By Boaz Dvir
Associate Professor of Journalism, Penn State University
It’s a scene that’s played out in K-12 schools around the country in recent years. Unprompted, a student expresses her thoughts or feelings about a difficult issue, such as the Iran war. A murmur spreads through the classroom. Other students prepare to jump into a heated discussion. But the teacher nips the conversation in the bud, redirecting everyone’s attention to the lesson of the day.
This approach, while perhaps well-meaning, can silence students, curtail their growth and rob them of learning opportunities.
Elementary, middle and high school teachers generally act with their students’ best interests in mind. Many simply lack the training to manage student concerns over distressing current events, according to research I’ve conducted with colleagues at Penn State and the University of North Dakota.
In 2019, I founded Penn State’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative. The program trains K-12 educators in six states to effectively teach difficult issues that pop up in the news but are not part of the curriculum. This includes fighting in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan. It also offers tips for talking about thorny issues like immigration, school shootings, Islamophobia, antisemitism and LGBTQ+ rights.
We also train teachers to better discuss complex topics that are often embedded in curricula, like indigenous history, slavery, the Civil War, gender and evolution.
Our research shows that when a difficult issue arises, educators in all grade levels and subject matters often freeze, punt to buy time or forgo the teachable moment altogether.
By using certain teaching strategies, educators can responsibly and safely encourage students to participate in respectful, constructive conversations about difficult topics, such as the Iran war. This conflict has triggered strong reactions among many K-12 students who have families in the Middle East or worry about a widening conflict reaching American shores.
Our initiative has developed a teaching approach for tackling controversial issues. This can help students develop crucial skills such as critical thinking, primary and secondary research, active listening, civic discourse and empathy for others.
Rather than having teachers announce their point of view on a particular issue, we instruct them to let the students do the research and explore various perspectives. We emphasize the importance of teachers taking a nonpartisan stance.
So, instead of sharing their own opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a teacher would task her students with researching and presenting viewpoints that differ from what they personally believe.
Teachers learn strategies on how to help students connect lessons to local conditions and experiences. For instance, a teacher may ask a student with relatives in the Middle East to describe how the Iran war has affected their daily routines and mental health.
We also teach educators to recognize the psychological wounds that many children and adolescents carry.
Ultimately, the more than 3,000 elementary, middle and high school educators who have participated in our initiative’s professional development programs learn to teach students how, not what, to think.
These educators encourage students to channel their curiosities into inquiries. When children and adolescents come up with and pursue their own questions, they gain ownership over their education. In the process, they learn to identify credible sources, tell facts from fiction, cross-reference, find documents, conduct interviews, gather data and review findings.
Exposure to a range of viewpoints helps broaden students’ horizons. It allows them to realize that people draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. They start feeling comfortable revealing their opinions and stop feeling threatened by what others think. They grow to see difficult issues as multilayered.
Teachers can also encourage students to become aware of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, deepfakes and whatever other cognitive junk foods algorithms feed them.
This work offers benefits. Teachers may no longer resort to sharing upsetting content to shock students into paying attention. Disturbing visuals and recordings can traumatize or retraumatize some students. They can also dull others’ sensitivity to violence and hatred.
It’s understandable why many educators shy away from unplanned discussions about difficult issues. The teachers who allow such moments tend to use traditional methods like lectures, which can backfire. Even the most well-meaning, fact-based lecture about, let’s say, the Iran war can be misinterpreted by students and parents as an attempt at indoctrination. Students might go home and tell their parents, “My teacher told me …”
By focusing on helping students craft compelling questions rather than handing them answers, teachers can send children and adolescents home with a message such as, “I’m interested in hearing what Iranian Americans think about the war. Can I interview our neighbor?”
Parents, legal guardians, youth group leaders, ministers, priests, imams, rabbis and other adults working with children and adolescents can also use this approach to promote critical thinking.
It’s essential that teachers avoid suppressing spontaneous discussions and revamp how they approach difficult discussions about current events and other topics. Rather than insulating students from complexity or dictating what conclusions they should reach, educators should trust students of all ages to develop skills to navigate current affairs.
When students are granted that trust, they tend to thrive. Over time, such experiences cultivate intellectual habits that extend beyond the classroom.
As countries trade precision-guided bombs, ballistic warheads, air-to-surface missiles, suicide drones and laser beams, educators fight a different battle: Helping students make sense of a fast-changing, increasingly shaky world.