According to Dr. Scarbrough,
There are many debates about what we should get a classroom to look like, but I see the difference when education is meaningful versus when it's a battle to survive or an obstruction to get through. Yet, so many students are better able to tell us what high school didn’t do for them, and that points toward schooling not looking right. Kids can tell when something juicy is going on, and often that means exploring a question complicated enough that not even the teachers agree on the answer. If we can construct a scenario where there’s no right answer, something good happens. It may not go well the first time, but by bringing dilemmas into the classroom, by deliberately running students into trouble and then asking them to navigate the terrain with you, we can see a genre of work that’s much more engaging.
Dr. Scarbrough has published on the value of using such texts in the classroom, where students role play in a town hall setting, each taking on the perspective of differing constituents. “Putting students in hands-on moments, immersing them in heated but respectful discussion, it allows for the rich, generative, and challenging discussion that we know—and they know—has real value.”
For more information about the programs in English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, visit https://cahss.d.umn.edu/elws