Lauren Copeland felt anxiety rise within her whenever she led her students into a classroom discussion on politics. The students were anxious, too.
Copeland, an associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University, noticed it happening at the start of the 2016 presidential election. She observed that students would either talk past each other, not hearing what those with different views were saying, or remain silent.
“It made the classroom environment feel toxic,” Copeland says.
Baldwin Wallace has devised a way to deal with a problem — political and ideological polarization — that has plagued every corner of American society over the past eight years or so. The university, starting this fall, will add the subject of civil discourse to its freshman orientation class, called First-Year Experience 100. All incoming students are required to take the class.
The civil discourse experiment is part of Baldwin Wallace’s Democracy and Civility Initiative, which Copeland helped launch in February 2023. The initiative is in partnership with Braver Angels, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to improve people’s communication skills — especially when it comes to politics, and cleveland.com, which has taken on the Braver Angels cause.
The initiative’s purpose is to teach students how to talk civilly and courteously about various issues, including potentially contentious ones, both inside and outside the classroom. The topics might include politics, but students might choose to discuss campus-related issues instead.
“It’s a really different approach,” Copeland says. “It’s listening to understand instead of listening to argue.”
Copeland first learned about Braver Angels in December 2022 and attended a virtual meeting of the group the following month. Attendees were divided into smaller groups, where conservatives, liberals and even conspiracy believers talked politics.
“I was nervous when the discussions started about how they would go and what I would say, but by the end, I came to have greater empathy for all of the discussion partners,” Copeland says. “We identified things we had in common instead of focusing on things that divided us.”
Lessons Copeland learned from Braver Angels were incorporated into Baldwin Wallace’s first-year class. However, Claudine Grunenwald Kirschner, the university’s director of first-year and second-year experience, says Baldwin Wallace also brings its own observations and research to the table.
“There have been elements of dialogue (about civil discourse) in the first-year experience course before,” Grunenwald says. “Now there is a stronger commitment to it. And we collaborate between what takes place with the first-year course and the new civil discourse initiative.”
Copeland says keys to civil discourse include listening and trying to understand how people arrived at their beliefs.
“One of the core principles is you cannot change other people’s opinions, attitudes and beliefs,” Copeland says. “Once you abandon that expectation, it’s very liberating, because it allows you to engage in curiosity conversations.”
The new civil discourse element in the first-year class received input from political science seniors and juniors, including Shekinah Crawford, as part of their applied research requirement.
“During my first semester, I didn’t engage in the conversation because I didn’t know how,” Crawford says. “And I didn’t want to be under scrutiny by any of my classmates. I like that we’re able to change the narrative and show students that it’s OK to participate and share your ideas with the people around you.”
