who teaches bioethics, says she’s been pleasantly surprised with how respectful students are in classroom discussions. Her class deals with controversial topics such as abortion and doctor-assisted suicide.
“I’ve been really impressed since I’ve been teaching at Carleton with how the students are trying to take each other’s views seriously,” she says.
The key to facilitating respectful discussion around these divisive issues is centering it on a particular author’s argument in an article. This way, she says, students can examine the specific premises and discuss whether the conclusion is valid. If classroom discussion becomes “uncivilized” Panitch reminds her students to bring it back to the article.
As for her role in the classroom, she says, “I try to disagree with everybody…I’m not going to defend it for them. That’s what they have to learn how to do.”
Panitch, McFarlane and Crook agree that professors must challenge students to think critically, especially about their own views and assumptions.
“If they leave the class with the same positions as they entered the class with that’s fine,” says Panitch, “but the hope is that now they have good arguments for them and that they can defend them to others who challenge them rather than just yelling at other people.”