The Secret Ingredient In Civic Dialogue Education

Want students to engage effectively across diverse viewpoints? First, respect their privacy.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

Hollis Robbins is pulling no punches.

Writing for The Chronicle and her newsletter, Anecdotal Value¹, Robbins strikes pointed jabs at trendy civic dialogue initiatives that coerce students to express personal views before giving them adequate time and space—not to mention meaningful habits of mind—to develop them in the first place.

Perhaps worse, ed tech is evolving to record, analyze, influence, and report on students’ views, contributing to a burgeoning dossier of interior states that student privacy regulations leave vulnerable to exploitation while habituating students to doublespeak.

Robbins interrogates:

In the race to increase “open” inquiry, what happened to privacy? Why is there an assumption that everything that comes out of students’ mouths is what they “believe”? Why should students disclose their positions on controversial topics? When did all this become normal?

Not only do I share her critiques—I’m also building a privacy-forward teaching culture that resists “treat[ing] students’ beliefs as data to be captured and managed rather than as private, provisional works in progress.”

Instead, one of the questions in my privacy pedagogy course analysis exercise is

“what learning activities are (or can be) for students unto themselves?”

—in other words, where in this course is learning more important than monitoring, recording, and assessing student behavior?

Intellectual privacy—freedom from actual or perceived interference and monitoring when engaged in the activities of the mind—is both a means to open inquiry and civic dialogue, and an end unto itself. Read on for resources to integrate intellectual privacy into your teaching and learning design through a privacy pedagogy practice.

Thawing the Campus Chilling Effect: An Introduction to Privacy Pedagogy

Are you concerned about the quality and authenticity of student engagement in your courses and on campus?

You’re not alone. Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Heterodox Academy (HxA), and Knight Foundation have tracked a historic retreat² from open inquiry and free expression at colleges and universities. Many institutions are launching “civics centers” to foster opportunities for dialogue across differences, where a primary focus is on equipping students with skills and intellectual virtues for expressing and discussing their ideas.

This program takes a different—complementary—approach, by considering another prerequisite of free expression: intellectual privacy.

In order to tune into and refine their own thinking, and decide what thoughts to share and how to express them, students must be free from intrusive monitoring, manipulation, and interference while they are engaging with ideas—both their own and others’.

Students must also trust in the collective privacy and confidentiality of their learning environments to overcome the legitimate fear that a single errant utterance or Devil’s advocate position could be broadcast out-of-context online or reported to a campus bias bureaucracy.³

Privacy addresses universal human concerns about how we are perceived by others, the risks of reputational harm, and the ability to make-up our own minds—and change them in the future. Absent conditions of meaningful intellectual privacy, students will succumb to the chilling effect and seek the self-preservation of self-censorship. And while all people share privacy interests and experience privacy harms, members of minoritized or otherwise vulnerable communities experience those harms disproportionately—and self-censor at greater rates.

Threats to student privacy abound⁴—and many of them are admittedly beyond the control of individual instructors. But we’re big believers in small moves: practical steps that we can take in our own classrooms to foster a grassroots teaching and learning culture committed to intellectual privacy as a prerequisite for open inquiry and free expression.

This guidebook introduces the theory and practice of privacy pedagogy⁵—“teaching about privacy while also teaching with our privacy principles.” Through a series of reflections, readings, and guided learning design exercises, you will achieve fluency in discussing the critical role of intellectual privacy in learning, inquiry, and expression, and effectively integrate intellectual privacy into the content and culture of your coursework.

Privacy—reprieve from being monitored, manipulated, interfered with, or exposed to undue scrutiny—is the secret ingredient in a robust campus climate for open inquiry and free expression. Privacy Pedagogy for Open Inquiry and Student Expression addresses privacy as the wellspring of speech, and an antidote to self-censorship and the chilling effect. Together, we’ll bring privacy considerations out of the shadows and to the forefront of discussions about how to foster healthy environments for scholarly inquiry and deliberation—in our classrooms, and our academic communities.

Portions of this post are excerpted from Privacy Pedagogy for Open Inquiry and Student Expression: A Faculty Development Guidebook. This first-of-its-kind guidebook for integrating intellectual privacy considerations in learning design is open-licensed and free to adopt or adapt. Faculty development materials are mirrored on a program guide, including a one-hour abridged workshop version. Corrections, suggestions, and inquiries are welcome to Sarah at smh767@psu.edu.

1. Hat tip to Martha McCaughey for sharing Robbins’s newsletter with me.

2. Johanna Alonso, “Students Report Less Tolerance for Controversial Speakers,” Inside Higher Ed, September 9, 2025; FIRE, “FIRE Poll: 90% of undergrads believe words can be violence even after killing of Charlie Kirk,” December 2, 2025; FIRE, “REPORT: Faculty members more likely to self-censor today than during McCarthy era,” February 28, 2023.

3. Shiri Spitz Siddiqi, “Attack data show the vibe shift has officially arrived on campus,” Free the Inquiry, August 14, 2025; Megan Zahneis, “The Real Source of Self-Censorship,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 22, 2023.

4. Ariel Fox Johnson et al., “Paying Twice to Learn: How Higher Education Students May Be Forced to Sacrifice Privacy for Digital Learning Tools,” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, November 19, 2024; Lindsay Weinberg, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).

5. Lindsey Wharton, Liz Dunne, and Adam Beauchamp, “Privacy Pedagogy: Aligning Privacy Advocacy with Course Design Standards,” in Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases, ed. S. Hartman-Caverly and A. Chisholm (ACRL, 2023), 283-301; Sarah Hartman-Caverly, “What is privacy pedagogy for? Situating privacy in the purpose of the university,” Information and Learning Sciences 125, no. 5-6 (2025): 383-400. 10.1108/ILS-06-2024-0073 [open access postprint].