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Notes on Teaching and Learning

Preparing to Teach Polarizing Topics

April 25, 2024
Amanda Leary
A busy DeBartolo Hall hallway full of students during a class change. The image is blurred, showing how quickly they're moving.

As instructors, we’re responsible for selecting and teaching course content in ways that will be effective for meeting our students’ learning needs. In many ways, we’re in control; we pick the readings, we decide on activities, we prepare assignments—often weeks, if not months, in advance. What we can’t control, however, is how what we teach will be received. Several factors—from how a subject is delivered, to who’s in the room, to what is happening on our campuses and in the world—affect how students will receive a particular subject. Students, and we as instructors, bring their whole selves into the classroom.

There are some topics, especially those that deal with identity, politics, and religion, that are likely to be divisive. In an increasingly polarized world, students’—and your—identities and deeply-held core beliefs may not align with what you’re trying to teach, making it challenging for students to learn. And yet, even the most carefully designed class sessions on seemingly neutral topics can quickly become challenging.

Having a strategy for addressing these topics can help the situation be less stressful for you as an instructor. While certainly we can’t plan for every eventuality—we’re all human, after all—we can take steps to prepare ourselves and our students for potentially challenging conversations in the classroom and promote civil discourse.

Anticipate

Before your course even starts, you can examine your syllabus from an outside perspective. What potentially charged topics might you touch on or actively include in your course? What preexisting opinions or beliefs might students hold that could conflict with what you’re teaching? What’s happening either locally or internationally that might color the way your class engages with your lessons? It’s also important to acknowledge where your own biases and opinions lie on the topics you’re teaching. What are you comfortable with your students knowing about your personal beliefs?

As an expert, you have the benefit of years of disciplinary training and possess knowledge and skills that your students may not yet have. What’s controversial or challenging to you might not correlate to what your students will find challenging. Knowing who your students are and some of the commitments they’re bringing into the classroom can help you anticipate moments of potential challenge. If you use a pre-course survey, you might include a question or two to gauge where students are with the topics you’re teaching—either in terms of prior knowledge or their personal beliefs. You may even consider asking a generative AI model to provide you with a list of potentially challenging topics to shed light on your own disciplinary blind spots, or with a few controversial opinions about your subject.

Inform

While evidence is mixed about whether or not content warnings improve learning, using them establishes trust and communicates care for students’ well-being. The point here isn’t to baby, coddle, or shield students from difficult topics and material. If it’s important to the learning outcomes of your course and there’s a valid disciplinary reason why students should grapple with a particular issue, still teach your content—but also be prepared to explain that rationale.

In recognition of your students’ full humanity, providing a content warning allows them some agency over their own learning and involves them in the process of creating respectful, empathetic, and critical learning environments. Advance notice offers students the opportunity to examine their own feelings and prepare to engage in thoughtful, civil dialogue about issues that might be difficult for them. And if something is too traumatic or offensive for a student to engage with, lead with empathy and work with that student to find an alternative reading or assignment that will still serve the learning objectives of your course.

Plan

We can’t account and plan for everything that might happen in a classroom. But having some strategies in mind for when something controversial comes up in class can help relieve some of the stress, anxiety, and tension both you and your students might be feeling in those moments.

Have planned responses in your back pocket for if the conversation gets tense or goes off the rails. Your knowledge of your students and your subject matter expertise are helpful tools for thinking through what might come out in a discussion and how you might respond. Again, something like ChatGPT could be useful for generating hypothetical student comments to which you might need to respond. Consider ways to:

  • Seek clarity without judgment: “I hear you saying … is that right?”
  • Prompt reflection: “How might that framing misrepresent or activate a negative response from individuals with a particular identity?”
  • Pause: “Take a few moments to write down your thoughts and feelings about the discussion …”
  • Redirect: “I think we’ve strayed from the original question …”

Build Community

Cultivating community—both for yourself and for your students—helps lay a foundation for productive—rather than defensive or combative—conversations about polarizing topics. Perhaps the most beneficial thing you can do is be intentional about creating a space for open dialogue between you and your students. Establish a mechanism for students to disclose—anonymously, if they wish—their discomfort with a particular topic and communicate your openness to working with them to find alternative solutions if necessary.

Take time to establish some guidelines for discussion. This might include guidance on active listening, language use, speaking from experience rather than generalizations or assumptions, avoiding ad hominem statements by criticizing ideas instead of people, holding space for everyone to speak, and how to respond when the guidelines are violated. Provide students opportunities to be accountable to these guidelines with conversations on lower-stakes topics before you discuss something major, and model civil discourse for students. When a controversial topic is approaching, review the guidelines so that everyone is on the same page.

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This approach likely won’t be applicable in every class you teach, but for classes that do touch on charged or sensitive topics, being prepared will pay off in facilitating more inclusive and transformative learning environments. It’s important, however, not to lose sight of you in the process. It’s impossible to keep up with everything in the world that might impact your students’ learning. But having some strategies in mind for when something controversial comes up in class can help relieve some of the stress, anxiety, and tension both you and your students might be feeling in those moments.

Further Resources

Amanda Leary is a postdoctoral fellow with Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, where she focuses on inclusive teaching.