Controversial Issues

Educators across Europe can benefit from a new online training programme to explore the capacity of social media to polarise public debate and develop their skills in teaching quality online discussion.

“Controversial issues” is part of a series of online courses on digital citizenship education developed in close co-operation with the Council of Europe.

The course explores the following questions:

• What are controversial issues and why is it important to teach about controversial issues in digital media at school?
• How to approach controversial issues in the digital environment
• How to integrate teaching to address controversy into your everyday practice.

Through this online course, educators will have the opportunity to work together with fellow professionals on real-life examples to learn how to encourage their learners to reflect more critically on the way controversial content is constructed on the internet and in social media, and involve them in improving their online discussion skills.

Here is a short teaser:

The term “controversial issue” is used in different ways in different places. However, the differences tend not to be significant; they seem to represent different variations of the same general definition. In its publication “Teaching controversial issues”, the Council of Europe defines them as: “issues which arouse strong feelings and divide opinion in communities and society”.

So there are two key elements in the concept of a controversial issue:

1. The capacity of the issue to arouse strong emotions in citizens – such as feelings of anger or offence, leading to negative attitudes towards people with opposing views, and sometimes even to violence and aggression.
2. The capacity of the issue to divide citizens from one another – causing conflict and divisions within communities and wider society, and sometimes within families, too.

Now, try to find the spheres of life where the controversial issues are possible:

Enroll for the course here