Political Alignment Between Teachers and Communities: A Comparative Case Study of Teaching Controversial Issue

• In Event: Politics, Partisanship, and Media in the Trump Era: Impacts on Teachers, Teaching, and Youth Engagement

Abstract

Purpose: This paper presents a comparative case study of four U.S. public high school social studies teachers in different sociopolitical contexts. In it, I draw on semi-structured interviews conducted across the first three years of the Trump administration to analyze teacher-community political alignment and controversial issue discussions across political contexts. Specifically, I look at the teachers’ political alignment (or misalignment) with their school communities’ politics, whether they felt limited in how they taught controversial issues, and how their sensemaking relates to other aspects of political climate, both at the national and local levels. Common sense would suggest that teachers whose political beliefs align with their school community’s politics might be more comfortable discussing controversial issues and/or disclosing their political beliefs, yet research has also indicated that for some teachers, the political climate of the Trump era has complicated the relationship between their political contexts and their discussions of controversial issues (Author, 2020).

Theoretical perspective: 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 question: How do social studies teachers’ think about the relationships between their own political beliefs, controversial issue discussions, and their local political context?

Methods: This study stems from a larger project on the study of teaching and learning in the Trump era (Author, 2020; Author & colleagues, 2017) conducted with English, math, and social studies teachers who worked in a nationally representative sample of U.S. public high schools. In this paper, I draw on three rounds of semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017 and 2019 with a subset of the overall sample’s social studies teachers. I focus on four of the participants from the larger work who were chosen through purposive sampling (Patton, 1990) as teachers with contexts and sensemaking most ripe for analysis. An abbreviated chart of participants is in the Appendix.

Findings: Findings show that teachers were not necessarily more likely to disclose their personal political beliefs if they were politically aligned with their school community. That is, liberal teachers in liberal areas were not necessarily more likely to disclose than liberal teachers in conservative areas, for example. In addition, teachers spoke to factors that shaped their pedagogical decisions, such as parental input on curriculum, administrative directives to enact political neutrality, or their perceptions of community consequences for how they might address controversial issues. The paper explores these findings in much greater depth due to space limitations here.

Scholarly significance: This study provides important evidence that illuminates how teachers across different sociopolitical contexts understand their classroom discussions of controversial issues within those local contexts. It complicates some commonsensical ideas about teachers and their local political contexts, and suggests that supporting teaching and learning through controversial issues requires substantive attention to these nuanced and local factors.

Author

• Rebecca Cooper Geller, University of Georgia