More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults believe that political discourse has become more negative and less respectful, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center. On this episode, Brett Levy of the School of Education shares how educators might play a larger role in reducing political polarization among their students.
More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults believe that political discourse has become more negative and less respectful, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Pew Research Center.
On this episode, Brett Levy of the School of Education shares how educators might play a larger role in reducing political polarization among their students.
Levy is an assistant professor of educational theory and practice at UAlbany. Read episode transcription.
The study, “Can Education Reduce Political Polarization? Fostering Open-Minded Political Engagement During the Legislative Semester,” was published in the Teachers College Record in May 2019.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Brett Levy, an assistant professor of educational theory and practice in UAlbany's School of Education. Brett has researched a political simulation used in high school government courses and its impact on civic discourse among students. Brett, it's great to have you back on the show.
Bretty Levy:
Thanks. It's good to be here.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So in your most recent study published earlier this year, you explored how students can foster their OMPE. What do you mean by this term and what got you interested in the topic from a research perspective?
Bretty Levy:
OMPE stands for open-minded political engagement, and I define it as the propensity to explore and participate in political affairs while maintaining a willingness to adjust one's political views. It combines two different ideas that I have been studying over the course of my career.
Bretty Levy:
I first became interested in political engagement itself when I realized that only about half of people in the U.S. who are eligible to vote do vote in presidential elections. It's even lower in midterm elections and in local elections. So I studied that first. And to study that, I looked at young people's attitudes towards political participation, including their political interests, their likelihood of paying attention to political issues and their political efficacy, which is the extent to which they think they can make a difference in the political sphere.
Bretty Levy:
Those two attitudes are highly related to actual participation, including things like voting, contacting representatives and participating in demonstrations. So first I focused on political engagement, but then as I moved deeper into my career, I saw that there was greater political polarization with people having stronger views on each side of the aisle and not necessarily being able to compromise.
Bretty Levy:
So I became more interested in how people can learn to listen to each other. And then I combined these concepts of open-mindedness and political engagement into this larger idea of open-minded political engagement.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. So for this research, you and your colleagues looked at three schools. What schools did you choose, and can you share a little bit about them?
Bretty Levy:
This study began because there was a really interesting program that I had never seen called The Legislative Semester. The Legislative Semester is a full course that lasts one semester and that enables students to play the role of legislator.
Bretty Levy:
So from day one of the class, they are referred to as Representative O'Carroll, or Representative Levy. And you sit there with a placard on your desk. There's a big day called Full Session, and Full Session is like the climax of the whole semester. And during Full Session the students get dressed up and they come ready for a full debate. And students who identify as Republicans are on one side of the aisle, students who identify as Democrats and on the other side of the aisle, and it's done in the school auditorium or in some large space.
Bretty Levy:
People present, and they usually debate about 15 bills over the course of several hours. So that's sort of the climax of the whole thing.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. So it's the whole picture that creates this really meaningful experience, it sounds like. Now, just real quickly, which schools did you look at?
Bretty Levy:
I can't reveal the identity of the actual schools, but I have pseudonyms for them. "Green High School" was a school that had been doing The Legislative Semester for only two years, actually before I went in there to study it, but they were quite skilled at it. It was a suburban school. About 22 percent of the students were nonwhite, minority students.
Bretty Levy:
"Gomez High School" was primarily Latino and Latina. About 96 percent of the students were nonwhite. About 68 percent of the students in this study had GPAs of 3.5 or higher. And that was also about the same for students from Green High School. They generally had high GPAs, and this is a class that students opted into. So that was one of the differences between Gomez and Green. At Green, everybody did The Legislative Semester. At Gomez, there were maybe five or six sections of it and the students chose this class for their government class.
Bretty Levy:
Standard High School was not a Legislative Semester school. So I can compare statistically the students who do engage in The Legislative Semester in two very different schools, and then one that did not engage in The Legislative Semester. The comparison school had 87 students.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay, and I'd like to now get to the key findings. You said you divided them from political engagement and open-mindedness, so can you share a little bit about what the big takeaways were here?
Bretty Levy:
The key takeaway findings are that students who were in The Legislative Semester had gains on the following variables that students in the regular government class did not have. Political interest, internal political efficacy, which is the extent to which people are confident in their own political knowledge, political discussion frequency, the amount that they talk about politics to parents, classmates, friends and teachers, that's combined into one variable, and expected political participation.
