Danielle Corple

Free Speech, Psychological Safety, or a Third Way?: Reflections on the CACE Civil Discourse Seminar

Danielle Corple, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communication

I struggle with discourse about civil discourse. Often, these conversations parallel our increasingly polarized world and ways of thinking– free speech, implicitly coded as “red,” is pitted against psychological safety, coded as “blue.” Once again, we have two categories that capture little of the nuance that is life, let alone the especially messy process that is learning. As professors, many of us are hungry for an approach to civil discourse in our classrooms that goes beyond binaries– that recognizes how learning not only requires many perspectives, but that growth requires getting it wrong. Meanwhile, we don’t want a form of free speech that can wound students.

Thankfully, the CACE seminar gave faculty a chance to engage these conversations with complexity and Christian charity. While most of us want to hold together freedom and safety, it’s easier said than done. After the seminar, I continue to reflect on the how– how do we foster intellectual freedom and safety in the classroom?

This is where bell hooks helps me. bell hooks, the renowned feminist pedagogue, is less interested in the dichotomy between free speech and safety, and far more interested in community. In her book, Teaching to Transgress, she says:

“Working with a critical pedagogy based on my understanding of [Paulo] Freire’s teaching, I enter the classroom with the assumption that we must build ‘community’ in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor. Rather than focusing on issues of safety, I think that a feeling of community creates a sense that there is shared commitment and a common good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn– to receive actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity to live more fully in the world.” (1994, p. 40)

This should be right up our alley at a Christian liberal arts college. Not only do our students share a desire to learn, they share a desire for growing themselves– for becoming more like Christ. They also share a commitment to caring for each other, to actually building community. These are the perfect ingredients for helping students grapple with difficult topics.

If we have the ingredients, how do we stir them together, cook with them? According to hooks, teachers must seek to draw out the individual voices of students, especially those whose backgrounds and perspectives are underrepresented. Importantly, the learning community hooks describes is not homogenous; it’s intentionally multicultural. Drawing out these voices is drawing out different lived experiences and ways of seeing the world.

hooks also pushes professors to be vulnerable, arguing that student “empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (p. 21). I’m left thinking, perhaps one of the best ways to help students engage difficult ideas is to share about our own shortcomings, to admit we haven’t arrived, and acknowledge our need to keep learning.

These practices– embracing our shared values, platforming individual voices, modeling humility and vulnerability–  they cultivate the learning community hooks describes. If we follow her reframing, we may find ourselves not only having those hard conversations but experiencing community instead of another ‘civil discourse’ debate.