{"id":92177,"date":"2019-10-15T18:46:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T18:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/in-covering-impeachment-teachers-focus-on-historical-significance\/"},"modified":"2019-10-15T18:46:32","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T18:46:32","slug":"in-covering-impeachment-teachers-focus-on-historical-significance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/in-covering-impeachment-teachers-focus-on-historical-significance\/","title":{"rendered":"In covering impeachment, teachers focus on historical significance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Teachers
Teachers say they are emphasizing the historical significance in discussing impeachment in the classroom.<\/span>Adobe stock<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The timing of the impeachment inquiry \u2013 a few weeks after schools started their fall semesters in La Plata County \u2013 didn\u2019t exactly give political science teachers and other educators the ability to build impeachment studies into their curriculums.<\/p>\n

With the frequent coverage of the impeachment inquiry dominating news cycles, teachers and professors had to abruptly adjust their syllabuses to accommodate the questions and comments their students had about the topic. Paul DeBell, a political science professor at Fort Lewis College, said that \u201cnobody could have added this to their course plans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one of those instances that happen in social sciences and political science when the world comes to your classroom,\u201d DeBell said. \u201cIt\u2019s really about allowing students to form their own opinions and raise things that concern or confuse them.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeBell teaches five different political science classes, and he views his role as laying out the most basic facts for his students because there are a lot of misunderstandings about impeachment and how the process works.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people hear \u2018impeachment\u2019 and have a lot of assumptions and a lot of really strong views on it, but there is actually a written-down portion in the Constitution that tells you exactly what the process is and what it\u2019s not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Students are curious about the topic, and when they hear varying messages from news sources, it can get \u201cheated,\u201d DeBell said, so he focuses on highlighting that it is a \u201chistoric moment, and it\u2019s important for us as citizens to be engaged and thinking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jessica McCallum, an 11th grade teacher at Animas High School, said she takes different approaches to teaching impeachment depending on if students are learning journalism or humanities, which is a combination of social studies and language arts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make sure that my journalism students are seeing the profound historic moment of journalism that we are living in because this is one of the biggest stories that we have had to cover in our time,\u201d McCallum said.<\/p>\n

While McCallum focuses on the media side of impeachment with her journalism students, in her humanities class, she fuses American political ideology on the social studies side, and rhetoric on the language arts side, to discuss the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith impeachment populating the news feeds, we can\u2019t not look at it,\u201d she said. \u201cWe look at the way that partisans are interpreting the same information and the relationship that that has with bias and persuasion and the rhetorical climate of the news.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCallum said it is interesting for her to be able to discuss impeachment with her students because the world around them has never been so \u201cpartisan and divided\u201d in their lifetimes.<\/p>\n

DeBell said he works to ensure his students feel comfortable asking questions about impeachment and do not feel judged, but that can be difficult given the partisan nature of the topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith these polarizing issues, as soon as you hear the word \u2018impeachment,\u2019 our partisan brains activate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

DeBell likened the discussions he is having now about impeachment to last year\u2019s Brett Kavanaugh hearings, in that both topics are \u201cpervasive and there wasn\u2019t a student not bringing it up.\u201d Adjusting lesson plans to account for current events happens frequently, he said.<\/p>\n

Student engagement on current events is usually high, but McCallum found that impeachment, despite its prominence in the news, isn\u2019t taking her students\u2019 focus away from issues that they have always been passionate about, like school violence and climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very interesting time to be studying U.S. history with young people,\u201d McCallum said.<\/p>\n

Ayelet Sheffey is a student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students are curious about topic, but mixed messages can become \u2018heated\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5816,5794,5736,5735,5741,5763],"tags":[1137,155,29,265],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-92177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-donald-trump","category-education","category-local-news","category-news","category-newsletter","category-politics","tag-donald-trump","tag-education","tag-newsletter","tag-politics"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92177"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=92177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}