Empowered students have the ability to think and act reflectively as individual subjects of a society or a culture who have formed a conscious self-awareness of the meanings of their multiple affiliations and the significance of their worldly transactions with the other. Teaching should incorporate student ideas and experience actualized from acts of cognition in the real world, not the relay of information or data purveyed in directed dialogue. Teaching and learning environments should be conducive to critical reflection by both students and teachers and should realize the legitimacy of honoring differences, especially ideological ones. Through using critical discourse to question and challenge the assumptions of the self and of the other, students can gravitate toward fresh understandings and can circumvent the need to reproduce institutionally endorsed ideologies. Education should promote an ethos of intersubjectivity. Through open and challenging dialogue in class, differences of meaning are more likely to be negotiated, apprehended, and then woven into interpersonal schemata or codes of meaning-making to stretch individual perceptions of possible worlds.