This paper presents findings from a study of high school students (N = 165) engaged in discussions of controversial political issues within Close Up Washington's civic education program. We report findings from pre- and post surveys to investigate how the group's views about the issues were affected by the discussion strategy they experienced. We…

Too often, the authors assert, discussion of controversial issues in high school classrooms is channeled through the teacher, rather than engaging students in discussion with one another. Teachers fear that students won't know how to talk to one another productively about issues, or that they'll end up in shouting matches. But when…

Five years ago, Diana Hess was teaching a graduate seminar called "Democratic Education." The purpose of the seminar was to critically analyze two seemingly simple, but actually very complex, questions: What is democracy? What is democratic education? Both are contested concepts, and the seminar was designed to help students understand…