Michael Martin, executive director of The Rowland Foundation, opened the conference. Photo by Ethan Weinstein/VTDiggerEducators nationwide face a tricky question in an election year: In an increasingly polarized political age, how should schools teach about politics, and with it, democracy? In Vermont, teachers are collectively grappling with the challenge.Hundreds of educators gathered at the University of Vermont last week for a conference on “Democracy and School,” exploring how teachers contribute to a democratic culture. The topic guided the 13th annual gathering organized by The Rowland Foundation, which supports Vermont’s teachers in an effort to improve school culture and climate.  National politics loomed over the event, from former President Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrection, to former Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ support for privatization in public education. So too did the politics of education in Vermont, from public funding for private religious schools, to rhetoric around school budgets and the historic rejection of budgets on Town Meeting Day.  Educator Chris Sheehan, who led one of the conference’s seminars, told colleagues he has found one principle most helpful in teaching civics at Twinfield Union School, which serves students in the towns of Plainfield and Marshfield.Eschewing the national conversation, Sheehan advised, engages rather than divides students. In the classroom, youth often fear that talking politics “is going to be a fight. It’s uncomfortable,” Sheehan said. The teachers in the room concurred. Conservative students in progressive Montpelier sometimes feel they can’t speak up, one guidance counselor noted. Another teacher asked how to allow dialogue across the political spectrum while ensuring there was “no place for hate” in the classroom. Sheehan acknowledged he hadn’t cracked the code of talking politics in school. But one way to engage students politically, he said, was to scale down. Old-school civics lessons are too divorced from kids’ lives, he said: “The textbooks aren’t going to have the Plainfield Selectboard in them.”So, as a part of what he calls the Twinfield Democracy Project, Sheehan has his class collectively decide on a local, issue-based political advocacy project. Through the process of developing a strategy for change, students learn about the levers controlling local power, like town officials and state representatives. Sheehan’s work has also involved trying to get the members of Twinfield’s broader civic community in Plainfield and Marshfield to engage with the school and its civics curriculum. In an interview following the seminar, Sheehan described striking up a relationship with a community member through those engagement efforts whose political ideology was “completely opposite” his own. They got coffee and talked about gender studies — a topic Sheehan said was particularly animating for some community members. “Nobody trusts public schools,” he said, characterizing the challenge of getting all types of people involved with the school through engagement events. “I’ve been moderately successful when I had food, and I was successful when I had kids leading.”Anticipating similar challenges, the Vermont Principals’ Association this fall similarly confronted the political moment, hosting a webinar on best practices and considerations for educators this election season. “There’s this great opportunity for civic engagement,” said Mike McRaith, the association’s associate executive director, in an interview. “We want students to be engaged in their citizenship and to be learning about how the government works.”McRaith led the webinar, which gathered about 80 attendees, alongside Elijah Hawkes, director of school leadership programs at the Upper Valley Educators Institute. Together, they sought to prepare teachers for the situations they might find themselves in come November, talking through First Amendment protections, district policy discretion and ways to connect elections to learning objectives. One key takeaway, according to McRaith, is to make sure there’s clarity within a school or district about what type of conversations are allowed and encouraged. “If you don’t think about this at all, you might be caught off guard,” McRaith said, “You might not be able to be as supportive as you’d want to be to your community, and as clear as you would want to be.”Like Sheehan, McRaith said he encouraged teachers to start local, by bringing election workers or local elected officials into the classroom. According to McRaith, that approach has the added benefit of building community trust.“There is an intensity to this election, but I’m old enough to remember that there’s an intensity to all the presidential elections,” he said. “It’s a good learning opportunity for students with this many people paying attention and them having a natural interest in civic engagement.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont educators ponder how to teach in, and about, a politically polarized country.