This blog post is actually an assignment for my TE class so I apologize in advance for its lengthiness, but hopefully anyone who is interested in the topic will still find it as useful as my briefer, spontaneous posts. The assignment is an ethnography about my placement school based around research about a particular topic. My topic was how a classroom community comes to conclusions about what is legitimate knowledge when dealing with controversial political issues. I conducted my research through two interviews, one with my mentor teacher, who teaches economics and one with another social studies teacher at the school who teaches government, and through continued observation of lessons and comments related to controversial issues in my classroom. I conducted this research because I have a strong belief that all students’ opinions about controversial issues should be treated as legitimate and I wanted to see how the teacher’s bias affects what is viewed as correct knowledge in the classroom.
One general strategy that both teachers I interviewed agreed upon was that it is crucial for a teacher to present both sides of the story when dealing with controversial issues. The other teacher even went so far as to say that his “job is giving both sides of the argument.” This, along with my mentor’s argument that what a teacher personally thinks is completely irrelevant to how they should approach these issues because communicating each perspective takes precedence, indicates an agreement that an important role of a social studies teacher is assuring that students gain knowledge about conservative and liberal viewpoints as two reasonable theories and explanations. When I asked them about the counterargument that teachers should be more genuine to who they are instead of hiding it in the classroom, both of them strongly opposed that idea, with the other teacher saying that it is not his job to be genuine about his beliefs and my mentor arguing that doing so would make the classroom about the teacher, like many college lecture halls, instead of being about the students and their learning. One example of a lesson I observed that illustrates this consensus is a lecture my mentor did about classical and Keynesian economics. Despite her personal preference for the Keynesian side, she presented a chart on the board with the basic ideas of the economic theories and pros and cons for each. Then, she asked the students to write a paragraph stating which side they agree more with, using evidence from the lecture to argue for their perspective. Although it was still somewhat clear that she preferred the Keynesian approach due to her tendency to present the classical side first and then critique it using Keynesian arguments, implying that the former is somewhat of a logical improvement on the latter, this was a good example of sticking to an unbiased representation of both sides, which the teachers agreed was absolutely essential as a social studies teacher.
Another area I asked about in the interview was the importance each teacher attached to teaching controversial issues. Both mentioned the fact that the trimester schedule at the high school limits how much they can cover such issues because they only have the students for one trimester, which seems shorter than a whole semester. This implies that they do think there is a value to getting students engaged with controversial issues, but my mentor teacher also said that she wants to ensure that students gain enough background knowledge on the issue to have informed opinions. Given time constraints, she thinks it is better to cover a few issues with enough depth to provide an accurate picture and allow students to develop their own perspective with factual, logical arguments than to simply bring up a lot of issues and allow students to leave her classrooms with arguments and opinions that are still unfounded. I think this way of looking at controversial issues can be beneficial, as in the lesson on Keynesian and classical economics, because it ensures that students know more about how to form arguments to support their ideas and also more about other perspectives on the issue, but can also have drawbacks because it runs on the assumption that current political issues are not at the core of the social studies curriculum, despite the fact that such issues are the most common way students will engage informally in the political discourse of our country. I would treat the training of my students to have opinions and meaningful, accurate evidence on pressing political topics as more of a cornerstone of my job as a social studies teacher.
In contrast to this mindset, the way the other social studies teacher approaches when to incorporate controversial issues into the classroom is through “teachable moments.” Since he thinks that hot button issues will come up in the classroom whether the teacher plans for them to be part of the lesson or not, he believes that a teacher should use moments when they spontaneously appear as opportunities to have students learn something about those issues. My mentor has also used this terminology when talking to me, so it seems to be a prevalent school of thought. Although I agree that it is beneficial to teach based on what your students show interest in, I think there are other, more formal ways to gauge what political issues they value and if an issue is so important that students will definitely bring it up, like the other teacher suggests about universal health care, it would not be a waste of class time to plan a lesson on that issue or a way to incorporate it into other activities.
