 I'm teaching, uh, writing about literature class this quarter, and I'm teaching Sherman Alexi short stories. And my students, um, a lot of the students are felt sort of trepidatious about talking about the text because they would say things like, I can't relate to this story, I'm not Native American, or I feel like I don't have a right to talk about this entire community, which has been so oppressed throughout the years. And what I tell them is that Sherman Alexi wrote to speak to all audiences and that, you know, you can look, you can look objectively at the text so long as you recognize that any claim you want to make about the text has to be sort of grounded in evidence from the text and has to be sort of rooted in analysis. And so I get them to, once, once they understand that their job is to sort of analyze a text to understand how the parts make up the whole, they sort of realize that if they recognize their own assumptions that they're bringing to the text, that they can actually analyze the text objectively and fruitfully, and they're not so, they don't feel so alienated by the text, or they don't feel like they have this, they don't have this right to talk about it. And if they see that they can, there's this actual process that they can engage in, suddenly questions of identity, they're still important, but they're able to understand like, oh, this is an assumption I'm bringing to the text and just recognizing that it does like trigger a light bulb moment for them where they realize, oh, I hadn't thought of that because of my background and now that I'm able to understand, you know, this context or, you know, the goal of the assignment is to articulate, you know, a thesis with support, they somehow feel like, okay, if that's what I need to learn how to do, I can do that. When students are able to see that what we're studying in the classroom is actually still very relevant politically or aesthetically in their current day, they get more comfortable talking about it. They also feel like they have some authority in thinking about the literature we're looking at. I think it's just understanding that people aren't, things aren't laws. They're not set in stone. They always come from somewhere. You know, your idea is about what to teach and what to study. They're all part of identity and background and so I think understanding this helps develop empathy with others in a world that is just shrinking all the time and that's huge. And also understanding better yourself, how learning works in yourself and how to develop skill and realize your dreams and to communicate. You know, you want to embrace people for who they are and understand that you're never going to fully understand somebody. Everybody processes what your story is and relates them to their own lives and you just need to be aware of that as a teacher and make sure when you're designing your curriculum backwards, right? I like the Wiggins, the backwards design materials that you spend a lot of time, you know, nailing down what exactly are your objectives and then making sure that you stratify what you're doing in the activities so that a lot of diverse learners will experience in a way that makes sense to them and you never are going to quite know what that is until, you know, you have the assessment and see what they really got but you just keep trying things. My students are first confronted with their assumptions and their knowledge base, right? Identify through their own experiences how they come to understand where they're at and then we do a series of activities, whether that's an assignment, a reading, a conversation or a physical activity to reinforce the content that we're working with and to challenge their assumption, their baseline assumption and in the process they come out with this reflective piece that is embedded into every assignment where they are expected to expand upon what it is that they actually learned and how it is that they shifted their action going forward based on that experience. And oftentimes what we uncover, more often than not, what we uncover is that the experiences working with individuals above and beyond just the team dynamic that comes with group projects typical to college courses gives them an opportunity to really get to know people and to learn how to enact those communication skills so that they can not only bridge the gaps between the differences but be able to elevate those similarities to the surface and it all comes back to that empathy piece, that piece of understanding, that piece of connecting and that piece of recognition of the profound value to be found among and between individuals.