Promoting Democracy: Fostering Skills for Better Civil Discourse
Resources to support instructors preparing students for productive engagement with differing viewpoints, values, and experiences.
This piece is part of CRLT and the Edward Ginsberg Center’s partnership to offer programming and resources for instructors around democratic and civic engagement through the Promoting Democracy Teaching Series.
Last October 31st, five days before the 2024 election, I took my kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Among the eight-foot skeletons and pumpkins in Detroit Lions gear, many houses sported yard signs supporting candidates for the U.S. presidency. My children knew who I’d vote for that Tuesday, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when these guileless six-year-olds booed—actually booed—a yard sign for the other candidate on their way to ask the sign-owner for treats.
It was there, in the shadow of a contentious election with a crew of cute, filterless superheroes, I thought of John Dewey’s reminder that “democracy needs to be born anew every generation.” Education, he argued, is how we cultivate it. At the University of Michigan, the role of “developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future” is at the forefront of our mission. It also guides CRLT and the Edward Ginsberg Center in our Promoting Democracy Teaching Series collaboration.
While I take comfort in Dewey’s “every generation” framing, our students do face challenges particular to this moment: intense political polarization, even violence, algorithmic news curation, and technology that limits engagement with social difference. Perhaps more than ever, productive engagement across diverse viewpoints, values, and backgrounds is an essential skill of citizenship. Recognizing this priority, U-M launched the Talking Maize & Blue learning module this year. This one-hour, interactive module orients all incoming undergraduates to U-M’s principles and traditions of free expression and inquiry, and introduces the “Michigan PAUSE” (Pause, Appreciate, Understand, Share, Explore), a conversational framework for engaging with challenging ideas.
Instructors across the disciplines play an important part in equipping students for better civil discourse. That said, the stakes are often high when students engage with differing viewpoints, values, and experiences. It’s vital that we plan and facilitate the learning experience with intentionality. That’s where our framework for planning and facilitating high-stakes discussions proves invaluable. In what follows, I’ll draw on that framework to highlight practical ways educators can support students in building these essential civic skills.
Unpacking Civil Discourse
Recently, there have been more calls in higher education to prepare students for productive conversations across disagreement. The terminology varies: in this piece, I’ve used “civil discourse;” Campus Compact inspires with its “Better Discourse” framing; A recent piece in the Chronicle calls for “constructive dialogue;” while U-M’s recent “open inquiry week” invited us to consider “what it means to explore ideas with curiosity and courage — even when those ideas are unpopular, flawed, or challenge prevailing beliefs.”
At first glance, it might look like we are talking at cross purposes, but these differences actually underscore how civil discourse is a multidimensional concept. Our role is to prepare citizens who are equipped to:
Engage in dialogue. Dialogue is distinct for its emphasis on listening and understanding without intentions to persuade. The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition explicitly names intergroup dialogue as a component of civic learning in higher education. The Crucible Moment framework, an AAC&U predecessor to CLDE, includes the goal of students “seeking, engaging, and being informed by multiple perspectives,” among others.
Discuss and inquire. These skills are wrapped up in these two frameworks of civic learning where we see critical inquiry, evaluating reasoning and multiple sources of evidence, and engaging with multiple perspectives. Discussion and inquiry is distinct from dialogue in that students are developing and sharing their ideas and arguments, as they consider and respond to others’ thoughts.
Deliberate. Deliberation is distinct from discussion because of its emphasis on coming to a decision—in the civic learning context, it’s often a collective decision. The CLDE framework captures deliberation in its objectives around “problem solving with diverse partners.” Crucible Moment explicitly names “deliberation and bridge-building across differences.”
So, when we talk about fostering “civil discourse,” we mean a set of distinct skills that prepares students for challenging conversations now and in their future roles in their communities. Now, how do we help students get there?
Laying the Groundwork
I’m often tempted to jump straight into designing activities, and I have to pause and remember why these skills are hard. That’s why consider the stakes is one of the first steps we urge instructors to take when they plan a classroom discussion on important topics that may divide students or raise strong emotions.
Last year, we laid out some of the risks (real and perceived) students may experience when asked to engage in these kinds of discussions. These risks may be academic, interpersonal, or for their own well-being. Moreover, personal experiences with an issue outside the classroom, sometimes through policies or public discourse, can raise the stakes for some students more than others, and these differences may not be visible to us.
All of this is to say: it’s vital to lay a foundation of instructor care and classroom community before we ask students to take on this challenging, sometimes vulnerable work. This list, while incomplete, offers concrete strategies to help instructors lay this groundwork.
