Societal acceptance of polarized discourse poses challenges for communication professors engaged in teaching ethical public speaking processes to undergraduates. This study explores how creating caring and safe environments for the discussion of difficult dialogues is paramount to creating civil and reasoned discourse that can address issues of moral conflict. It involved one civil public discourse course in which the goal is to instill a deeper understanding of the necessity of ethical public discourse, while engaging students in the process of crafting rhetorical presentations. Students follow certain procedures at the beginning and end of the course, and they must give four speeches as class assignments. Two broad research questions were posed to investigate whether students in this in-context speech course would learn the presentational skills that traditional public speaking courses address and whether students would discover the importance of civil public discourse in promoting reasoned and rational public deliberations. Pre- and post-tests revealed that students vacillate between dualistic and multiplistic thinking, moving from strongly held beliefs about what is right and wrong to basing their decision-making processes on authorities or intuitive feelings about the goodness-of-fit for any expressed position. Results suggest that students' understanding of civil public discourse does increase. Pre- and post-tests for another research question indicated that all students reported an increase in public speaking skills especially in their understanding of ethical public speaking. (Contains 10 references.) (NKA)