The Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Faculty Collaborative consists of faculty from Davidson College and other higher education institutions who are committed to learning and implementing new ways to improve and deepen the quality of their class discussions. These faculty come from a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds to study and discuss deliberative pedagogy methods, share their ideas and questions with one another, and work to embed deliberation in their classrooms. In this special blog series, members of the Collaborative describe and reflect on their experiences developing and teaching their deliberation-involved courses.
I joined the DCI DeeP Collaborative because I wanted to learn about deliberative pedagogy and examine my own discussion-oriented teaching within a supportive community of practice. The course I decided to incorporate deliberation into was a new one for me: an interdisciplinary seminar in the Honors College at UNC Charlotte called Labor, Leisure, Learning, and a Good Life. The course asks students to consider how work, play, rest, and education contribute to a well-lived life, and to examine how U.S. systems and policies influence individuals’ occupational and educational choices.
The course (CTCM 2530) fulfills the Critical Thinking and Communication requirement within UNC Charlotte’s updated general education curriculum and includes a semester-long central inquiry project. We consider CTCM 2530 to be like a “mini-capstone” course for the general education curriculum. It’s particularly important in the Honors College because it helps prepare students for the more intensive capstone projects they’ll undertake as juniors and seniors.
Adding deliberative pedagogy to a course focused on critical thinking and communication seemed like a natural fit from the start, but I didn’t fully realize how well the course content would align with deliberation until we got underway. On the first day of class, I shared the DCI’s key deliberative dispositions as a starting point for our conversation about the type of classroom community we wanted to build. The class reviewed descriptions of the dispositions and each student chose their top two, “voting” via sticky notes. This resulted in a frequency histogram showing which dispositions students initially deemed most important (check out our results in the picture below!). Unsurprisingly, open-mindedness was the top choice.
We discussed what it would take for students to show up with open-mindedness, charity, evidential emphasis, and attentiveness in class this semester. I also asked students to speak up for the dispositions that were less popular and to consider why they might be important as well.
We carried these agreements with us into all of our class discussions over the course of the semester, but particularly into two full-length deliberations on universal basic income and standardized testing policies. As preparation for these deliberations, students split into two groups and collaboratively wrote the content for the deliberation guides, deciding what to include and each providing an overview on one dimension of the issue. I set the deliberation structure and prompts, and ended each deliberation with a short “case study”—a wonderful idea that my DCI partner, Dr. Nick Triplett, tried first and recommended to me.
Overall, the deliberations were an incredibly successful component of our class that helped set the tone for the semester as a whole. When debriefing the first deliberation on Universal Basic Income (UBI), one student shared that she appreciated the opportunity to talk about something substantive with her classmates because “it helped her know them as humans.” This was a theme in our class that echoed the Aikin and Talisse (2019) reading we did early in the semester: students felt that their engagement with their peers’ ideas during the deliberation was a form of care for one another’s cognitive health.
This “cognitive care” spilled over into other forms of generosity with one another as well. For instance, when one student broke her foot and couldn’t get to class, I emailed to see if anyone could help and got an immediate volunteer. Students also offered rides to The Dubois Center, the UNC Charlotte uptown campus to hear from our guest speakers during the semester, and stayed late to hang out with each other and me at 7th Street Market. And perhaps most tellingly, toward the end of the semester the class buzzed with energy and chatter as I attempted to start class each week, a welcome change from a roomful of students scrolling on phones or finishing assignments.
Integrating deliberation into the course wasn’t without challenges, however. For me as the instructor, one of the biggest challenges was assessing performance during the deliberations. During each deliberation, our 21-person class was split into 3 groups. They self-facilitated, passing facilitation duties around as they moved through the deliberation guide. I rotated between groups to assess deliberation performance using a rubric adapted from Sara Drury’s 2019 chapter in Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education.
I narrowed the rubric to just four elements most closely aligned to the key deliberative dispositions identified during our conversation on the first day, deciding to err on the side of brevity while we all learned this new format for discourse. I asked students to assess their peers and also assess themselves using the same rubric. While the rubric was helpful in providing shared language and a reminder of deliberative goals, it did not produce much variation in scoring. It was difficult for me to assess particular elements when I only heard parts of each deliberation, and the students (mostly) gave each other and themselves high marks.
While this is consistent with the tight-knit community described above, I will likely try to assess using different methods in the future. I don’t want to take away the self-facilitated deliberation: the opportunity to engage each other in substantive, structured dialogue without an evaluator presence was empowering for the students. They often clammed up when I joined them, and their remarks became more performative than contemplative.
Next time I incorporate deliberation in a course (and there will definitely be a next time!) I will be more intentional about norming expectations for scoring using the rubric, and will also try to devise a way to evaluate the students’ full contributions, perhaps by video or audio recording. Despite these challenges with assessment, I am excited to incorporate deliberation into future courses and continue to use it a means to build critical thinking skills and class community.
References
Aikin, S., & Talisse, R. (2019). Why we argue (and how we should): A guide to political disagreement in an age of unreason. Second Edition. New York: Routledge.
Drury, S. A. M. (2019). Cultivating dialogue and deliberation through speech, silence, and synthesis. In Shaffer, T. J. & Longo, N.V. (Eds.), Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education (pp. 69-82). Stylus Publishing, LLC.
