Teaching for Open-Mindedness: A Justice-Oriented Approach

This article explores the pedagogical virtue of open-mindedness in practice and its relationship to epistemic justice through analysis of a fictional, narrative case. The case focuses on a young white woman who attempts to implement a pedagogy of open-mindedness as she teaches a unit on the civil rights movement. After presenting the case scenario, Tadashi Dozono and Rebecca Taylor examine three tensions that arise for teachers as they seek to enact a pedagogy of open-mindedness. First, what form of open-mindedness should guide them? Second, how should they respond to limits in their own knowledge and understanding? And finally, how should teachers exercise authority within a pedagogy of open-mindedness? Their analysis confronts the tension between the teacher's own open-mindedness, on the one hand, and the teacher's subject position, on the other. Through this exploration of open-mindedness, Dozono and Taylor argue that, in practice, teachers must counteract legacies of epistemic injustice as a necessary part of cultivating their own and their students' access to open-mindedness.