Travis' Question

Something that I constantly struggle with as a teacher revolves around one important question, a question I personally feel (in my limited experience) is one of the most important for us as educators to ask ourselves. What is the role of partisanship in the classroom. All too often, either implicitly or explicitly, we are expected to be unbiased in our teaching, content, and classroom. In chapter one of Martin’s book see writes, “This book is limited by where I stand in the social scientific argument presented earlier and by my belief that social science research cannot be value-neutral” (p. 17). This past week during teaching I showed a clip of a speech presented by Barack Obama and was asked by a student “Could we watch anybody but him?” In reference to not wanting to hear him for political reasons. Although my questions do not link directly to organizational communication (or maybe it does) and reasearch. What is partisanship’s role in the classroom? Is there a place for partisanship? And how do we tell our students the importance of politics in the classroom in order to become better democratic citizens?