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.
By Vincent Russell (2024-25 Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative Faculty Fellow)
I have been involved in the public deliberation field for more than a decade, but prior to this DeeP Fellowship, I had never robustly incorporated public deliberation into my pedagogy. In the past, I did what I could to make my courses experiential and discussion-focused, and I often incorporate service-learning. I regularly include current events and controversial topics into my course material to encourage students to apply course content. After all, as a Communication scholar, I am interested in helping my students learn how to better talk to one another, and I believe that preparing students to be participatory and justice-oriented citizens is the fundamental purpose of postsecondary education.
When I told a colleague I had received this fellowship, she congratulated me and said it sounded like it would be a perfect fit for my Intercultural Communication course—an upper-level course I teach every year that focuses on communicating across difference, globalization, and social justice. I surprised my colleague by telling her yes, incorporating deliberation into that course would be a logical fit, but instead I had chosen to incorporate public deliberation into the introductory communication course I teach called Foundations of Communication. Allow me to explain why.
The Challenges of the Basic Course
At WCU, Foundations of Communication (what our discipline refers to as “the basic course”) is required for all students to satisfy the “oral communication” requirement of our general education curriculum. No other WCU courses satisfy the oral communication requirement, so nearly every undergraduate student at WCU must take the course to matriculate. Approximately 2,000 students take Foundations of Communication every year.
Teaching this course presents several challenges. First, students, most often, are not willing participants. They are in class because they must be, not because they chose to be there. Additionally, the students come from a range of majors (including undeclared majors), so their base knowledge of Communication varies widely. Third, despite the course being an introductory-level class intended for first- or second-year students, a significant number of juniors and seniors enroll.
This is partly due to our basic course program being underfunded (we don’t have enough instructors to meet demand, so there is a backlog of students needing to take the course to graduate) but also because of the content of the course. Students with high communication apprehension (colloquially known as “public speaking anxiety”) often delay taking the course until necessary. Thus, in any given section of our basic course, an instructor may have students across a range of ages and school experiences, and most of them did not elect to take the course but are simply there to fulfill a requirement.
Beyond adapting instruction to students’ needs, another challenge of the course is the content itself. The basic course tends to be known as “the public speaking class,” and many people are terrified of public speaking. So not only are students only in class because they must be, the general content we cover is usually unpleasant—if not downright panic-inducing—for the students.
However, our course is not just about public speaking. We also cover interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, small group communication, and mediated communication. It is a lot of material to cover in a single semester, and then you must factor in the days dedicated just to having students deliver presentations in class (and I usually require three presentations each semester). Dedicating class time to presentations reduces the number of days that one can cover and practice content.
As a final note about the challenges of the basic course, our instructor team has noticed since the COVID-19 pandemic that students increasingly struggle with the interpersonal communication aspects of the course. Sure, they still struggle with giving a presentation, too, but what has been new since 2020 is that students appear less confident in their abilities to have casual conversations with classmates, make friends, participate in group work, contribute to class discussions, and perform the other quotidian tasks of face-to-face communication. In other words, our students’ communication apprehension used to be, primarily, about public speaking. Since 2020, we’re finding that their communication apprehension has extended to interpersonal contexts, too. Many of our students appear anxious about simply talking to their classmates. National trends appear to corroborate our experiences, as college students are increasingly anxious and lonely.
The Opportunities of the Basic Course
These challenges of Foundations of Communication also make it ripe for the benefits of public deliberation. First, the class includes diverse students from varying backgrounds, which means they are more likely to have varying viewpoints on public issues than students who self-selected to enroll in an elective course. Second, the plurality of students in the basic course usually are first- and second-year students, so I was hopeful that their opinions on public issues were still malleable and that deliberating about these issues could help students better refine their stances. Third, I believe it’s important to expose students early to the skills of deliberation so that they can reap those benefits in later courses. If they learn the basics of reason-giving, source credibility, and how to disagree with classmates in my basic Communication course, then those skills will serve them will in their future coursework, whatever it may be.
Most importantly, though, I saw deliberative pedagogy as a way to help students reduce their interpersonal communication apprehension. I provided explicit instruction about the communicative orientations and skills necessary to perform deliberation well, along with structured opportunities to participate in (and facilitate) deliberation with classmates. In doing so, I intended to provide opportunities to practice the communication skills of questioning, reason-giving, empathy, managing conflict, problem-solving, and decision-making. This, in turn, would help them feel more comfortable relating to their classmates.
Incorporating Deliberation into the Basic Course
To incorporate deliberative pedagogy into my Foundations of Communication course, I revamped the assigned readings to include several pieces of scholarship about deliberative pedagogy and public deliberation, the facilitator’s guide from the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, and several chapters out of Lara Schwartz’s Try to Love the Questions. Schwartz’s book was recommended to me by another DeeP faculty fellow, and it does a good job preparing students for the deliberative dispositions I wanted them to practice.
I scaffolded the course so that students were introduced to deliberative pedagogy and its basic concepts at the beginning of the semester. Later, as the semester progressed, they read about specific deliberation skills, such as listening, questioning, and facilitating. I dedicated class time to several “practice deliberations,” where I facilitated 30-minute conversations with the class about social issues. I also used activities from the Constructive Dialogue Institute and the Collaborative Discussion Project to give students chances to practice specific deliberation skills. For instance, on the day we practiced listening, I used the “Listening to Understand” activity from the Collaborative Discussion Project to give students a chance to practice listening skills they read about prior to class that day. All of these examples were ungraded opportunities to practice deliberation skills.
