Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

discussions and a poser of questions. In some ways, my role
could be seen somewhat as the “Devil’s Advocate.” However, the
intention behind this was not to raise questions or stir
controversy simply for the sake of contradiction alone but to
urge students to recognize and avoid assumptions and to
complicate and question generalized perspectives of reality or
“truth.” While I initiated this “dialogue” with my students,
the nature of their responses or reactions, however, was on
their terms, not mine. In terms of my feedback, my margin and
end comments to their writing and their thinking therein were
offered not prescriptively, telling them what was wrong with
what they were writing or what they were thinking therein and
how they should write or think in more “correct” (i.e. my)
terms, but, as well as I could, much more like Dewey’s “forked
road”: presenting them with different, perhaps as yet unseen or
unknown, possibilities of perceiving some issue or experience.
What they did with these other ways of seeing and reseeing the
reality or “truth” of their world and their place in it and
their senses of “self” defined in those terms was based wholly
upon, again, their own terms. It was up to them to do with what
they would such different or even conflicting possibilities.
There was an admittedly social and culturally reformative and
progressive nature to the course and the writing done throughout
it; however, for this intention to be made a reality, the
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