At the beginning of December, the National Council for Social Studies sponsored its annual conference, where Civics was a featured strand. A couple of our members offer their thoughts on civics from some of the sessions they attended.

JASON JANCZAK (Grayslake Central, 2014)

One of the highlights of attending NCSS 2022 in Philadelphia (besides the abundance of cheesesteaks!) was getting to attend Matthew Kay’s featured speaker session on Saturday. Kay, who is the author of Not Light, but Fire is also a language arts teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. The title of his session was “The Tale of the Tape,” and throughout his talk, he had audience members analyze a video of a high school teacher conducting a discussion on the controversial topic of the Confederate Flag, which the teacher posted on YouTube. The teacher’s prompt was: Should the Confederate Flag be allowed to continue to fly?

Kay was clear in his approach that he was not showing the video to embarrass or demean any educator or student, but instead he wanted us to watch the video as an instructional tool—to learn how to better conduct these sensitive conversations with our students. Here are three key takeaways from his presentation. 

1. While controversial issues should not be avoided, there needs to be some groundwork done by both the students and the teacher in preparation for these types of conversations. In other words, simply having a conversation about a topic that could trigger deep-seeded emotions for the sake of having the conversation (or to say you had the conversation) is not an effective teaching strategy.  
2. Teachers must provide two essential components before having these conversations: the context of the discussion (where does it fit in with the larger curriculum themes of the class) and more importantly, a set of expectations for behavior (and here is the important part) that allows for respectful conversations to be had, all voices to be heard, and does not result in some type of competition between the students. (e.g., Debates have clear winners and losers. Don’t debate—discuss!) For this to happen, the teacher must have developed some type of positive rapport with their students to create a culture of respect and caring during these conversations.  
3. Lastly, Kay alluded to a theme that seemed to weave itself throughout the conference, and that is when planning for this discussion, teachers should really reflect on who they want their students to become by having this conversation. Do they want them to develop empathy for a situation, understand a different side of an argument, become a better listener, or maybe have an understanding about an issue that will be elaborated on in the curriculum? It is an important question to ask when approaching a critical conversation or controversial topic discussion.  

If you have not done so already, I would strongly encourage you to seek out and read Matthew Kay’s book, Not Light, but Fire, or follow him on Twitter (@matthewrkay). There is no doubt we need to be having these types of conversations in the classroom, but doing them the right way is the key to positively impacting our kids!

JIM VERA (Oswego East, 2015)

I attended a session by Pam Brunskill at NLP on Media Literacy. This was a power presentation, jam-packed with a really great activity on having kids identify commonalities in misinformation on social media. She gave us things we can use (and I did use) immediately in class. This was not a surprise, as everything NLP does is fantastic!

I also went to see Emma Humphries from iCivics who presented some great information on how both sides of the political spectrum support accurate information and strong civic education. We use a lot of materials from iCivics, and they do plenty to promote the mission of Democracy Schools.

And a few of my own recommendations from the conference (SK):

• The Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard University. The Civic Project Workbook poses ten questions for young change-makers that could be incorporated/adapted for your classroom activities and projects.
• A rubric for assessing a deliberative dialogue.
• Using Quad Text Sets to Teach for Social Justice and Equity in the ELA classroom provides a step-by-step approach to creating this resource for your students to explore a current issue.