Americans are struggling to talk across political divides, but a classroom at Kalamazoo College recently became a laboratory for civil discourse. Political Science Associate Professor Justin Berry led what he describes as the best class he’s had the privilege of teaching: a senior seminar on political polarization that challenged students not just to study the problem but to actively engage with it.
“I teach a lot of the bigger kinds of classes—intro classes—on Congress and the presidency,” Berry said. “This was my first opportunity to teach a seminar-oriented class, and I was excited about the chance to design something new. I picked a topic that I thought was pertinent to what they’ve learned over their time in political science. It’s a topic that’s particularly relevant to the democracy they’re participating in today.”
Berry designed the course to give students the tools and experiences they need to model what he calls civil disagreement. Over the term, students examined the forces driving political polarization in the United States, from widening divides among elected officials and the public to the ways media and social media reinforce differences. They analyzed the most recent election cycle using various sources, and through dialogue and interviews, they practiced ways to communicate across these differences.
“I wanted to give them the space and the tools to engage in difficult conversations,” he said. “I wanted them to fundamentally disagree on ideas, concepts and values, and yet do so in a constructive, civil way, which I think is absent from our politics today.”
Berry also noted the delicate balance between creating a sense of safety while fostering genuine disagreement in a course of this nature.
“I want to engender an environment that’s intellectually, politically and socially safe, but at the same time, I don’t want it to be so safe that people aren’t actually sharing their true beliefs,” he said. “If everybody’s feeling happy and comfortable, we’re probably not engaging in a real political discussion because politics is conflictual.”
The class was able to achieve that balance, Berry said.
“There was enough overlap, commonality and trust in one another for us to engage in a meaningful conversation on a weekly basis,” Berry said. “Yet there was also enough disagreement to lead to a meaningful exchange. A student would have a strong opinion, attitude or concept, and people would push back and give different perspectives. I heard students say time and again that in their discussions, they changed an attitude or an opinion toward something and I thought that was great. That’s real conversation.”
The Assignment That Changed Perspectives
The centerpiece of the course was an intentional challenge: students had to interview someone with drastically different political views and write about their conversation. For many students, this meant stepping far outside their comfort zones. What they discovered often surprised them.
Lyrica Gee ’26 spoke with her uncle in Florida, whose politics differed sharply from her father’s despite their similar upbringings.
“I had gone home with some of the questions that we’ve been asking in class,” she said. “I talked to my dad about it and heard some of his answers about the way he was raised by his parents and their ideological lenses. Then, going into that interview with his brother, who ended up with a totally different political perspective, it was interesting to see how such a similar background landed them in these different situations.”
Libby McFarlen ’26 emphasized the humanizing effect of the face-to-face conversation she had.
“It’s so much easier to see what people think and dismiss it when it’s online,” she said. “But when you’re actually speaking to someone face-to-face, it personalizes those opinions. You realize that your opinions about people who disagree with you are attached to a real person, not to a statistic or someone on the other side of a phone screen.”
Berry mentioned two outcomes from the project that were especially noteworthy to him.
“I had one student who interviewed her dad, and she valued the experience so much that she wants to do it with all of her family members and record the conversations to trace her family’s political story,” he said. “I also had some students who assumed those they interviewed had very different beliefs, only to find false polarization once they had the conversation. Sometimes our assumptions are just false, and these things that we think divide us are our own misperceptions.”
Student-Led Learning Creates Community
For Reagan Woods ’26, the seminar did more than explore polarization; it gave students practical ways to understand and challenge it.
“Polarization in past political science courses has been an undergirding theme that doesn’t get talked about,” she said. “It’s almost like the boogeyman—this unnamed force that drives our political differences and our current political economy. I like that we have a course where we can address it head-on and say, ‘This is what this is. Let’s name it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s dissect it.’”
The seminar’s structure was deliberately collaborative. Rather than traditional lectures, students led discussions, preparing activities and questions to engage their peers with weekly readings on topics such as media, geographic, and identity-based polarization. Woods described these readings as tools that could be kept in a tool belt, ready to use for class discussions, as well as outside the classroom.
“We have this tool belt full of theories, so what do we do with it now,” she asked. “Do we tackle polarization? Is this a problem we can fix? And while there is no one answer to that, I think it still got the gears turning. We can ask, ‘Is polarization an inevitable problem?’ Dr. Berry also mentioned that we’ve been more polarized before when we fought the Civil War and during the revolution, but we survived as a nation. This is not a hopeless cause, which I think was a hopeful message.”
Hollis Masterson ’26, who is pursuing majors in political science and history, appreciated how the seminar synthesized his undergraduate work.
“The interview assignment and leading class discussions were probably the most important to the classroom experience,” he said. “They offered a great sense of community and understanding among us about where our politics lie, our backgrounds, and that variability of where we all come from.”
Berry said the students embraced the student-led process.
