Getting Way Beyond “Indoctrination” in the Classroom
Veteran tips for creating genuinely curious classrooms.
When I started teaching Science and Technology Studies at Michigan State University’s Lyman Briggs College in the late 1990s, it quickly became clear that my students came from a very wide range of educational and life experiences. Some had graduated from Detroit inner-city high schools, others from wealthy suburbs, and still others from the state’s far north rural districts, where an entire senior class might number 30 kids, all of whom had known each other since kindergarten.
What our highly diverse students all had in common was being science majors. This meant they also had in common the assumption that a college course would consist of a straightforward intellectual path that all students would follow in lockstep. They arrived thinking they would all do the same readings and labs and leave with the same knowledge, varying only by quantitative gradations reflected in their course grades.
But in Lyman Briggs – a residential science undergraduate program – the faculty came to do exceptional teaching. This meant we were always trying to impress upon our students what Heterodox Academy’s motto has been since 2015: Great minds don’t always think alike.
Still, increasing intellectual curiosity in a classroom is a tricky thing! You aren’t really teaching a college course if you just let students read, do, and think whatever they want. Academic courses and disciplines are called that for a reason.
So, how can you teach in a way that signals that you genuinely welcome and support students from a wide variety of intellectual and life backgrounds, and how can you encourage your students to see that intellectual diversity is a good thing, something you value?
Think very consciously about what you’re assessing. As one wise teaching mentor taught me, your assessment is your teaching. Whatever it is you are grading students on is what they will work hardest to learn.
Therefore, if you want your students to learn that thinking outside the box is good, that critical thinking is good, that changing your mind in the face of new evidence and reasoning is a sign of great intellectual strength, and that appreciating a variety of viewpoints makes our knowledge stronger, figure out how to reward those specific things in your grading.
For example, give the students a detailed grading rubric for their oral or written presentation that includes points awarded for considering contrary points of view and evidence that goes against their thesis. Set up a grading rubric that rewards points for steady and rigorous development of an argument rather than just presentation of an argument. (Assess the steps to the final product, not just the final product.)
Or, try something I did in my courses: require students to bring in class-related “found objects” that are examples of something they used to think about one way but now think about differently. This is basically show-and-tell but with a twist in that the thing presented has to be something about which the student has changed their thinking, even if it’s just having gone from having no real insight into or questions about the item to having some. (The “item” doesn’t have to be a physical object.)
Be clear with students if there is something they must agree with you on to succeed in the course. This helps students see what they must do to get a good grade, but it also helps them see where they don’t have to agree with you. For example, when I’m teaching history of medicine, I make sure students understand they must agree, in the course, that we follow what the historical evidence shows us and not just make up stories about the past.
But I also make sure students know they don’t have to agree with me on the “lessons” I take from the history we’re studying – for example, that the history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study shows us how easy it is to let institutional inertia subvert ethical behavior, or that the history of birth suggests midwifery ought to be highly valued.
Help your students see the difference between disciplinary methods and disciplinary conclusions – and make sure you help them see why your discipline’s methods are valuable yet fallible. Ideal: Show where you’ve made methodological or intellectual mistakes in your own work and how you recognized the mistakes.
In at least one required class assignment, ask your students to criticize and suggest alternatives to your chosen class resources. The students might opt to respond by criticizing and subbing something else in for a particular reading, video, assignment, or speaker. What you’re saying to them when you do this is that you and they need to recognize the course was created by a human (you) and that all humans can improve in their intellectual work. Besides that, this assignment requires students to look for and consider material you might have missed.
In my own teaching, I was often surprised by what my students suggested as alternatives, and I frequently worked their ideas into future classes. When I did, I would make a point of telling my current class that the new course item had been suggested by one of their student predecessors – signaling, again, that we develop smarter collaboratively.
If you opt to do this kind of assignment, again, make sure you’re paying attention to how you grade it. The rubric you give your students will tell them what you’re really after. Do make clear they’ll be graded on whether the criticisms and arguments for alternatives are well articulated and thoughtful. Don’t grade them down because they confessed they didn't love your favorite text or suggested an alternative you consider unworkable.
Always be teaching epistemology. Whether you’re teaching in the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, you should always be helping your students understand where knowledge comes from, how to judge its reliability, and how to improve it. Our students need to understand that knowledge (so far, mostly) comes from humans, and humans are fallible.
