Pedagogical Utility of Controversial Content

• Author: Omar Ha-Redeye
• Date: December 22, 2019

Contrary to what you may have heard, there isn’t a crisis of free speech on campuses in North America. The evidence, as analyzed by the Niskanen Center, demonstrates otherwise.

This hasn’t prevented numerous states from introducing legislation around these concerns, or even the American President from signing an Executive Order around these concerns earlier this year.

That doesn’t mean that universities are free from controversy. There is pedagogical benefit to introducing conflicting viewpoints, but challenges in doing so effectively, as described in The Atlantic,

Schools teach many things. For the most part, though, they have not taught students how to engage in reasoned, informed debates across society’s myriad differences. Simply put, the rhetorical commitment to “teaching controversial issues” in American schools has not been reflected in day-to-day classroom practices. Thanks to poor preparation, some teachers have not acquired the background knowledge or the pedagogical skills—or both—to lead in-depth discussions of hot-button political questions. Most of all, though, teachers have often lacked the professional autonomy and freedom to do so. That is particularly the case during wartime, when schools have sharply curtailed discussions of America’s military conduct. But throughout America’s history—and into the present—teachers have faced formal and informal restrictions on political discussions of every kind. Rising education levels have probably increased this pressure, emboldening citizen challengers who formerly might have deferred to teachers’ superior knowledge and credentials. “The high-school teacher has in fact lost relative status in recent years as more and more parents are themselves high-school graduates,” the eminent sociologist David Riesman observed in 1958. “And while the kindergarten teacher gains admiration because she can control several dozen preliterates whose mothers cannot always manage even one, the high-school social-studies teacher has a harder time being one-up on American-born parents who can claim to know as much as she does.”

A recent controversy out of University of Toronto Law School lead to the dean offering an apology, because a case scenario relied on stereotypes of Indigenous people. The Globe described it as follows,

…a hypothetical scenario in which Indigenous parents, struggling with drug and alcohol issues, had placed their three children in care. A non-Indigenous family looked after the children for two years and was prepared to adopt them.

But the father, who had stopped drinking and remade his life, wanted to maintain access to the children. The students were asked to write a memo about the case, taking into account a 2017 Ontario law that gives priority to maintaining familial and cultural links for Indigenous children.

The scenario itself did not appear to perpetuate stereotypes, and many lawyers who work in these areas would identify the challenges as accurate. Similarly, the application of the facts in the context of new legislation, Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act, would appear to provide an appropriate venue to apply critical thinking skills.

Although some commentators treated the students’ response with ridicule, it was difficult to ascertain the precise nature of their objections as they would not identify themselves publicly or speak on the record. One could hardly blame them, given the only frenzy that greeted the faceless students. Universities, and the media generally, have certainly contributed for centuries to the solidification and pervasiveness of stereotypes towards Indigenous people in Canada.

Controversial content, even when delivered by different faculty members, can have vastly different effects from an educational perspective. The distinction often manifests in the...