Creating a positive classroom experience for students can be a challenge, especially when teaching a contested topic such as gender studies. Teaching and learning gender is teaching and learning against the grain, which can lead to feelings of comfort and discomfort among students. The objective is to capture different manifestations of…

Research into student experiences of learning about potentially emotionally sensitive topics tends to focus on the use of trigger warnings, with less attention paid to other teaching strategies and to broader context. This questionnaire study of 917 arts, humanities and social science students therefore sought to explore the extent to which…

Controversial scientific issues, or socioscientific issues (SSIs), demand the consideration of more than scientific content when constructing decisions. The Justification for Knowing framework (JFK) was developed to categorize the information sources drawn upon when making SSI decisions within the academic domain of natural sciences. These…

In a polarized society, it is a university's responsibility to offer courses that explore highly controversial issues. Traditional forms of debate may create barriers to knowledge and entrenchment of perspectives, with students self-limiting their ability to develop informed opinions. We describe an active learning, double-blinded approach to…

Universities have historically fostered spaces where students, faculty, staff, and administration can fruitfully engage in discussion around contentious issues. Current political divisions have had a chilling effect on these discussions inside and outside the classroom. To nurture a campus culture of dialogic engagement, the communication studies…

This qualitative interview study examines challenges college students may experience in extracurricular dialogues on contested sociopolitical issues. It also discusses approaches that students claim support them through the challenges of contested issues dialogues. This study found that college students encountered challenges including difficulty…

The controversy surrounding trigger warnings has highlighted a mystifying confound in post-secondary education. Faculty, students and school bureaucracies are divided. While trigger warning proponents emphasise the value of protecting students with trauma histories from unscaffolded exposure to content related to sexuality, violence, race and…

This study asks, "How do instructors successfully engage students in learning about controversial issues of race without hitting the common tripwires of low trust, stereotyping or racial microaggressions?" To address this question, I conducted a study of two courses on race that were focussed on difficult issues, yet were consistently…

The role of emotions in learning has been the focus of much debate in teaching circles, as has the question of discussing controversial issues in the classroom. The aim of this small-scale inquiry was to investigate how two groups of intermediate level students of French as a foreign language expressed emotion in discussing the controversial issue…

Prior research on epistemic beliefs, that is, individuals' views about knowledge and knowing, has mainly focused either on individuals' professed beliefs (as reported in questionnaires) or on their enacted beliefs (as indicated during task processing). However, little is known about the relation between professed and enacted epistemic beliefs. The…

At their best, common reading (CR) programs are a high-impact educational practice. By bringing the campus community together to read and discuss the same book as a common intellectual experience, CR programs create the sense of belonging and thirst for learning that position students for success at their new university. Discussions and…

Bioethics is an important aspect of understanding the relationship between science and society, but studies have not yet examined undergraduate student experiences and comfort in bioethics courses. In this study, we investigated undergraduate bioethics students' support of and comfort when learning three controversial bioethics topics: gene…

Controversies are a potentially powerful teaching tool in the management classroom enabling students to explore different perspectives on an issue and to develop their skills in areas such as critical thinking and communication. Controversy is implicit to learning and to leadership and management roles in workplaces where multiple opposing views…

In a highly polarized political environment, political discourse on divisive topics is all the more important. Heeding the many calls for higher education to teach political discourse skills, this study investigates the impact of political discourse lessons in a college-level, political science classroom. Further, it explores the effectiveness of…

Evolution is central to biology education and yet, it is often one of the most misunderstood and controversial topics that biology educators must teach. Research spanning the last four decades has shown that students continue to struggle, even with direct instruction, to understand the process of evolution by natural selection. In my first…