Teaching: Making Sense of the Election

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

From: Beth McMurtrie

Subject: Teaching: Helping Students Make Sense of the Election

This Week:

• I share stories from different campuses on how faculty members are helping students process Election 2020.
• I point you to resources on how to navigate difficult election conversations.
• I share stories and reports about teaching that you may have missed.

The Day After

Anne Berg, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches two courses this semester that connect to the politics of the moment. One is on the origins of Nazism, and the other is on white nationalism in the era of climate change. For weeks, she and her students have discussed current events alongside historical ones.

So on Wednesday, the day after a presidential election whose outcome remained unclear, she knew that she wanted to ditch her normal class structure and simply let students talk. It’s a decision that many professors have made as they help their students discuss, debate, and support one another during a period of tremendous conflict and uncertainty.

“The mood was pretty grim,” she said, after wrapping up two hours of conversation by Zoom, one for each class. “Students really felt like there’s nothing they can do. The difficult part was to come to grips with the fact that the country is still divided.”

At times of great stress, professors often wonder, What is their role? Educator? Facilitator? Adviser? Berg took on a bit of all three. She answered questions about what might happen next in the political process, and why so many voters backed Trump, something her mostly progressive students seemed to find unfathomable. She gave them a space to talk, which many said they found helpful. And she reminded them that they should still invest their time in the causes they care about and the communities they support.

“I tell students they need to take care of each other and of themselves, and remember that a lot of things can be done incrementally, and history doesn’t change quickly,” she said. Even a Biden presidency “wouldn't change a lot of the things they are most concerned about.”

Every professor handles classroom conversations in their own way, of course. For Berg, Wednesday’s discussions may have been easier to navigate because she has been open with her students all semester about her views on the Trump administration, which she considers dangerous on many levels. (Berg has said her family history has informed her professional life: She was born and raised in Germany, and her grandparents had ties to the Nazis.) Her students needed, she said, “someone they can talk to who is not pretending this is business as normal.”