This workshop will start with hearing your concerns about classroom experiences you have had, or ones you worry about. We will devote most of our time to strategies meant to prepare for raising hard topics in class, and ones that can help instructors when hard topics we did not plan for come up in discussion. We will differentiate different types of hard topics, and discuss ways to develop norms that build trust and create an inclusive environment in class to help instructors and students navigate these polarized times.
Sigal Ben-Porath is professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a member of the philosophy and the political science departments, and a fellow at the Institute for Law and Philosophy. Shereceived her doctorate in political philosophy from Tel-Aviv university in 2000, and was a fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, Tel-Aviv University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her recent books are Cancel Wars (Chicago 2022), Free Speech on Campus(Penn Press, 2017) as well as Making Up Our Mind(with Michael Johanek, Chicago 2019).She chaired Penn's Committee on Open Expression 2015-2019, and serves on the board of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. In recent years she has offered guidance to many campuses on policy development and responses to controversies surrounding speech.