Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Politically or Racially-Aware I believe in democracy. As a high school social sciences teacher, I strongly believe in democratic education and political awareness. I want my students to be aware of what is going on around them locally, nationally, and internationally. I require my students to keep up with news. Everything they learn from newspapers, magazines, and television becomes substance to use in my lessons. Before the presidential elections, I asked my students to watch all the debates, try to see the different perspectives, and how those perspectives may lead to different courses of action and to different implications for people. As part of this effort, I gave students a "persuasive writing" assignment. I gave them a list of topics from the debates, such as abortion, healthcare, affirmative action, and foreign policy. Students were to take a position on one of these issues and write a persuasive essay. When it was time for students to share their writings in class, things got out of hand. Every single topic we discussed along with the essays turned into a discussion of race. My Black and White students took opposite perspectives on every issue and during the discussions, they were not civil. I felt like my efforts for democratic education were not producing anything good. Should I change my activities? How come the political awareness I wanted develop in my students actually turned out to be racial awareness? Some guidance please! Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) First, what the teacher is experiencing is quite normal in that the students are expressing their views on each issue from their own personal cultural frame of reference; therefore they will express and defend their positions with emotions. Second, the teacher activities and goals/objectives for the lessons are not the problem. The underlying issue is about classroom management. Here is what I mean. Prior to engaging students in discussions and presentation of work, the teacher should have engage the class in the creation of rules and consequences (they would all agree to defend and uphold) to govern class discussions/debates and peer reviews/feedback. This would promote civility and fairness in the classroom; the teacher can serve as the facilitator/manager to pose questions to stimulate discussions whiles the students manage their behaviors using the rules and expectations they helped to create. Furthermore, when the issue of race does come up in the class discussions, it is important that the teacher is very attentive and facilitates the class discussions with thought provoking questions that would help students to stay focus on the issue and not make it a "black" or "white" issue.