In the lead-up to last week’s election, Joe Emery’s AP Government class at Bellows Free Academy in Fairfax, Vt., held its own.
Two students were nominated to be the school’s Republican and Democratic nominees to the presidency. The students picked campaign staff and policy teams, crafted platforms, created websites and got hashtags trending. They even held a debate, moderated by Taylor Dobbs, a former reporter for VPR who has also written for Seven Days and VtDigger.
Emery has held these mock elections every other year. He wants his students to understand the vexation of political operatives who can’t get their message to resonate at the ballot box.
“If they can understand that frustration, as a politician, maybe moving forward as a voter — and as a citizen — they’ll take a little bit longer to understand the issues in front of them and what they’re voting for,” he said.
Discussing current events in the classroom is a balancing act for educators, who must engage students without allowing the chaos and rancor of present-day politics to poison the conversation.
But many of Vermont’s teachers nevertheless leaned into the moment, using the election to teach their students lessons in the practical realities of campaigns, to explore the history of our electoral systems and to practice debating with civility.
In Fairfax, the students did not role-play as Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump, but instead created personas and policy proposals that aligned with their own beliefs while falling somewhere within the ideological spectrum of their party.
Emery thinks students have more buy-in if their platforms are truly their own, but they also had to think more deeply about the policies they’d like to see enacted. The liberal candidate wound up getting into the nitty-gritty of the Green New Deal, for example, while the conservative one adopted a platform calling for more nuclear energy.
As in the real-life presidential election of 2016, BFA’s Republican candidate won the Electoral College vote despite losing the popular vote. (The electoral map was drawn using advisories, or homerooms.) One campaign even had a few Instagram posts taken down because it was reported for spreading misinformation.
“Talking about an election and the election cycle really touches on a lot of things, of how our political system works for good — and for ill,” Emery said.
In South Burlington, social studies teacher Krista Huling prompted her students to think about the Electoral College, and asked them to research its history and impact so they could argue whether they believed it was fair.
“Students were all over the map about whether that was fair or not. The ones that thought it was unfair, really grabbed on to the fact that popular vote should really be a fair way to elect a president, while other students were like, well, it’s tradition, it’s what we’ve done. It weighs states of different sizes,” she said.
In the days following the election, as the country tallied the votes, Huling asked her students to calculate possible paths to victory for both sides, depending on the electoral votes left outstanding.
To impress upon her students that voting does matter — even in states that reliably vote blue or red in presidential elections — Huling had them explore the way in which states have changed how they vote over time. And she reminded students that down-ballot races, like House Speaker Mitzi Johnson’s unsuccessful reelection bid, are often decided by just a handful of votes in Vermont.
All of Huling’s students were too young to vote this year, and for some, that was disheartening. But their teacher reminded them that the skills they hone now in research and persuasion can serve now — and later.
“I just encourage my students to be better than politicians. Make sure that you are not just making claims, and that you have evidence and that you recognize where the bias is,” she said.
At U-32 in East Montpelier, social studies teacher Geoff Green asked his students to reflect on the historic moment and their place within it, and used his classroom to let students talk and process through their emotions.
Students generally said they were disgusted by the venomous nature of today’s political debates. Many expressed fear about Trump’s rhetoric, and its impact on marginalized communities. But some spoke in favor of the outgoing president, and Green says he was struck by his students’ ability to talk, with curiosity and empathy, to one another about their deeply divergent points of view.
“It felt humanizing,” he said. “Like, you could see this other person as, like, a human being too, who had thoughts and feelings and emotions just as much as you did.”