That was just one benefit of including students in course design, professors at Dayton and other colleges have discovered. The practice can also help students reflect on their learning and provide professors with fresh ideas for exploring a topic they may have been teaching for years.

To have them look at their information environments not as vehicles of just self-expression, but as ways to transcend their own prejudices. To read and listen much much more than we speak. And to see what is needed through the lens of privilege – teaching the beauty of deference to the students with self-confidence and social capital, while teaching marginalized students to find communities that can provide them with the self-confidence they need.