Despite its importance for students' learning, engaging students in dialogic discussions, especially about controversial, justice-oriented topics, can be difficult for U.S. teachers to enact due to current political constraints. In this study, we explore how three middle school teachers engaged their students in curriculum-embedded discussions on a controversial topic and highlight their deployment of talk moves to "invoke or extend discussions," "assert authority," and "interrogate." Using the Low-Inference Discourse Observation tool, we also identify how teachers used specific talk moves for each of these purposes during discussions. Our work underscores how teacher talk moves, coded along a spectrum of dialogicity in "form," can "function" differently in the context of dialogic discussions about controversial topics.