The Business of Controversial Topics

During my rookie year of teaching, several of my high school students secretly tacked up a small Confederate flag in the back of my classroom. After class, other students ripped it down. The next day, a larger version of the flag appeared, and this precipitated an even angrier conflict as more students entered the fray. I took this as one of my first teachable moments and developed a project around it.

I asked my students to write a formal business letter to the principal following the flow and style of a classical argument. I instructed the students to defend or to criticize the actions of their peers. Their position, however, needed to contain a few concessions to the other side. This concession part was key -- the instructional equivalent of Harper Lee's admonition in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus Finch says, "You can never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

Some students argued that the battle flag symbolized Southern pride; but they conceded that the flag may be offensive to Blacks. Other students argued that the flag was nothing more than a sign of ignorance and racism.

Eventually the flag was banned, not by an opposing group, but by the students who originally displayed it. These students, most of them white, privileged and deeply conservative, demonstrated empathy by "walking around" in another person's "skin." I'd like to think that the structure and demands of the writing fostered these feelings and actions.

Now I have students choose any controversial topic and write a business letter regarding it. Or I simply wait for a controversy to crop up on our campus like a recent student proposal that our school fund a gay-straight alliance on campus. I always encourage students to write on topics that are relevant to them, since relevance is a jumping-off point for any classroom project.

Mark Franek
The William Penn Charter School
Philadelphia, Pa.