Unlearning "being right" means taking 4 - 6 perspectives

In June of 2020, just a month out from the May 25 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, my colleague Alison Park and I sat down to develop a scalable response to requests from educators wanting "tips and tools" to support students talking about race.

We built on a foundational concept she articulated as taking 4 - 6 perspectives and then formalized the response into a video for the 2020 Online Educators Resource project.

With Covid-19 as a backdrop and centuries of racialization and identification oppression underpinning societal systems, we wanted to offer up something that took well-intended leaders / teachers / mentors and their respective learners / colleagues beyond a checklist of "things to avoid" and offer up this conceptual tool, because it can be thoughtfully applied in any situation.

Practicing taking 4 - 6 perspectives trains our brains away from the instinct to find or prove the right answer and instead push ourselves into a space of curiosity and openness to what is unfolding before us.

Unlearning by opening ourselves up to new perspectives does not mean that we must compromise our longstanding beliefs and values in the name of consensus of some sort. Instead, it offers us a framework to move beyond a win / lose debate that in the best of circumstances might end in an "agree to disagree" closing.

Unlearning means that we train ourselves to question long-held truisms or beliefs incase we want to pivot to a new position or understanding. While pivoting is not the ultimate goal; being open to learning so that we can make an informed personal choice about whether to change our mind is, and as you can imagine soft and hard pivots frequently result.

Our beliefs are generally informed by our personally lived experiences and the influences of those whom we trust who surround us. So, another way to think about the impact of taking 4 - 6 perspectives is to wonder: What would it be like if, for any identifier that we experience as "normalized, just the way things are, or privileged," each of us had the capacity to:

1) Unlearn any assumptions and societal training that it's [polite, kind, respectful, safer, more politically correct] to avoid talking about topics that are personally uncomfortable, unpredictable, and grounded in the assumption that avoidance exemplifies equity.

2) Learn that avoidance of a topic that you know little about is often a negation of someone else's lived experience (because if you can avoid it, you're not experiencing it).

3) Pause and wonder how else an experience or narrative (shared with you or recounted) could be perceived? And, give up preconceived assumptions and truisms and wonder what else might be possible as an explanation or possible result.

4) Learn to lead with curiosity, engage with humility, and ask questions to move beyond "the discourse of uninformed certainty." (Sensoy and DiAngelo). For instance, why are so many of us certain that we understand what is best for others as we navigate shared spaces and experiences? Conversely, why do we not have the frameworks and language we often need to question the status quo? Why do we accept as "true" or "normal" that which serves some but not all? How can we even begin to recognize how the collective could be served better.

Let's imagine what's possible!