Bretty Levy:
So four areas of gains, controlling for a bunch of background variables, including being part of a minority group, being female, GPA and age. And also controlling for the initial levels of those variables. So those are the political engagement gains. The separate set of findings...
Sarah O'Carroll:
On open-mindedness.
Bretty Levy:
....on open-mindedness, are the ones that I think a lot of people are more interested in, because these are different, and different from prior studies. What we find is that being in The Legislative Semester class increased students' open-mindedness. How did I measure political open-mindedness? There were four questions. One is, "In general, I like to talk only with people who share my perspectives." So either strongly disagree or strongly agree. "People who have different political opinions from mine often have good reasons for their views." "How open are you to changing or revising some of your political beliefs?" "Do you like or dislike reading things or listening to people who challenge your opinions on political issues?"
Bretty Levy:
So those are the four questions, and people can take issue with them, but this is the first study that uses that measure. I had decent reliability on both of them, meaning students answered these questions in relatively similar ways. The first one was reverse coded, which means I just switched the numbers so that they line up in the same way as the others.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And so looking at these findings, what guidance would you have for educators who are seeking to make their classrooms more emotionally safe environments? And also what advice would you have for educators, in terms of now that you know that they have an impact that they can have in their students' lives and intellectual development?
Bretty Levy:
Yeah, those are great questions. Well, first I should say that the students at Gomez High School had gains that were much greater in political open-mindedness than students at Standard High School. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It could be that they lived in a more partisan environment and so being exposed to different views was especially powerful for students at Gomez.
Bretty Levy:
Another really interesting finding was that in one particular class, there was a decline in political open-mindedness. I looked into this and looked back at the data. We dug through our observations of the different classes because this wasn't just a statistical study. This was a study that involved observations of classrooms and interviews with students and surveys.
Bretty Levy:
So there's a day, early in the semester about somewhere between four and six weeks into the semester where students get up in front of their classmates after having had several debates about heated issues, like abortion or climate change or gun control, things that really get people excited and animated. They decide which party they belong to. It's called "Party Declaration Day."
Bretty Levy:
It's part of the curriculum and they go in front of their classmates, sometimes in their classrooms, sometimes in a separate room, and they say, "I am Representative O'Carroll and I belong to this party because I think of this, this and this." And you list three issues that align with your party and then you pin yourself on a board, and all the way from the left. On the left side, it's all blue, and you pin yourself maybe as a far left Democrat, or a moderate left Democrat closer to the center, or a far right Republican, all the way at the end, or kind of a centrist Republican in the middle. Or you can put yourself right in the middle and say, "I'm independent." That's an option.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I'm already stressed out just thinking about this.
Bretty Levy:
Yeah. Doing this in front of say 25 of your classmates when you're in 10th grade.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And those hot button issues that you're aligning yourself with on a spectrum.
Bretty Levy:
Right, exactly. Exactly. It could be a stressful moment for many of these students, but they have four to six weeks to prepare; they know that it's coming. And I talked earlier about Committee Hearing Day and Full Session, but this is a big one, because after this day, the students in one of the schools, not in all the schools, sit according to their party when they come to class. So you're coming to school as part of a legislature.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Which perhaps might... It seems like it could get a little bit tribalistic in the sense of, "I'm with these people and we're not those people," and some "othering" going on.
Bretty Levy:
Yes. And the teacher said to students in advance that Party Declaration Day is the magical day where everything changes. And he explained...
Sarah O'Carroll:
That sounds a little tongue-in-cheek to me.
Bretty Levy:
Yeah, and he explained to his students -- I mean he had a great personality, he was a lot of fun and his students really liked him. There was a bit of a competitive atmosphere in there. And he said to students, "You are no longer thinking about yourself but your party; I am a Democrat and these are the issues that we care about, or I'm a Republican and these are the issues we care about, or I am an independent and both parties have it wrong, but I'll be caucusing with the Democrats or the Republicans," meaning I'll be sitting on this side or this side depending on where I feel like I fit in. Like Bernie Sanders was an independent who caucused with the Democrats, right? And at one point, he joked about "revenge bill-killing," like after Committee Hearing Day.
Bretty Levy:
So there are certain things that we found in our observations that were like, hmm, like if somebody kills your bill then you kill their bill. Just because you're mad at them.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Right. Not at all like what happens in real life...
