At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Michelle Blanchet, co-author of Preventing Polarization: 50 Strategies for teaching kids about empathy, politics, and civic responsibility. Michelle has taught social studies around the world for many years and was shocked, upon returning to the U.S. a few years ago, by the degree to which politics seems like a team sport, fueled by ego driven conversation and ever-increasing divides. She recognized that we can’t prevent polarization–it’s here!--but it’s what we DO with it. Michele is very concerned about the degree to which dialogues about critical political issues don’t make it into the classroom— which is a disservice to students. Too often books about civics are about facts and take the emotions out. But “just teach the curriculum” doesn’t work —you can’t, for example, teach about the Electoral College without eliciting feelings and reactions. She feels that politics is the soul of civic engagement—and policy is how you shape the world you want to be in.
Michelle believes it's more important than ever to support teachers to facilitate difficult dialogues and to equip students with skills like communication and consensus-building so they can use policy to tackle our country’s most pressing challenges. It’s not about teachers imposing their views–it’s about facilitating dialogue and engaging with the complexity of the “wicked problems” of our time. The goal of her book is to reopen lines of communication. There are simply too many important issues in the world to be in discord. Given the futility of keeping politics out of the classroom, we talked about how to integrate politics into the classroom in a healthy and productive way, how to make discourse more productive (and what makes this so challenging), and the importance of giving young people time and space to do applied civics to learn how to engage productively. We share a love of being in the change maker space to help young people see how they can make things happen. Thank you for listening!
