How the heck can I fit one more thing into my course?

Most college courses are crammed with goodness. The traditional fifteen-week semester rarely feels like enough time to do all the things that instructors would like to do. Faculty have to make tough choices about what is included and what is left for another time. Moreover, there seems to be growing list of items being inserted into the curriculum from the outside. Integrating civil discourse might seem like one such add-on. Instructors might reasonably wonder, “how much time am I supposed to devote to this?”

On the one hand, learning to navigate the vagaries of public discourse requires practice. Like other skills, developing new habits requires attention to the process and practice (practice, practice). For example, watching someone play the piano, hit a fastball, or bake a perfect loaf of sourdough is one thing, but doing it ourselves is something else altogether. If learning the skills associated with civic discourse were the only thing going on in a person’s life (or in an instructor’s course), then we would be looking for as many opportunities to practice as possible. On the other hand, civic discourse skills are not the only things going on in a person’s life (or in your course). The good news is that these materials were designed with this reality in mind.

Pause to consider what is most important

Before integrating any of the student exercises in this guide within your course, you are encouraged to pause and think about your course goals.

• What’s the purpose of the course? Are you looking to expose students to new ideas, introduce them to new skills, or delivering a piece of a much larger sequence?

• Are you looking to go deep or wide?

• Are you encouraging open-ended inquiry?

• What is the role of student agency in your course?

• How does this course fit within the larger curriculum (e.g., stand-alone course, one within a sequence)?

• In twenty years when you bump into one of your former students at the grocery store, what is the one thing you hope they remember about your course?

Such questions do not settle what is included within any particular course in any given semester, but the answers to these questions can help anchor decisions about how the various course elements are integrated with one another. For example, once we identify the most important skills to be introduced and reinforced within a course, we probably also know that these skills deserve the most attention and opportunities for practice. Once we identify the content and skills that are less important in the grand scheme of things, then we can adjust how much attention they receive. These elements need not be eliminated, but instructors may want to make sure that they don’t inadvertently take over and swamp essential elements. Likewise, taking a deep dive into course elements can form the backdrop for considering how skills related to civic discourse might be integrated into your course.

Looking for opportunities to practice (practice, practice)

This guide offers opportunities for daily, weekly, or monthly engagement with civic discourse skills. Later in the guide there are a variety of activities that might be integrated into existing course materials. These activities can be mixed and matched in ways that suit course needs. An instructor might choose to use some or even all of them. It need not be the case that more is better. Skills require practice. Creating opportunities to practice increases the chances that skills will be developed. However, it is most important that instructors are intentional about when, where, why, and how students have opportunities to practice these habits. Civic discourse is important, but it’s not the only thing going on in your course.

Ways to integrate civic discourse into existing course material

Many courses focus on skills that are at least adjacent to civic discourse skills – asking good questions about evidence, method, interpretations of findings, implications, and so forth. This points to curiosity, critical thinking, and managing information.

Likewise, we might look at the ways that we approach inquiry with an open-mind. Few academics that believe that all the important questions are settled. Rather, the possibility of being mistaken is real. This points to humility. While not civic discourse, these are transferable skills that also underlie civic discourse. If we can build capacity for these skills in as many places as possible, then they can be transferred to civic discourse spaces.  

Being explicit can be beneficial

As we are building capacity, I would encourage us to be as explicit as possible about what is going on. In this case, I don’t advocate hiding the broccoli in the lasagna. I’ve been part of studies on higher-order thinking where faculty thought it important and students were doing it, but they didn’t realize that is what they were doing. Consequently, they didn’t realize that they were developing transferable skills. And because they didn’t realize these were transferable, they didn’t see them as relevant.

Low stakes can take the pressure off practice

Faculty can build trust and community through low stakes activities and low-stakes topics. For example, students could practice constructive engagement by talking through whether a hot dog is a sandwich or whether we should call the cops when a friend commits a crime. This can help build trust for the conversation about “hot button” topics later on.

Structure can contain conversational fires

Introducing a potentially inflammatory topic without structure in place risks throwing an accelerant on the smoldering flames that students bring with them to class. Structure can be something as simple asking for arguments on one side and then another. Other suggestions include:

• have students come up with their own rules of engagement before any topics are introduced.
• use a “two-minute listening” exercise where only one student is allowed to talk at a time and then one will be asked to summarize the other’s view on their own terms.
• explicitly structure the discussion in terms of the most recent reading. “Please set aside your view for a moment and consider how this author (or that theory) would respond to this topic.”
• use a “four corners” exercise where students are given a prompt and then asking students to move to a designated area of the room corresponding one of four answers that best represents their view.

The point is that structure can provide guardrails to keep the conversation from becoming too inflammatory and can provide focus to the conversation in ways that allow students to practice important skills.