Today’s post is the second in a series offering guidance to educators as they begin planning lessons about November’s election.

‘Help Students Reach Across Lines of Divide’

Kent Lenci is the author of Learning to Depolarize: Helping Students and Teachers Reach Across Lines of Disagreement. Through his business, Middle Ground School Solutions, he helps schools prepare today’s students to ease tomorrow’s political polarization:

It’s the question on everyone’s mind!

As with any election, we want to teach the juicy bits of civics that roll around every four years—such as how the electoral college works and what primaries and political parties and delegates are. This year, though, given the country’s polarization, it feels like a daunting task. So how will we teach the election this year? If we’re on our game, we’ll do so in ways that help students reach across lines of divide and disagreement—that acknowledge, rather than ignore, political polarization and that lay the groundwork to ease that polarization.

My most sincere recommendation is to craft a set of durable, visible, thought-provoking norms that help students understand how they are supposed to engage with each other—and then stick to them. The election might get slippery. Communities need guardrails. These are the guardrails.

A number of resources could help. Facing History and Ourselves has a helpful lesson on co-creating such agreements, as does the Greater Good Science Center. Most of the questions that plague teachers—What do I do if someone says something that feels out-of-bounds? How do I create space for those in the political minority? What do I do if I, myself, freeze in the face of commentary that challenges my deeply held beliefs?—have their answers in sturdy community agreements. Take the time to build this strong foundation, and in times of uncertainty and duress, it will ground you and your students.

I also suggest that we attend to the candidates for president and to their policy proposals but that we keep our balance. It’s no secret that our political leaders can at times be lousy role models, and featuring their more inflammatory rhetoric may feel like a disservice to our students. Let’s remember that those who draw the media spotlight are not the only show in town, and we can expose our students to elected officials who are in fact playing nicely.

The joint campaign ad of the 2020 Democratic and Republican candidates for governor of Utah is one example. Spencer Cox won that election, and, as the chair of the National Governors Association, he launched a Disagree Better initiative that features video snippets of governors of opposing political viewpoints engaging in civil discourse. The election invites us to expose students to this sort of modeling.

Just as we might leverage the buzz of the presidential election to highlight leaders who bridge divides, we can also turn our attention to those overlooked “down-ballot” candidates—the folks running for a congressional seat, or mayor, or school board or city council positions.

Doing so can harvest many of the same learning opportunities we get by attending to the presidential election itself—we can look at maps, and do math, and discuss campaign promises. But, in contrast to the presidential candidates, we can get a lot closer to the people who in most cases are going to be much closer themselves to the issues that affect students’ lives on a day-to-day basis.

Learning for Justice features a lesson plan on local elections, as do iCivics and PBS. So yes, we absolutely should pay attention to the presidency this election season and to the people who covet that job, but “teaching the election” does not require that we fixate only on those people.

Ultimately, our most important job is to instill in our students a curiosity about and an appreciation for our democratic processes. To do that, we need to have some fun. Launch a contest to see who can predict the electoral vote most accurately … or the popular vote of your home state … or the voter turnout … or anything else that taps into students’ competitive instincts. Wear your most spirited outfits. Show a “Saturday Night Live” election skit. Smile. Amid an overwhelming and dispiriting narrative of divisiveness and dysfunction, let’s help students find the delight in this election season and show them a pathway toward easing the polarization that keeps us up at night.

School House Rock

Angela M. Ward, Ph.D., is a veteran anti-racist educator with over 27 years of experience in the field and a Public Voice Fellow at UT Austin with The OpEd Project. Follow her @2WardEquity on Instagram, Threads, and X (Twitter):

One conversation at a time.

What we are dealing with in this era is beyond polarization.

Case in point, as I write this post, the U.S. Supreme Court has just handed down a decision to grant wide immunity to presidents. As I listened to the various perspectives on the decision, I thought back to the “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons I watched as a young child and wondered what they taught us about the king who once ruled those who came to the Americas. These cartoons were created to teach a narrative. Each had a catchy tune and simple to remember content. I looked up the videos and found one, No More Kings. Of course, the cartoon introduces revisionist/partial history that cannot be addressed in this word count.

In the video, the king declares, “Anything I say, do it my way … don’t you get to feeling independent ‘cause I’m going to force you to obey.” What the SCOTUS decision makes painfully clear is living in the United States does not automatically grant one freedom to be. With this decision essentially everything we know, the protections we value granted to us as U.S. citizens are now subject to the whim of the next POTUS.

Because I understand the complexity of who gets to be in spaces and places in the U.S., I plan to use humanizing pedagogy to teach about the 2024 presidential election. That pedagogy requires me to co-create space in my classroom for open dialogue. I will be and will invite my students to be open to ideas, not hate, or demeaning words or gestures.

My students are college age. Here is a narrative of a sample lesson I might teach:

As I facilitate learning, I plan to take an inquiry stance to encourage students to think deeply about how polarization of ideology might play out daily in their world. A deep understanding of how their world acts on them will hopefully spur them to vote in the election.

Using the “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons, I invite my students to analyze the messages. As they analyze, they can ask: What years were the cartoons made? What was happening in the world at that time? Who was the target audience? Why? What is the current age span of the young people exposed to “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons as young people?

Next, I encourage my students to compare the messaging of the “Schoolhouse Rock” era to the messaging current day and analyze the impact messaging has on our daily political decisions.

This inquiry process invites all perspectives to the table. It is important that I create dialogue space for all perspectives, especially the ones that conflict with mine. As the teacher, it is my role to invite critical dialogue. Critical does not mean negative. It means that my students will be pushed to think deeply, reflect, and also to write about their thinking.

With this potentially polarizing topic, it is imperative that as I attend to my curriculum, I provide space and fluidity in the content for students to insert their voice. I want to hear their questions, quandaries, and find opportunities within open discussion or set aside time to go a bit deeper on something we are still pondering.

In this era of polarization at every level of government, our young people need to understand the purpose of the presidential election. They must understand the purpose of state, regional, county, and city elections. They also need to understand why the U.S. Constitution establishes three branches of government, how those branches have traditionally worked, and be invited to get curious about how those branches currently operate.

I want my students to understand how the decisions that are made by local and state legislators impact their finances, play, food choices, family, and all decisions they are currently free to make living in the U.S.

Thanks to Kent and Angela for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

In this era of polarization, how do you plan to teach about the 2024 presidential election?

In Part One, Lindsay Lyons, Sarah Cooper, and Erica Silva contributed their responses.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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