What we learned from Covid-19 about discourse-based learning

Abstract

Now is an auspicious time to make student-centered discourse a centerpiece of social and civic education, as well as across the curriculum more broadly. We describe here the features of the middle-school program we have developed and implemented for this purpose, emphasizing its concentration on direct student-to-student communication, in contrast to the more common whole-class teacher-led discussion. The Covid-19 epidemic forced us to modify the way in which we implemented the program, eliminating face-to-face contact. What had been an in-person interactive discourse-based workshop we transformed into a remotely-experienced, technology-supported interaction between rotating student pairs. Each participant debated individually with a sequence of individual peers who held an opposing view on a series of social issues. This modified distance-learning approach revealed some unanticipated benefits that we share here. Most notable among them were the enhanced comfort in sharing their views that participants reported they experienced, due to the remote, text-only connection that concealed their personal identities.