DEERFIELD — In an increasingly polarized country, schools have often become battlegrounds for issues relating to free speech and academic freedoms.

As the nation prepares for the presidential election — amid continued fallout from college campus protests this past spring — a nationwide group of secondary school leaders has released an educational framework members believe can help public and private high schools promote intellectual diversity and stimulate productive discourse.

The effort was born out of the Pioneer Valley, as Deerfield Academy Head of School John Austin was the lead author and researcher on “Thriving in a World of Pluralistic Contention: A Framework for Schools.” Austin said in an interview that the challenges of today are not new, but questions about freedom of speech and intellectual diversity are being lost amid the country’s increasing polarization.

“It’s very much a framework designed to meet the challenges of the present moment; the social and political moment we’re living through, which have been incredibly challenging for a wide range of institutions, particularly schools and colleges,” Austin said. “These challenges are not new to schools and colleges, but the moment we’re living through, particularly with the rise of new media, has changed the landscape.”

Over the last year, Austin worked with a wide network of independent secondary school leaders across the country, while also drawing inspiration from 20th-century documents, such as Yale University’s 1974 Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression. The result is a framework centered on three core pillars: commitments to expressive freedom, disciplined non-partisanship, and intellectual diversity.

The pillar of expressive freedom focuses on teaching students how to respond to views that may be unreasonable or upsetting to them, while encouraging them to listen deeply to those points. Non-partisanship provides guidelines for educators on sharing their personal views associated with their curriculum or social events and encourages those educators that faculty opinions can possibly compromise student inquiry and expression. Intellectual diversity emphasizes that schools should be a place where ideas can be respectfully shared in an open dialogue.

“I think healthy institutions will seek to practice all three of them,” Austin said. “It can be applied to any school. … What it tries to do is set forth what we hope are useful ideas and principles that schools can use to assess themselves and study themselves.”

At his own institution, Austin said these pillars are “baked into the school.” However, he noted that there is always work to be done, and that Deerfield Academy has a faculty task force studying the framework and seeing how the school can “deepen the commitments that it articulates.”

“I think my community understands that Deerfield is not going to be issuing statements in response to national and world events, and we have a principled reason for not doing that,” Austin said. “Our faculty has incredibly high professional standards, and they’re very sensitive to the independence and diversity and autonomy of their kids. And I think our faculty shares a commitment to intellectual diversity as well.”

In this politicized moment, Austin said high schools have the unique opportunity to “elevate conversations beyond social media” and help students value open debate, critical thinking and curiosity.

“High schools are shaping the sensibilities of kids during these critical years of growth and maturation,” Austin said. “I think high school is a really unique opportunity to create thoughtful, engaged citizens, who are really respectful of complexity, open-minded, and eager to learn from people who think differently from themselves.”

“Thriving in a World of Pluralistic Contention: A Framework for Schools” can be found on Deerfield Academy’s website at bit.ly/4d7JxCO. The project was funded by a grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation, which seeks to improve secondary education by supporting independent schools in the U.S.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.