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75.010 - Interdisciplinary Contributions to Civic Debate and Civic Reasoning: Post-Truth Complexities

Tue, April 9, 8:00 to 10:00am, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Floor: 100 Level, Room 104B

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Among the most important goals of public education is to prepare young people to engage in informed civic action predicated on a disposition to wrestle with the complexities of policy making in a diverse society. The political, economic, and moral dilemmas that are central to accusations of “fake news” actually entail complex issues that often involve competing interests and warrants. As a consequence, weighing alternatives in order to decide a policy question (i.e., deliberation) isn’t only a matter of weighing evidence and judging the credibility of sources. While the belief is widespread that accurate information is the keystone of democratic decision making, accurate information is itself now a contested construct. It is well known that directional motivation or “hot cognition” (Lodge & Taber, 2005) biases information processing, but this is especially the case when that information is about controversial policy issues. Furthermore, with our wildly proliferating media (social, print, cable, etc.), there is ever- increasing opportunity for sincere persons to believe “alternative facts.” The importance of the task requires at least that we understand policy making as an ideologically driven dynamic system with tractable entry points.
This symposium featuring interdisciplinary scholars will engage in dialogue around the underpinnings of civic debate and reasoning and the potential entry points that anticipate its difficulties including how to address challenges of conceptual change (e.g. misunderstandings that people bring to such questions), implicit bias (e.g. stereotype biases), understanding cultural variation (e.g. understanding the ways contexts shape beliefs and dispositions), content knowledge (e.g. political, social and economic systems, history as it impacts current events and issues); knowledge in relevant domains such as science and mathematics involved in warranting claims around such issues as global warming and distributions of impacts of poverty; of literature and the arts as windows into understanding lives of people different from ourselves and the ability to understand cross cutting human dilemmas. Despite efforts to introduce state level policies to increase and enhance opportunities for young people in public education to engage in civic activity, these efforts are not typically informed by the range of extant knowledge about human learning and development that provide a more comprehensive framework for thinking about how to tackle such goals and are often limited to addressing courses in civic education. This symposium brings together scholars working in the following domains who typically are not in dialogue with one another around robust framing of how to address the need to prepare our young people to engage in complex civic reasoning and debate as entry points into civic action: civic education, human development, cognition, content area instruction in science and mathematics, international work in civics education, and policy and practice.

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