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.
As an anthropologist, I feel most comfortable in discussion seminars, working through texts and data with students as a group. The issue, of course, is that undergraduate students may feel more accustomed to lectures and thus may hesitate to contribute to discussion, even when they have worthwhile observations or arguments to make. This holds true particularly at institutions not typically regarded as “elite.” The students are, in my opinion, just as intelligent as at elite institutions in a general sense. However, they often lack the confidence in their own opinions and perspectives that an elite institution instills. I often feel as though I must coax their perspectives out of them. Facilitating discussion has proven difficult at times, and the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative offered me the chance to experiment with deliberation in the classroom.
Anthropology requires nuance and encourages political stances, and I initially resisted the framing of many mainstream issues with which DeeP engages. Indeed, I feel that one of the primary goals of anthropology as a discipline is to interrogate the way that we commonly frame political or social questions. My breakthrough came when I asked students to watch “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” and debate the ethical and political merits of the argument espoused by the film (a fictionalized narrative drawing from Andreas Malm’s essay “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”). In other words, I asked my students whether it was ok to blow up a pipeline, given the risks posed by climate change and government inaction.
The ensuing debate surprised me, both in terms of the range of opinions within a relatively small class, and in the way that students drew on the texts that we had already read in the first three weeks of the semester. Offering them a yes/no question with strong ethical and political implications and then asking them to justify their opinions led to a far more animated discussion requiring far less guidance from me. They also, eventually, reached a consensus where they agreed that blowing up a pipeline might be ethically permissible but was likely politically counterproductive.
I realized that simplifying complex issues into a single question on which students could take sides allowed them to mobilize complex readings in new ways and explore their nuances. I think that this stands as the key insight offered by the deliberative literature, though it is not an insight that is frequently made explicit. Operationalizing these insights required some thought, of course. Not every weekly topic can or should be reduced to this format, particularly as I cannot always develop relevant questions. How, for instance, would I develop a deliberation on a unit engaging Indigenous worldviews? Is a deliberation even necessary? Probably not! In some cases, I can and perhaps should continue to guide the students through the literature and highlight any relevant debates. However, I began to formulate questions that would allow students to engage in deliberation while drawing from 3-4 weeks of more complex readings. In turn, I think that the periodic deliberations further encouraged students to talk during the weekly units.
