Video: New workshops help Ohio State faculty and staff navigate new state laws

The Ohio State University’s Center for Ethics and Human Values has been hard at work helping faculty and staff prepare to teach in ways that are consistent with the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, also known as Senate Bill 1.

CEHV is offering workshops for general audiences, as well as ones designed to meet the needs of particular units and colleges. In a new interview, Kathryn Joyce, CEHV Civil Discourse program director, and Aaron Yarmel, CEHV associate director, explain what the workshops offer and how they hope faculty and staff can benefit.

“We’ve been teaching courses on civil discourse for the past few years, and so we have the Civil Discourse Framework that we use, and it's worked really well for us,” Joyce said. “Then, when SB1 was enacted, there was new guidance around intellectual diversity and how that should play out in the classroom. We found that these tools that we have already been using really aligned with the goals of SB1 in encouraging critical thinking, allowing students to express opinions and test ideas.”

The workshops offer tips that are firmly grounded in CEHV’s 4Cs of Civil Discourse: be Curious, be Charitable, be Conscientious, be Constructive. This framework has been used by thousands of people within and outside of Ohio State through workshops, online training programs, courses, and facilitated dialogues. 

When it comes to the classroom, SB1 is an opportunity to lean more heavily on the civil discourse work that CEHV has already been doing rather than inventing something new. 

“I think it’s really important to emphasize that if nobody had been doing work on civil discourse at our university, we would be in a difficult situation because we would need to invent new tools and new approaches to respond to some of the things within SB1,” Yarmel said. “But because of the work that CEHV has been doing for years in developing the 4 Cs – in formulating it, in exploring its nuances and working out how to apply it in different contexts – the only thing we need to do is to lean back on our traditions.”

In addition to the trainings, CEHV created a downloadable resource for faculty currently available on the Listen. Learn. Discuss. platform for tips on facilitative civil discourse in the classroom after Senate Bill 1.