Family science and students: Pedagogical connections that transform our lives

Abstract

Students are the heart and soul of the academic enterprise. Many scholars have found the motivation and reward for sustaining an academic life through the unparalleled experience of joining learners within the classroom and beyond. Students provide a healthy dose of reality about how society is changing and how instructors must change as well. Students offer a primary window into the needs, commitments, and necessary correctives of real-world experience; by attending to their opinions, emotions, concerns, and other realities, instructors contribute to a transformative process in the lives of students that also promotes change in their own lives and in the institutions where they work. When we embrace education as a process of mutual teaching and learning, new knowledge can see the light of day. That is a lesson learned over and over again in the transformative experience of teaching and learning as articulated by the most intuitive and knowledgeable teachers who have shaped critical pedagogy (e.g., Freire, 1970Freire, /1997 hooks, 1994;Palmer, 1998;Shor, 1996) and informed the teaching and learning practice of family science for decades.The articles by Fitzpatrick ( 2022) and Wiersma-Mosley and Garrison (2022) provide excellent examples of the hope for racial equality and the educational practices that promote social justice and inclusion. Both articles offer ways to diversify the curriculum with a critical eye toward complex knowledge that does not reduce lived experience to stereotype. They address professional preparation in the service of improving individual and family lives, which is the very purpose of transformative family life education (Allen & Lavender-Stott, 2020;Ballard & Taylor, 2022;Russon et al., 2022). These two articles expand understanding of all families through the ethical practice of microinclusive teaching (Fitzpatrick) and through diverse intercultural service learning opportunities that address the needs of individuals and families who are often on the margins of society (Wiersma-Mosley & Garrison).Fitzpatrick (2022) explores the range of intentional and unintentional microaggressive communication practices that land on the recipient (regardless of the sender's level of awareness) as insulting and disparaging and, in the worst cases, as bullying. In place of the insidious yet dangerous microaggressive practices that disproportionately target individuals and families with multiple intersections affected by racism, sexism, and classism-among other systems of oppression-Fitzpatrick advances an alternative teaching method, of microinclusion, thereby providing workable solutions to the harmful practices that have hurt our students, neighbors, and family members. Microinclusion brings respectful, open-minded, and responsive approaches to working with and creating connections among diverse groups of students.Wiersma-Mosley and Garrison (2022) demonstrate through their pedagogical research with undergraduates that actually working with diverse populations in service learning, which offers a high...