Four Deliberative Forums, 10 expert panelists, 15 Student Fellows, 22 Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative Faculty Fellows, 39 D Teams, and over 1000 Davidson students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members who participated in facilitated deliberations on challenging and contentious issues facing our society…2023-24 was a busy year for the DCI! The range and depth of this work is captured in the DCI’s fourth Annual Report that was just published on its website. We’d like to share a few highlights from the report and encourage you to check it out yourself as well. We hope that it will inspire you to join the new and continuing programs that the DCI is planning for the coming year.
The year began with our second annual Fall Semester Kickoff Party and our fifth Deliberation Facilitator Training Program, which trained over 50 people in how to moderate challenging conversations on difficult topics. They included our fourth cohort of DCI Student Fellows and our third cohort of DeeP Faculty Fellows, who came from 13 different colleges and universities from across the country. The student fellows went on to host our Deliberative Forums, D Teams, Commons Conversations, Deliberating GOATs event, and their own personal deliberation projects, while the Faculty Fellows developed and taught courses that systematically incorporated more deliberation about contentious topics into them.
The DCI hosted Christy Vines, CEO and President of the Ideos Institute, for a series of public lectures, workshops, class visits, and small group discussions with students. Vines focuses on empathic intelligence in her work, and her public lecture was titled, Faith, Race, and Politics: Can empathy help bridge our divides in a polarized world? Her visit helped the DCI and the Davidson community grapple with challenging questions related to identity, public discourse, and the pursuit of justice in a pluralistic society.
The DCI’s newly re-imagined Commons Conversations series featured Davidson faculty and staff who hosted discussions on topics related to their expertise. One of the DCI’s forums also highlighted the expertise of Davidson faculty on challenges facing democracy around the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa. The DCI continued to collaborate with academic departments, co-curricular programs, and community partners throughout the year. For example, its final forum of the year on Guns in America was co-sponsored with the Davidson College Democrats, Davidson College Republicans, Davidson College Libertarians, Center for Political Engagement, and the Political Science Department.
The work of the DCI also extended last year beyond Davidson, as it co-organized the first North Carolina Campus Discourse Leaders Conference with colleagues from UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, Elon University, and North Carolina Campus Engagement. Hosted on the Chapel Hill campus, the conference brought together over 40 faculty and staff from public and private institutions of higher education from across the state of North Carolina to connect, share, and learn about how to best foster more productive discourse about difficult political and social issues in the classroom, on campus, and with the community.
Suffice to say, it was a rich and rewarding year, and provides a solid foundation for the exciting opportunities that the DCI will be pursuing in the year ahead. Check out the annual report at the link below, stay tuned for more info about our upcoming programs that are coming soon!
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