The Answer Sheet column by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post published a letter that an Edina, Minnesota middle school teacher sent parents explaining how he was addressing the House impeachment hearings in his class. The teacher, Jason Pusey, stressed that lessons “focused mainly on process, not so much on substance.” I suggest three other approaches for teaching about the impeachment hearings and the 2020 election in middle and high school that focus more on substance and on preparing students for participation in the 2020 election as civic activists, which is mandated in a number of state social studies standards. I consider these approaches, (1) Policy Wonks, (2) Campaign Fact-Checkers, and (3) Civic Activists, especially crucial in these very disturbing times.
(1) Policy Wonks: In this approach social studies lessons focus on specific issues, rather than on candidates. Students research and define positions on immigration, climate change, gun control, economic growth, free speech and social media, democratic values, health care, foreign involvement, and Presidential leadership. They can send their recommendations to candidates, promote their ideas in public forums, and use their research to evaluate candidates.
(2) Campaign Fact-Checkers: This approach is especially important as students evaluate candidate claims in the 2020 election campaign and draw conclusions and make recommendations about which candidate to support. Important websites that do fact-checking include FactCheck.org, Fact Checker, and Politifact. Students can also conduct textual analysis of testimony and documents, including transcripts of the phone calls. Based on these investigations students can turn to an examination of the Constitution and legal precedents and make judgments based on their investigations. Is President Trump’s decision not to make some documents available and his order to members of the Executive branch not to testify a defense of Presidential pejoratives and the independence of the Executive branch or obstruction of justice by a legitimate and Constitutional Congressional inquiry? If the Democratic majority on the House Committee concludes that President Trump did use the Office of the President to solicit support from Ukraine to further his 2020 reelection campaign, does that in itself constitute an impeachable offense and grounds to remove the President from office?
(3) Civic Activists: Teachers constantly worry whether they are allowed to express a point of view in class on major issues or how to handle student views that may be extreme or disrespectful of others. Teachers I work with expressed that these two concerns came up repeatedly in discussions of the 2016 election and I expect them to continue in 2020. A goal in a democratic classroom community is that students learn to respect themselves and each other. Democratic classroom communities provide students with emotional support so they can take intellectual and social risks. For communities to develop, teachers must play active roles. I believe they must also be willing to model what it means to develop a point of view based on evidence and what it means to listen and learn from others.
The New York State Social Studies Frameworks are aligned with the National Council for the Social Studies College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework and national Common Core Standards. They specifically call on teachers and students to collaboratively “Analyze evidence in terms of content, authorship, point of view, bias, purpose, format, and audience.” In addition, students are supposed to learn to “Compare the points of view of two or more authors in their treatments of the same or similar topics, including which details they include and emphasize in their respective accounts.”
As part of this process, students are expected to “Demonstrate respect for the rights of others in discussions and classroom debates; respectfully disagree with other viewpoints and provide evidence for a counter-argument”; “Work with peers to set rules for collegial discussions and decision making (e.g., informal consensus, taking votes on key issues, and presentation of alternate views), clear goals and deadlines, and individual roles as needed; “Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that relate the current discussion to broader themes or larger ideas; actively incorporate others into the discussion; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions”; and “Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives, summarize points of agreement and disagreement, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views and understanding and make new connections in light of the evidence and reasoning presented.”
As students develop their views through research and discussion, they are encouraged to act on their understandings. New York State and the NCSS 3C Framework specifically endorse student activism through voting, volunteering, and “joining with others to improve society.” I can’t think of a better way of “joining with others to improve society” than becoming involved in the 2020 election.
Some projects that students can create as they engage in any of these approaches include rapping about a candidate or issue, making a sixty-second infomercial, or producing memes, t-shirts, letters to the editor of local newspapers, blogs, and tweets. I tweet Donald Trump my latest meme about two or three times a week. You can follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/ReecesPieces8.