During the COVID years, class participation became more and more of a struggle in the classroom while student engagement with political issues increased. Students clearly see politics as relevant to their lives though they are less and less likely to engage with it in meaningful ways in the classroom. This observation, along with the realization that the problem lies in the way I was structuring engagement in my courses, led me to join the Deliberative Pedagogy (DeeP) Collaborative. I wanted to restructure my American Political Thought class as a series of exercises in democratic deliberation, combined with reflections and discussions about the necessary components of meaningful engagement.
Our first engagement activity was a roleplay of the Constitutional Convention. In preparation we read John Locke, Thomas Paine, John and Samuel Adams among others to lay some of the groundwork. Across a period of 4 weeks, students took on the roles of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Elbridge Gerry, etc. They debated the merits of direct election by the people, representation, and the length of presidential terms of office. They dug into a character, prepared and delivered speeches, questioned each other’s reasoning, and ultimately reconfigured their speeches into the form of essays.
They got to know each other, first, in character, as colleagues, to some extent opponents and supporters, but also as complex characters, working hard to ensure a sustainable system of governance. In other words, they developed bonds through the process of taking on positions and arguing points they didn’t necessarily accept or believe in. Moreover, they developed the ability to pose questions in the nomenclature of “my right, honorable colleague from, [insert state].”
The second engagement activity was a deliberation about originalism. With the experience of debating the Constitutional Convention fresh in their minds, they knew that the delegates to the convention had agreed to a text, though not necessarily to its meaning. They also knew that some of the delegates refused to sign the document in the end. Finally, they knew that interpretation was not something the delegates had ever debated.
In preparation to engage substantively the issue of originalism, they read several articles by Scalia, Meese, and others on originalism, living constitutionalism, and their varieties. In preparing to deliberate with peers as themselves, they read Monica Guzman on cultivating curiosity, Jean-Luc Nancy on listening, and Adriana Caverero’s The Stork. They practiced the roles of weaving and devil’s advocacy. They posed questions to each other about their experiences.
In the end, several students offered that regardless of which deliberative technique came most naturally, the most difficult part of the deliberation was to approach the conversation with humility. Almost all the students indicated at one point or another that while they were vaguely familiar with the term originalism, they were not aware either of the intent or public meaning varieties, nor could they identify any varieties of living constitutionalism, though most placed themselves in that camp. The class concluded with a robust conversation about the purpose of and guidelines for the campus protests that occupied so much of our national attention throughout April 2024 and the early part of May 2024.
In this iteration, students took on an ideologically charged topic. They had a good and productive conversation in which most of them acknowledged at least one weakness associated with their own position, as well as a strength associated with the opposing perspective. Virtually everyone said that they learned something about originalism and a few students actually changed their minds about how the Supreme Court should make decisions.
Moving forward, I will attempt to improve upon three things. First, there was a lot of variety in what the students understood devil’s advocacy to be. I need to do a better job of recognizing that while nearly all students are familiar with the phrase, they do not share a conceptual understanding of what it means.
Second, internalizing fallibility is a high hurdle, which we probably do not model well in academia. Two out of thirteen students signaled that their comments were provisional during the deliberation. I need to think through the ways that I model humility, as well as exercises for practicing provisional thinking. In keeping with this goal, one of my summer reading goals is Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
Finally, in terms of assessment, the only thing that I had time to do during the deliberation was to check boxes. The rubric for the actual deliberation needs to be both simple and it needs to reveal my observations about the roles that students are actually playing.
