"That's Not True": Epistemic Contentiousness and School Climate

• In Event: 77.017 - School Climate in the Age of Trump: Educators' Responses

Abstract

This paper explores how high school humanities teachers have experienced the influence of the political climate on a particular classroom practice: discussions, especially those related to current political and social issues. Drawing on bodies of literature examining classroom discussions of current events (Parker, 2010; Swalwell & Schweber, 2016) and the political classroom (Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Journell, 2016), I was guided by the following research questions:
1. How do U.S. public high school English and social studies teachers describe their experiences of political, school, and classroom climate in the context of classroom discussions?
2. How, if at all, have these descriptions changed from the 2016-17 school year to the 2017-18 school year?
3. How do teachers characterize the role their school leaders play in the cultivation of a school climate that fosters classroom discussion?

This study draws on semi-structured interviews with 25 public high school English and social studies teachers across the summers of 2017 and 2018. Teachers were participants in a 2017 survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. public high school teachers. The same teachers were interviewed again in 2018 in order to understand the ways in which, if at all, their experiences or practices had changed in the intervening year.

In keeping with the findings of previous research on teaching and learning in the Trump era, social studies and English teachers described increased contentiousness, instructional and pedagogical challenges for which they felt unprepared, and disparate experiences with school leadership. First, their descriptions of discussions showed that for many, they have come to be characterized by student hostility toward both peers and teachers, making them feel out of control of the classroom. Many felt surprised by this dynamic in the 2017 interviews, and felt by 2018 that they had learned how to anticipate, avoid, or respond to it. Second, many reported challenges and the rejection of the school’s epistemic authority. This combination of epistemological and interpersonal hostility, or epistemic contentiousness, at the school and classroom levels is described in the paper as having a substantive effect on teachers. Finally, teachers described vastly differing experiences with school leadership. Some teachers reported school administrators whose policies and actions actively undermined a climate that would allow teachers and students to participate in productive discussions. Others described leaders who were neither especially obstructive nor especially helpful. A few teachers felt their administrators were deeply supportive and had helped to ensure that students and teachers alike felt safe to engage in substantive classroom discussions about difficult current events. The paper uses these interviews to explore epistemic contentiousness, school climate, and teachers’ perceptions of their school leadership in much greater depth.

This study provides important evidence that illuminates how school and broader political climates have created challenges for teachers’ efforts to engage students in productive classroom discussions. Returning to interview teachers after a year allowed me to see both what they and their leadership have learned as well as how their thinking and practices have grown to meet the difficulty of the time.

Author

• Rebecca Cooper Geller, University of California - Los Angeles