One way to do this is to deconstruct textbooks and any other material you’re using to teach. (Who is the author? What is their background? Why is the book laid out as it is?) Teach the students how to recognize and assess sourcing, how to look for built-in assumptions, blind spots, and biases. Be very transparent about where your knowledge has come from. Constantly ask your students – and ask yourself in front of students – “What are the sources for this claim, and how reliable are they?”
Many students are never explicitly taught to do this epistemological work, and it can be a real game-changer when they come to appreciate, at the gut-level, that all knowledge comes from somewhere, and it may be wrong.
One exercise I used to help drive this point home is what I called a “head excavation exercise.” This was a multi-page worksheet handed to students at the start of an hour-long period. I’d ask them to put everything else away and work alone on the worksheet with the understanding that it would not be collected or graded, ever. The worksheet would ask them questions that dug down into specific topics like gender, science, or social power. I’d ask them what they know about these things and then ask them to unpack how they “know” it. I would ask them to judge the reliability of various points of knowledge.
Step by step in the head excavation exercises, they’d see that what they “know” came from somewhere and might be different if they had come a different path. (By the way, I always did the worksheets at the same time, to signal I still saw myself as a lifelong learner.) Just schedule a lot of office hours after this! Students always want to talk one-on-one about what they discovered in their own heads.
To teach epistemology, I’d also use the Truth Box Experiment in every class I taught. You can read about that here.
Let students know not everyone takes the same “course” in a course. Again, the goal is to help students see you’re not looking to turn them into mini-me’s but rather into better thinkers.
I made this explicit in my courses by likening the class on the syllabus to a bus tour: We’d travel as a group to various “places,” but because we came from different places, had different interests and biases, and had varied brains, we would not all experience it the same way. They should not be surprised if other students were not having the same course experience as them in terms of which readings resonated, what they thought about particular ideas, and so on.
At the end of courses, I sometimes did a “cognitive map” exercise to drive home how we all experienced the course differently – and that that is to be expected. I would have us make a circle of chairs, and then I’d put down large pieces of paper to represent various “stops.” Each piece of paper would have the name of a reading, topic, video, or speaker we encountered in the class.
I’d bring to the class rolled up construction paper tubes (stapled to hold their shape) in green, red, yellow, and blue. Then I’d tell the students green signified “this made me want to keep going,” red signified “I hated this and wanted to stop,” yellow meant enlightenment, and blue could be used for whatever else they needed to express.
We then held a kind of Quaker meeting where students would sit quietly until one was moved to pick up a “flag” and plant it on a “stop” they wanted to talk about. So, one student might plant a green flag on a reading that made him want to keep exploring; he’d explain why. Another might put a yellow flag on a video that opened her eyes; she’d explain how. By the end, students could see that, while we had some similar experiences, our pathways were really quite different, and that was perfectly okay. (Again, to signal I am always a co-learner, I participated lightly in this exercise.)
Remember: How you teach is what you teach. If the way you teach feels like indoctrination to your students, they will believe that’s what your aim is. But if, instead, you teach in a way that celebrates curiosity, humility, and diversity of minds, you will be teaching your students those values. Or at the very least, you’ll teach them what your real values are.
A postscript: This essay was inspired not only by Heterodox Academy’s mission and work – about which I obviously feel passionately! – but also by three contributions to the latest issue of inquisitive, the intellectual magazine I manage and edit for HxA: Scott Parker’s “Teaching Obama in Montana,” Nicole Barbaro Simovski’s “The Power of the Classroom,” and Luis Lozano Paredes’s “Noble and Pragmatic Reasons to Embrace Generative AI.” If you are a higher ed teacher, I hope you will check those out.
You can peruse the entire June issue, on the theme of “Power,” by clicking here. Right now, I’m editing contributions to inquisitive’s September issue, which will be on the theme of “Class,” and which is going to bring so many wonderful ideas and experiences. (Subscribe for free here.) Please note you can now pitch an idea for our December issue, which is on the provocative theme of “Eve.”
And, hey! If you’re a grad student, faculty, or staff at an institution of higher ed, you can join me and thousands of wonderful teacher-scholars in HxA membership as we work to make higher education a safer place for intellectual freedom and truth seeking. Come be with people who know that great minds don’t always think alike.