{"id":169454,"date":"2026-02-08T17:13:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T17:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/169454\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T17:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T17:13:07","slug":"in-an-age-of-digital-discourse-how-can-educators-get-youth-talking-in-civil-discourse-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/169454\/","title":{"rendered":"In an age of digital discourse, how can educators get youth talking in civil discourse \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students are stuck in a modern catch-22 situation, a new national research report by the Chapman University-based Or Initiative<\/a> says about the state of civil discourse among youth.<\/p>\n

Youth are eager to grapple with the world\u2019s most polarizing issues, but in a digital age where headlines are incessant and social media often doubles as a primary news source, they may lack spaces where they can slow down, talk face-to-face about these topics and engage in an evidence-based exchange of ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw that coming out of the pandemic, teaching this class on civil discourse,\u201d said Vikki Katz, the Or Initiative\u2019s executive director and the Fletcher Jones Professor of Free Speech in Chapman University\u2019s School of Communication<\/a>. \u201cAnd for a couple of years, they had a really hard time talking to each other face to face.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m seeing that less now. But it still doesn\u2019t mean that they didn\u2019t spend their formative years far more isolated than would have been ideal,\u201d Katz said. \u201cThis, to me, is part of the correction: How do we start leveraging the time that kids are together?\u201d<\/p>\n

Helmed by Katz and a team of university researchers, curriculum designers and educators, the Or Initiative was founded in 2025 out of Chapman University to tackle that question and leave teachers with long-term curriculum and tools to discuss political issues.<\/p>\n

The program\u2019s mission to equip students with civil discourse skills \u201ccrystallized\u201d around students mobilizing at the height of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is now the initiative\u2019s first curricular focus.<\/p>\n

The initiative found financial footing with a $1.85 million grant from the Samueli Foundation, <\/a>which helped fund interviews last year with 52 eighth grade and 11th grade students across public and private schools in Southern California and New York City between May and November.<\/p>\n

As part of the Or Initiative\u2019s launch, the report, \u201cComing of Age in Polarized Times: Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era,\u201d will be released Monday, Feb. 9, during a two-day convening at Chapman\u2019s Orange campus, where attendees will practice implementing the report\u2019s curriculum models for discussing within classrooms topics ranging from immigration to climate change.<\/p>\n

Algorithms<\/p>\n

Max, identified only as an eighth grader from Southern California, told researchers of learning about \u201cthe murder of Charlie Kirk, the robbery of crown jewels from the Louvre, and the government shutdown\u201d from social media first, according the report.<\/p>\n

Max\u2019s experience is hardly unusual. Social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, the researchers said, are often primary news sources for students, even as students understand how content reaches them.<\/p>\n

\u201cKnowing that their feeds are curated, both by the social media algorithm itself and by their own behavior, often heightened, rather than reduced, teens\u2019 information skepticism,\u201d the report\u2019s authors said.<\/p>\n

And with AI-generated content becoming more pervasive on social media, along with a growing community of news-influencers, the report found teens\u2019 media literacy skills \u201care no match for their digital environments,\u201d and it\u2019s becoming increasingly difficult to identify what\u2019s real and fake.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help, Katz said, that algorithms create \u201cecho chambers\u201d of opinions, where the loudest opinions are most heard and absorbed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very small number of people who hold the extremes, but that\u2019s another thing that social media distorts,\u201d Katz said. \u201cIt makes the groups that are on the far ends of an issue look much larger and much scarier than they would otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Katz said she sees the phenomenon on college campuses, \u201cit\u2019s not showing where people are finding common ground, where they\u2019re figuring out how they talk about hard things.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, the morning after Kirk\u2019s fatal shooting, Katz walked into her civil discourse and communication class and was surprised to hear from her students that not one of their other professors had acknowledged what had happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in classes in social psychology, and other topics that should be related, where it should come up, no one wanted to touch (the topic),\u201d Katz said.<\/p>\n

But she made sure her students didn\u2019t shy away.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what we did in that class \u2014 which had students who are leftists and a young man who would come in in a MAGA hat \u2014 we got to things that we could all agree were true. And then we realized that whatever we build on top of that, we had a shared space,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Or Initiative, Katz said, \u201cis an effort to treat tech like a tool that we can leverage and use as a springboard to help motivate young people to want to jump in. How do we do that in ways that help to kind of glitch the matrix?\u201d<\/p>\n

Classrooms<\/p>\n

\u201cGlitching the matrix\u201d is a top-down effort, Katz said, that begins with giving educators the tools to facilitate civil discourse within their classrooms.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike students, educators view classrooms as a precious space for young people to engage in difficult issues,\u201d the researchers said in their report. \u201cBut they also described feeling pressured to spend time meeting academic standards, to respect a wide range of family beliefs, and to avoid becoming the next viral controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMany teachers tried to create \u2018small sanctuaries\u2019 within these constraints with episodic lessons that allow for reflection and dialogue. Without institutional backing and coherent curricular support, these efforts are isolated and fragile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Katz said she hopes the initiative can create opportunities for educators to regularly convene, where they can troubleshoot how to best facilitate civil discourse in their classrooms, and \u201ceventually develop a research-based protocol\u201d to help with that undertaking.<\/p>\n

As part of the report, the Or Initiative\u2019s team interviewed educators and reviewed 84 organizations and curriculum models to identify ways learning could be improved.<\/p>\n

Three key themes emerged: Students are learning and discussing polarizing topics in online spaces without support from adults; digital literacy curricula emphasize the risks of online engagement, but fail to recognize opportunities to spark meaningful discourse; there are opportunities for \u201ccreating and implementing AI tools that scaffold civil discourse skills.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is coming into classrooms. We can yell, scream about that,\u201d Katz said, \u201cor we can build more affirmative models of how that doesn\u2019t derail the learning kids need to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have all the answers,\u201d Katz said. \u201cBut we want to build with students, and we want to refine and test and evaluate it until we know we\u2019ve really got something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of that work begins with an inaugural fellowship where four Civil Discourse Accelerator Fellows\u00a0<\/a>will be given up to $50,000 over two years to \u201cdevelop digital and AI-driven technologies,\u201d Katz said, to integrate with Or Initiative\u2019s evolving curricula.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, to me, the stakes are unacceptable,\u201d Katz said. \u201cIf we fail to act, we are leaving young people alone in algorithmically engineered environments that are not teaching them how to think about any issues with matter, and it\u2019s completely degrading their ability to trust each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students are stuck in a modern catch-22 situation, a new national research report by the Chapman University-based Or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,17700,15,100,171,611,4568,136],"class_list":["post-169454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-chapman-university","tag-education","tag-news","tag-orange","tag-orange-county","tag-social-media","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}