Tag: difference

Dependability as Calling: Facilitating Freedom in Our Polarized Age

This post explores the challenge of supporting students with diverse callings, especially when we might differ and disagree with them. Educators are urged to foster dependable environments to facilitate students’ freedom , even amidst political and ideological differences. The story of Joseph serves as a powerful example of supporting others’ callings through dependability.

blurred motion of woman against overcast
Photo by Kseniya Kopna on Pexels.com

This past spring, I taught a new course titled “Your Life’s Calling.” One of its main goals was to help students discern what it would mean to feel called in a world that often feels noisy, angry, confusing, and devoid of reasons for hope. As we moved through the course, students—especially those who knew they wanted to become classroom teachers—wondered how an educator could support every student’s calling, especially those callings that might challenge or directly conflict with the teacher’s most firmly held beliefs.

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The Change a Difference Makes

Susan and Grover from episode 131 of Sesame Street.

Do you remember the Sesame Street tune, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things does not belong…”? There would be some collection of objects displayed on the television screen—say a variety of fruits and a glass of milk—and children would intuit the unnamed category. This is how we learn; we make meaning by understanding difference. When we move from grouping foods or shapes to thinking about human beings, however, the phrase “one of these things does not belong” becomes problematic. Why do our brains see people who are different from us as if they don’t belong?

[Click here for the history and variations of this song from Sesame Street].

What if we were asked instead to examine a range of wildly different objects, and discern what binds them together, or imagine how they might be utilized creatively so that their cumulative capacities could accomplish something grand?

None of these things is quite like the other

Yet each of these things surely does belong

Can you figure out how they might work together

By the time I finish my song?

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