Get to know almost any social studies teacher (even one who mostly wants to talk about the Wars of the Roses or the Ming Dynasty) and you’ll likely find out she’s an election-year geek. In classrooms across the country, presidential elections typically mean walls splashed with red, white and blue campaign décor. For years, one of my teacher colleagues collected election-related covers from decades’ worth of TIME and Newsweek magazines and used them to build a frieze along the perimeter of her room.
As a history teacher, I was no exception to the geek rule. And, although I haven’t been a classroom teacher for nearly 20 years, I haven’t lost my enthusiasm or imagination for teaching.
That being said, I literally don’t know how I would handle the 2016 election if I were teaching today. Let me explain.
As a classroom teacher and, later, as the director of the Newsweek Education Program, I was immersed in election-year fever in schools. The election packages Newsweek produced included giant blank maps for classes to track primary results in the spring and record the electoral votes in the fall. I produced lessons explaining the nomination process, the convention and the Electoral College. I published handy worksheets that encouraged students to track where the candidates stood on issues. These materials supported civics teachers in schools across the country as they organized debates and held mock elections.
News education programs like the one I worked for have disappeared as the print news media circled the drain in first decade of the 21st century. What’s taken the place of journalism generally has been called the “echo chamber,” a terrain of sites and channels that cater to particular ideologies. Hard news—what my former colleague Jonathon Alter referred to as “expensive news”—has been replaced by opinion and bluster.
If I were a teacher today, could I keep my distaste for what passes as civil discourse in the media at bay? I doubt it.
Maybe I would try, gamely, to ask students to weigh the competing positions and proposals. But do I really want to open a discussion that could too easily slip into xenophobia and questions about the significance of hand size? I don’t think so.
Would I want to risk incurring the wrath of families questioning the constitutionality of some of the proposals that have been raised on the stump? Unlikely.
I’m wondering how teachers—election-year geeks or not—are approaching this historic and unprecedented election season. What are your challenges? Are you doing things differently than you’ve done in the past? Are you lying low and sticking to the basics? Or have you figured out a way to discuss the campaign without replicating its tone?
Please let us know. Send us an email with the subject line “Teaching election 2016,” comment on our Facebook page or tweet us your answer using #TalktoTT.
I really want to know.
Costello is the director of Teaching Tolerance.
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