At a minimum, this knowing requires that students discover their own and others . It also requires a social justice perspective for students to understand the power differentials and issues among diverse groups. And it requires providing students with an intellectual awareness of diverse visions of the future as well as processes leading to a more equitable, pluralistic, synergistic society. The Division of Social Work strives to achieve these diversity learning goals to prepare graduates to contribute to the evolution of our potential for both autonomy and interdependence in synergistic social systems. As a faculty, in collaboration with each others and our students, we are learning more to co create classes that generate such learning goals.
Students feel as if they have a voice.
Students feel that when they speak, people listen with open minds, open hearts, and open ears. Students realize that each has partial knowledge and therefore needs one another to develop a fuller understanding. Students feel as if who they are is recognized, understood, and assumed to be a critical part of their capacity to learn. Everyone assumes that dissent, debate, and disagreement are part of how we learn. Everyone realizes that the class is one forum to express one s ignorance, misinformation, incomplete knowledge, and that voicing such ideas is one way of expanding learning.