How can you teach your students to have a respectful debate on controversial topics?   

This skill is increasingly important as classrooms (and societies) become increasingly diverse and are teeming with opposing and diverging views. Yet it seems students are continuously losing the ability to respectfully engage with people who think differently. This appears to be caused by a constant flow of information, served to students through social media and the Internet. Even though students can access an endless plethora of sources 24/7, they still end up living in a so-called bubble. The information students see is based on what their friends, family and people they follow on social media engage with. This bias can result in strongly held beliefs. This is especially problematic when this concerns extremist ideologies, conspiracy theories, alternative facts and so-called ‘fake news’. As a consequence, teachers are more often confronted with radical and opposing views in the classroom and expected to deal with them. But how do you do that?

EuroClio’s (first!) Online Annual Conference and Professional Development Training Course: Controversy and Disagreement in the Classroom will present 20 different workshops that will give you hands-on, ready-to- use lesson plans that will help you teach your students to articulate and substantiate their arguments in a debate. These lesson plans will also develop their ability to tentatively listen to, and understand different perspectives.  Additionally, these lesson plans will help students explore new ways of thinking, change their views and critically evaluate their own values and attitudes, and most importantly teach students how to respectfully disagree.

The Annual Conference will be held online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as we know being on zoom for an entire day can be quite challenging. Therefore we decided to schedule our conference during the entire month of November, hosting one workshop a day between the hours of 16:30 - 18:30 (CET). This year’s conference will be even more special than the ones prior, as the new format allows educators from all over Europe, who might not have been able to join in person due to busy schedules or for financial reasons, to take part in the Annual Conference.

We cannot wait to share these lesson plans with you and to meet you online at EuroClio’s Annual Conference!

For more information on the Conference, please contact Alice Modena at alice@euroclio.eu

About EuroClio  

The European Association of History Educators is a membership-based organisation, founded in 1992. Ever since, EuroClio has strived to inspire and support educators to engage learners in innovative and responsible history and citizenship education. In order to do so, we manage a variety of projects, most of which are aimed at teachers, that provide new teaching strategies and methodologies. Our Annual Conference is the moment that we share the end products of our projects, alongside other exciting lesson plans developed by our partners and members, with the wider community.

To see the full, ambitious programme of our conference, please click here.