Leadership

Principal Investigator

Diana Hess is the Principal Investigator for The Discussion Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER). As Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education and faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Hess is deeply committed to working with teachers to improve the quality of democratic education in schools.

Since 1997, she has been researching how teachers engage their students in discussions of highly controversial political and constitutional issues, and what impact this approach to civic education has on what young people learn. Her first book on this topic, Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion won the National Council for the Social Studies Exemplary Research Award in 2009. Her most recent book, The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education, co-authored with Paula McAvoy, won the American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award in 2016 and the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2017. Also in 2017, Dean Hess was recognized by the National Council on Social Studies with Grambs Distinguished Career Award for Research. With her deep expertise in discussion pedagogy, Dean Hess has guided the project’s research on discussion and the design and implementation of the professional learning series.

Hess earned her PhD from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Washington–Seattle with extensive coursework in educational policy and law and holds a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is based in Madison, Wisconsin.