Maryam Zoweil, a first-year student in the McCombs Canfield Business Honors Program, will lead the session “Civics by Students, for Students: Depolarizing via Discourse” at this year’s SXSW EDU conference on March 5. Since then, she’s explored how students can become more civically engaged, including co-authoring the study “The Impact of Discourse-Based Learning on Student Civic Engagement, Polarization, and Topic Comprehension,” which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences in 2024. Alongside study co-author Isabel Epistelomogi, a student from the University of Southern California, Zoweil will present the study’s findings and provide actionable practices to educators and students at SXSW EDU.