“One thing I found really special about the class was how kind and gracious they were with one another,” he said. “In today’s world of social media and our phones, more often I’ll walk into a classroom, and students won’t be engaging with each other. But because they were developing the lesson plan, I would walk into class, and no one was on their phones—they’d be chatting about the reading they’d done. They posted questions on social media to poll other K students about their attitudes toward topics like political violence, and then they brought up the results in class. We would talk about the different responses in the community, so the conversations didn’t just end in the class; they kept flowing. That, for me, is a rare occurrence.”
The student-led approach created unexpected benefits. Masterson noted that the class brought together political science majors who had rarely shared a classroom before their senior year.
“It became this slow development of a community,” he said. “I wish we could have started this cohort sooner, but having the opportunity to tie everything together as a group made this one of the most valuable experiences of my education.”
From Skeptic to Scholar
Maddie Hanulcik ’26 had an experience with the course that reflects the transformative power it had.
“I was excited to take the senior seminar with my cohort, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t excited about the topic,” she said. “We know that polarization exists, so I wondered whether we needed to make a whole class about it.”
Hanulcik’s perspective shifted drastically as the course progressed. What she initially dismissed as obvious became fascinating as she discovered the depth and breadth of polarization’s impact. The transformation was so complete that Hanulcik chose polarization as the focus of her Senior Integrated Project (SIP). Her project examines why Generation Z has significantly lower faith in democracy than Generation X and how the media influences this decline.
“If people don’t believe in democracy, that’s really scary,” Hanulcik said. “Even if a democracy is not functioning the way you want it to, it’s important to change it for the better instead of just abandoning it. We need to have things like civil discourse and a civil society to keep democracy alive.”
Challenging Assumptions
Perhaps the course’s most powerful lesson was how small the actual policy differences could be between opposing sides.
“Despite the fact that ideologically and verbally we have all of these differences, when it comes down to policy, the difference between a moderate Republican and a moderate Democrat is maybe an inch wide,” Gee said. “The difference between voting for one person and voting for the other is sometimes just about how much you dislike the other team.”
Hanulcik, a self-described libertarian, was one of only two non-left-leaning individuals in a class of 20. Initially, that made her feel uneasy, but as class conversations progressed, she found common ground she hadn’t expected.
“People started asking me why I felt the way I did, and after explaining, they said, ‘Oh, I share almost every belief that you have. I just came to it in a different way in my head.’”
The experience helped Hanulcik recognize her own polarization.
“At the beginning of the class, I was polarized against people who were polarized,” she said. “But then I realized I have to have conversations and help them understand the dangers of polarization and what it can lead to.”
She came to see polarization not as a simple left-right divide but as a problem created by extremes on both sides.
“Most individuals here in the U.S. have a similar concept of good or bad,” she said. “Discourse is driven by the extreme ends of both parties, and folks are slowly pulled from the middle. At what point do we lose that extreme dialogue and start communicating with folks in the middle?”
McFarlen captured a common takeaway from the course: people on both sides of the aisle really aren’t as different as they think; they are just shaped by different environments and experiences.
“It doesn’t mean they are your enemies,” she said. “It just means that they think differently, and it’s important to try to understand why people think the way they do.”
Gee reflected on how social media algorithms and sensational journalism exacerbate division for entertainment and profit.
“We’re stoking this fire between the two sides to make it more entertaining,” Gee said. “The entertainment aspect is making us grow further apart because we are sitting in our anger rather than in any critical thinking.”
Beyond the Classroom
The lessons students learned have already begun influencing how they engage with politics beyond the classroom. McFarlen said the course changed how she views political campaigns, making her more attentive to how candidates target different audiences and frame their messages.
For Masterson, the course sparked greater interest in state and local politics, where he said bipartisanship still occasionally exists. He’s applying to master’s programs at Tufts University, George Washington University, and three Australian universities, having fallen in love with Australian politics during study abroad.
Gee, who plans to pursue political journalism in Washington, D.C., sees the course as foundational to her future work.
“I always want to look toward educating others and helping them get through really complex bureaucratic systems,” she said. “Having some of these ideas in my head is going to be very helpful in understanding the complexities within people.”
Hanulcik plans to join the Peace Corps after graduation.
“I love being abroad,” she said. “I like moving all the time, and I like helping people in some way, shape or form. I want to live my life as a life of service.”
A Model for Democratic Citizenship
For Professor Berry, the course represents more than an academic exercise. It’s about preparing students for democratic citizenship in a fractured era.
“We have reached the point where we can no longer discuss politics with those with whom we disagree,” he said. “I wanted to provide students with a venue to grapple with difficult political questions and model how to engage in civil disagreement. It is a vital component of democratic citizenship, and it is not a skill we have effectively modeled for them.”
The results speak for themselves. What began as a required senior seminar became what multiple students described as their favorite class at K. In a moment defined by division, the course offered a glimmer of hope, proof that with curiosity, respect, and honesty, real conversation is not only possible; it’s transformative.