Guidelines for classroom discussion, which are sometimes described as community agreements or ground rules, is a strategy on that list that deserves particular attention. Guidelines put parameters around high-stakes discussions and make transparent the community’s expectations for how to engage with each other. They also encourage a group to think about how they want to approach a heated moment while heads are still cool.
It’s valuable to collaborate with students in developing discussion guidelines, especially when students will be practicing civil discourse. Students’ role in the creation could vary:
You might ask students to independently annotate or provide feedback on a set of guidelines that you propose.
Alternatively, you could bring in students at the ground-level, developing and refining expectations together. The Constructive Dialogue Institute provides some excellent student prompts and recommendations for this approach. The Ginsberg Center’s Voting on Course Policies activity, while not specific to co-creating discussion guidelines, provides a clear, useful way to structure class-time dedicated to co-creation of guidelines.
CRLT has curated examples of discussion guidelines that can serve as a jumping off point for instructors and students.
In addition to these regular practices to establish a supportive classroom culture, we might also want to introduce specific activities in the lead-up to a class session where dialogue, deliberation, or discussion are front and center. An activity like the Ginsberg Center’s What Did You Know and When Did You Know It helps normalize that we are constant learners, and that changing our minds is not a failure but a part of intellectual growth. Likewise, the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s Hopes and Fears activity is a great starting point, encouraging students to see that their classmates are also navigating concerns, that some of their own concerns are shared, and that good can come out of facing these challenges together.
Designing Learning to Foster Civil Discourse Skills
With this centering of community and care, we can turn to designing specific learning experiences. At this stage, our framework directs instructors to define a specific goal for a class session. In a high-stakes discussion, hot moments—sudden eruptions of tension, conflict, or strong emotion—can quickly disrupt the learning process and have long-term consequences on student well-being and academic belonging. When we identify a specific goal for a discussion or activity (and share it with our students!), we place bounds on it, which can mitigate hot moments and help students move forward when they do occur.
This step in the framework also takes us back to good old-fashioned course design. When we start with a specific learning objective in mind, it helps us to select or design classroom structures, including activity types, that are well-suited to help students make progress on the goal and mitigate common stumbling blocks.
For example, when we know that our learning goal is around dialogue across differences, we can intentionally choose structures that guide students away from evaluative or critical questioning. We might select an activity like a conversation café to nudge students in the right direction. Alternatively, structures that facilitate group decision-making, such as dot-voting, may be a higher priority if our goal is around deliberation.
Wondering what kinds of structures are well-suited to a specific civil discourse skill? Although the language differs slightly from the terms used here, our Classroom Activities for Engaging with Politics, Policy, and Social Issues (and its companion handout) explores this question, along with sharing example activities to use or adapt.
Facilitation Strategies: Modeling Civil Discourse
Even with careful planning, high-stakes discussions can become unexpectedly hot, which may look like student conflict, visible strong emotions, or even students shutting down. Hot moments can limit learning, and affect student well-being in both the long and short term. That’s why our framework for high stakes discussions underscores the importance of choosing and practicing facilitation strategies. The Strategies for Responding to Hot Moments resource lays out concrete options available to an instructor in the middle of a hot moment and discusses when to implement them.
When students are developing a civil discourse skill, our facilitation strategies for hot moments serve a secondary purpose: they allow us to model component skills or conversational practices that make dialogue, discussion, and deliberation possible. The Hot Moments handout, for example, provides instructors with language to model responding to an offensive statement, such as slowing things down with clarification questions like:
“I heard you say/suggest ________. Did I understand that correctly?”
“What do you mean by X?” or “I heard you saying Y; is that what you meant to say?”
Similarly, we can model language to explain the impact of this kind of statement with:
“When I hear the phrase/word ‘X,’ it distracts me from the other points you’re trying to make because…”
“I don’t think this is what you intended, but...”
Importantly, the Strategies for Responding to Hot Moments handout is designed as an instructor resource. A number of the strategies and phrasing are only appropriate to an instructor-student interaction, though some could be adapted for peer interactions. I also recommend exploring the Collaborative Discussion Project and Constructive Dialogue Institute for student activities to practice component skills for better civil discourse, such as practicing generous interpretations and listening to understand.
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The natural conclusion to this piece is to share how I turned that uncomfortable Halloween moment into a civics lesson, setting my children firmly on the path to engaged citizenship. In truth, the night was a sugar-fueled blur of warnings not to follow their friends haphazardly into the street. What struck me at the time, though, was that my kiddos booed that yard sign in the same way our family boos the Yankees. In the days that followed, I started talking about why I supported one candidate over another, practicing the language I hoped they would soon use to navigate the democracy they inherit.
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Wonderful compilation of great tools. Thank you!!