From controversial to academic class discussions
By changing the mode of the discussion from controversial or emotional tone to academic, teachers can turn the situation into a valuable learning experience, and encourage students to develop analytical and critical thinking skills. This way, students learn to delink from their emotional reaction to a certain topic and attempt at analytically thinking about it.
Pat Clarke in his “Teaching Controversial issues” article proposes four steps that teachers can take in order to facilitate analytical thinking about controversial issues in classrooms in a student-centered way. At each step, students are given a set of questions to encourage a number of ways of looking at an issue.
Step 1: What is the issue about?
The goal at this step is for students to identify the nature of the controversy to help then analyze an issue without prejudice and emotions. Most of the time, controversies are related to three issues: values, information and concepts.
“Applied to the honour killing question, the inquiry starts by determining if it is a values issue. Is it a controversy over what should be, or in recognition of differences in cultural values, can honour killings be excused? Is it an information issue? Is it an issue around which there is controversy because it is difficult to know what or whom to believe? Or is it be a question of what we mean by the concept of “honour killing?” Concept is very much a matter of cultural interpretation. What is considered murder in one culture may not be in another. If students gravitate toward that interpretation, how do they deal with the universal value that killing another person is wrong?
For this issue, students might conclude it is mostly a values issue with information and concepts related but not central to the main question, Is it right? In any event, such a discussion reveals that even a question as blunt as Honour killing, right or wrong? has shades of complexity.”
Source: Pat Clarke “Teaching Controversial issues: A four-step classroom strategy for clear thinking on controversial issues” BCTF/CIDA Global Classroom Initiative 2005.
Steps 2 and 3 : What are the arguments and what are the assumptions behind the arguments?
At this step, students are encouraged to consider various arguments supporting the different positions on the issue. In other words, students are encouraged to think analytically, determine whether there is adequate support for various positions, and judge the validity of various positions.
If students have decided that the honour-killing question is about values, then they will have to respond to a moral question and then decide if it has a universal application. So they may decide that honour killing has to be accepted because of cultural considerations and that in certain cultures such a practice has a prudential value because it assures the broader well being of a family? The obvious question then is, Is this a good enough reason? and we turn to the moral question, What if everyone did it?
If they decide on the moral imperative I wouldn’t want this for me or this is a practice that would have terrible consequences if everyone did it, then they also have to think about the consequences of applying this value in a culture which does not hold to it.
The honour-killing question has obvious application to the UN Declaration. It can be analyzed from the Who is advocating this? perspective. Are the people who make a case for honour killing mostly self-serving and conducting the killings for their own benefit or to accommodate their own distorted notions of truth? Or are there such deeply imbedded cultural reasons for the practice that prohibiting it in those cultures would have consequences such as the destruction of traditional cultures, which, in turn, could lead to more death and destruction?”
Source: Pat Clarke “Teaching Controversial issues: A four-step classroom strategy for clear thinking on controversial issues” BCTF/CIDA Global Classroom Initiative 2005.
Step 4: How are the arguments manipulated?
At this step, students analyze the political nature of the issue, to understand how the politicization of an issue can be used to manipulate and shape opinions. Argument manipulation has important implications for how the issue is seen, who is held responsible and what actions are taken. For example, argument manipulation may use strategies such as scapegoating, false analogies, extreme examples, and others. Teachers may direct students’ attention to well-known topics that are presented from opposing viewpoints and ask students to respond to the following questions:
– Who is involved in shaping these debates and what their particular interests are in the issue?
– What is the rationalization for their position?
– What are their reasons for taking the position they advance?
One example of such a debate is climate change:
