ABSTRACT
As I sat in the chair waiting for my class to begin, I looked down at the desk in front of me, where a seemingly bored student had sat previously. I say he or she was bored because he had taken the liberty to leave a stylishly written and profound message inked into the wooden laminate. In what I could immediately recognize as medium-point black Sharpie was written, “Minds are like parachutes … they only function when open.” Following the statement was drawn a cartoonish young man jumping out of an airplane to his peril. It seems he took this course because his mind and parachute were unfortunately closed. On the desk, close to the edge, the artist (or vandalizing criminal, depending on how one chooses to view the situation) drew the poor young man’s brain decorated with a peace sign and his (now useless) open parachute. Later, I would find out that the quote was taken from Sir Robert Thomas Dewar, a Scottish physicist, but at the time it seemed to me that this unknown graffiti artist had written it to me as a new lens through which to view the dialogues that were taking place every week in class. This class, entitled Moral Reasoning in Higher Education, focused on introducing students to the lexicon of moral reasoning in higher education. It tied in the importance of critical social dialogues, as well as themes of social justice/agency, which culminated in two major projects for the semester.
