Though I did not always have the language to describe it as such, I have long relied on deliberative pedagogy as a framework both for modeling philosophical inquiry inside the classroom and for imparting the critical, interrogative, and evaluative skills required for responsible and reciprocal civic engagement. My approach to teaching has always been shaped by a commitment to foster a space of shared inquiry in which all perspectives and social positionalities are avenues rather than barriers to understanding. It is critical that my students recognize themselves as participants and co-creators of our collective learning experience, and that they approach the study of philosophy as an invitation into an ongoing dialogue of which we are all a part.
To this end, I encourage my students to engage with philosophy deliberatively, as an always-unfinished, critical enterprise that is open to a constant questioning of the norms, assumptions, and premises of that which we have long taken for granted. By approaching philosophy this way, we are reminded that we are limited in our capacity to know, and that reciprocal engagement with others—and especially those whose lived experiences are far different from our own—is what enables us to see the blind spots in our thinking, brings to light questions that we may not have considered, and opens up avenues for new modes of knowing. This kind of critical, philosophical ethos is one that is genuinely self-reflective, governed by intellectual humility, and attentive to the historicity of the present.
This approach to philosophy has served me and my students well in this last academic year. As a social and political philosopher, all of my courses—no matter the topic—engage with issues of power, and therefore with issues at the forefront of our concern as social and political beings. My responsibility, as I understand it, is to provide the tools and cultivate the space that enables my students to take on these issues with care. I do not set aside class days for formal, deliberative exercises, but incorporate them into every aspect of our classroom experience: we deliberate over the meaning of the text, giving reasons for why we interpret certain passages in certain ways; we deliberate over the tenability of arguments, both on their own terms and in relation to the lived present; we deliberate over how an author’s framework of analysis can help us make sense of the crises of our day, and where they cannot. The Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative has enabled me to better articulate these dimensions of my pedagogy.
By way of example, one new strategy that I employed for the first time this semester was to include specific “discussion questions” in my syllabus as a means of guiding students as they did the readings for our class. In my freshman-level course entitled “Aesthetics and Political Resistance,” which met once a week for three hours, I devised a series of inquiries under each set of readings that were intended to give students specific themes to focus on and which they would be expected to deliberate about during our meetings. Inevitably, however, students would take our conversations beyond those I imagined us to have, and I understood my responsibility in those moments to explore how our readings could shed light on their concerns. As the semester progressed, some of my students connected our themes—which included the aesthetic reproduction of the status quo, the role of aesthetic feelings in destabilizing social norms, and so forth—to the events unfolding around us, both abroad as well as on our campus.
Given the extremely polarized nature of these events, disagreements were unavoidable—and for this reason, several of my colleagues preferred to shut down such conversations entirely. Yet in an era where the rhetoric of “civility” is increasingly deployed to censor critical speech, these moments of disagreement are perhaps the most significant for us as pedagogues. They have reminded me that responsible deliberative pedagogy demands that we understand where our students are coming from, so that we can better put competing viewpoints into constructive dialogue and translate disagreements into learning opportunities. In other words, it requires that we cultivate a critical ethos in ourselves just as much as we try to cultivate it in our students. I am grateful to the Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative for giving me the space to deeply reflect on this responsibility.
