SAGE

While that might sound a tad daunting, this recipe is doable, as CQ Press author Ken Collier and his co-authors and colleagues from Stephen F. Austin State University, Steven Galatas and Julie Harrelson-Stephens, demonstrate in both their political science classrooms and in their best-selling textbook Lone Star Politics: Tradition and Transformation in Texas, now in its sixth edition. Their suggestions for teaching politics in Texas could be generalized as "embrace the diversity." "I open the semester," Collier tells us, "by telling students that one of the obligations of being a citizen is understanding your fellow citizens. One analogy I use, because I have student athletes in my class, is to say, 'OK, so before you play somebody, what do you do?' They say, 'Well, you watch tape, right?' And I say, 'So you're always studying the other side, and that's to understand the other side, so even if it's to counter what they do, you need to understand the other side.'" It helps that by talking Texas, and not Trump, that the automatic barriers against listening to the other side— in what the authors agree is a very polarized place—don't fly up. "So if I can start talking about an issue without referencing Donald Trump," Galatas says, "I don't drag them into the Take a state that has produced both a Ted Cruz and a Beto O'Rourke, add a geographic immensity in which it takes 10 hours to drive from El Paso to Houston, then top with a host of changing ethnic, political, and economic demographics. Now teach Texas politics. partisan bickering as quickly as I would otherwise. If I start talking about some state policy, and I don't mention Trump or the national Democrats or whatever, they're sitting there going, 'OK, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this,' and so then they have to think independently." Or as Collier puts it, "I think our politics is just different enough that the students will sometimes give it a chance. Many of them don't want to study politics now because it's contentious, because it's ugly, and they feel like studying politics is like studying some horrible party history that's just going to leave them depressed. The further I can get them from all of that, the better." The authors' remit, of course, is larger than merely teaching politics, as the ...[O]ne of the obligations of being a citizen is understanding your fellow citizens... A Texas Recipe for Making Wiser Citizens Ken Collier and Steven Galatas, both from Stephen F. Austin State University, discuss their approach to teaching politics in Texas. Texas Politics 6

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