By Dr. Jessica McCort, Instructor of Writing in the English Department, Duquesne University

Image courtesy of wallpoper.com.

Recently, I have become deeply invested in fostering mystudents’ ability to question the world around them, particularly the received messages that they tend to accept blindly rather than interrogate. This past semester, for example, in each of the classes I taught, we studied the written versions of different fairy tales with an eye to the fact that these stories are constantly evolving and changing based on the culture that is telling them. As one of the first written assignments for the semester, I asked my students to analyze a specific tale before they came into class to discuss it. I was once again struck, as I am every time I do this exercise, by how much students want to stick to the messages they have learned to associate with these stories…