Three Organizations Teaching Students to Navigate Political Difference – BCB #94

This week, we’re highlighting educational initiatives helping younger Americans navigate our polarized political world.

Teaching healthy dialogue

For educators, the upcoming election poses a unique challenge and opportunity to teach students how to engage with politics—and each other. Essential Partners, a nonprofit focused on strengthening relationships through dialogue, is one of several organizations we’re covering in this issue who are devising new educational strategies that aim to strengthen democracy through future generations of voters. The nonprofit recently put out a mini-curriculum to “help students build a strong collective resilience against polarizing forces through deep reflection, intentional listening, and authentic relationships” during this election season.

The 2024 presidential election is “poised to be the most divisive in living memory,” in the words of Essential Partners. And polarized conversations don’t just impact voters. The aggressive social media posts on your feed are showing up on the phones of teenagers and kids, too. Those dinner table debates are also happening at lunchroom tables.

Essential Partners’ free curriculum for middle- and high-school students focuses on teaching dialogue and listening skills so that young Americans will be better equipped to express their own views and engage with others’. The curriculum creators argue that the kind of conversation they aim to teach is meaningfully different from other forms of interaction:

“Dialogue is not a debate where the goal is to win or persuade. It is not a discussion where views are analyzed and evaluated. Dialogue is a way of communicating in order to understand other people and so other people can understand you. It is a way of holding a perspective while engaging openly with different views and visions about a community, the country, and the world. Politics becomes dysfunctional when we cannot talk to each other without fighting, or when we avoid talking altogether.”

Over the course of four lessons, the plan gives students the opportunity to uncover their own political perspectives, learn skills around asking questions, create communication agreements for a group dialogue and participate in a structured dialogue about politics. Middle and high school educators interested in using the curriculum can access it here.

Scaling by meeting students where they are

Dialogue workshops led by organizations like Braver Angels have become a popular strategy for working to bridge the partisan divide. But even when these projects meaningfully improve discourse, they still only reach a small number of people. In a recent interview, Heidi Burgess of Beyond Intractability and James Coan from More Like US spoke about the need to scale up depolarization initiatives so that more people can participate. Burgess breaks down the challenge of scale:

“So let's assume, for ease of calculating, that each dialogue involves ten people.  That means we would have to hold over three times 10⁷—thirty three million—dialogues to involve everyone in the U.S. just once.  Even considering a much smaller country—Israel, together with Gaza and the West Bank, for example, (about 15 million)—would require 1.5 million dialogues.  Say you involve 20 people. You only need half that—3/4 of a million dialogues.  It still isn't close to possible!  And, that dialogue would still be only one of the thousands of human interactions and news reports that shape the political views of each person.”

Coan’s work is largely focused on scaling depolarization efforts at More Like US, which he co-founded. The group aims to “engage those who already have audiences, rather than trying hard to build a separate audience from scratch.” In doing so, the organization believes it can improve the information environment more comprehensively and quickly than a string of simple dialogues can. He pointed out that schools can be a good place to start:

“A lot of activities in depolarization encourage people to go to a separate activity [such as a Braver Angels dialogue]. So participants need to have the time, interest, and energy to actually attend some kind of workshop. We want to reach people where they are … So we asked 'where else do we find an audience that's there that doesn't have to actively go somewhere?’ It's students. There are a lot of students, and there's actually some work on trickling up that they may talk to their parents, and there's very strong connective tissue.”

When Coan speaks about “trickling up,” he’s referring to the idea that when kids receive civic education in school, they bring those ideas home, potentially influencing other family members who are eligible to vote now or will be in the future. A recent study from the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute found that these “trickle-up” relationships are especially common among non-white students and students on free and reduced lunch.

Showcasing his emphasis on the importance of civic education in schools, Coan and his team at More Like US offer a Perception Gap Lesson Plan for secondary school students. (We’ve covered the Perception Gap before—the fact that Americans believe that the other side has more extreme beliefs than they actually do.)

Their lesson plan aims to create “more well-informed and less-polarized citizens who are also better able to discern if news reports about polarization in America are accurate.”  It would pair well with a curriculum like the Essential Partners one we mentioned above. On the first page of the lesson plan, the More Like US team points out that:

“Civil discourse is enhanced when students have accurate views of what average Americans across the political spectrum think about various political topics. In the absence of lessons like this, students may have unnecessary anxiety about engaging in civil discourse, and/or overemphasize binary and fringe policy options.”

An exchange program bridging America’s divides

The American Exchange Project takes a more immersive approach to connecting students across differences, by sending high school seniors on a free, weeklong trip to an American town or city radically different from their own the summer after their graduation. Students from Palo Alto and the Bronx might visit Kilgore, Texas, or students from Dodge City, Kansas might spend time in New York City. The program creators explain that their goal is to expose students to new environments and set them up to build relationships with people whose backgrounds differ starkly from their own:

“Toxic polarization has moved into our daily lives, corroding our faith in one another and our democracy, shaping the choices we make, the people we associate with, and the places we call home. As a consequence, our kids are growing up isolated in bubbles that burden their mental health and limit their development as young adults and young citizens.”

Students who participate in the program are paired with a host family for a week and participate in “cultural immersion, community events, professional development and volunteering to gain exposure to local issues.” This could include visiting a bear conservation center in Anchorage, Alaska, watching a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming, having a picnic in New York City’s Central Park or learning about the Civil Rights Movement in Flowood, Mississippi. 

Although the program does not directly state a connection to the 2024 election, this type of cross-cultural immersion within the U.S. could be one way to change negative attitudes about those on the “other side.” This summer, teens from over 60 towns across the country will participate in the program just a few months before many of them vote in a national election for the first time.

What do you think?

Are you an educator with more ideas about how to teach about the upcoming election? The New York Times and Chalkbeat want to hear them. If you are interested in helping shape their reporting in the coming months, you can fill out their questionnaire here.

Quote of the Week

Election campaigns tell us who to fear and who to trust, who to exclude, what to say, and what to believe. Although we never feel more divided than we do at the height of these campaigns, soon it will be the day after the election. We’ll return to life, work, worship, and school, and we’ll need to do that together. We will need to solve new problems together. We will need to help and reconnect with one another.

– Essential Partners “Resisting Polarization, Revitalizing America” curriculum