I also had various graded components to promote deliberative learning. Most significantly, students were put into groups and assigned to facilitate a deliberation about a topic I had chosen. I created four groups with six students in each group. On their assigned deliberation day, the entire class was assigned to read a deliberation guide (from DCI and/or) about the topic for that day. I chose issue guides from DCI and the National Issues Forum Institute about social media regulation, economic mobility, immigration, and police reform. On deliberation day, the facilitators were expected to deliver an 8–10-minute informative presentation summarizing the deliberation guide and the perspectives it offered, explaining how the deliberation time would be structured, and offering a conversation agreement.
Following the presentation, the facilitators had 60 minutes to facilitate deliberation about the topic. The class broke into six small groups, with one facilitator in each group, and the facilitators guided the students through the questions in the deliberation guide. I then floated around the groups grading the facilitators on their facilitation skills. After each deliberation day, every student had to complete a reflection essay identifying what they thought they did well, what they want to improve for the next deliberation, and how course concepts manifested during their conversations. Facilitators had a specific set of questions to answer in those essays, while deliberators had a different set of questions.
These graded deliberation days occurred about halfway through the semester. I structured the course in this way so that students already would have had several weeks to build rapport with one another, develop a baseline understanding of public deliberation, and practice their deliberation skills in class before being graded on a student-led deliberation.
This assignment structure accomplished several goals. First, it was efficient. I typically require an informative speech in the class around the middle of the semester, and this deliberation assignment was a way to merge informative speaking with deliberation, thereby combining two assignments into one. Second, every student facilitated one deliberation and participated in three deliberations as a deliberator, so they gained exposure to both roles and had multiple opportunities to practice deliberation skills. Because students were assigned pre-existing deliberation guides (rather than researching and writing their own), the students could focus more on applying the communication skills of deliberation, which was my goal for this introductory course.
In summary, students had three graded assignments related to deliberation. Each group received a group grade for their informative presentation—after all, this course does have a public speaking component. Each student received an individual grade and feedback about their performance as a facilitator, and then every student received grades for their reflection essays (four total).
Outcomes and Next Steps
Overall, my first foray into robust deliberative pedagogy went well, but there are some things I want to change. In the future, I need to make the facilitator groups smaller. I had 24 students in class this semester, so when they would break into six small groups to deliberate, each group had four students in it (one facilitator and three deliberators). Because students sometimes were absent, some facilitators had a group with only two deliberators in it, which isn’t sufficient for robust deliberation. However, creating more facilitator groups means finding additional days in my already jam-packed course schedule to hold graded deliberations. Another improvement I would like to make is to find a way to give students feedback on their deliberation skills. This semester, I only graded each student’s facilitation skills. I had developed a rubric for the deliberators and had the idea of having students fill them out for their peers (so students were giving each other feedback on their deliberation rather than me), but I scrapped the idea because the logistics were too complicated for my first time incorporating these deliberation assignments.
As for outcomes, I believe students appreciated the opportunity to learn about pressing social issues and talk with one another. In their reflection papers, many students remarked upon their anxiety related to discussing “political” issues. Having grown up on social media, they feared that social media dynamics about politics would play out in the classroom (e.g., being “canceled,” people making fun of them, appearing ignorant, etc.). Students tended to appreciate that the deliberation assignment provided a structured way to discuss wicked problems, helping them develop their opinions on these topics; learn that “political” discussion does not have to be tense, hostile, or frightening; and develop interpersonal connections with their classmates.
Another outcome from my perspective as a professor was that by having students deliberate about controversial issues with one another, it took pressure off me to help students navigate those murky waters. In the past, when I’ve had class discussions about controversial issues, I still served as the focal point and leader of discussion, and so students would sometimes form perceptions about my “biases.” The deliberation assignment removed my “bias” from the equation, enabling students to talk with one another without fear of reprisal from the professor. My rubrics also were content neutral, so students knew they were graded on their facilitation skills instead of the stance they took on the topic.
Lastly, an unexpected outcome from this experiment was that students’ presentations were better than they had been in the past. As I mentioned before, the deliberation assignments occurred about halfway through the semester; it was the second of three units in the course. The final unit is about persuasive speaking, and students must deliver an advocacy speech about a social issue. It’s an individual assignment (instead of a group assignment), and they must take a stance on a topic and present a well-researched argument supporting their stance. The students’ advocacy speeches this semester were better than past semesters. I believe the opportunity to discuss controversial issues with their classmates during the deliberation unit helped reduce their anxiety about taking a public stance on a controversial topic. They also already had a chance to practice a “leadership” role by serving as a facilitator, which potentially increased their confidence when standing in front of class to deliver their presentation as an “authority” on their chosen subject. Finally, the deliberation guides provided examples of well-researched arguments about wicked problems, and some students used those guides as starting points to develop their advocacy speeches. Doing so enabled them to craft higher quality, more nuanced, and better sourced presentations than I had seen in previous semesters.
In conclusion, I believe my attempt to incorporate deliberative pedagogy into a foundational course that’s required for all students at WCU was successful. I plan to share my insights with my fellow instructors, and I’m hopeful that we can infuse deliberative pedagogy into more sections of the Foundations of Communication course. Doing so holds the potential of introducing students early in their academic careers to foundational skills necessary for participatory citizenship, which students can then leverage in their future coursework, careers, and communities.
