A small but salient part of Pedagogy for Liberation was when Freire articulates the complication in expecting dialogue, which is that it is sometimes expressed as a requirement to speak "even when [the students] have nothing to say" (102). So often in classes that are trying to shy away from the traditional lecture model of imparting knowledge, the professor adds a speaking requirement into the syllabus. While I understand the logic behind their choice, I have always thought that creating speaking quotas and rules is counterproductive. For a student who may not feel comfortable being a vocal presence in class, a speaking requirement could detract from his or her learning experience by injecting tension where there doesn't need to be any.

"These students describe the majority of their relationships with teachers as devoid of trust, devoid of caring, and devoid of viable information and therefore deficient in social capital resources that enable positive educational outcomes."

Upon reading Levinson's work, one of the things that struck me the most was Lebinson's students complete mistrust of "the system." While Levinson agrees that she is more of a state to trust politics and engage civically, I wonder about the pieces she left out. I would posit that a lot of people do not civically engage because they do feel a sense of loyalty to this country. It is not necessarily the fact that these people believe their efforts won't make a difference - in most cases this is probably the opposite. People know their efforts are meaningful, but perhaps they don't care. What then? How do we encourage students, especially young people to become engaged if they do not care? In most cases, this lack of care seems justified.

I really enjoyed reading Shor & Freire's discussion of the "Dialogical Method" of teaching. As a scientist interested in environmental education who has always struggled with traditional lecture learning styles, I have grappled with similar questions of how to teach subjects, especially hard science that is not seen as "needing discussion," through more interactive, dialogue-friendly techniques. I especially appreciated Freire's example of his friend's physics course, and how he begins by situating the subject matter within concrete materials gathered by the students around their lives.

In Dance's "Tough Fronts" article, she writes, "Unlike adult-to-adult social relations, teacher-to-student relations are asymmetrical: teachers are in a better position than students to possess mainstream social (and cultural) capital resources that students need. Students have little to offer except future promise of educational success." I'd like to push back on this statement and some of the ideas it's laying out; while I agree that teacher-to-student relations can involve an asymmetrical power dynamic, I think the idea that teachers are in a better position to possess social/cultural capital and that students can only offer future educational success goes against the idea of the bi-directional relationship that Dance says makes a teacher a "good" one.

Empathy and pity are closely related social constructs that are used to relate to human experiences and across cultural identities. However, identifying with an experience becomes a problem when pity is the main source of relation because it could lead to a misunderstanding of situation. To summarize what I found Megan Bowler’s main points in The Risks of Empathy, she describes the main risk of empathy is that it can become pity and if this happens there is no full understanding of how oneself is implicated in the creation of the social situations of the Other.  Without this understanding and cross-cultural analysis I feel like something is missing fundamentally from the multicultural space. I find that this idea of empathy v.

In the Bondy-et-al article, CRCM (culturally responsive classroom management) is described as a way that teachers can use their understanding of their students’ cultural backgrounds to connect with their students and manage the classroom in a way that is effective and sensitive to the students’ varying backgrounds. It reminds me a lot of differentiated instruction, in which a teacher takes into account students’ varying academic backgrounds while creating lessons and leading the classroom. Many parallels can be made between examples of CRCM in the article and typical examples of differentiated instruction.

In thinking about ‘passive empathy,’ I have been wondering about the difference between sympathy and empathy, which has often left me uncertain. Many seem to use the words interchangeably, skewing the lines of both definitions. I believe this is not simply the case for 20 something undergraduates, rather this is an affliction many throughout academia succumb to and/or overlook in the contexts of research.

Like we’ve continuously read in class readings, student success is so often determined by how closely a student fits with, or can adapt to, the dominant social culture. This often means that the success of students from minority cultures is pre-determined for them, although that seems not to be the case in classroom like those discussed by Dance in Tough Fronts.