It’s a Monday afternoon and around 70 students are filing into a classroom on the ground floor of Straz Hall at Marquette University.
It’s the first day following the university’s fall break. And frankly, it sounds like it.
Nearly 60 seconds of silence follow questions posed by Dr. Mike Olson and Dr. Leslie McAbee to their lecture class.
It always takes students a bit to warm up after a few days off, but professors say this type of silence is a growing problem in college classes. Students don’t want to talk.
And they want to disagree even less.
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Dr. Amelia Zurcher is an English professor and the director of the Honors Program at Marquette. She's noticed this problem, too. This year’s class of college freshmen were in eighth grade when the pandemic began. In some cases, lively classroom discussions have been replaced with online homework turn-in and chat boards.
“Students sit back a bit. Certainly right after COVID we all noticed that and it was kind of a national conversation in every educational space. It was hard to get students to talk," she says.
"Students are very concerned at Marquette about building empathy and about respecting each other. That’s great, but they are at the same time very worried about conflict and about getting into spaces where people disagree," she adds.
So Zurcher designed a curriculum to get students to engage with one another again and, even more importantly, disagreeing on complex issues. She and Dr. Amber Wichowsky, now at UW-Madison, received a $150,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to develop the civic discourse program.
The curriculum is now in its second year. She hopes Marquette can require it for all freshmen in the coming years.
Here’s how it works: Students attend two lectures each week. The lectures cover sometimes challenging topics — for example, in a single week in October, instructors Olsen and McAbee touched on AI and ethics, the rights of non-human living beings and protest tactics by various advocacy groups. Despite the sleepy start on the first day back from fall break, the class broke into lively discussions about these topics.
After the lectures, the class is divided into smaller discussion groups to debate, deliberate and learn how to share how they feel. Those sessions are run by a peer facilitator.
Moruri Ondande is a student who oversees these small group discussions. She took the class last year as a freshman at Marquette. She says the discussion is where the magic happens.
“When you’re in a big lecture hall it can be harder or more intimidating to speak out and share your opinions in class," she says. “I think this really gives a great opportunity to have a designated time to discuss in detail a topic, (and) to go further than what was discussed in lectures. But also to give the space to have students feel more comfortable to discuss it.”
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When asked why they feel that students their age don’t participate in class discussion more, facilitators offered a range of thoughts.
James Mosciano says hybrid classes at his high school in the Chicago suburbs made it harder for students to get to know each other and feel comfortable in class.
"So you had a very slow progression into being able to talk to people. Which did not help," he says of the transition to high school.
He describes being in class in person and seeing the other half of his class assigned to log in from home.
"The other people on the projector or on the computer... I don’t know who they are," he says. "I know they’re in my class, but I don’t know much about them.”
Sam Woodward is a junior. He’s only one year older than the students taking the curriculum this year.
Woodward says he thinks his generation is conflict-averse because they’ve grown up with so much access to social media.
“Social media will have us think people can’t disagree respectfully," he says. "It’s either you’re on one side or the other, there’s no in-between. We’ve become more polarized. Seemingly it’s only getting worse."
Learning to disagree will help students be better professionals and voters, facilitators say
A few of this year's facilitators are majoring in political science — so they’re likely to debate these issues in their professional careers some day.
But the students who take the civic discourse curriculum are from all majors. Although their careers may not include debating the big issues of our time, facilitator Alyssa Maves says they’re still going to use the skills they learn here in the workplace.
“It’s really important to disagree — to know how to disagree with someone on a fundamental level," Maves says. "So that in any career field you go into, in any topic you talk about, regardless of if it involves politics or not, it’s important that you have the fundamental skills to be able to have those rational, conducive conversations with someone.”
Dr. Zurcher, the creator of the curriculum, says the class is also oriented toward creating informed citizens. She hopes they’ll be more likely to vote, run for office and stay up-to-date on the issues impacting their communities, even if they don’t have all the answers.
She says that learning how to disagree and do it respectfully counteracts the desire not to engage with each other.
For Zurcher, the future of our democracy depends on it.
Katherine Kokal is the education reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. Have a question about schools or an education story idea? You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
