Denial

The first approach occurs when teachers deny that an issue is controversial. When a teacher does not believe an issue to be controversial, then by disclosing her views, she is not taking a “side,” but speaking the “truth.” For example, one teacher argued that whether the death penalty should be used in the United States was not a controversial political issue, but a question for which there was a clear right answer that students should be taught to believe. She was a member of Amnesty International and deeply embarrassed to live in a nation that sanctioned capital punishment. “How can we ever make progress on human rights issues,” she asked, “if we pretend that there is no right or wrong?” She made a distinction between matters of “legitimate” controversy and matters of “illegitimate” controversy. She still wanted to include the topic of the death penalty in her curriculum—not as a legitimate issue, but as an illustration of how the United States is out of step with prevailing world opinion. By doing so, she hoped her students would understand that the United States has not realized its potential as a democracy and that changes are necessary. Despite a conception in the general public that this issue is controversial, this teacher's denial of its controversies served her aim of promoting a particular kind of social transformation.

Privilege

Conversely, the next approach involves teachers who believe a topic is controversial, but want to privilege a particular perspective in their teaching. An example of this approach is provided by a teacher, a political activist, who works on a number of social justice issues designed to achieve “equality and liberation in a true sense.” Shortly after returning from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., to protest the proglobalization policies of the U.S. government, he taught a lesson about sweatshop labor that was designed to “counter the brainwashing” his students receive from a “biased media.”

Recognizing that the issue of globalization was indeed a genuine issue, he shared an article from the Gap's web site explaining their labor practices as a token toward balance. He acknowledged, however, that this was a ruse and that the lesson was not balanced. He struggled with whether it was ethical for teachers to purposely and explicitly create an ideological curriculum. “I worry,” he said, “that if I allow my ideology to control the content, then some right-winger will do the same thing in his classroom.” Yet he also wanted to “speak truth to power” and encourage his students to consider “what side they are on.” Doing this, however, caused him to question whether there was any real difference between teaching for social justice (which he wanted to do) and stacking the ideological deck so far toward his own perspective that he was, in fact, indoctrinating students.

Others would argue that his concerns are overblown, and that the very possibility that neutrality is a pedagogical possibility is naïve, impossible, or immoral. For example, when introducing their resource guide for teaching about globalization, William Bigelow and Robert Peterson state that “for educators to feign neutrality is irresponsible. The pedagogical aim in this social context needs to be truth rather than ‘balance’—if by balance we mean giving equal credence to claims that we know to be false and that, in any event, enjoy wide dispersal in the dominant culture” (2002, 5). In their view, striving for objectivity and neutrality is akin to worshipping false gods. Instead, teachers should realize that all of teaching is political and that teachers' political views can and should direct their teaching toward particular ends. Moreover, some teachers who take this position of privileging a particular position on an issue agree with Wayne Ross (2002), who argues that “the widely held belief in our society that activities strengthening or maintaining the status quo are neutral or at least non-political, while activities that critique or challenge the status quo are ‘political’ is wrongheaded.”

Avoidance

Even when teachers believe a topic is a controversial issue, they do not necessarily include it in their curricula. When talking with a group of high school teachers about what Supreme Court cases they think deserve attention in high schools, I encountered an example of avoidance: virtually all of them said they did not teach Roe v. Wade (1973) though they acknowledged it was a landmark case and that abortion rights were still an important controversial issue in the United States. Their reasons for avoiding this controversy fell into two categories. First, some teachers were afraid that the very mention of abortion in the classroom would cause uproar in the community. Some even taught in school districts that had explicitly forbidden coverage of the topic. More prevalent, however, was the influence of the teachers' own views. One teacher, a staunch Catholic, said her personal belief that abortion was a sin caused her to fear that she could not approach the issue fairly. Moreover, she feared her religious beliefs would invariably inform her comments to students (especially those who supported abortion rights), and she did not want to impose her religious views on her students. Another teacher had spent the past 10 years volunteering for an organization that supported abortion rights. She was furious about the tactics used by anti-abortion groups and simply couldn't stomach hearing her students' views about why abortion should be illegal. Thus, these teachers avoided including issues in the curriculum not because they thought it was an insignificant issue, but for precisely the opposite reason: Their strong views about the issue prevented them from teaching their students about it in the pedagogically neutral fashion they assumed was possible.

Balance

The fourth approach, what I call “balance,” typically involves applying a standard for determining whether a topic is an issue and, if it is, teaching about it without favoring a particular perspective. For example, two teachers whose course I studied (Hess and Posselt 2002) believed that if there was genuine controversy about a topic in the world outside of school, then it should be treated as a controversial issue in the classroom as well. Even when parents complained (as often happened when abortion's legality was the issue under discussion), the teachers treated especially controversial topics as legitimate issues and went to great lengths to ensure that students had exposure to different perspectives. One of the teachers gave this explanation of his goals:

Many advocates of controversial political issues teaching support the distinction this teacher makes between teaching students a particular point of view about issues, versus aiming for a “best case, fair hearing of competing points of view” (Kelly 1989, 132). Such a standard would be met if especially well-informed advocates of differing perspectives on an issue listened to the discussion and felt their views had been given a fair hearing. This standard draws on ideals of objectivity (so perspectives can be analyzed fairly) and equality (so that different perspectives have equal power). Fred Newmann (1975) provided support for this perspective when he argued that it was inappropriate for teachers to convince students to support specific policies because they were genuinely controversial (i.e., infused with competing perspectives) and students' open inquiry into a variety of perspectives would be limited if they were presented with a prepackaged “best” answer.

The “balanced” approach, while on its face appeals to many educators, school administrators, and members of the general public, is not without its problems. As a number of the approaches described previously illustrate, there is often disagreement about whether a topic should be treated as an issue in the first place. Applying a “balanced” analysis to a topic that some parents believe is not a legitimate controversy would not strike them as balanced, but as wrongheaded propaganda. This concern, of course, often leads to avoidance or to the selection of controversial issues that don't actually spark a lot of controversy. That is, the very reason that this form of education is often advocated—to teach young people how to deal effectively with authentic and challenging political controversies—may be abrogated if relatively “safe” issues dominate the curriculum.