Having hard classroom conversations
I am no expert at managing conflict. For most of my life, I’ve avoided it, and when I find myself immersed in it, I get scared, anxious, overwhelmed, and consumed by it. At best, I’m unconstructive and at worst, I’m combative and destructive. The only thing that saves me is that I’m usually self aware enough to know I’m doing these things that I can pull myself out of the situation.
Unfortunately, avoiding conflict is no way to make change. Our long unjust history in this country has shown that change doesn’t come from everybody avoiding their disagreements. We have to engage hard topics, and that can be uncomfortable, as it can involve strong emotions, arguments, protest, and more. However far such conflict escalates, when people in power refuse to listen, it’s often a necessary part of demanding and implementing change.
As a teacher interested in change, this puts me in a challenging position. I don’t like conflict, and my core discipline of computer science has broadly avoided it, and so I have a comfortable default of simply pretending that things like racism, sexism, and ableism are somehow unrelated to computing, and so they don’t need to be talked about. But I know they are not, and I know it is my responsibility to address them in class. But that necessarily means creating and managing conflict in class.
In my academic home, the University of Washington Information School, many of our faculty are coming to realize that our moral commitments are going to require some new skills and facilitating difficult conversations about controversial topics. And so our new Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Wanda Pratt, has begun working with her team to organize a series of faculty professional development opportunities, the most recent of which addressed how to have hard conversations, particularly in learning contexts. The two hour session, facilitated by consultant Anu Taranath, aimed to help our faculty reframe how we see high conflict conversations in class, and set us on a confident path to facilitating them in our own classes.
Dr. Taranath brought a wealth of experience to the session. She’s one of the recipients of our university’s Distinguished Teaching Awards; she’s written several books and essays about dialogue on justice. And as a consultant, she’s worked with a rich diversity of organizations across the political spectrums. Even the way we started the session—a disarming request to take a deep breath, write down something we would set aside for the next two hours, and then share that with our colleagues—demonstrated a rich pedagogical knowledge about how to manage the strong emotions and fears that come with approaching conflict, including even talking about conflict.
I won’t summarize the entirety of the session, but I will surface a few ideas that I found particularly helpful in reshaping how I see hard conversations in class. One was the notion that meta-cognition is a key skill, both for a teacher and their students, both for slowing the pace of dialogue by making space to reflect on one’s thinking, but also for emotionally distancing teachers and students from the substance of the debate. Dr. Taranath explained this, but also modeled it, showing how basic methods like asking students to verbalize their thoughts, and then reflect on them, could move a group from feeling their emotions on a topic, to thinking about their feelings on a topic.
Another powerful idea was the notion that many teachers avoid difficult conversations out of fear of harm: harm to themselves, harm to particular groups of students, and harm to the delicate social context of a classroom. But she challenged us to try to be explicit about what we mean by harm. We spent some time in small groups discussing the different kinds of harm we feared and found widely varying concerns. Some harm was personal, about fearing professional retribution for addressing a challenging topic. Some harm was about trauma, with some faculty trying to avoid surfacing emotionally painful topics that some students might not want to process in a classroom setting. Some harm was about sparing students with low resilience from being uncomfortable. She explained that by being explicit about our fears of hard conversations, we could focus our teaching on “good” harms (helping students be resilient to the discomfort that comes with reason about highly charged topics)—and avoiding “bad” harms (further traumatizing victims of highly charged topics like racism and transphobia). Ultimately, discomfort can be a powerful pedagogical tool for learning, as long as it is used thoughtfully.
The third powerful idea was about lowering expectations of the outcomes of hard conversations. Dr. Taranath pointed out that because highly charged topics have such a high degree of emotion associated with them, students tend to expect conversations about those topics to resolve those emotions. But, she explained, they couldn’t possibly do that. Discussing structural racism for 30 minutes isn’t going to fix it or our feelings about it; the conversation might not even fully articulate what it is, or resolve for a student their relationship to it. It might only catalyze a series of moral questions, concerns, ideas, and fears, which might need to be engaged over the course of weeks, months, or years. And so pedagogically, lowering these expectations is key: teachers must explicitly note when framing a conversation that the discussion can only do so much, and that students might leave with no resolution. In fact, students need to know that they might leave more distressed than they were before, just better equipped to reason about that distress, because they will know a bit more from where it is emerging.
These pedagogical ideas struck me are far more considered than blunt tools like content warnings. Those methods, while they might protect vulnerable students who have deep traumas from opting out, end up also enabling low-resilience students who fear conflict from actually learning to discuss challenging topics. The methods that Dr. Taranath shared are more nuanced, carefully setting expectations for a teaching context, giving space for students to be mindful in how they approach the conversation, and encouraging the teacher themselves to be mindful, monitoring for different kinds of harm that are and are not preferred, and managing them as they arise. These methods might still embed content warnings in them, but not framed as an opportunity to opt out, but as preparation for the discussion to come.
For my own teaching—especially during the next two weeks (or two months) of U.S. civil conflict—the implications of some of these are clear. As conflict arises in class, it’s my job to set clear expectations, encourage mindfulness, and assert to students that their learning and interactions in class may lead to a kind of productive discomfort. But it’s also my job to notice, throughout, that all of this learning needs balance—too much discomfort could lead to unproductive harm, and too little could be unproductive for students learning. Since I’m just at the beginning of my journey in trying to facilitate these conversations when teaching computing, I fully expect to fail. But I will do so knowing what I’m failing at, and how I might improve.
