Teaching Controversial Issues under Conditions of Political Polarization: A Case for Epistemic Refocusing

Abstract

Educating students for democratic life requires teachers to make difficult judgment calls about whether controversial issues are appropriate for directive teaching (i.e., teaching that attempts to persuade students to adopt a particular view about the thing being taught). To help educators make these decisions, theorists have proposed criteria for systematically differentiating between issues that do and do not qualify for directive teaching. Unfortunately, the epistemic environment of political polarization degrades educators' abilities to reliably assess whether a broad class of politically contested issues meet these criteria for directive teaching. In this paper Eric Torres argues that, while making judgments about whether individual cases warrant directive teaching remains essential and inevitable, educators can best address this problem by engaging in a practice of epistemic refocusing that makes the conditions of educators' own deliberations salient to students, thereby hedging against the effects of bad calls about which issues to teach directively while simultaneously illuminating the constraints of polarization on political cognition, an awareness that is essential to healthy democratic participation in the twenty-first century.