When Discourse Becomes Less Civil

Managing Difficult Discussions 

In some courses, instructors plan to have students discuss controversial topics, but these discussions can become heated and instructors may lose control of the conversation. In other courses, controversy can crop up unexpectedly and instructors may not be prepared to manage the resulting discussion. Responding to and managing these kinds of situations can be a source of worry for new instructors. Take a couple of minutes to read the scenario below about a difficult discussion and think about what is taking place.

Consider for a couple of minutes how well you think Emily managed the controversy that cropped up in her discussion section.

To what extent was her reaction helpful? In what ways could she have managed this difficult discussion more effectively? How should she and other new instructors make sense of these kinds of heated student exchanges?
 

Situating Controversy in the Higher Education Classroom

Disagreement is essential to many of the discussions that take place in our disciplines, and as a graduate student you’ve learned the value of critiquing others’ research proposals, poking holes in arguments you read in journals, or playing devil’s advocate to help a peer consider a theory she is building.

You know that in order to expand the limits of knowledge in their disciplines, experts seek out what is controversial in the work that they and others do.

As a graduate student, you have learned strategies that help you navigate those discussions productively and you and your fellow graduate students expect to be productively challenged in conversations and critiques.

Unlike you, your undergraduate students are at a different stage in their cognitive and emotional development and don’t yet have the skills they need to navigate controversy effectively and learn from a highly charged discussion. This can be challenging for new instructors, especially when undergraduates struggle to get past their strong emotional responses and disagree productively.

As a result, sometimes new instructors, like Emily, avoid or shut down any kind of controversy in the classroom.

However, this kind of avoidance isn’t effective because disagreement is really at the heart of our disciplines and of learning. It is through disagreement that students can examine their own thinking and that of others: comparing and then resolving these differences leads to new ideas and deeper understanding (Graff & Birkenstein, 2014).

To work productively with controversy, instructors like Emily can turn to evidence-based practices to help ensure that difficult discussions are opportunities for learning and growth. These practices involve first understanding student emotion and then helping students work productively with emotion.

Understand Student Emotion.

When discussions touch on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, socio-economic status, or other topics that require students to consider their own experiences and identities, it is understandable that students may experience strong feelings.

Because undergraduate students are still in the adolescent phase of their development, their emotional responses often run ahead of reflective and planful thinking (Casey, Jones, & Hare, 2008).

Students at this stage in their development are also less averse to taking big risks than their older counterparts, and in a conversation they may feel compelled to jump in and defend their identities and beliefs. As their identities become salient in these discussions, undergraduates often feel that they must either dive into a defense of their own experiences or retreat and keep their strong responses private and thus protected; whether they express themselves or retreat, their emotional response is heightened.

The tendency to quickly experience strong feelings, the wish to defend oneself and one’s group, and the impulse to express these strong feelings and responses is, in many ways, a good thing. Consider that adolescents have historically been at the forefront of important social movements; adolescents at different times and in many societies have been responsible for taking great risks for the greater good of their people.

All in all, it is important to see that experiencing strong feelings and convictions, expressing these reactions, and responding to what feels threatening are behaviors that are normal, adaptive, and usually beneficial.

Acknowledge and honor students’ strong emotional in productive ways.

Because new instructors don’t always understand student emotion in this developmental context, they may, like Emily in the opening scenario, simply shut down a conversation or a student. But this is not a productive way to respond to student emotion.

When instructors don’t acknowledge the important emotional reactions of students, those students’ feelings of being marginalized or misunderstood will be reinforced (Sue et al., 2009).

In fact, some students may completely withdraw from conversations because they feel the constant psychological threat of confirming negative stereotypes about groups with which they are aligned (Steele, 1997).

In such an atmosphere, students won’t feel safe to engage with one another or the instructor, and as a result, trust is lost and learning becomes difficult, if not impossible. When Emily tells Teshawn to calm down, he will hear the message that his anger is not acceptable and he may feel that Emily is stereotyping him as an angry Black man.

How might an instructor acknowledge student emotions in ways that lead to engaging with controversy more productively? Here is an effective framework to help move students into, through, and beyond their initial emotional responses during heated discussions.
 

