If you are ready to sign-up for a Spring 2026 D Team Community Conversation, click here and it will take you to the registration form. If you’d like to learn more, read on below…
You might have heard that this year — 2026 — is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You might also be concerned about the state of our country — 3 out of 4 Americans are dissatisfied with its direction.
Perhaps you are looking for a way to both express and explore those concerns while also reflecting on the trajectory of American history in this anniversary year. How can we both celebrate the progress we have made (and the world has made) while also examining the progress we still have yet to achieve?
If so, you might be interested in participating in the Deliberative Forum Series on American Values being hosted by Davidson College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The series aims to engage diverse public audiences with a nuanced and complex understanding of our nation’s history and the underlying principles, traditions, and stories on which our country was founded.
The series is organized around a series of four forums over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year. Each forum will consist of an Expert Roundtable that will explore two particular values and connect them to current events and issues facing the American public. The roundtables will be followed by Community Conversations by higher education institutions and other organizations across North Carolina and beyond.
The D Team Community Conversations hosted by Davidson College will follow a format similar to the D Teams it has been organizing for the past five years. They will be held in the week or two after each forum, and students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members can sign up for meetings that will be held during the day or in the evening on both weekdays and weekends. You can sign-up for these conversations here; the registration deadline to register is January 30.
For those unable to join a D Team Community Conversations, we will also be hosting a single Community Conversation on the same topic as the first Expert Roundtable on February 25 at 7 pm in the 900 Room. This will be an opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and community members to discuss the issues covered by the roundtable’s panelists, guided by DCI facilitators. You can register to attend this conversation here.
The first American Values Deliberative Forum was hosted at Davidson College in the fall and focused on Balancing Equality and Unity: The Case of Immigration and Citizenship, while the second American Values Deliberative Forum, hosted at UNC Chapel Hill also in the fall, explored the topic of Balancing Self-Government and National Stability: The Case of Presidents, Institutions, and the People.”
Our third American Values Deliberative Forum topic is Balancing Liberty and General Welfare: The Case of Social Safety Nets. The associated Expert Roundtable will be held on February 11th at Davidson College. You can learn more about this Roundtable and the participating panelists here. The fourth American Values Deliberative Forum topic will focus on Justice and the Rule of Law: The Case of Constitutional Rights. This forum will be held on March 24 at Duke University, broadcasted online, and streamed live at a watch party at the Davidson College. More information about it will be coming soon.
This innovative two-stage process is designed to connect expert knowledge with diverse public audiences. Scholars with diverse backgrounds and divergent interpretations of the topics at hand will be invited to the Expert Roundtables to ensure a wide range of perspectives is represented. They will share and discuss their perspectives on the values in question (e.g., unity and equality) and how they relate to the contemporary issue in focus (e.g. immigration and citizenship).
Then the Community Conversations will provide the public with the opportunity to share their own views on these topics, building on, contesting, or transcending the experts’ perspectives. A Deliberation Guide will be provided in advance of the forum to provide everyone with some baseline information about the topics and different perspectives on them. This process hopefully will help us break out of tendencies towards our selective amnesia so that we engage with the full range of American voices and how we each, individually and collectively, understand what our values are and how they are relevant to our current challenges as a nation.
To learn how your organization might host its own Community Conversation following one or more of the Expert Roundtables, you are welcome to watch this webinar that will introduce the forum series and map out a range of different ways to get involved.
To learn more about the D Team experience more generally, check out this page.
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