Looking ahead to the start of a school year that corresponds with the final months of the presidential election cycle, many faculty are thinking about how (and how much) they will choose to engage the election in their courses. No matter your discipline or your prior teaching experience, this resource is intended to help you describe the stakes of this election for student learning in your context and identify some proactive steps you can take to support student learning during a tumultuous election season.
There are a wide range of ways to navigate the election season in your courses. Faculty with the relevant expertise might build in regular opportunities for students to engage in disciplinary conversations about the election. Others might focus more on how to attend to student wellbeing and belonging during what is likely to be an anxiety-producing time for many of us. Still others might see opportunities to encourage students to consider their responsibilities to civic life. While the exact choices you make in each course will be informed by relevant contextual factors, we encourage you to at least acknowledge the election cycle and its potential impact on your students’ learning.
What’s at stake for teaching and learning?
No matter your political views, the 2024 presidential election likely feels like another high stakes election. When those stakes are felt within the four walls of our classrooms, it can make it more difficult for faculty to teach and for students to learn. This section intends to describe what’s at stake in the classroom during this election cycle. Look to the following section on “Proactive Planning” to see more on steps you can take to honor those stakes while supporting student learning and wellbeing this semester.
Safety and Wellbeing
Recent election cycles have been accompanied by more threats and public acts of political violence. It’s not surprising then that the American Psychological Association found that adults in the U.S. were already reporting that they were especially anxious about the election in May 2024. When any of us are worried about our own safety, the safety of our loved ones, or the peaceful transfer of power, it is difficult to focus our attention on learning.
Differentiated experiences of classroom belonging
Research shows that a sense of belonging (“people like me fit in here and succeed at this kind of work”) is important to student learning and persistence (Romero 2018). Faculty and students who identify with groups that have been targeted or stereotyped during the election — including people of color, immigrants, Muslim and Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, to name a few — may experience belonging uncertainty at higher levels in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the election, likely expending energy evaluating environments for cues indicating whether or not they will belong, and making it more difficult to focus on learning.
Academic Standing
Students might worry that sharing their perspectives on the election — or opting out of discussing the election — might negatively influence their relationships with peers or their academic standing with the faculty member.
Trust with Students
Student learning and persistence benefits from positive relationships with faculty (Pascarella and Terenzini 1978; Kuh and Hu 2001; Umbach and Wawrzynski 2005; Komarrau, Musulkin, and Bhattacharya 2010). How you navigate the election — or other social or political upheavals — can stress test relationships in any course. Research shows that students find it helpful when faculty acknowledge moments of significant upheaval in some way (Huston and DiPietro 2007), and students locally and across the country have expressed frustration when faculty have chosen not to acknowledge major events.
As colleagues at Georgetown shared in 2020, some students experience silence on the part of their instructors as apathy or a false pretense of distance between scholarly pursuits, campus life, and sociopolitical realities. For students who hold identities that have been targeted during the election, silence can feel like tacit approval for those attacks or an inability or unwillingness to recognize the toll of such attacks. At the same time, many faculty worry that engaging in a conversation and saying the wrong thing — or not knowing what to do when a student says something that crosses a boundary — can also breach trust with students.
Proactive Planning
As an individual instructor, you cannot control what happens during or around the election. However, you can take some steps that make it more likely that your class is better equipped to respond to the stresses caused by the election.
Consider your pedagogical values and commitments
When deciding how you want to support students around the election, it can be helpful to reconnect with your core pedagogical values and commitments. Not only can that practice help you decide what you will — and won’t — do to support student learning and wellbeing through the election, but it can also provide you with energy, motivation, and accountability. The following reflection prompts can help you clarify your values and commitments:
- How would you like students, colleagues, or other community members to describe your teaching?
- Who are your teaching role models? Why do you aspire to be like them in some way?
- What are you most proud of in your time teaching?
- Who are you responsible to in your work as a teacher? What do you owe them?
- What do you hope are the ripple effects of your teaching? What changes do you hope to witness?
Get clear about your goals and boundaries
Once you have a better sense of the general values and commitments that you want to guide your actions, you might also consider the more specific goals you have for your classes. Do you want to prioritize student wellbeing and belonging, help students better understand the issues or context of the election, encourage civic involvement?
It may also be useful to think about your own boundaries and limits. As well as you can anticipate, how much distance do you think you’ll be able to have from the election in the days immediately surrounding it? What are you willing to share with students about your experience of the election? What do you want to keep private? Do you think you will feel ready to talk with students about the election and navigate conflict or line-crossing comments? Check in with yourself periodically over the course of the semester.
Invest in Trust-Building
While trust is always an important component for learning, the potential stresses of the election season make it even more important to cultivate trusting relationships with students. There are a number of ways you might go about doing that:
- Survey students and/or have a conversation about what they want from faculty during the election and other significant events
- Share the values and goals that guide your decision-making around the election and other significant events and your other pedagogical choices (e.g. design transparent assignments, talk about the reasons behind course policies, etc.)
- Express your commitment to supporting student learning and your care for their wellbeing
- Show that you take students seriously by modeling curiosity about their thinking, soliciting and listening to their feedback (mid-semester feedback is one way to do this), and providing space for them to share their relevant expertise and experiences
- If you plan to have explicit conversations about the election with your students, give students opportunities to practice engaging with one another and identifying what helps them learn during those conversations (e.g. collaborate on classroom discussion expectations, collectively reviewing and critiquing models of people aiming to learn through disagreement, etc.)
Plan for Flexibility
The days leading up to and immediately following the election are likely to be especially tense and all of us are more likely to be distracted. To help reduce anxiety and make it easier for students to access supports during that period, you might consider what flexibility would be appropriate for your class context and how you can clearly communicate those options to students. For example you might choose to:
- Review your syllabus and make sure there are no major assignments scheduled immediately around the election
- Proactively communicate options for extensions
- Make course meetings optional and/or schedule a review day around the election
- If you aren’t already doing so, plan to record your classes that week using lecture capture (or personal capture if your classroom isn’t equipped with lecture capture), so that students can review content later if they were finding it difficult to focus during class
Encourage Voting
Research suggests that encouragement from other members of campus communities — including faculty — makes a significant difference to student voter registration and turnout (Bennion and Nickerson 2016). You can encourage voting by pointing students to voting guides, sharing your own voting plan with students, and providing them with BC’s Civic Engagement website, which includes information on voter registration and deadlines.
Connect students to other resources
You are not alone in caring about students’ wellbeing on campus. To learn more about how you might recognize and respond to a student who is experiencing acute distress — and your legal obligations as an instructor — see the Students of Concern webpage. You can also always reach out to consult with staff in the Dean of Students office (617-552-3470, ask to speak with a member of the Student Outreach and Support team) or Counseling Services (617-552-3310). Our sample syllabus statements page provides models of how you might introduce resources like bias incident reporting and mental health and wellness.
Consider what you’ll do ahead of and after the election
What you’ll do in the days leading up to and following the election may have to be responsive to immediate circumstances. If you want to start thinking through your options in advance, consider our Teaching After An Election resource for some actions you might take.
Teaching during this election season is likely to be challenging, but you aren’t alone. At the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Day, a panel of BC faculty talked about their experiences teaching during elections. Review a recording of their remarks (behind BC login) to hear other BC faculty share what they have found impactful in recent years. CTE staff members are also here to support you. Email centerforteaching@bc.edu to request a consultation.