An Ed School panel highlighted the critical role schools can play in helping students learn to listen to different perspectives and have conversations across divides in a webinar on Thursday.

“Schools are one of the places where people with diverse perspectives are often together,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer on education. “Other settings are often not diverse, or at least they’re contained or bounded in ways that schools are not … Schools can be laboratories of democracy.”

Led by Meira Levinson, Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society, the panel made the case for schools as ideal settings for lessons in compromise and civil disagreement.

“Schools are socializing agents,” said Carlton Green, an assistant clinical professor and co-director of Intergroup Dialogue Training Center at the University of Maryland. “That is where we learn some of the ethic around how to be in community with other people, especially people who are different from us.”

Educators help students learn interpersonal skills and how to navigate conflict, the panelists noted, fostering their social and emotional development. Although that work has been part of education for decades, the concept of “social-emotional learning” has recently come under attack by some conservative activists — and parents — who insist that teachers should focus strictly on academic learning.

Kara Pranikoff, an education consultant and coach, pushed back on that idea.

“We have this tendency to say that social-emotional learning is one thing, and academic learning is another thing,” said Pranikoff. “But we cannot separate our social-emotional selves from our academic selves. It’s just not possible, even if people report that it is. It’s not part of being a human. They go hand in hand.”

As microcosms of society, schools experience their own versions of national debates over issues such as religion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration, creating third-rail moments for teachers, the panelists said.

“There are things that you can say that are going to trigger a parent,” Weissbourd said. “Without support from your administration, these conversations become very difficult.”

But those conversations are important, said Weissbourd, who directs the Ed School program Making Caring Common, which provides resources for families and educators to help children develop empathy and other emotional capacities.

“It’s important to be able to mend fractures and for people to get along,” said Weissbourd. “But we want to have these conversations because we really believe in principles of human rights, justice, inclusion, and fairness. Part of the work, too, is how do you have conversations in ways that advance those principles?”

Educators should rise to their daily challenges by communicating with parents and building support from school administrators, Green said.

“I’d say to parents, ‘I think you want me to help your child be a good human, right?’ and if you have questions about me helping your child to be a good human in the context of the other little humans, I’m open to that, but that’s what I’m committed to doing,” said Green. “We are educating good humans here.”