Foster Civil Discourse in High School Civics Classes

High school civics classes are making a comeback and along with them come discussions of highly charged issues in the classroom.

This month, Arizona became the first state to approve a law requiring high school students pass the U.S. citizenship test in order to graduate, a regulation several other states are considering, The Associated Press reported.

"You can't just assume that people understand these rights and responsibilities and these habits," says Mary Ellen Daneels, a U.S. government teacher at Community High School in West Chicago, Illinois.

Civics education usually covers the basics of democracy and citizenship. High school seniors haven't performed well on civics assessments over the past decade.

Discussing controversial political issues is recommended as a core component of high-quality civics education, says Diana Hess, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, whose research has focused on how middle and high school teachers engage students in these discussions.

[Learn more about state legislation requiring a civics exam for high school graduation.]

"We want to teach young people how to engage in discussion with people who agree and disagree with them, which is incredibly important, especially now, given how politically polarized we are," says Hess, who is also the senior vice president of the Spencer Foundation, an organization that works to improve education around the world.

"We want young people to develop their opinion on these issues and you can't do that unless you are discussing it with somebody," she says.

But managing these discussions can be tricky for high school teachers.

Teachers first need to ensure they have a clear understanding of what exactly controversial issues are, she says, and they need select topics for conversation carefully.

"Just because you have an event or a phenomena that has generated some controversy, doesn't mean that it's a controversial political issue," she says.

Raising the minimum wage and building the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would stretch across the U.S. and Canada, would be considered controversial political issues, for example, she says.

Teachers also need to be aware that matters of legitimate controversy change over time, she says. Whether interracial marriage should be legal, for example, was once controversial.

"As issues are changing from being controversial to being more settled, that often puts teachers in a tricky spot because they don't know how quickly to make that transition," she says.

Same-sex marriage, for instance, is a controversial political issue in some schools, but not in others. Being aware of what's happening politically both on a micro and macro level is very important, she says.

Teachers also need to make sure students are well prepared or else these discussions won't be very effective, she says.

"You would either have two or three kids talking -- which is not a discussion, that's two or three kids talking -- or you would have a bunch of kids talking about something they don't know anything about," she says.

[Find out what other subjects are spreading at high schools this year.]

Daneels, the teacher in Illinois, says that she sets ground rules to keep her students on task while discussing hot topics.

"Our community has a lot of immigrants from Mexico, so when we talk about issues related to, let's say, immigration, that has a lot of personal connections to their experience," she says. "So yes, it gets personal, but by using parliamentary procedure and setting sort of the ground rules for civil discourse, the kids know that they can disagree without being necessarily disagreeable."

A safe environment is also crucial, she says.

"A lot of these new students into our schools maybe come from cultures or environments where it's not safe to talk about these topics," she says.

"You are teaching some of these foundational principles of what makes our democracy work," she says.

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Alexandra Pannoni is an education staff writer at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at apannoni@usnews.com.