Teaching and the Election

Plan flexibility into your schedule. While consistency is key for students managing their responsibilities, you may want to identify– for them and for yourself —what assignments and deadlines are flexible or not crucial. Building in a decrease in workload—for you and your students—may make more space to reflect, to process, or just to breathe inside a demanding term.   

Access resources that support mental and emotional health*. Most of us can use mental health support from time to time. If you are not linked to mental health services but are interested in talking with a professional, GEs can contact Counseling Services; faculty and staff can contact Cascade Centers. 

Plan places to process your emotions*. If you haven’t already, identify people you feel you can contact to discuss your feelings about the election—even plan for when you’ll connect. Many of us want to bring ourselves as humans to our classes—including indicating that we have feelings or thoughts around big events. Still, our students may not be the people we want to actively and externally process raw feelings and thoughts with. 

For many Black, Indigenous, and POC faculty and GEs, being with other BIPOC academics and accessing resources made by BIPOC academics has been crucial. If you are looking for community on campus and are not yet a part of one of the Strategies and Working Groups you may wish to explore this or other opportunities for community through DEI. Academics for Black Lives also offers Black Survival and Wellness Resources created by and for Black faculty and staff.

Verbalize care explicitly. There are several things we would encourage faculty to name with students, both to normalize stress, and to express care. This might be expressed in live in Zoom; this can or go out in an Announcement through Canvas. We can: 

• Acknowledge this election may be a charged and stressful event, that political polarization—including our perceptions of being dehumanized based on our politics —is increasing, and that this is added on top of other difficult contexts.  
• Affirm that you care about all students’ wellbeing and learning, regardless of their political beliefs. 
• Name for students that prolonged stress impacts us all physiologically, affecting our physical and mental health (and our learning process). Normalize that threat responses are  frequently autonomic—they are involuntary. We strive to cope with them, but we don’t control them. 

Create and communicate schedule flexibility in Week 6. Assess workload during the week of the election and whether it’s possible to make deadlines more flexible. This can also be done with student input. 

Acknowledge overwhelm and express care right after the election. At the beginning of the first synchronous class or asynchronous content after election day, it might be appropriate to provide students with a short moment of reflection, perhaps using a set of guided prompts, before you move forward in the usual way. At the very least, a simple acknowledgement of the election and its stakes and the sense of overwhelm that many may be feeling, can be helpful.Additional insights using trauma-informed practices can be found here.

Post a list of UO resources for students such as this one. Consider posting somewhere visible and stable on Canvas and letting students know that Counseling Services is a good resource to access in any season, that it is free for students, and that students can get a same-day appointment. 

Share something from another arena that brings you, as instructor, inspiration in difficulty or uncertainty. This could be a poem, music you play just prior to class, artwork, a picture of your very cute dog. This brief openness communicates care; it also models a coping strategy centered on joy or inspiration. Consider asking students to do the same with each other (see the following section for ideas).  

Structure consistent, recurring moments where students can interact in small groups and share a bit about themselves as people (in addition to course-related learning). Instructors may choose to start each class with a question that students can consider in small groups (or, if asynchronous is preferable, using Canvas discussion boards). Examples of structures and question prompts can be found in Section 1 of the Teaching in Turbulent Times Toolkit, along with other strategies for building community. 

Offer opportunities for students to identify what they value, what brings them relief, and what brings them joy. We can think of this as a very quick show and tell or brainstorm; the goal is both facilitating student connection as well as compiling a list of activities that peers might want to also engage in that may decrease stress/distress. To do this, we would use a clear prompt, such “what is one thing you’ve done in the last month that you really enjoyed or appreciated?” Answers might go into a shared document that students quickly populate in class or might be images, video, or text students post to a discussion question in Canvas.  

Create and use participation guidelines. If you haven’t yet, we recommend collaborating with students to develop guidelines for participation–sometimes called ground rules or class compacts. These can help everyone be more prepared for exploring challenging content, navigating difficult discussions. Identifying “protocols” around what the class can do if discussions get particularly heated is an additionally important step for classes right now. Details around creating and using guidelines and protocols, as well as other strategies around supporting student discussion, can be found in Section 5 of the Teaching in Turbulent Times Toolkit.

