Columns by Dana A. Williams

Now more than ever, graduate students need support in teaching preparation. Liberal arts classrooms are among the most fraught spaces precisely because of the work we aim to do—to encourage critical thinking, to promote diverse perspectives and develop leadership that values these perspectives, and to communicate complex ideas with clarity. Doing this work is hard; doing it without intentional training is harder.

As we live through this polarizing time, we must model the types of interactions and debates that we would like to see lived out by our wider community. After all, what is humanities scholarship but doing the work of discourse with civility? We teach our students how to use textual analysis to deal with conflict and communicate ideas in the classroom, and we can also provide living examples of how to grapple with conflict outside the classroom.