The OAR (Observe, Acknowledge and Reflect) Framework

Adapted from Souza et al., 2016

This three-step framework can be used by you and taught to students so that they can use it. This approach helps slow down what can be a rapidly shifting set of angry or emotional exchanges.

Slowing down that exchange and naming and honoring student emotion sets the stage to make students feel accepted and to explore emotion to make way for intellectual work.

The framework, when used frequently, gives instructors and students a way to practice identifying emotions and separating (or connecting) emotions and thoughts. After you have successfully created an opening in the conversation and time for reflection about their initial responses, students should be moved toward productive academic discussion.

That productive discussion should be one in which you ask students to use course concepts or course processes to work with the issues or topics that have initially brought about a strong emotional response.

Let’s look at the three steps in this framework.

Create Your Own Approach

As you become a more experienced instructor, you will learn about and create your own approaches to slowing down difficult discussions and managing them so that students feel their reactions are respected.

Keep in mind that the aim for any approach that helps us slow down an intense and emotionally loaded exchange is to move students from their initial emotional response to a reflection on that response.

As students analyze their initial responses to a difficult discussion, they get some intellectual distance that will allow them to shift back to and consider  the concepts, principles, and processes in the course they are taking with you.

As a new instructor, it is important to recognize that you are not helpless during difficult discussions. After students have had time to reflect, you can and should return to the tools that your discipline uses to examine phenomena that at first elicit emotional responses.

Often for the new instructor, it is structuring a productive reflection that is most challenging. We’ve looked at one example of reflection above as part of the OAR framework, but now we explore other options for asking students to reflect on what has happened and why they have had their responses.  

Structure reflection prompts that require students to move beyond their emotional responses to more analytical thinking.

When students hear the word “reflection,” they often think we are asking them to write in an unfocused way that simply shows us what is in their minds. But that kind of reflection is not analytical and may not help students identify the actual feelings they are having, where these feelings come from, the thoughts that are connected to those feelings, or their understanding of others’ thinking processes.

In other words, if we simply ask students to reflect on what has happened during heated exchanges, they may not do much more than summarize what happened or tell us how they feel in a way that doesn’t really allow them to begin to make sense of their own and others’ responses.

Here are examples of Analytic Reflective Prompts that require students to both express feelings and begin to analyze them.

After students have had time to write, you have a number of alternatives. You may ask students to hold onto their reflections; you can plan some writing or research that they may do individually outside of class using their reflections and other resources you gather.

You may collect the reflections without students’ names on them to get a read on how students are making sense of the issues and ideas that came up.

Depending on the class and the students, this written reflection time may suffice to prepare them to re-engage in the discussion in the way that you had planned - by exploring the topic using course concepts, principles, or processes.

If this is the case, you may ask them to share something new and helpful that they have discovered through this quiet writing time. If you feel they (and you!) still need some distance from a difficult discussion, you can honestly share that with them and suggest a new direction for the rest of the class.

For example, you might say, “I feel that we are still in a pretty emotional space and that we should take a different direction for the class for the remainder of our time together. I would like some time to read your reflections carefully and plan some next steps that allow us to look at this issue fully and from all perspectives.”
 

Resources

• Bart, M. (Ed.). (2016). Faculty Focus Special Report: Diversity and Inclusion in the College Classroom. Retrieved February 1, 2017 from Faculty Focus Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications: http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/diversity-and-inclusion-in-the-college-classroom/
• Casey B. J., Jones, R. M., & Hare, T. A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 111–126.
• Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2014). “They say / I say”: The moves that matter in academic  writing (3rd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
• Landis, K. (Ed.). (2008). Start talking: A handbook for engaging difficult dialogues in higher education. University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University.
• Souza, T., Vizenor, N., Sherlip, D., & Raser, L. (2016). Transforming conflict in the classroom: Best practices for facilitating difficult dialogues and creating an inclusive communication climate. In Kellet, P. M. & Matyók, T. G. (Eds.), Transforming conflict through communication in personal, family, and working relationships (pp. 373-396). Lexington Books.
• Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52(6), 613-629.
• Sue, D. W., Lin, A. I., Torino, G. C., Capodilupo, C. M., & Rivera, D. P. (2009). Racial microaggressions and difficult dialogues on race in the classroom. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 15(2), 183-190.