Caring confrontation, or “interrupting niceness”?

I’ve been thinking a lot about “niceness” — all those ways we act when we don’t want to shame each other, or create pain, or offend. A lot of the time that very niceness ends up creating more pain, or offense, than the initial action might have. What are our responsibilities for intervening when a learning situation is evolving in a way that seems problematic? Can we do so with gentleness and humility, or is sometimes deft anger called for? Stephen Brookfield and I once co-wrote a chapter in a book we edited whose subtitle was “acknowledging collusion and learning an aggressive humility.” I think it’s the practice of “acknowledging collusion,” and then going beyond that to learn “an aggressive humility,” that I’m pondering today.

I ran across an article this morning, written in the K12 context, that is about helping students learn how to practice,"caring confrontation." I was struck by how many of the practices are concrete classroom practices, which leads me to wonder about concrete classroom practices we can help our graduate students learn? A lot of what Stephen works on in discussion group structure has some resonance here, I think. But anyway, that's what I'm pondering on this fine, bright morning.