Bretty Levy:
[LAUGHTER] Well, right? We have this modeling that goes on in what we're seeing in the real world. So that is one of these things, when you asked about longitudinal effects, I don't know if the political open-mindedness continues beyond The Legislative Semester experience, because students are getting increasingly interested, which means they are probably going to start watching more news and reading more news and some of that can lead you into a filter bubble where you read things that fit your perspective. Or you may be getting your news feed from Facebook, which has a lot of...
Sarah O'Carroll:
An algorithmic bias.
Bretty Levy:
Exactly. Yeah. It knows where you live. It knows the things you've clicked on before. And same with Google. If you're logged in, it can know what kinds of things are more likely to get you to click. So I don't know. So does this have Effects? That would be a very valuable study worth doing.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Okay. So even though we don't have the answer, that this is the program that every high school should have necessarily, but what else would you say to educators in how they are approaching political polarization or political issues with their students?
Bretty Levy:
I think one of the big takeaways is that teachers, if they want to have political engagement grow, and political open-mindedness grow, they should try to set up an atmosphere where students feel free to express themselves and are able to listen to each other and respond to each other in ways that do not hurt others' feelings and hurt others willingness to share. This takes work. It takes practice. It's never perfect, but it's a goal worth pursuing. I think.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now sneaking into my thoughts, this whole discussion has been, okay, what can adults get out of this? Or what can we learn from these high schoolers? Because it's clear to me that public discourse is in crisis, so what hope might there be for bridging these ideological divides, particularly on politicized issues and problems?
Bretty Levy:
That is a great question and a really hard one to answer. One reason I'm in education is because I think we all know that young people are the future. Somebody who's 16 today, will in 20 years be 36, and will be making decisions for the whole country with their votes, and with their words, and with their demonstrations, or with their apathy and their withdrawal from the whole system.
Bretty Levy:
So I focus on young people because we have a contained system. We have an opportunity to shape young people's willingness or unwillingness to engage in the political process, not be turned off by the political process, manage their reactions to media and their reactions to aggressive talk towards themselves, and also develop an openness and willingness to listen to views that may differ from their own without being closed off.
Bretty Levy:
Those are my goals with young people. So, it's like schools are an opportunity for people to practice this in a way that could continue into their adulthood. Often we think about schools as ways to prepare people to support themselves and to be competent in the workforce. That's extremely important. It's also important to prepare people to perpetuate a healthy and sustainable democracy. That requires work and practice and education and experiences that will enable people to engage in democratic processes in a healthy way that will not lead to conflicts and violence.
Bretty Levy:
We do see political violence and in some places, and that's really sad, but are there ways that we can avoid that by preparing young people to express themselves in reasonable ways. And even if it doesn't lead to violence, they're still aggressive words that keep people from compromising and keep us from solving real problems. You referred to this, right? You feel kind of like, "Ah, what are we going to do about the situation right now?"
Bretty Levy:
And I have these numbers right here from Pew Research. I don't know if we have time to talk about it, but there's so many areas on which Americans are just increasingly divided, not listening to each other, and that's part of the inspiration for this whole line of work. Can it affect the future? I hope it can.
Bretty Levy:
There could be room for adults to have these types of community forums where they talk about issues. There are organizations that try to bring people together to talk about public issues, and learn to talk about things in a civil way. It can be difficult to pull people out of their busy lives. Everybody has things they like to do...
Sarah O'Carroll:
It's easier to just post on Twitter to people who agree with you.
Bretty Levy:
It is, it is. So, I'm not sure what the answer is for adults, which is why I focus on places where we do have opportunities for change. There may be opportunities within workplaces, there are institutions that people do have to go to. People do have to go to work, people do have to do some other things. People do engage in religious practice, and they feel connected to certain community organizations.
Bretty Levy:
Those could be opportunities for leaders to organize people to talk openly and engage with issues that are challenging to engage with and open their minds up. And these types of community events do exist. So could that change things, could that move the dial perhaps?
Sarah O'Carroll:
So maybe there is some hope for us after all.
Bretty Levy:
I hope so. I hope there's hope.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Brett, thank you so much.
Bretty Levy:
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll, and that was Brett Levy at The School of Education. If you enjoyed hearing about Brett's work, you might want to check out an earlier episode I did with him on how high school textbooks frame the issue of climate change. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu, or you can find us on Twitter at @UAlbanyNews.
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