When
I started out as a freshman here at Eastern, I always dreaded going to classes
where the professor encouraged everyone to participate in whole class
discussions and based your participation points of whether you added to the
class discussion or not. However, as I have gotten older and realized that
adding to a discussion can be as simple as making a quick statement, I no
longer dread, and in fact I kind of look forward to, going to discussion based
classes. Nowadays, lecture classes can bore me to tears and I feel that almost
all classes should be discussion based. There is so much knowledge to be spread
between peers and if it is only the professor talking the entire class time
about important topics or issues, then the entire class is only learning one
perspective of the topic at hand. After reading this article, I feel the most
important requirement to a discussion that most people have a hard time overcoming
is creating a hospitable (or welcoming) environment. Some discussions,
especially about hotly debated topics, can become so heated to the point where
the discussion dissolves in to a contest to see who can scream their opinion
the loudest over the other person. This will no doubt intimidate other people
who were thinking about joining the discussion and will make them just want to
sit on the sidelines in silence. We have to remain civil and respect one
another during discussion in order to maintain that hospitable environment we
seek to achieve. Tying back in to my earlier sentences about my personal experiences
with discussions, it was only when I started encountering these hospitable
environments did I actually want to start participating in whole-class
discussions, even if it meant just adding a statement or two to the discussion.
Hospitality, in my opinion, is the result of all other requirements of a discussion
acting together as one.
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