In this paper, we describe a program tailored to enable the productive participation to heated discussions as a way to prepare students to be part of a deliberative democracy. We chose to focus on dialogues around societal controversies. In such dialogues, the emotional intensity must be high: the stacks involved divide the society according to different ideologies, ethnicities or systems of values. The societal controversy takes into consideration the fact that this distinction may be blurred. It is risky but is often lauded for being by definition provisions of socio-cognitive conflicts, thereby being the source of possible cognitive gains. However, the emotional aspect of such interactions is seldom being considered as a significant part of learning processes as a facilitating/inhibiting factor, and a fortiori as an end in itself. We conceive of productive group talk as a kind of talk that should include the emotive; Groups should learn to include certain emotive aspects in their discussions as an end in itself, without impairing conceptual learning. Controversial issues are contexts in which such emotive aspects might be learned if these controversies reflect societal issues: such controversies challenge the ways people can live together. Introducing societal controversies in schools provides a two-fold educational goal: learning about the stakes involved in the controversies, and learning to be involved in the controversy in a rich social context, in spite of the antagonistic character of this involvement. We show in this paper that the program led students to participate in deliberative argumentation. We show that this participation prepares students to deliberative democracy.
