Recently, I participated in a panel hosted by the Coalition for Racial Equity and Social Justice focused on children’s wellbeing and education. We talked about the purpose of education and what young people may need from schools as technology becomes a larger part of their lives. I left thinking about dialogue and what has to be present for people to really think with one another. It took me back to my own classroom.
Dialogue was a big part of how I taught. We might begin with a reading or something happening in the world and end up somewhere I had not planned. A student would interpret something one way and someone else would challenge it. Sometimes I had to bring us back to the evidence because we were moving toward a conclusion the historical record did not support. Other times, a student said something that caused me to reconsider what I thought.
Over time, I learned that these moments did not happen just because I encouraged discussion. You can put students in a room together, ask an interesting question, and still have a pretty bad conversation. A few students can dominate while others decide it is safer to stay quiet. Students can also become very good at figuring out what the teacher wants to hear. At the beginning of the school year, I used the principles of Ma’at to help students think about how we wanted to exist together in the classroom. I did not want them memorizing definitions. We tried to figure out what the principles might mean if we actually attempted to live by them.
With truth, for example, I would ask, “If we say we value truth, how would someone know that by watching us?”
Simple Participation vs. Critical Engagement
Balance brought us into conversations about participation and what happens when the same people dominate a discussion. Reciprocity pushed us to consider what we could reasonably expect from others if we were unwilling to listen seriously to them. Justice brought us to questions of harm and responsibility. We also talked about what disrupted those principles. Students could identify obvious behaviors like talking over someone or making fun of them, but I became more interested in what those behaviors did to the community. If somebody gets ridiculed for saying something that turns out to be wrong, another student may decide not to take the same risk later.
Those conversations became part of our expectations for the year. I was still the teacher. There were responsibilities I had that students did not have, and some boundaries were not negotiable. But I wanted students to understand why our ways of interacting mattered to the learning we were trying to do. I tried something similar with assessment.
I had something called the Being Woke Participation Rubric. The word “woke” lands differently now than it did when I developed it. At the time, I was trying to make critical thinking an intentional part of students’ grades because I was never satisfied with participation being reduced to how many times somebody raised their hand. Some of my most vocal students were not necessarily the ones wrestling most deeply with what we were studying. Other students said much less in class, but I could see something happening in their writing. They might return to an idea differently than they had approached it earlier. I wanted the assessment to account for intellectual development that was not always visible through conventional participation.
Toward the end of the semester, students used the rubric to assess themselves, and then we met individually. Those conversations could surprise me. I might have been thinking primarily about what I heard during class while a student pointed to something they had written weeks earlier. Sometimes they could show me development in their thinking that I had missed. Other students were harder on themselves than I was. Looking back, I think I was trying to influence what the classroom incentivized. Schools incentivize things all the time. Students pay attention to what earns credit and what teachers notice. If participation is measured primarily by speaking, they learn something about what counts. The same is true when completion becomes the primary evidence of learning.
I wanted the grade to reflect something about how students were thinking. Could they sit with an idea long enough to question it? Could something they read or heard from another student cause them to reconsider what they thought? I wanted saying “I don’t know” to have a place in the intellectual life of the classroom. Of course, I was still giving grades. Some students undoubtedly figured out what I valued and became good at performing those things because they wanted the points. I don’t think I resolved that contradiction. I was working inside it. My classroom was not equally successful for everyone either. Some students remained quiet. Some conversations failed. There were students for whom the classroom never became as safe as I wanted it to be.
Creating the Conditions for Growth
I still saw enough to become convinced that the conditions mattered. Students were more willing to expose unfinished thinking when they did not expect embarrassment for being uncertain. I noticed what happened when changing your mind became evidence that you had learned something rather than proof that you had been wrong. There are limits to what I can understand from the experience of my own life. I can study history and expose myself to experiences different from my own, but I still encounter the world from somewhere. Another person may notice something because of where they stand that I cannot see as clearly from where I stand.
That does not mean experience automatically makes an interpretation correct. Evidence matters. Sometimes another person’s interpretation is wrong. Sometimes mine is. But another person can make something available to my thinking that I might not have reached alone. I have since encountered the concept of intersubjectivity, which helped me put language around some of this. Some understanding develops between people. I saw versions of that in the classroom long before I had language for it. A student could notice something in a text that changed what someone else saw. A conversation could expose an assumption the rest of us had accepted without noticing it.
Black Studies and African Intellectual Traditions
Black Studies has complicated my thinking further because it pushes me to pay attention to how knowledge gets organized and how questions get asked. That has also led me toward African intellectual traditions that have long wrestled with questions of personhood and community.
I don’t see African intellectual traditions and Black Studies as interchangeable. Black Studies provides part of the framework through which I approach questions of knowledge, history, power, and education. That framework requires me to take African intellectual traditions seriously enough that they can reorganize a question rather than simply appear as additional voices after the intellectual structure has already been established. Ifeanyi Menkiti has been useful to me in this regard. I do not accept every implication of his argument about personhood, particularly when thinking about children. But one challenge underneath his work has stayed with me: communal life participates in human formation.
Kwame Gyekye complicates this by preserving a stronger place for individual agency within communal life. I find the disagreement useful. Students are formed in relationship with other people, but a classroom also has to leave room for someone to challenge the group or the teacher. When I return to my classroom from that perspective, ordinary interactions take on more significance. A student might begin saying something, hesitate, and look around the room before deciding whether to continue. How other students responded mattered, and so did how I responded. If someone challenged something I said and I became defensive, students learned something about questioning that had nothing to do with what I had written in the lesson plan. That is where my thinking about AI gets more complicated.
There are educational possibilities here that I would have welcomed in my own classroom. Someone reluctant to expose what they do not know in front of classmates can work through an idea privately first. Because of the students for whom my classroom never became as safe as I hoped, I cannot dismiss the value of having another place to work through unfinished thinking. Where I become more cautious is when that interaction begins replacing encounters with other people. If relationships participate in our formation, then it matters who or what we spend our time thinking with.
[Artificial] Intelligence
An AI system does not have a stake in what I become the way a classmate or teacher does. It does not have to share a classroom or community with me after our exchange ends. If I cause harm, I do not have to repair my relationship with it. Another person places different demands on me because the relationship continues. AI can give a student space to work through an argument without the embarrassment that sometimes comes with doing that publicly. I see value in that. But another human being can bring something into the conversation that unsettles what I thought I knew. Afterward, we still have to figure out how to live together.
The panel was about the future of children and education, but it sent me back to practices I used years ago and made me look at them differently. I am not suggesting that another teacher needs to use Ma’at or recreate my participation rubric. I am more interested in what happens when educators examine the conditions they create for thinking. Students learn things from those conditions that we never formally teach. They figure out whether it is safe to be wrong. They notice whose ideas receive attention. They learn whether changing their mind is something to hide or evidence that they have been thinking.
As AI becomes more present in education, I think we have to pay attention to whether these tools are helping students enter more fully into a community of learners or gradually making that community less “necessary.” I keep coming back to the conditions themselves. I saw their importance imperfectly in my own teaching, and I am still thinking about what they mean as the classroom changes. But I have become convinced that what we incentivize and what we make possible between students are not secondary questions about classroom culture. They are part of the education itself.
