Roxanne L. Euben

The confluence of multiple pandemics—from COVID-19 to racial violence to partisanship that’s gone off the rails—has produced a moment of arguably unprecedented polarization in both politics and the classroom. Teachers now confront what seem to be distinctive and unusually daunting obstacles to the kind of critical, potentially transformative engagement with texts and one another at the heart of a liberal arts education.

Yet there’s also something here that feels familiar to me. Perhaps this is because both my research and teaching are located at the intersection of two fields with particularly bad reputations:  political theory and Islamic political thought. Political theory is often regarded by undergraduates as either intimidating or irrelevant to the immediacy of everyday events—sometimes characterized even less flatteringly as the study of books by “dead, white, Western men.” In the United States, Islamic political thought is so routinely seen through the lens of 9/11 and its aftermath that Muslim thinkers of all kinds tend to register as violent terrorists until proven otherwise.

In many ways, I learned how to teach—and how not to teach—by shepherding fractious class debates about everything from the Racial Contract to government justifications for torture to the relationship between Islam and democracy. Unsurprisingly, my pedagogy (which owes much to dedicated teachers who came before) normalizes disputation and even intense disagreement as constitutive of the process of collective inquiry and participatory learning. To put the same point slightly differently: for me, conflict in the classroom isn’t something to be either domesticated or ignored but centered as a critical dimension of higher education.

This sounds nice, but isn’t always easy. Many students are uncomfortable with any conflict in the classroom, are unused to arguing directly with others, and equate open contention with unleashed hostility. Other students deliberately avoid challenging their classmates’ convictions on the assumption that tolerance and respect for others requires withholding judgment. (The trouble is, they make judgments all the time and rightly so; it’s impossible to talk about what is unjust or wrong without them.) Then there are the students whose eagerness to position themselves as sole arbiters of right and wrong tends either to provoke equally doctrinaire reactions or throttle discussion entirely. 

On the first day of class I say explicitly that disputation is central to what we’ll be doing; that arguments can be productive rather than dangerous; and that paying very close attention to claims you disagree with is a unique opportunity to examine convictions of your own that often go unquestioned in the online echo-chambers of the like-minded in which many people now reside. Toward this end, I push every student, regardless of their politics or background, to justify their positions and make explicit the assumptions undergirding those positions and the political stakes of holding them. In other words, I use my authority in the classroom to normalize exchanges where students are challenged to make available to others the evidence (textual or otherwise), logic, experiences, and emotional investments behind their convictions.

To show what this looks like, I ask students: Why are you in this classroom? Why bother going to college? Why UPenn in particular? If the answer is “college will help me succeed,” (and it often is), I press them: How are you defining success and why define it this way? Why are you sure that this is going to give you a full, good or happy life? Continually asking versions of “why?” sounds overly simple, but doing so takes the pat, almost habitual answers we often give as only the beginning of a process that dives ever deeper into the assumptions anchoring political shibboleths such as “human beings are naturally self-interested,” or “Islam is intolerant” or “government is about protecting rights and maintaining order.”

I have to play devil’s advocate for this to work, and I do try to make it playful as well as serious. This makes it easier for students to reflect critically on what’s seemingly natural, inevitable, a given, and even take the risk of thinking differently or otherwise. But the key point I make here is that critical purchase on your own position need not threaten your commitment to it; it can also provide you with a deeper sense of why you believe what you do. After all, Socrates’s practice of interrogating all comers in the streets of Athens wasn’t in the service of nihilism or questioning for its own sake but to ensure that the truths we endorse and the convictions we embrace are actually worth having. Of course, in the process of thinking critically about your own positions, there’s usually a shift, incremental or significant, in what you believe, why you believe it, or both.

To ensure that all students engage in this activity, I’ve developed some strategies to encourage quieter students, shy students, and students who feel marginalized to feel safe in speaking up. This is critical to addressing the inequalities and power imbalances that tend to pervade classroom dynamics but are often avoided as an unwelcome source of division. Here—and always—it’s essential to have a sense of humor. I often say that I’ll call on students who haven’t yet spoken to hear “their mellifluous voices,” or because I know that “still waters run deep.” This signals my confidence that what more reticent students have to say is worth hearing, that naïve questions can be invaluable, and that their comments don’t have to be brilliant (though they occasionally are) because sometimes participation is itself an accomplishment. The effect, I find, is to coax such students into the conversation by lowering the stakes of the comments they offer and reducing the anxieties that often attend such reticence.

In all these exchanges I try to model two things: First, I show how much I enjoy it when students first begin to push back in my exchanges with them. This is not difficult to do, as I take genuine pleasure not just in the growing confidence students show in their ability to make cogent arguments back to me about a text or a judgment, but also in the liveliness of the exchange itself. Such confidence tends to be contagious as students become increasingly comfortable arguing with each other on political, intellectual, and methodological grounds, and learn to do so with precision and self-control, even or especially when the issue at hand is highly contentious and brings intense passions to the surface. Second, I model intense listening: I pay very close attention to what each student says and push them to clarify what is confused or show us supporting textual evidence. Through this back and forth I present myself as an ally rather than just an interrogator in developing what is often an inchoate or reflexive instinct into an argument with justifications that are at least accessible—if not convincing—to others. 

I do far more of this in the early part of the course than in later weeks, as students usually become acclimated to this direct style of exchange and interrogation relatively quickly. If I’ve done my job, students eventually begin conducting their exchanges with one another in ways that mimic how I engage with them. Still, these techniques don’t necessarily produce a happy, linear progression in which antagonism, outrage or felt injury inevitably give way to critical thinking and mutual appreciation. This is partly because, like all human endeavors, learning is often disorderly and unpredictable. But it’s also because emotion and reflection aren’t opposites; rather, they inform one another in unexpected ways to shape the course of the class conversation, sometimes for worse but sometimes—if we’re lucky—for the better.

Roxanne L. Euben, professor of political science, is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences. She is a leading scholar of contemporary political theory who specializes in Islamic political thought.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.