Possible metacognitive prompts include:

• When your stress levels are high, what actions/activities make you feel better? What is one action/activity from our collaborative list [if you have generated one in your class; see above] that you haven’t tried but will this next week?  

• What hopes and fears do you have for this election or, if you’re not invested in the election, in this term? How do these hopes and fears intersect with our work in this class? What, if anything, can I and your peers do to support you around your hopes/fears?  

• What person or group can you contact if you need support with class content? How will you know if you need help, and how will you make that contact? What person or group might you contact if you need support due to stressors around the election or the pandemic? How will you know if you need help, and how will you make that contact?  

• How are you supporting those around you (in this class and outside of this class)? What is one new way you might offer support? 

You can encourage students to engage in reflecting on these prompts in a variety of ways, including both synchronous and asynchronous modes and through multiple means such as text, audio, or short video responses. We recommend emphasizing that the reflection is primarily for the student, that content will not be scored, and that only a student can choose to reference their own reflections in the class. As many instructors and students already have a full workload, we recommend keeping any requirements for completion short, so the emphasis is on engaging in meaningful metacognition, but not in completing an additional, involved assignment. Examples for this type of engagement might include: 

• Reflection assignments.  Reflection assignments can be as simple as responding briefly (a few sentences) to a weekly prompt or as elaborate as keeping a daily reflection log and periodically submitting a short summary of one’s reflections over a given time. Such assignments can be for credit/no credit or an option for participation points. Using the survey feature in Canvas can allow for anonymous submissions yet still record who submits, if credit is being offered.   
• Discussion boards. A discussion board can provide students with a collaborative space for sharing reflections on use of resources, strategies, or opportunities for self-care or community engagement. The discussion board also allows students to see development and change in their group reflections over time. 
• Journals. Use of journals can be a productive outlet for expressing feelings, ideas, questions, needs, or strategies one will pursue. It can be helpful to provide guided questions for student reflection, and this could take the form of a few new prompts each week or providing a longer list and having students choose a few to reflect on and write about at a time. Journals can be entirely optional, be completed for extra credit, or serve as an option for class participation.  
• Mindfulness moments in class. At some point during a class session, pause and have students reflect for a few minutes on a particular prompt. As a follow up, you can invite them to submit ideas to a collective resource, for example an evolving resource page or discussion board in Canvas. You could also use a mindfulness moment as an opportunity for students to write reflections in a journal, or simply as a brief moment of reflective silence. 

Be aware of stakes and acknowledge potential impacts. The election is producing strong feelings for many people, though the stakes involved and potential impacts for people vary. These differences matter. For instance, for some students and instructors alike, the election has heightened attention to their social identities and positioned them even more prominently as targets of negative representations, threats, and violence. To be asked to engage the election in some manner in class can exacerbate students’ feelings of vulnerability and put them into potentially harmful interactions. It helps to encourage students to be more attentive to their own feelings and to have empathy for the different stakes involved for others, however difficult this may be. One way to gauge what is at stake for students is to invite them to share with you any concerns they have about their participation in discussion or activities focused on the election. This could be done through a simple email from the student, a “comment box” form using Qualtrics, or in a short survey about their feelings and relationship to the election, including if there are any reasons why they might not want to participate in a class discussion or activity focused on it.  Also consider alternative options for how students can achieve the same learning goals.  

Communicate how student expression will/will not impact your assessment of them. Students may perceive risk in how they engage with peers around the election; they also will understandably perceive risk in terms of how their engagement will be seen and assessed by their instructors. It’s important to let them know where the connections they draw and the perspectives they hold are and are not part of what we are assessing.  

Identify clear parameters for expression of individual opinions or positions. Bringing the election into a class opens a door for students to express their opinions or political positions, which may not be the objective you intend or may lead to divisive and unproductive interaction. It is therefore important to determine if or to what extent individual opinions or political views can be expressed, how, and when, and then articulate these parameters explicitly for students. It might be helpful to model “discussion moves” and specific phrases to use to help students learn productive dialogue strategies that keep them focused on critical inquiry, curious exploration, and collaboration. For instance, when encountering a view one disagrees with, one can inquire about the assumptions informing it by asking, “When I’ve heard this before, I’ve thought it means X. Do we think this assumption fits here?”  A range of discussion moves can be found here.

