Students as Teachers for Political Discourse

• In Event: New Strategies for Increased Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

Seventy percent of participants in the 2019
Civility in America” survey felt that incivility was “dangerously high” in the United States and most felt that incivility had negative repercussions. Further, it appears fear of conversations becoming hostile or uncivil was deterring citizens from engaging in political conversations and was leading to political gridlock (Weber Shandwick and KRC Research 2019). Stifling of political discussions is also an issue on college campuses. Anderson (2020) found that over half of college students were reluctant to engage in classroom discussion concerning politics, race, religion, or other controversial subjects, and she argued that reluctance to engage in classroom discussion results in lost opportunity to hone the skills necessary for political discourse. Others (AACU 2012; Leskes 2013) have argued that civil discourse should be at the heart of undergraduate education as a tool for democracy, stressing the need for college curricula to include (and assess) instruction in effective oral communication that includes listening skills, an understanding of one’s own perspectives and their limitations, and the ability to interact constructively with a group holding diverse opinions.

In our paper, we will offer a course of instruction for building and assessing civil discourse skills in the undergraduate classroom, and study the results of an experiment testing the effectiveness of the curriculum. Our study seeks to determine if student peer leaders can teach the concept of political discourse to students in a lower division, introductory course, and whether peer teachers are more effective than professors at facilitating civil discussion among students of their age cohort. Our study also examines the benefits gained by the peer teachers who learn the material and interact with fellow students. We conducted experiments in which treatment sections of an introductory American government course were provided with two intervention lectures focused on political discourse, while control sections received the typical class lectures. We expect to find that undergraduate students showed more favorably gains in political discourse skills when taught by their peers rather than their professors, and that peer leaders will gain important discourse skills as well. In our paper, we will explain our classroom experiment and results.

WORKS CITED
Anderson, G., (April 29, 2020). Survey Identifies ‘Dangerous’ Student Self-Censorship. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/04/29/survey-identifies-%E2%80%98dangerous%E2%80%99-student-self-censorship
Leskes, A. (2013). “A plea for civil discourse: Needed, the academy’s leadership,” Liberal Education, 99(4).
Weber Shandwick, Powell Tate, and KRC Research. (2019). “Civility in America 2019: Solutions for Tomorrow,” https://www.webershandwick.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/CivilityInAmerica2019SolutionsforTomorrow.pdf.

Authors

• Lynne M Chandler-Garcia, US Air Force Academy

• Stacy G. Ulbig, Sam Houston State University