Here's the second post today on practices in higher ed--which leads me to mount another pulpit, this one on the "how to do this well" and some internal challenges to "doing it well." 

Here is a pretty ok piece on seeing things from another point of view.  It's not ground-breaking, but it does cover the ground in a good way.  It offers a classical justification of the liberal arts, and especially the humanities, to wit: "teaching difficult issues" is about teaching people to take a step back and see different perspectives, to expand their scope of the plausible ways to inhabit the human condition.  This allows our students better to assess the particularity of their own position, and get a more mature picture of its plausibility and its vulnerabilities.  Here's how one professor, in the piece, explains this mission:

One of her goals, Redstone says, is to help students see that their views, as much as anyone else’s, are built on beliefs and biases. If they start from that vantage point, rather from the idea that they are correct and others are wrong, she says, they are likelier to avoid communication breakdowns when they encounter different viewpoints.

"There’s a certain level of humility to recognize that, maybe the way I see the world is not Truth with a capital T," she says.

If students can’t do that, Redstone says, they won’t know how to respond when they go out in the world and start dealing with people who think differently.

This "teaching differences," so to speak, is a really good thing.  (I would say so; my first job, in my last year of grad school, was working with (be honest Chuck--under) Gerry Graff on the development of the MA Program in the Humanities at the U of Chicago--still something I'm very proud of.)  And it is, I think, a necessary thing.  After all, it is human nature to assume that the way we see things is the "natural" and "obvious" way to see things.  Even thinkers who are very sophisticated representatives of their own specialties, with enormously acute and self-critical epistemological reflexes, are prone to thinking this.  This is especially obvious in situations where people feel that something they value deeply is threatened, and it can be threatened merely by not provoking immediate assent from everyone around you.  

Consider, for instance, that this is true about "ethical" matters, where people who don't teach ethics professionally don't realize that almost every ethical position one can hold has interesting arguments for and against it, and a further set of arguments explaining why the whole position is mistaken in a more general way.  (This is why, for example, the people discussing "social justice" on college campuses (who have rarely been academically trained in ethical reasoning, in philosophy or political theory or religious studies departments) turn out, not infrequently, never to have realized that literally almost every moral axiom they hold dear has been reasonably contested--for starters, as to its legitimation, the scope of its application, or the nature of its implications.  Then, when they discover that the commitments that they so sincerely profess aren't held by every other person in quite the same way they hold them--or the implications of those claims are contested, or different implications proposed, or something else--it not infrequently happens that they meet these challenges, or proposed alternatives, with outrage.

So, as I said, teaching people to confront difference without outrage or defensiveness is hard work, good work, and important work.  In general.  

However--and there's always a however--notice what this approach itself assumes: that, absent these classes, these students will never have a chance to "think differently."  The presumption behind this assumption is that our students don't have experiences of life like that.  However, this assumption itself assumes that "our students" are all ones who have gone about their lives without the existential and cognitive and symbolic frames of their universe broadly untroubled.  Certainly that is true of a lot of our students.  But for some classes of students, that is not true.  For example, I would suggest that minoritized populations of students, however you define them, have already had to do this--they're under no illusions that theirs is the natural, obvious, unquestionably correct position.  They don't experience the lesson as one they need to have.  Can they see the "point" of another position?  Well, does the other position acknowledge their equal dignity, or is it reasonably seen to be disparaging them?  If the latter, then is the right aim to "appreciate" that point of view?  

These are not, and should not be, rhetorical questions; they're real ones.

Teachers in the contemporary academy confront these questions all the time, whether they recognize them or not.  I think this challenge is what we need to be thinking about now.  I expect I will be thinking about it in coming years.