You can also establish a clear protocol for what to do if things go awry, for instance what students should do if their breakout room discussion or discussion board thread gets sidetracked into a divisive exchange of political positions, or what a student should do if they feel targeted or threatened because of opinions being expressed by others. It is helpful to normalize the desire to share thoughts or feelings that are adjacent to the topic but that don’t fit the goal of the discussion. You can invite your students to write down these thoughts and feelings (in a bare bones reflection or journal entry they keep open during discussion, for example). Even when they don’t meet a discussion goal on a given day, they may be important for the student to process internally, and/or they may be something the class wishes to return to.  Fear of division or rancor should not prevent a class from engaging in important learning centered on the election, but doing this work productively requires parameters that keep everyone focused on the task at hand.

Encourage democratic dialogue.  Engaging with others in collaborative discussion and scrutiny of different perspectives is a hallmark of democratic participation. Even if development of democratic dialogue is not an explicit course goal, instructors can still foster important skills of democratic participation when asking students to engage charged topics like the election. Naming these skills and having students practice them and then reflect on their interactions can generate more productive dialogue. Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill have identified several important benefits of learning through democratic discussion and specific discussion dispositions that underpin democratic engagement, which can be called up for students to practice and reflect upon. 

Use “protocols” to provide more structure for discussions. When topics are challenging, a higher level of structure can be particularly valuable, and will support the practice of using discussion moves, adhering to conversation guidelines, and practicing democratic dialog. Common protocols instructors may have used include jigsaw or structured academic controversy; there are, however, dozens of excellent and widely used structures that can act as containers for the prompt and for your students’ valuable thoughts, feelings, and made connections to course content. Two good resources for protocols include this one from Harvard’s Teaching and Learning Lab, the School Reform Initiative’s extensive list and the truly wonderful menu of structures from Liberating Structures. 

Identify the learning objective for the conversation clearly; instructors can also ask students if there is anything they’d like to add to the learning outcome prior to talking. It may be supportive to post that collaborative learning objective or goal somewhere visible, so the class can keep this shared goal in mind. This also supports instructors in ensuring that they are able to articulate a goal for the conversation. A struggle to do this is frequently an indicator that either it does not align with what our students need, or that the structure we’ve built is not yet strong enough to support our students as they engage.  

Include a variety of perspectives. When engaging the election and considering specific issues or candidates, include a variety of different perspectives for students to engage. It is important that students have opportunity to interact with different ideas, give each perspective a fair and charitable hearing, and thereby establish well-informed views, especially if your course goals include development of skills such as critical thinking or ethical dialogue, for example. Consideration of multiple perspectives also creates a more inclusive environment for student participation, allowing students to see themselves in some of the views under scrutiny and to give voice to their perspectives and reasoning. However, there may be certain ideas that are not up for consideration, for instance ideas that express hate or bias; in such cases, it is important to be explicit about parameters and why certain ideas or views are not open for inquiry (e.g. they are not in alignment with the University mission or are simply not up for debate in the scholarly field). 

Have protocols for hot moments.  Even the most careful planning and best intentions can result in heated moments of interaction. Such moments need not go afoul and can be productive learning opportunities if facilitated with skill.  It helps to be prepared and have options at hand, such as those found in Section 6 of the Teaching in Turbulent Times Toolkit.   

Public service in the community. The United Way of Lane County maintains a database of local volunteer and service opportunities with area nonprofit organizations.  The Great Nonprofits list and the Get Involved in Eugene, Oregon list both provide links to numerous local organizations with opportunities for volunteering and service. UO’s Holden Center for Leadership and Community Engagement offers a comprehensive leadership and community engagement resource guide and is holding  virtual office hours Mondays through Thursdays from 10am-12pm (PST). Students can email us at HoldenCenter@uoregon.edu to sign up for a time.

Supporting causes and activism. Numerous student-led organizations on campus offer opportunities to get involved as advocates or activists for various causes. The UO Division of Equity and Inclusion also lists several organizations that promote causes centered on equity and social justice.

Pursuing artistic endeavors and creative work. The UO Craft Center offers students many opportunities to develop and refine a host of artistic and craft skills.