Furthermore, the way these “teachable moments” occur in my mentor’s classroom indicate that using that strategy does not correlate easily with providing legitimacy to all students’ opinions. She said in the interview that she only teaches about controversial issues “as much as she dares” because she knows she has a strong liberal bias and does not want to stir up too much controversy if a student distorts what she says and the wrong parent hears it. Therefore, in order to combat and control her bias, she focuses on presenting both sides, as in the lesson above, but also uses teachable moments in lieu of planning additional formal politically charged lessons that could creep closer to the realm of indoctrination. The fact that these moments sometimes occur between her and an individual student as opposed to in front of the whole class definitely protects her from appearing more biased, but they also prevent her from putting a filter on her opinions that would allow for students’ voices to be expressed and treated as legitimate knowledge. For example, many of these moments have occurred when students have made statements about President Obama’s handling of the economy that I would agree are unsupported generalizations, such as how he is destroying our country with a huge deficit and how he wants to raise everyone’s taxes. However, instead of using these moments as opportunities to show the students how to refine their perspective into statements that are more accurate and well supported, like telling the student that actually he only wanted to let the Bush tax cuts expire for people with higher levels of income but that could have detrimental effects on investment and economic growth, which would give the student’s own opinion legitimacy while also making them more politically informed, she takes them as chances to prove her students wrong, immediately jumping to reasons why what they said was wrong, just as any liberal naturally would when faced with a poorly formed, generalized conservative argument. In response to this, I have seen some students shut down from the classroom, distressed by the fact that their teacher had just told them they were wrong. It is important for teachers to remember that students’ political opinions, especially the cultural contexts, family relationships, and personal experiences behind them, are a personal part of who they are and should not be treated as worthless but rather made stronger through more accurate supporting evidence and an understanding of the challenges from the other side.
Before collecting data for this project, I believed that a teacher should make every effort to keep their own political opinions secret from their students in order to not influence them one way or the other. In his interview, the other teacher agreed with this goal, saying that he likes when the students do not know his beliefs and are always trying to figure out exactly what he thinks. I tried to hide my pleasure as un unbiased researcher, but it was a struggle to not express how glad I was to hear that someone shared my same ideal of being politically secretive as a teacher. However, I have discovered in my experiences in her classroom that my mentor teacher has the more accurate interpretation of how much a teacher’s bias can be limited in the classroom. In her interview, she said that even if teachers make the correct decision to present both sides of an issue, their bias will still show up in the way they present it. She thinks that there is no point trying to cover it up because it is virtually impossible to do so and because attempting to makes the teacher the center of attention as students try to discover what his or her beliefs are. Instead of choosing that path, she advocates making the focus of the class learning about the two sides of the story so that students will know which side she supports but it will not be controversial because she will make it clear that there are two legitimate options that both have supporters and valid arguments.
For example, when she did a lesson on one of the most controversial and pertinent topics today, health care, she presented a hypothetical scenario about how Sparrow Hospital pays for broken elbows for people with good insurance, elderly people on Medicare, workers without insurance, and the homeless to illustrate how the pre-Obama health care system works and then asked the class about any ideas to improve this situation. When no students responded, she asked me what I thought. I knew that she wanted the punch line of the lesson to be how universal health care might actually be more efficient and I agreed with that conclusion, but I got really uncomfortable because I did not want to be the one saying such a politically charged statement in front of the class. I hesitated and then said that the government providing everyone health care might help solve the problem. She responded in fake disbelief, questioning if I really meant universal health care like in Europe and I begrudgingly affirmed that was what I meant. This was all brilliantly devised on her part because she successfully made one of the most controversial things she could present in the classroom as a true statement not about her, but rather about me. I even talked to one student in the class who I knew was very conservative after the lesson, asking him about what he thought about the political nature of the lesson. He shrugged and told me that she had made me say the worst part so that she would not have to. She had successfully communicated a strong argument in favor of her bias while still keeping the lesson centered on the details of the problem and the solution in lieu of a focus on her own beliefs. Although I still think this lesson was way too biased because she basically presented one side as the only legitimate solution, it does illustrate how a good teacher can make a lesson about the content not his or her own bias, despite the presence of a strong bias.
I initially considered not making an effort to disguise her personal opinions a mistake because her bias was clear in all of her lessons and that might be seen by students as indicating that the liberal perspective is more accepted in her classroom. However, after some reflection on the formally planned lessons and informal work I have done with students in the classroom, I have realized that social studies is so completely defined by bias and subjectivity that I cannot hope to make all my biases secret. I may be able to hide my opinion on something as openly controversial as abortion, but in a subject such as history, everything from the content I emphasize to the additional perspectives I want to incorporate into my teaching to the sources I have my students analyze has a subtle bias about what I consider important in history and how I want my students to view history. For example, a short lesson my mentor asked me to help with was about the differences between the Netherlands and Spain in the sixteenth century. The students were analyzing two paintings, one from each country, to determine what each nation valued, and, when helping them think about their ideas, I could not avoid implying that the democratic values of religious toleration and appreciation for the middle class present in the Netherlands were somehow better than the divine right of kings and Inquisition of non-Catholics valued in Spain, showing some bias in my interpretation of history.
This unavoidable bias is also evident in the various historical perspectives teachers choose to present to their students. In seminar, we did an activity where we were asked to describe a scene from an Indiana Jones movie from the perspectives of different people in the scene, including groups that whose viewpoints are underrepresented in the historical record such as women, people of non-European ethnicity, and people of lower classes who were illiterate . The point of this activity was to highlight that their perspectives on historical events are often ignored in historical study and classes because, in the words of the author of the lesson, “written, white, and Western modes of recording history are privileged.”[1] I would love to use activities along the lines of this in my classroom, but it definitely has political undertones because discussing the ideas of disproportionate power between social groups in history or the present correlates with being more liberal politically, especially due to associations of revisionist history with efforts to undermine current forms of inequality that privilege white, high SES, heterosexual men. To put it simply, since social studies is almost always subjective it is unwise for a teacher to honestly attempt to hide all possible bias because some will always seep through.
My research also shows that teachers may have some biases that they are not even aware of. One of my interview questions asked the two teachers to describe their own political beliefs and another question asked them to describe the political beliefs of the town where my school is located. My mentor teacher, who said she was very liberal, described the town as an even split between liberal and conservative, but the other teacher, who described himself as moderate, said the community was very conservative. These two varying perspectives on the town cannot both be correct so there must be an explanation for the divergence. I think the most logical one is that the other teacher has an inaccurate interpretation of his own political beliefs. Since my mentor teacher is clearly on the far left side of the political spectrum, she has the perspective necessary to accurately evaluate the people in the community purely based on how much they agree with her, from those who are in concordance with her on almost everything to those who are in complete opposition. However, the other teacher may have come up with a different idea on the community’s political beliefs because he is not as moderate as he says he is. He did say in other questions that he voted for Obama and tends to vote for Democrats, so he may be more liberal than he thinks he is. This would explain the difference between the two teachers’ answers because the government teacher, wrongly thinking that he is in the middle of the political spectrum and noticing that the majority of the town is to the right of him, would then conclude that the town is very conservative. This shows that we as teachers need to remember that we may have biases that we are not even aware of because our perceptions of ourselves are not completely accurate. Therefore, when we are planning lessons, we have to admit to ourselves that there are biases that influence our teaching which we cannot even account for or plan to hide.
However, this research has also shown me that when teachers have strong political opinions, it is still worth it to make a truly honest effort to always remain unbiased because the subjectivity of social studies needs to mean that teachers communicate to their students that none of their political opinions are objectively wrong. Despite her emphasis in the interview on the importance of presenting both sides, I have seen many examples where she has unfortunately allowed her strong political opinions to impact the way she views and reacts to students she disagrees with. As I have already mentioned, her responses to teachable moments often communicate to students that their teacher thinks their opinions are completely wrong and do not count as valid political knowledge. Furthermore, during the lesson on the American health care system she did include in her lecture reasons why certain people should legitimately disagree with universal health care because they lose from its implementation, but when a few students challenged her conclusion with some of the common conservative arguments against Obama’s health care legislation, she did not waver from the conclusion that universal health care is overall the best system for the good of the whole country. She simply treated the student’s questions like she would statements from any conservative who disagreed with her in conversation, by arguing why those opinions and points were wrong. In this case, she permitted her own strong beliefs to interfere with her role as a teacher of maximizing student learning. Instead, it would have been better to respond to their questions by adding additional explanations and evidence that would support the conservative students’ perspective. This would serve the dual purpose of maintaining student motivation and interest in political issues by treating both sides as legitimate knowledge and improving those students’ skills for political engagement by showing them how to improve their own arguments in addition to giving them a full understanding of the other side of the issue.
She also made a few other comments during the interview that illustrate how her strong biases may have a detrimental effect on her teaching. After describing that Williamston was an even split politically, she said that the division was determined by one factor, with those who read being on the liberal side and those who do not being more conservative. Although this may have some truth to it, as many stereotypes do, this statement indicates a serious danger of forming expectations about her students that could impact her relationships with students and her teaching, specifically the expectation that conservatism and intelligence have a negative correlation. This would then make it even more likely that conservative arguments would not be treated as legitimate knowledge in her classroom because they are assumed to be intellectually inferior. Similarly, she gave one example when discussing how she thinks students lack knowledge about the historical background of political issues. That example was Roe vs. Wade and she said that students were generally unaware of the dangerous back alley abortions that had occurred when abortion was illegal. This again indicates a tendency for her to view some conservative opinions voiced by her students as objectively incorrect and uninformed, a message that likely is sent to her students on some occasions. In order to maintain a classroom environment that honors all student contributions to political discussions as valid, with a few extreme exceptions, teachers really need to make an effort to prevent their own strongest political opinions from influencing how they treat student voices that may speak out against those staunchly held beliefs. It is not a teacher’s job to change any student’s political opinions, but rather to assure that all students learn something more about both sides and to equip students with the tools to be informed, politically active citizens.
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